A disclaimer, since I will be flamed for this post, I'm sure. I WANT more female engineers. I WANT more female PhD engineering students. I WANT more female engineering faculty. Both my wife and I have PhDs in engineering. I've had male and female advisors.

That being said, there is no need to promote hiring of female engineering faculty as females are being hired for engineering faculty at rates significantly greater than men are being hired for engineering faculty when you account for the gender ratio in qualified applicants. This distracts us from the real problem - girls in the US start dropping out of math and science in junior high, not college. It is also noteworthy that this is more of a US phenomena as in other countries, espescially developing nations, there tends to be very little gender gap in STEM fields.

A faculty position, like any job, has certain prerequisites. I think we agree that a florist (of either gender) is not qualified to teach quantum electrodynamics or manage a research group developing new catalysts for making gasolien from natural gas.

So why do people use the student-body gender ratio to determine what the faculty gender ratio should be? Shouldn't the gender ratio to use to determine the aprpopriate faculty gender ratio be the gender ratio of PhD students in a particular field at the top schools in that field (the ones most likely to have students oriented towards academic careers)?

After a frustrating faculty search, I had the feeling that if I were female, that I would have had a significantly higher chance of getting interviews. So I went to NSF and looked at the PhD degree trends and gender breakdowns and tried to sort out hiring practices from the gender studies on tenure granting. Suprisingly (or maybe not so surprisingly), I was unable to find statistics from NSF on gender equality in hiring faculty for the sciences and engineering. I can't find my spreadsheet with the data on it right now, but the key results I found were interesting:

1. When calculating the percentage of women receiving PhDs in STEM fields, the ratio of men to women in most fields were similar except for psychology which was something like >80% female.
2. Removing psychology from the calculation of the gender ratio for STEM fields dramatically reduced the female-to-male ratio.
3. Limiting the fields to only engineering was about the same as the aggregate STEM fields less psychology
4. The aggregate (assistant, associate, and full professors) faculty gender ratio is largely skewed to a lower percentage of women due in large part to the high percentage (~95%) of men that joined the faculty over 30 years ago when the percentage of men receiving PhDs in science and engineering was ~95%.
5. The percentage of junior (assistant prof.) engineering faculty that are women is much higher than the percentage of women receiving PhDs in engineering.
6. Female engineers with PhDs were 37% overrepresented in junior faculty positions relative to the percentage of female PhD engineers.
7. There was no signifcant bias in promotion from junior to senior faculty with regards to gender which means that the 37% overerpresentation of females in junior faculty was due to increased hiring, not decreased promotions.

A key point here is to remember that every college and university has a chemistry department, but a much smaller percentage of universities have engineering programs, therefore the competition for engineering faculty is much more intense than for the sciences.