September 10, 2000 at 12:00 am #15186
Larisa
Participant
Well, in the past, women have not been encouraged to excel at mathematics or science in childhood, or even to entertain fantasies of a technical career. The idea that ‘women are good with people, and men are good with machinery’ has been a very pervasive one. Also, women who did manage to enter engineering programs in college faced quite a lot of prejudice. Fortunately, all of the above is changing. I think that in the next 10-20 years this particular gender gap will narrow significantly.