ECE Department Vs. Biomedical Department at NCSU

After the interview with Dr. Ozturk, I decided to do some statistical analysis of the department of electrical engineering at NC State University. I first went to the people page at the ECE website (http://www.ece.ncsu.edu/people/) and counted the number of female professors and male professors. I did the same for the department of biomedical engineering as well. The statistics were quite interesting. I found that there are 50 male professors and 7 female professors. This equals to being roughly 88% male. For the biomedical department, I found that there were 25% female, and 75% male.

This is very interesting in that biomedical engineering has a lot of similarities to Electrical Engineering. I was so interested that I continued my analysis by comparing the number of male and female students in ECE and BME. I found that in roughly 8% of students are female in ECE and 32% in biomedical engineering who had graduated in 2011! I wondered how this could be so far off. Is it the field of medicine that attracts women to men? Dr. Ozturk had some interesting points relating to this field but she too seemed somewhat puzzled by this.

I then went to analyze the number of ECE students over time. I analyzed four years: 1997, 2001, 2005, 2009, and 2011. It would have been interesting to find data from 20+ years ago, but unfortunately I could not find any. I initially thought that it would have increased over a ten year period but actually found that there was very little difference. Overall, in 2005 there were the most female graduates. I actually found that there were fewer female graduates in 2009 and 2011 than in any other years. This clearly shows that there is no increase in the number of female students graduating with an electrical engineering degree.

This opens a lot of opportunities to help inspire females to look into the field of Electrical Engineering. From the results, it also seemed as though electrical engineering had the lowest percentage of female students than any other engineering course of study.