In CBE, gender balance is stable

“At 55 percent female enrollment, the percentage of women in the department exceeds the University average of 40 percent in all engineering departments as well as the national average of between 17 and 20 percent,” Peter Bogucki, associate dean for undergraduate affairs in engineering and applied science, said in an email.

Though civil and environmental engineering has 59 percent female enrollment, CBE has significantly more students. A total of 115 students were enrolled in the department, compared to 64 in CEE.

This trend is not particularly recent. Bogucki noted that CBE has consistently sustained over 50 percent female enrollment for a number of years. Assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering Celeste Nelson observed that the majority of students enrolled in chemical engineering when she was an undergraduate student at MIT — some 20 years ago — were female.

But the reasons driving this trend are less clear. Several students interviewed for this article alluded to the diversity of fields contained within CBE, which consists of biology, energy and chemistry, as a potential draw for female students.

Lynn Loo, a professor in the CBE department and deputy director of the Andlinger Center for Energy and Environment, noted that biology courses in particular make up a large portion of the department’s curriculum.

Reflecting the department’s decision to add “biological engineering” to its title in July 2011, all students are required to take MOL 214: Introduction to Molecular and Cellular Biology. In addition, Loo noticed that almost 50 percent of CBE students go on to complete a certificate in engineering biology.

Jessica Saylors ’13, who began her freshman year as a prospective mechanical and aerospace engineering major, said that the biological aspect of CBE sparked her decision to join the department. However, she added, “I’m not sure if I want to say that there are more girls interested in biology than in robots.”

While such a conclusion might be reductive, many students agreed that the numerous applications of CBE appealed to them. Samantha Halpern ’14 said that the “broader range of interests” that the department caters to, such as her own interest in pharmaceutical and drug research, attracted her to the discipline.

Loo similarly observed that CBE students are able to enter a variety of professional fields by virtue of its diverse curriculum.

“A lot of students can go to grad school, medical school, law school or become consultants,” Loo said. “It’s very versatile, and that’s what attracts a lot of students to our discipline.”

Loo recalled a scenario in which five members of the CBE department were admitted to Stanford graduate school to study a wide array of subjects — biology, material science and chemical engineering among them.

The department is also popular among pre-medical students. Katie Yang ’13 said that upperclassmen at a CBE open house event she attended during her freshman year — when she was still considering going to medical school — had explained how “chemical engineering is great for pre-meds” because it differed from a conventional, biology-based pre-medical track.

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Others praised the department’s collaborative nature and the numerous opportunities it provides for becoming close with peers, since many CBE students first meet each other freshman year in introductory CBE courses.

“We’ve slaved over problem sets together and really gotten to know each other,” Cathy Chen ’14 said.

Catie Bartlett ’12 explained that being able to take classes with many of her peers in the department during junior year has created a “great community atmosphere,” contributing to informal mentoring between upperclassmen and underclassmen.

Bartlett noted that through interacting with a peer adviser in the CBE department, she was able to have a “better understanding of what classes there are in the department” and a “real-world perspective” that faculty advisers might not be able to offer.

These mentoring relationships appear to extend even beyond the boundaries of formal advising programs. Yang recalled her Princeton Preview host, an “amazing” female CBE student who was involved in several extracurriculars on campus and was “very humanitarian and organized.”

Loo also observed that her research group consists of more than 50 percent female students, which might suggest a preference to work with other female members of the department. However, she emphasized that this statistic could be the result of a multitude of other reasons, such as a student simply “identify[ing] with certain faculty and senior graduate students.”

Though the high enrollment of undergraduate CBE female students might suggest that gender parity is no longer a pressing issue in the department, Loo observed that a definite reduction occurs in the number of female graduate students; she estimated graduate female enrollment to be around 30 percent. More surprising, however, is the fact that Loo and Nelson are the only female faculty members in a department of 18 professors.

“There is a pipeline issue, and it’s associated with the timing of things,” Loo said, attributing this significant drop-off in numbers to the fact that the tenure clock for professors often begins just as many women are deciding whether to have children. “You coincide everything with the childbearing age, and there are difficult decisions to make.”

Despite the drop-off in the number of women in the graduate school and on the faculty, some students said the significant attention directed to this issue by University President Shirley Tilghman is less necessary than it once might have been.

“Though I love the term, ‘woman engineer,’ it would be nice if engineer were enough of a description,” Chen said.

However, she added that the issue of gender parity in these disciplines is still an issue in other parts of the country. “Princeton is doing the right thing by trying to lead the way to change,” Chen said.

Halpern said that she decided to major in CBE mostly before coming to the University, and Saylors said that she “might roll [her] eyes very slightly” at the University’s attempts to encourage women to study engineering. However, she added that these efforts might be necessary in some situations, depending on the mindset or background of individual students.

“I’ve never felt out of place in science ... but there may be some people who feel the opposite. And that encouragement may give them a sense of confidence,” Saylors said. “The ones that are really gung-ho about it will go ahead and do it anyways.”