Photos

Walking around the engineering building as a female, there are many situations that you can notice do not apply to yourself.

Here is a picture of a set of doors in the engineering building that I walk through every day to get to class:

Seems simple, nothing much to see here right? Well let’s take a closer look at the posters that are posted on these doors, and exposed to a majority of the engineering population:

5th Annual Gentleman’s Evening. This is an event that outright targets male engineers. This event consists of the engineers going strip club hopping. Some of the things on this poster include “Firm Handshakes”, “Pressed suits”, “Enjoy cigars”, “Monocles”, “Sophisticated”. All these things are meant to describe something that you could only find in a “gentleman’s affair”. This poster shows the gender disparity that exists in engineering, where they have such male-targeted events that consist of activities many females would dislike, and disapprove of. And righteously so, as not many straight women would want to go watch other women get nude, for the pleasure of the males.

Many posters similar to this one can be seen around the building. This poster asks readers if they want to learn from the wisdom and life of Dr. Martin Zinke. As I looked at this poster I though about how prominent there are male speakers, but female speakers in engineering are very rare. We always learn HIS story. Where are the female speakers? Where is HER story? Again women’s voices are not being heard.

Here is a picture of the Undergraduate Engineering Society and its members. They actually actively try to recruit women into this society, and it has helped as you can see there are more women involved and with positions on this board, but we are still outnumbered 20 out of 51. This active recruitment and involvement of women has helped, having 39% of the spots filled by females. This proves that a society that proactively tries to have fair representation of males and females can easily be successful at this. Last year, the president of the UES was a female from Trinidad.

Further analysis of these photos can be found in the analysis section.