2010-11 academic year of the University of La Rioja. No woman studied Electrical Engineering and only one had opted for Industrial and Automatic Electronics. Not even fifteen years have passed since then and the zero, or almost zero, presence of female students in the … Engineering degree classrooms no longer exist, although the number of women continues to be very small compared to men: they are only two out of every ten.
In that 2010-11 academic year, now long ago, there were only 32 girls among the 212 students in those grades. They represented only 15% of the students and, over the years, that percentage gradually increased. In fact, three years later the female presence in these engineering careers had risen to 17.6%, a figure that after a decade has stood at 22% in the most recent year (171 girls to 609 boys). That is, in two decades the percentage has grown by just over 4%.
There are five Engineering degrees that are studied at the UR: Agricultural, Electrical, Industrial Electronics and Automation, Computer Science and Mechanics. Among them, both by number and percentage, the Agricultural is the one that has the most women. They have accounted for 36.69% of the students in the 2023-24 academic year, while in others such as Mechanics, Computer Science and Electrical Sciences they have not reached 20%.
In any case, all these figures are very far from the trend shown by the UR. Not in vain, more women than men currently study at the Rioja educational center thanks, above all, to the differences in careers such as Nursing (275 girls and 63 boys) or Early Childhood Education (257 girls and 24 boys).
According to these data, there are still studies that are linked, globally, to the male gender and others that are much more in demand by the female gender. In that sense, Jesús Velilla considers that “it makes no sense” for men to choose technical careers more than women. «Engineering is not incompatible with sex; There are colleagues who are true phenomena,” emphasizes the dean of the College of Industrial Technical Engineers of La Rioja.
Even so, the differences that are seen in the educational field are also transferred to the professional field. “Of the 1,200 members that we have, more or less, about 130 are women,” says Velilla. “We are around 10%, but the number has been growing over time,” she adds. To exemplify this evolution, the dean of the school details that, when he studied, there were hardly any female engineers. “Maybe there was one or none,” he says. However, his group is soon going to hold an event to recognize professionals who have been in the trade for twenty-five years and there is already a progression. “Out of seventy people, there are already ten women,” he says.
Not in vain, and according to Velilla himself, the female presence in the sector expanded in the nineties and this trend has intensified over the years. “It is something that is much more normalized than before,” he congratulates. And, in fact, he believes that in the future these registrations will continue to increase. “We have a project to introduce ESO and Baccalaureate students to Steam careers and it is curious that there the percentage of women is even higher than that of men,” he points out. “What’s more, one of the groups, from La Enseñanza, has won an introduction to innovation award and was made up entirely of girls,” he highlights. For all this, the dean of Cogitir is “very proud” of the greater importance that the female presence is taking on in the sector. “I am very happy that it is no longer seen as something atypical for a woman to decide to pursue these studies,” he concludes.
In the Association of Telecommunications Engineers of La Rioja, the presence of women rises to 22% and in the College of Industrial Engineers, for its part, of the 380 members in the autonomous community, only 42 are women, that is, around 11%. However, there is “hope” that the numbers will grow in the future, since in the Master of Industrial Engineering this percentage increases to 17% in the case of the UR. “We see the glass as half full in the face of society’s need to incorporate more and more women into the sector, mostly dominated by men,” says Teresa Alós, secretary of the official association of the sector in La Rioja and Aragón. “We should not be afraid to enter the sector,” she concludes.
A day to vindicate the role of women in the sector
This Sunday, June 23, World Women’s Day in Engineering was celebrated, a day that aims to vindicate the role of women in the sector. “We must highlight the industrial engineers who are references,” says Teresa Alós. “We are just as valid as men and we can perform our duties in any sector in the same way,” adds the secretary of the Official College of Industrial Engineers of Aragon and La Rioja. Alós also emphasizes the need to “make the career attractive” and both she and Jesús Velilla, dean of the College of Industrial Technical Engineers, highlight the low unemployment rate among students who complete related studies.
