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Annals of Biomedical Engineering, Vol. 38, No. 5, May 2010 ( 2010) pp. 19281935 DOI: 10.1007/s10439-010-9958-9
The Pipeline Still Leaks and More Than You Think: A Status Report on Gender Diversity in Biomedical Engineering
NAOMI C. CHESLER,1 GILDA BARABINO,2 SANGEETA N. BHATIA,3,4 and REBECCA RICHARDS-KORTUM5
1Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2146 Engineering Centers Building,1550 Engineering Drive, Madison, WI 53706-1609, USA; 2Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA; 3Division of Health Sciences and Technology/Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA; 4Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, VA, USA; and 5Department of Bioengineering, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005, USA
(Received 11 September 2009; accepted 2 February 2010; published online 17 February 2010)
Associate Editor Julia E. Babensee oversaw the review of this article.
AbstractWhile the percentage of women in biomedical engineering is higher than in many other technical elds, it is far from being in proportion to the US population. The decrease in the proportion of women and underrepresented minorities in biomedical engineering from the bachelors to the masters to the doctoral levels is evidence of a still leaky pipeline in our discipline. In addition, the percentage of women faculty members at the assistant, associate and full professor levels remain disappointingly low even after years of improved recruitment of women into biomedical engineering at the undergraduate level. Worse, the percentage of women graduating with undergraduate degrees in biomedical engineering has been decreasing nationwide for the most recent three year span for which national data are available.Increasing diversity in biomedical engineering is predicted to have signicant research and educational benets. The barriers to womens success in biomedical engineering and strategies for overcoming these obstaclesand xing the leaks in the pipelineare reviewed.
KeywordsWomen, Engineering, Barriers, Bias.
INTRODUCTION
The lack of diversity in engineering is a persistent and important problem. As Neal Lane, a former Assistant to the President for Science and Technology noted at the Summit on Women in Engineering,21 we
simply need people with the best minds and skills, and many of those are women. Senator Ron Wyden echoed these sentiments in 200342 when he stated:
America will not remain the power it is in the world today, nor will our people be...