This is a sponsored post.
In honor of DiscoverE’s National Engineering Week’s “Girl Day,” we’re celebrating today’s emphasis on ensuring girls feel welcome and excited in the field of engineering. One program that is leading the way with middle-school-aged girls is the Future City Competition, which my family was lucky enough to attend for the second year in a row.
Here’s a bit more about Future City:
It was great to see how many teams were mixed gender or even all girls. That so many girls are interested in engineering at a young age is a good sign that we’re working toward gender equality in the hard sciences and engineering. The girls we met were excited about their models and were thrilled to be competing in a field that is still overwhelmingly male. Only 20% of undergraduate students majoring in engineering are women — an improvement over the abysmal percentages of the ’70s and ’80s — when less than 5% of engineers were women — but not exactly a representative percentage of the population.
DiscoverE believes in encouraging young girls to take a serious look at engineering and everything the field has to offer. If the Future City competition is any indication, there are plenty of girls in the U.S. open to engineering. They just need to be dedicated enough to stick with it through college and graduate school, or the professional will always be thought of as predominantly male. As the DiscoverE folks explain, there’s a budding engineer in every girl, just waiting to come out — so let’s #BringItOut. For more about Future City or the National Engineering Week campaign, click here.
