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Women Engineers Needed to Save the World

More women must be welcomed into the engineering profession in New Zealand if this country is serious about dealing with environmental problems, according to a professor at the Auckland University of Technology.

Professor John Buckeridge, head of the School of Engineering and associate dean of the Faculty of Science and Engineering at AUT, says the state of the natural environment and the low status of women in engineering are two issues which are closely related.

"Engineering needs women as they are generally more likely to promote concepts such as environmental empathy," says Buckeridge.

With an increasingly educated and environmentally aware public, engineers are becoming more accountable.

"I believe that through a greater involvement of women in engineering, science and technological decision-making, we will nurture an ethos that will enable humanity to achieve sustainable environmental management," Buckeridge says.

Buckeridge and Heather Stonyer, an engineering lecturer at AUT, presented a paper on the barriers to women entering the engineering profession at a recent UNESCO conference in Hobart, Tasmania.

In 1996, women made up only 3.6% of engineers in New Zealand, and the academics say this must be changed.

From their research, they found that there is evidence of an undercurrent in the engineering field which inhibits bright young women from seeking and maintaining a career in engineering.

Buckeridge says that the barriers to women getting involved in engineering are not intellectual, as women students studying engineering tend to perform better academically and are less likely to drop out than their male peers.

However, the number of women studying engineering at tertiary level has tended to remain static for a number of years, and accounts for less than 10% of students.

Furthermore, once women enter the workforce, Buckeridge says female engineers earn less, have less prestige within departments and are less successful in obtaining research grants than equally qualified men.

Women are also more likely to leave the profession, for reasons such as sexual harassment, inflexible work practices and a hostile workplace culture.

"Women must not be seen as inappropriate to the engineering world," says Buckeridge. "Instead they must be viewed as an intellectual and spiritual resource that is currently being underutilised. They are an integral part of all future engineering."

The researchers point out that engineering has traditionally been a male domain.

When New Zealand was colonised there was a period when the focus of engineering was seen as taming the land, a "man's battle against nature".