Women In Engineering Education In Turkey

The enrolment of women in engineering education is much lower than that of men in the whole world [1, 2, 3]. The socio-economic status influences positively the tendency to follow and complete more scientific courses [4]. Although women enrolment in engineering is also expected to be positively correlated to the development level of the country, this is not generally verified. Turkey is one of the countries where the enrolment of women in engineering education (22.7%) is higher than in most of the developed countries [5, 6, 7]. There are several reasons to that: engineering profession is still an attractive one in terms of social status; engineers are employed in a large spectrum and not only in their own field; top management positions are generally occupied by engineers. This is why boys as well as girls continue to prefer engineering departments to other fields of study. This explains why the enrolment rate in engineering in Turkey is not decreasing, as it is the case in most of the developed western countries. Yet the enrolment of women in engineering education is almost half of the overall women enrolment in higher education in Turkey which is 42.6%.