The Women in Engineering and Computer Science club is combatting it through solidarity
Illustration by Marley Allen-Ash via Scientific American
On the second day of Emily Murray’s software engineering degree at UVic, she witnessed a male student harassing a female classmate outside a lecture hall before class. A group of men had approached the woman, attempting to mingle, and upon being rejected they asked her what program she was in. When she told them she was in engineering, one said, “Drop out now! Don’t even bother coming into the course.”
Murray, standing nearby, overheard.
“I took out my earbuds, like, ‘Did I hear that right?’” This was when she decided to step in. “I [walked] up to them, and I’m like ‘Hey, nice to see you again, I saw you at orientation!’ She was like, ‘Oh my god yeah, I remember you!’ and we walked away. I had no idea who she was. I haven’t spoken to her since.”
Murray is 26, and recently returned to university after rediscovering her passion for sciences, so she says she has thick skin when it comes to rude comments made by men in her program. When she told friends she chose engineering, they warned her of the condescending attitudes of her male counterparts, but she was surprisingly also warned about the women. Family would say, “Only 10 per cent of the women in your program are going to make it out, so you have to make sure you kick out the other 90 per cent.”
However, after feeling lonely in the beginning of her degree, Murray quickly realized that she wanted to create more low-commitment community events for women and gender non-conforming engineering students so these perceived social boundaries could be broken.
Murray discovered WECS Club, which has been at UVic since 2012, and is best known for drop-in review sessions for first year science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) courses. WECS broke up in 2022 due to graduating participants, but last October, Murray rounded up new members and is now the president of the club.
While the WECS club members are excelling in their fields, they are aware that they are gender minorities within their programs. This issue occurs across Canada. Murray notes many women experience false hope about the number of women that will be in their degree program when they are in UVic’s 100-level classes, because general undergraduate audiences take them. Then, in upper-level courses, the gender divide becomes what students describe to be 70:30. This is apparently worse in lab settings.
“There’s usually about 40 people [in labs]” says Charli Harrold, computer science major and WECS Academia Director. “There’s never more than five women in any of those rooms.”
This translates to clubs, too. Tobi Adepoju — computer science and psychology major and WECS Vice President of Marketing — describes feeling intimidated from participating in clubs day because most STEM clubs only have male members. “I just don’t think I’d ever be able to project myself in a space like that,” she says.
Murray believes the positionalities of our instructors indicate who will feel most welcomed in class. “There’s not a lot of professors [and TAs] that reflect a diverse background, and when you don’t see yourself in the people that are leading you, it’s hard to stay motivated.” Murray says.
Ed Nissen, Earth and Ocean Sciences professor at UVic and member of the Education, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) committee for science students at UVic, says he is worried about routine losses of female STEM professors. “I do think we have a retention issue… You think, ‘Is it something systemic?’”
Professor Lin Cai of UVic’s Engineering faculty echoes this. “When I joined the ECE Department, there were only two other female professors here,” Cai says.
Women made up 44 per cent of first-year STEM students in universities according to a 2010 study by Katherine Wall. So, why do women make up less than a quarter of the current STEM career field according to Statistics Canada? The answer is because a disproportionate amount of women in Wall’s 2010 study switched out of their STEM programs before graduating: a common trend. Murray is only in her second year, and two of her closest female friends have already left their programs in STEM.
The further she got in her degree and the more specialized her classes, Murray says, “[she] noticed how willingly certain groups of people are making women feel uncomfortable.” Knowing women are already a minority, Murray believes that men are targeting women which causes them to leave the faculty.
This disrespect bleeds into student-professor relationships too. WECS members recall students questioning and disrespecting female lecturers, and once even playing loud computer games during a class.
For Alice Zou — first-year computer science major and WECS Vice President of External Outreach — the most difficult thing is walking into rooms where she is the only woman.
“I always go into classes aware that I’m going to be a minority,” she says. “It makes me realize I’m going to have to work harder to connect with everybody in this room… It’s disheartening that I have to make the extra effort just to be on an equal level.”
For Murray, prioritizing an intersectional approach at WECS is one way to combat this issue at UVic. “I would love to be able to draw people from different backgrounds so people can see themselves in our leadership,” Murray says.
Zou explains that diversity in STEM spaces should be a priority, adding to the quality and accuracy of research. She mentions a headline from 2015, when an African-American guest at a science fiction convention realized the soap dispensers didn’t register his dark skin.
“They [only] tested to make sure it would register pale skin,” Zou says. “That’s why being diverse [in STEM] is important. Not just because you need to hit a diversity quota.”
Adepoju hopes to bring Black and Indigenous people of colour (BIPOC) people into the WECS sphere with more intention. “Being a minority — like a person of colour — it’s kind of just expected that you’re not always going to have something that’s perfectly catered towards you… I would love a minority group of people in STEM on campus, because in general there are not many visible minorities,” says Adepoju.
WECS is one of the only local women in engineering university groups run by students. Most universities, including the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, and the University of Toronto, run groups like WECS out of necessity to meet their EDI requirements. Murray is proud that WECS is fostered by her and her peers.
“I like to feel that people can tell that we’re genuinely excited about trying to grow the club,” Zou says. “We’re all genuinely in this to improve the experience of being an underrepresented minority in STEM.”
