Sombre ceremonies in Montreal on Sunday marked the 25th anniversary of the massacre of 14 female engineering students at the École Polytechnique. On December 6,1989, gunman Marc Lépine, specifically targeted women and left a note behind blaming feminists for ruining his life.
But rather than scaring women off engineering, his act led to an eventual increase in their numbers. In April 1992, the Canadian Council of Professional Engineers issued a ground-breaking report entitled More Than Just Numbers.
Initiatives boosted women’s enrolment
“It documented the barriers that young women faced when entering the engineering profession as well as gave a list of recommendations of things we could do as a community to try to encourage and support women in engineering,” says Mary Wells, associate dean of outreach for the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Waterloo.
Listen“This ignited a number of initiatives aimed at encouraging women to consider a career in engineering and the number of women enrolled in engineering programs across Canada climbed steadily throughout the 1990s,” says Wells.
Among the initiatives, women in engineering committees were set up at universities to give women a voice and several outreach programs were created to attract children to science and engineering studies.
‘Still much work to be done’
Over the past 25 years the number of women studying engineering has tripled. Still, only 20 per cent of the students are women. Wells concludes “there’s still much work to be done.”
Women are more attracted to programs like bio-medical, bio-systems and environmental engineering where they make up almost half of the cohort. Their numbers are lower in the more traditional fields of mechanical and electrical engineering. Wells thinks women and men need a better understanding of what engineering is and the impact that it has.
Women engineers ‘galvanized’
In September 2014, an unprecedented 27 per cent of students enrolled in engineering at the University of Waterloo were women. The proportion was 30 per cent at the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia.
Wells is optimistic the numbers will continue to climb and concludes Lépine’s attack on women engineers had a very different effect from what he intended.
“After the horrific events of 1989, it really galvanized many of the women that had studied engineering to even more focus on encouraging women to study engineering to kind of counter the devastation he had created with taking some of those women engineers away from us.”
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