Women in Engineering: Top Leaders, Resources and More

Women in STEM are changing the world. They're finding cures for diseases, making moves on other planets (while working to save our own planet from the damaging effects of climate change), advancing artificial intelligence,  developing software that is helping companies tackle everyday challenges and so much more.

Still, women are underrepresented in STEM careers like engineering. So here are five female engineers leading the industry, and some resources to help you dive into a career in STEM yourself.

Women Leaders in Engineering

Despite the obvious lack of female leaders in finance, the few who've made it to the top are changing the future of STEM. Here are five women engineers you should know.

1. Carol Leung

Carol Leung is the engineer manager of Airbnb. She leads the engineering for the "guest side" of Airbnb's Plus initiative.

"I love traveling and immersing myself in different cultures — I have lived and worked as an engineer in different parts of the world, building algorithmic trading systems at Goldman Sachs Tokyo, co-founding my own digital photography software startup in Hong Kong, leading a mobile development team at XtremeLabs (now Pivotal) in Toronto, and building an iOS and Android app from the ground up for a small social network startup after I moved back to San Francisco," she said of her experience in an interview on the site. "My love of travel (and software development) lead me to Airbnb. I love that I can use my passion for traveling to help shape a product that enriches other people’s journeys."

2. Meredith Westafer

Meredith Westafer is a senior industrial engineer at Tesla, where she manages the design and layout of the company's Gigafactory. The Gigafactory, located in Reno, Nevada, will be the world's largest factory by footprint and produce the lithium-ion batteries on which Tesla vehicles run.

3. Krysta Svore

4. Karen Casella

Karen Casella is the engineering leader of the Edge & Playback Access teams at Netflix, where leads the teams responsible for ensuring that Netflix users are viewing content securely. She was formerly the vice president of engineering at Shop.com and has also held engineering positions at eBay and Sun Microsystems.

5. Yael Garten

Yael Garten is the director of Siri Analytics at Apple, where she is in charge of using data to make Apple's voice assistant, Siri, make decisions. Here team helps decide how Siri is updated (the new features the program will get) and more. Before working for Apple, Garten worked as the director of data science at LinkedIn and founded the informatics consulting firm, Genetics Systems Inc.

Engineering Resources

Here are some organizations, groups, conferences and scholarships to check out if you're interested in a career in engineering, yourself.

Organizations

• National Girls Collaborative Project
• National Math and Science Initiative
• Women in Engineering Proactive Network
• Million Women Mentors
• American Association of University Women

LinkedIn Groups and Meetups

• STEM Women
• Women in STEM
• NYC-Women in STEM
• Largest Women Science Technology & Mathematics Meetup Groups
  

Conferences for Women in STEM

• IEEE Women in Engineering Leadership Summit
• The Women in Tech Summit
• Wonder Women Tech Conference
• The Global Women in STEM Leadership Summit
• Women in Product Conference
• Women in Tech Conference

Scholarships for Women in STEM

• Institute of Industrial Systems and Engineers Scholarship
• AWIS Kirsten R. Lorentzen Award
• Science Systems and Applications, Inc. (SSAI) Academic Scholarship
• Women Techmakers Scholarship
• Aysen Tunca Memorial Scholarship

Returnships for Women in STEM

• Pathforward Returnship Matcher
• iRelaunch Return to Work Programs
• Cadence Returnship Programs
• Northrop Grumman Returnship Program

Career Opportunities for Women in Engineering

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that STEM jobs will grow by nearly 11 percent by  2032, and millions of these jobs are expected to continue to go unfilled due to lack of skilled professionals. The STEM labor force significantly under represents diverse workers with Hispanic workers accounting for just 8% of all STEM employees, Black workers just 9%, and women only 27% workers. 

STEM has a promising career trajectory, as there's a demand for these jobs and they're lucrative. There were almost 10.5 million STEM jobs in 2022, representing 6.2 percent of U.S. employment, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

And 93 out of 100 STEM occupations had wages above the national average. Specifically, petroleum engineers earned the highest salaries, with an annual mean wage of $142,800, over $80,000 higher than the national average across all occupations. And physicists ($150,130) was also among the highest-paid STEM occupations, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But women aren't the highest earners in STEM. In fact, STEM is notoriously male-dominated with a rather grim gender pay gap. Men working in STEM average $65,000, while women working in STEM average just $60,000 — a gap of 7.7 percent, according to a report by US National Science Foundation published in 2021.

On top of the pay gap, women in STEM face unique challenges that make them more likely than men to leave their careers for jobs in other industries, according to Catalyst data. For example, 53 percent of women (compared to 31 percent of men) who start out in business roles in tech-intensive industries leave because of isolation, hostile male-dominated work environments, ineffective executive feedback and a lack of effective sponsors.

Another study of 1,464 women engineers found that women are neither receiving the recognition they deserve for their work nor the opportunities for advancement. And they report feeling unable to effectively use their math and science skills, often because their superiors and colleagues doubt their skills.

It's no surprise, then, that few women even bother studying STEM. Only 27 percent of all students taking the AP Computer Science exam in the United States are female, and just 18 percent of American computer-science college degrees go to women.

But the world needs more women in STEM.

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AnnaMarie Houlis is a feminist, a freelance journalist and an adventure aficionado with an affinity for impulsive solo travel. She spends her days writing about women’s empowerment from around the world. You can follow her work on her blog, HerReport.org, and follow her journeys on Instagram @her_report, Twitter @herreportand Facebook.

This article was updated by Fairygodboss on Feb 26, 2024 with up to date statistics and updated resource links.