A gender-focused profile of student applications for Electrical Engineering in Portugal

Electrical Engineering is considered one of the areas with the lowest presence of women, both during their academic career and in professional practice, even when compared to other areas of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. Even though Electrical Engineering encompasses a wide and diverse range of topics, and despite having a strong impact on society, it apparently continues to fail to attract women. In Portugal, there are several academic degrees in the general area of Electrical Engineering or equivalent, some covering a wide scope of topics, while others are more narrowly focused on a specialized area of Electrical Engineering. Because of the traditionally a large student gender disparity in these programmes, the characterization of demand by gender is an important topic to analyze. In this way, the aim of the study presented in this paper is to characterize the demand for Electrical Engineering programmes in higher education institutions in Portugal, focusing on demand by the female gender. The analysis considers factors such as the type of education subsystem (polytechnic and university), type of Electrical Engineering programmes, geographical distribution of institutions, and access classifications. The study covers a chronological evolution of a time window of 5 years. Thus, the results obtained refer to official data for the years from 2016 until 2020. The results show that the female candidates who apply for Electrical Engineering programmes have application averages equal to or higher than male candidates, and that they have a preference for certain institutions and regions. It was found that 81.53% of the total number of women who choose this area are concentrated on 4 of the 18 institutions considered in the study.