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I've worked in an engineering discipline for more than 25 years. What makes my work (civil engineering) different than many other engineering disciplines is that CEs generally require professional licensure for much of their work. You can design a car for Toyota or a microprocessor for Intel without a professional license, but you can't sign and seal a design drawing without one.

In my field, the real differences between male and female engineers doesn't show up in engineering school, but in the licensing exams. There are plenty of good civil engineers who happen to be women. But I have come across far too many cases where women are pushed into an engineering curriculum as part of a "diversity" initiative ... only to find themselves in a position 5-10 years later where they are unable to pass the licensing exams.

My son just graduated as an astronautical engineer from a small, private engineering university. There were very few girls in the entire school, let alone his program.

They try hard to recruit them into the higher level STEM stuff, but if they’re not interested, they’re not interested.

Guys tend to gravitate more heavily into those types of fields. That’s not a bad thing.

Very good overview of yours along with the several other posters. I'm 39 years out of college now so diversity wasn't invented then. There were about 17 people in my chemical engineering graduating class with 1 female and about a 50:50 split between non-USA citizens and citizens. The one female was very good and the only diversity type advantage I can think of is she was offered several very nice corporate summer internships. When it came to the graduation 1st time job offer, I don't believe there was any kind of diversity advantage she had.

About 15 years ago, a ChE new graduate female was hired into my team. A few months after her on-board, she asked me for assistance with a simple unit conversion sort of like converting metric to USA standard units. I was like holy crap, this is freshman chemistry stuff. Within a year, she was nudged out of the company and “resigned” to take a job in the city engineering department for a medium size city. For a ChE, this is way outside the profession. No way would I hire or recommend an engineer from that major university again. She was qualified to be a lab tech but lacked the creative and functional skills of the profession.

Regarding PE license, I was about 20 years into my career before it would have been of utility and even the it would have largely been for business card cachet. My niche is industrial process design, not detailed engineering and have several hundred million $$$ of designs out in industry. I work extensively with the detailed specialists for narrow, focused input when needed. My work product feeds into the capital authorization process then detailed engineering. Detailed engineering produces the spectrum of construction drawings and specs that require PE stamps. For the downstream DE, often times I am a senior reviewer of the process side piece of the detailed engineer products. I also am often a key person for procurement in preparing some of the bid specs and bid evaluation processes and start-up when everything comes to life.