Few Women Becoming Engineers Despite Pay : Education: Experts in industry and education wonder why more women are not entering this lucrative field.

Marcy Herman studies blueprints in a sparse orange construction trailer on the grounds of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. The trailer lacks plumbing, but contains the tools of her trade: hard hats, telephones and architectural drawings.

Sharon Markiewicz works beneath the fluorescent lights in a sprawling Westinghouse assembly plant inspecting the circuit boards that will run one of the most sophisticated aviation radar systems in the world. At other times, she gathers with other experts in a conference room to discuss progress being made on the AWACS radar system.

Herman and Markiewicz overcame the odds and are among the minority of engineers who are women.

“Women can do it,” Herman says, with a self-confident smile. As a civil engineer with Whiting-Turner Contractors, she is helping oversee the construction of a 186,000-square-foot addition to the physics laboratory near Columbia, Md.

“I was never afraid I wouldn’t be able to do what the men were doing,” says Markiewicz, a manufacturing engineer with Westinghouse.

Experts in education and industry are perplexed about why there are not more women like Herman and Markiewicz.

Careers in engineering generally pay well. Engineers with an bachelor’s degree can expect starting salaries of about $30,000 a year. With a master’s degree, they can earn twice that amount.

The hours required on the job are as regular as most professional jobs and almost all graduates can find work right after college. Yet women account for only 3% to 7% of working engineers.

More disconcerting to those in the field is that women seem to have lost ground. Women achieved their greatest representation in 1984 when they accounted for 17% of engineering students. Now they are about 15.5% of engineering students.

But to some extent, the declining numbers of women in engineering programs reflect a general decline of both men and women studying engineering. Since 1983, engineering enrollments throughout the country have declined by one third, according to the American Assn. of Engineering Societies.

“If more American students don’t become interested in engineering, we’re going to have a very difficult time competing on an international basis,” says David VandeLinde, dean of the School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

More women engineers will be needed to make up the anticipated shortfall, says H. Judith Jarrell, vice president for institutional advancement at Capitol College in Laurel, Md., a school which specializes in engineering and engineering technology programs.

Part of the reason why fewer women are studying engineering is that they have discovered opportunities in other fields, such as business, and because traditionally female occupations, such as teaching, now pay better, Jarrell says.

But often, women don’t choose to study engineering because they don’t know much about it. “There’s no ‘L.A. Law’ for engineering,” she says.

Another obstacle to attracting women to engineering is that high school girls often do not take the necessary math and science courses. They may be subtly discouraged from taking the courses or their failure to do well in those courses may be more readily tolerated than it is for boys, says Suzanne Jenniches, an engineer at Westinghouse and former national president of the Society of Women Engineers.

“By the time maybe they do decide they want to work and have a career, they’ve fallen behind,” she says. “I’d like to see a strong emphasis in the middle school that women take math and science.”

Cathy Morris, an electrical engineer with Bendix Field Engineering Corp. in Columbia, resisted her teachers who encouraged her to study medicine or law, and instead chose engineering. She had wanted to be an astronaut as a child, but later decided her chances of flying into space were slim. “If I couldn’t go, I’d build something that could,” she says.

Yet it wasn’t easy to be one of only a handful of women studying engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, she says. “It was lonely. . . . Sometimes when you’re the only girl walking into a classroom you ask, ‘Should I run now and become a nurse?”’

Another difficulty women face is a shortage of role models, especially in upper level management positions, Jenniches says. “Women will stay when they see a future.”

Maryland schools do slightly better than the national average in attracting women to engineering fields. At Johns Hopkins University, 23% of its 750 undergraduate engineering students are women. At the University of Maryland, 18% of the 526 engineering undergraduate students are women. Morgan State University has the best record of recruiting women--one-third of the school’s 420 engineering undergraduates are women.

“We don’t carry some of the baggage that’s been carried by some of the institutions in selecting students,” says Eugene M. DeLoatch, dean of engineering at Morgan State.

Minority women frequently are more interested in studying engineering than white women, he says. “Black or Hispanic women now believe part of the good life means ‘I have to go get it,’ ” he said.

The women who do go into engineering usually do well, experts say.

“Women students in general have a higher grade point average and play leadership roles in student societies,” says George Dieter, dean of the School of Engineering at the University of Maryland.

When they graduate, women can expect to be paid at least as much as and sometimes slightly more than men with the same experience, says Richard A. Ellis, director of Manpower Studies for the American Society for Engineering Education. “Engineering is perhaps the only large profession in which this is the case,” he said.

Laurel Snyder’s first career choice was early childhood education, but “I found I wasn’t going to be able to support myself doing that.”

So at age 27, she went back to school to study engineering. “It was a practical decision. I wanted to get out, get a job right away, and make money,” she said.

She started work 6 1/2 years ago as a computer engineer in Washington, making $24,000 a year.

In one of her first meetings with male colleagues, they asked her to make the coffee. “I made the coffee and served it so conspicuously that by the time we were through they were so sick of me that they never asked me to serve coffee again,” she said.

While many women engineers say they never noticed any discrimination against them, a couple say they were not given work as challenging as that given their male colleagues.

“Discrimination is out there. It’s subtle,” said Karen Blood, who founded her own computer training company in Frederick, Md., 10 years ago. “But it’s not going to be any different from any other business struggle.”

One time a prospective client asked her what would happen to her business if she got married. Although she felt her company was qualified, she did not win the contract from that client.

Both business and schools will need to work harder to recruit women engineers, Dieter says.

During the 1970s, as schools and businesses tried to attract women to the field, a number of scholarships were available to help them. But as the number of women engineers began to increase, the money dwindled.

The Society of Women Engineers offers $50,000 in scholarships, but “that’s a drop in the bucket compared to what the needs are,” Jenniches said.

More engineering scholarships need to be available for both men and women, she said.

Experts vary in their predictions for the future of engineering. Some say there will be a shortfall of 560,000 engineers by 2000. Ellis and his colleagues are more conservative, but still say more engineering students are needed.

“This is still going to be a good time for young engineers,” Ellis said. “People going into the system now should do quite well.”

Suzanne Jenniches, a manager of Westinghouse’s Systems and Technology Operations in Baltimore and a former national president of the Society of Women Engineers, said high school girls interested in engineering should:

* Take two years of algebra, one year of geometry, a semester of trigonometry, a semester of analytical geometry, a year of biology, a year of chemistry, a year of physics, and two years of social studies or a foreign language.

* Consider participating in the National Engineering Aptitude Search, a three-hour test for high school students that helps evaluate aptitude and qualifications for engineering studies. For more information contact: NEAS, 345 East 47th St., New York, NY 10017.