The Society of Women Engineers has released new data regarding the representation of women who earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in engineering disciplines during the 2023–2024 academic year.
Overall, women earned 48,717 of the 183,251 total engineering degrees awarded in 2024 (26.6 percent). When combining engineering with manufacturing and construction degrees, women’s representation among 2024 graduates drops to 20.4 percent.
By engineering degree level, women received 25.6 percent of bachelor’s degrees, 28.7 percent of master’s degrees, and 27.6 percent of doctoral degrees. Minority women are particularly underrepresented, with Hispanic women earning just 3 percent and Black women earning just 1.1 percent of all engineering degrees in 2024.
Notably, women’s representation among engineering degree-holders varies significantly by discipline. Computer science engineering was the degree conferred most to women (12,509), followed by mechanical engineering (6,728) and biomedical engineering (6,642). The disciplines with the highest share of women graduates were environmental engineering (50.2 percent), biomedical engineering (49.9 percent), and biological and agricultural engineering (43.9 percent). In contrast, women were least represented among graduates in aerospace engineering (18.6 percent), mechanical engineering (18.6 percent), and electrical engineering (19.1 percent).
By institution, the universities that awarded the most engineering degrees to women in 2024 were the Georgia Institute of Technology (698), Texas A&M University (632), Purdue University in Indiana (630), North Carolina State University (533), and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (426).