Engineering, a course of men: does the inversion of this trend remain?

Abstract

Commonly, there are more men than women seeking engineering courses, even though, with some common exclusions as for health related engineering courses.Recently, Higher Education in Portugal has faced deep changes, particularly regarding the number of students, the growth of the educational network and the courses' curricular structure. There is an association with the increase in the number of women attending Portuguese Higher Education Institutions and the vast augmentation in the number of students.To investigate whether these changes have also changed the preferences of women/men in engineering courses, options and admissions, from 2010 to 2014, in fifteen engineering courses of a Portuguese University, were studied and the conclusions of that work published [1].In this paper we revisited that work and extended it with data from 2015/2016 and 2016/2017 and we studied, for each course, the number of applicants and the number of students placed (by gender), the application option and the average grades of the admitted applicants.As a result of this analysis we verify that in courses with male predominance, the female gender increased significantly, unlike what happens in the other two courses (female predominance), where the values remain almost constant.