Girls in engineering

Female students are just as much aware of what they want in life as are the boys

Your editorial (it’s great that more pupils are taking science… but far too few are girls, September 2013) makes it clear that you do not regard young women to be sufficiently discriminating to choose engineering or science as a career or to have the capacity to see a pink toy or a blue toy for exactly what they are.

I suggest that some fully empowered young women of today reading your editorial could be affronted by your comments. Just as easily as young men, young women know that an engineer must first of all be a technologist. Technology is the science of artifacts. But an engineer is required to know much more than that and must also command skills in economics, law, finance and business accounting. This all goes with being an accomplished engineer.

I suggest that female students are just as much aware of what they want in life as are the boys and gender imbalance in engineering never crosses their minds. From your editorial it could easily be inferred that you seek to regulate the lives of some others in an image of what you think is best for them.

Richard Hudson, Queensland, Australia

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