Despite comprising nearly 60 percent of admitted students for 2004, female students have low enrollment counts in technical fieds of study, according to data from the Office of the Registrar released in spring quarter.

Statistics show that women continue to be especially underrepresented in comparison to overall campus numbers in science and engineering majors. The data also suggests that, compared to enrollment numbers from 2000, disparity among the genders in many of these fields is on the rise.

Some of the technical fields with the most gender disparity include bioengineering, structural engineering, mechanical/aerospace engineering, computer science/engineering and electrical/computer engineering. In bioengineering, undergraduate females constitute 36.5 percent of the total number of students, and female graduate students form 37.5 percent of the total. Less than 30 percent of undergraduate structural engineering majors are female, while 22 percent of structural engineering graduate students are female.

Of the MAE majors, 15.4 percent of the undergraduate students are female, while 17.6 percent of the graduate students are female. In CSE, almost 85 percent of undergraduates are male and about 79 percent of graduates are male.

In ECE, only 148 out of 1,063 undergraduates are female.

“We are concerned [with these statistics], but the application is not something we can control,” said ECE Chair Paul Yu, whose department enrolls the lowest percentage of women on campus. “We need to go back to the source of the problem … the [female applicant] pool is much smaller. Across the country there are not many people in the pool.”

More than 86 percent of undergraduates in ECE are male, and male graduate students represent 84 percent of the total students.

According to Yu, very few women apply for the science and engineering majors and, consequently, few ever become engineering majors and professors.

“We are trying to enlarge the pool of graduate students so that there will be more people to become professionals,” Yu said.

Maria Charles, an associate professor of sociology and expert on gender segregation in higher education, co-authored a federally funded study on the underrepresentation of women in science and engineering. She said she has found that women continue to shy away from “traditionally male” fields of study in favor of other subjects.

“I think it’s rooted in beliefs about discrimination, in beliefs about competence, and, to a certain extent, internalized preferences,” Charles said. “It’s this ‘equal-but-different’ ideology — even in the feminist movements you find elements of this — that I think drives this horizontal segregation [between fields].”

While males dominate most of the science and engineering departments, women continue to make up sizable majorities in social science and humanities fields. The gap is starkest in human development, where women make up more than 93 percent of the program’s 454 declared students.

While the number of male students in science and engineering majors is significantly higher than that of females, some female students said they did not feel this affected their experience in these majors.

“I notice when there’s not a lot of girls in my classes, but that’s about it,” said Thurgood Marshall College sophomore Megan Reid, a structural engineering major. “I don’t feel like the professors talk to me any differently … I don’t think people treat me any differently.”

Thurgood Marshall College junior and communication major Cassie Vinnedge said she believes that the imbalance is promoted by traditional notions of what and who women are supposed to be.

“It seems to align with old stereotypes,” Vinnedge said.

Most of the departments in which males have a large majority over women are UCSD’s impacted majors — those majors most difficult to be admitted to. The impacted majors include bioengineering, computer science, computer engineering and electrical engineering, all majors where women are underrepresented in enrollment. All of these majors must be declared upon application to UCSD, and cannot be switched into once one becomes a student.

However, the departments do not keep records of the gender distribution of applicants to these majors.

Although UCSD applicant Melody Jue, a senior at Castro Valley High School, said she was interested in science and engineering, she said she has decided to attend UC Davis as an English major.

“I didn’t want to pin myself down in a pursuit that was very limited,” Jue said. “I still like math and science … Being a girl, I know there are a lot of males [in the science and engineering fields]. That’s not something that factors into my opinion.”

While women continue to make up roughly the same proportion of the total UCSD population as in fall 2000, data from individual departments suggest that the inequality in gender representation is increasing. In MAE, ECE, CSE, physics, philosophy and chemical engineering, the proportion of women has dropped since 2000.

From fall 2000 to spring 2004, the physics department has seen a drop from 34.6 percent of females to 20.1 percent of females in undergraduate physics majors, according to statistics from the registrar’s office. In MAE, ECE and CSE, the proportion of undergraduate female majors has decreased by approximately 2 percent from 2000 to 2004, while female chemical engineering majors have dropped by 4 percent.

According to assistant professor of sociology Mary Blair-Loy, the disparity of males versus females in several departments is a phenomenon that begins prior to college.

“One theory is that women are less likely to be encouraged in technical or mathematical fields, starting even in elementary school, and that there is a systematic and unconscious discouragement of women and encouragement of men,” Blair-Loy said.

However, she said that women who do enter technical fields perform as well as their male counterparts.

“The women that are in these fields, although there aren’t enough of them and that is a big problem, are just as productive as the men are, and sometimes are even more productive,” Blair-Loy said.

Carolyn Gordon, president of the Association of Women in Mathematics and a math professor at Dartmouth College, expressed her frustration with the nationwide statistics.

“We are quite concerned,” Gordon said. “The numbers [of females in the affected fields] are improving, but not as quickly as we like. It’s still much too low of a percentage.”

Outreach groups such as the AWM are trying to improve the lopsided numbers by providing mentoring programs for high school, undergraduate and graduate students, encouraging AWM university student chapters and providing workshops for women in the later stages of graduate school, Gordon said.

Department of Communication Chair Geoffrey Bowker, whose department is favored by undergraduate women three to one, believes that steps must be taken to address gender inequity.

“I think an enormous amount should be done,” Bowker said. “There needs to be positive programs to bring women in at the undergraduate level, graduate level, staff and leadership positions. We’ve still got a long way to go before gender equity [is achieved].”