Gender and Engineering in the Americas: A Preliminary Study in 2010, the Inter-American Year of Women

The Organization of American States proclaimed the year 2010 as ̈The Inter-American Year of Women ̈ 1 to commemorate the 10 anniversary of the adoption of the Inter-American Program on the Promotion of Women’s Human Rights and Gender Equity and Equality, as well as the 35 anniversary of the first United Nations’ World Conference on Women during the International Women’s Year, and the 15 anniversary of the last United Nations’ World Conference on Women celebrated in Beijing in 1995. The intent of the proclamation was to broadly mobilize throughout the Americas an evaluation of successes and challenges in women’s human rights and gender equity and equality, and to strengthen public sensitivity to gender issues. The Latin American and Caribbean Consortium of Engineering Institution (LACCEI) sponsored an Inter-American Year of Women event in 2010. During the event, a review of hemispheric data was presented, additional resources were identified, and the challenges to attain gender equity and equality in this engineering in the Americas were discussed. The session yielded a spirited discussion on differences in engineering education gender data available for comparison and differences in progress across the nations of the Americas. This paper provides an expanded literature review of pertinent data and shows that U.S. percentage of women studying engineering decreased 0.98% from 1998 to 2008, and although data is not comparable, data from Latin America and the Caribbean shows equity or near equity has been achieved in Argentina, Cuba, Brazil, Paraguay and Venezuela. LACCEI is collaborating with the OAS to launch an initiative to conduct a hemispheric study on gender in engineering to identify effective practices and understand how progress can be improved. As a result, collaborators are sought to create a taskforce to design and implement the hemispheric study.