Female engineers more common in Muslim countries

WSU researchers are trying to understand why significantly higher numbers of women study engineering in certain predominantly Muslim countries than in the United States.

Funded by a two-year, nearly $600,000 National Science Foundation grant, the researchers aim to discover the mechanisms that motivate women to pursue engineering in Jordan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia.

The participation rates of women in these countries are as high as 50 percent, according to Nehal Abu-Lail, an associate professor in the Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering at WSU and co-principal investigator on the project.

“In the United States, the government has spent a lot of money trying to develop programs and change curriculum to attract women to the field of engineering and science, with little success,” said Julie Kmec, professor of Sociology and co-principal investigator.

The researchers are interested in learning what about Muslim countries and the experiences that women have there which make them more likely to persist in engineering and continue graduate education, Nehal said.

“If I say engineer in the United States, you automatically think of a guy and it might not be that way in those countries,” Kmec said. “It is our goal to isolate what is creating that.”

The team is made up of two researchers from WSU, one researcher from Western Washington University and one from Purdue University.

Members of the team will travel to the four Muslim countries to meet with female engineers, where they will focus on students and faculty, as well as women in the engineering industry.

The first stage will consist of focus group research and then studying those conversations to analyze patterns. After this first step, they will conduct individual interviews.

“Women’s engineering participation in predominantly Muslim countries is surprising for reasons beyond the absence of national STEM-focused efforts to increase representation,” Kmec said. “Women in these countries experience social, political and economic restrictions. In Saudi Arabia, for example, women cannot drive a car on their own”.

Kmec said this adds to the puzzle because men and women do not live in “different worlds” in the United States and have virtually the same rights when it comes to things such as voting and attending college.

Nehal received both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemical engineering from Jordan University of Science and Technology in Irbid Jordan. She grew up in a family with five girls and a boy and all became engineers.

“Being from Jordan, I have a love for the discipline and want to retain the interest of my female students,” Nehal said. “Females often have better grades, so why do they leave?”