It is no secret that women are vastly underrepresented in engineering disciplines. In 2013, women earned less than 23 percent of all doctoral degrees in engineering fields. A generation ago the percentage of women earning engineering doctorates was closer to 10 percent.
Given that there were so few women who have earned doctorates in engineering fields over the past several decades, it is not surprising that today very few women are inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, a society that honors people with memberships based usually on a lifetime of achievement in the field.
Recently, the National Academy of Engineering announced its 2015 class of new fellows. According to WIAReport‘s analysis, only 11 of the 67 new members are women. Thus, women are just 16.4 percent of the new members. A year ago, there were eight women among 67 new members. In 2013, five of the 69 new members were women. Three years ago in 2012, there were seven women among the 66 new members elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
Of this year’s 11 new women members of the National Academy of Engineering, five have current affiliations with the academic world. Three of the five are on the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and another of the five earned her Ph.D. at MIT.
Sangeeta Bhatia is the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is also an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and director of the Laboratory for Multiscale Regenerative Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dr. Bhatia is a graduate of Brown University and Harvard Medical School. She holds a master’s degree in mechanical engineering and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from MIT.
Ingrid Daubechies is the James B. Duke Professor of Mathematics at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Before joining the faculty at Duke, she taught at Princeton University from 1994 to 2011, where she was the first woman full professor in the department of mathematics. Dr. Daubechies was also the first woman president of the International Mathematical Union. She holds a Ph.D. from Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium.
Karen Klincewicz Gleason is the Alexander and I. Michael Kasser Professor of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She also serves as associate provost at MIT. She was recognized by the National Academy of Engineering for her work with chemically vapor-deposited polymers. Professor Gleason holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from MIT and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.
Janet G. Hering is director of the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology and a professor at the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology in Lausanne and Zürich. Before going to Switzerland, she taught at the University of California, Los Angeles and the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Hering is a graduate of Cornell University. She earned a master’s degree in chemistry at Harvard University and a Ph.D. in oceanography from MIT. Her research focuses on removing inorganic contaminants from drinking water.
Daniela Rus is the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is being recognized by the National Academy of Engineering for her contributions to distributed robotic systems. Before joining the faculty at MIT, Professor Rus taught at Dartmouth College. She holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Cornell University.