My husband is TAing a course in tissue engineering this semester to a group consisting primarily of undergrads and yesterday was the first day of class. Over dinner I asked him how it went and, in the course of his telling, I realized that I was hearing a lot of first names typically associated with women - Karen, Kristen, Lisa, etc. I asked him how many women are in the class and said he didn't know, but there were "a lot." He pointed out, though, that there were always a number of women - approaching 50% in most cases - in his biomedical engineering masters-level classes, so he wasn't at all shocked to find a similar number among his students. I found this both surprising and pleasing.


Allow me to explain. He and I both spent our bachelors and masters years at Drexel University in Philadelphia, a school with a good regional reputation for (among other things) providing a solid education in engingeering and the hard sciences. Historically, the ratio of male to female undergraduate students was some crazy thing like 4:1. Lately that ratio has been leveling out (many of my college girlfriends are engineers), but there is still this holdover that somehow there may be only 2 or 3 women in a freshman design class of 30 students.


So I wondered how it came to pass that there were so many women involved with and achieving in biomedical engineering with all its byzantine subsets and arcane research areas. At then it hit me - this field is really quite new and does not have the "male club" pedigree of other engineering fields like mechanical, electrical or chemical that have been around, in some form or another, since the industrial revolution. Those fields came about and were shaped in a time when most women didn't have a prayer of going to college, let alone developing a long-term career path (of course, we all know of exceptions) and so when women began to push their boundaries into engineering they found a hidebound system of education, apprenticeship and hierarchy that wasn't terribly welcoming to them.


Biomedical engineering, though, only really started evolving into a discrete field in the early 80s (around the time that many of my husband's students were born). It hasn't had nearly the time to develop the same boys' club tradition and so, perhaps, has proven to be an attractive option for young women interested in flexing their science, math and logic skills in an engineering field. I mean, why bang your head against the wall trying to be heard as a, say, mechanical engineer, when the biomedical field is wide open?


This is just my pet theory, of course, and it is one that deserves more scrutiny.