A leading academic from the University of the South Pacific (USP) says Fiji needs to “trace the issue right back to the source” if it wants to see more women in engineering – starting from early childhood education.
Dr Daniel Wood, USP Senior Fellow and Discipline Coordinator in Mechanical Engineering, said while women were enrolling at the university in high numbers, participation in engineering remained low.
“In engineering, we’re at around – at our highest – about 30 per cent in civil engineering,” he said.
“We go down to about 14 per cent for mechanical and electrical engineering. It’s not that women aren’t going into university. It’s just that they’re not choosing the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) side of things. How do we fix that?”
He said efforts to recruit more women into the field needed to start well before students made subject choices in high school.
“We’ve got to trace it right back to the source – and the source is getting science introduced to girls right back at kindergarten level. It’s a long haul,” he said.
Dr Wood said while scholarships were useful in attracting female students to science and engineering, they were not a standalone solution.
“Unless we’re continuously giving scholarships, I think the ideal is to flip the status quo – to make sure girls are exposed to and accepted in science from the start.
“Overseas in Australia, we’re topping out at about 16 per cent female participation in engineering. If we could even reach that, we’d be tripling our numbers and that would be a win.”
