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Female airmen underrepresented in tech field

Women account for 8 percent of airmen in technical career fields, even though they make up a fifth of the enlisted force, Air Force statistics show.

Of 108,735 enlisted airmen who do what are considered technical jobs, such as engineering, 100,036 are men and 8,699 are women. The disparity mirrors a nationwide trend of men outnumbering women in fields related to math and science.

Nearly half — 49 percent — of enlisted male airmen in Community College of the Air Force programs are in technical specialties, compared with 17 percent of enlisted female airmen, according to data from the Air Force Personnel Center.

Airmen are in CCAF programs that align with their Air Force Specialty Codes, so academic specialties closely mirror AFSCs. The personnel center could not provide data for women in technical AFSCs.

The careers that a new recruit can enter are determined by his Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery scores and academic qualifications such as high school or college classes, according to the Air Force Recruiting Service.

“We try to match them up with jobs they’re going to be successful at, and then ultimately they make the choice,” said Tech. Sgt. Angela Lesko, AFRS’s program manager for enlisted accessions.

The difference in the number of men and women in technical fields could be due in part to female recruits generally having lower scores on the Armed Forces Qualification Test, which includes weighted ASVAB scores. Math, science and mechanical skills are key to scoring well on the AFQT.

Forty percent of new female airmen were in the 65th percentile or higher on the AFQT, compared with 51 percent of new male airmen.

The Air Force calculates ASVAB scores in four aptitude categories: general, mechanical, administrative and electrical. The score for each category is computed on scores for the ASVAB’s subtests.

Many technical career fields, such as communications and electronics AFSCs, have minimum required scores for the electrical and mechanical qualification categories. For example, a recruit who wants to be a technical applications specialist must score in the 88th percentile in the mechanical category and in the 85th percentile in the electrical category; by contrast, a recruit who wants to go into maintenance scheduling needs to score only in the 44th percentile in the general category.

The scores for men and women in the electrical and mechanical qualification categories weren’t available.

But even well-qualified women choose technical educations and careers less often than men, said Amy Wendt, an electrical engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-director of the university’s Women in Science & Engineering Leadership Institute.

Wendt said she sees girls in high school take as many science and math classes as boys do, but they are less likely to continue in those tracks.

“It’s between when they graduate from high school and that decision about what they’re going to do afterwards that we see the big drop-off,” she said.

The way technical fields are marketed to high school students is one reason why girls tend to choose careers that don’t require strong science or math skills, Wendt said. Engineering and other technical fields often receive attention for being technically rigorous and difficult, which might appeal more to men, but factors that could appeal more to women — creativity and the ability to make a difference in people’s lives — aren’t highlighted, she said.

A female engineering noncommissioned officer stationed in Europe concurred.

“Engineering and technical fields are considered ‘geeky,’ and a lot of young women shy away from them because of this,” she wrote in an e-mail.

Young women who might be interested in technical fields also have few role models, Wendt said.

“There are a lot more male engineers out there, so I think for boys there is a lot more identification ... than girls have,” she said.

The NCO thinks the small number of female engineers in the Air Force hasn’t had much effect on her professional growth.

“I’ve had good male mentors and good female ones,” the engineer wrote on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to talk to the media. “In my experience, if you do your job and aren’t afraid to get your hands dirty, you’ll be accepted.”

The Air Force data for women in technical fields reflects trends in U.S. society.

A 2007 study by the American Society for Engineering Education found 17.5 percent of undergraduate engineering students in the U.S. were women, even though women made up 58 percent of all college undergraduates.

And little progress has been made despite an effort to attract women into technical fields, Wendt said. In fact, the ASEE study found the percentage of women in university engineering programs has decreased slightly in the last 10 years.

“When I entered into engineering [in the 1980s] ... I thought, well, there aren’t that many women in engineering but ... certainly the numbers will increase over time,” she said. “And they haven’t [changed] that much.”