There was only one other female engineer on staff when Sheila Boyington helped design wastewater treatment plants at the Walnut Creek, California office of Black & Veatch, a global engineering firm.
And then Boyington was the last woman standing. Her sole female colleague left to be a midwife.
That was years ago, but Boyington – who’s now a successful Chattanooga-based entrepreneur in the educational field – says too few women still pursue degrees in STEM, or science, technology, engineering and math. And even if women do find a STEM job, she says, 50 percent of them quit within 10 years.
That’s why Boyington serves as the national honorary co-chair of Million Women Mentors, an effort to find a million women in STEM fields – including 10,000 in Tennessee – to act as mentors and encourage girls to explore STEM degrees and careers.
It’s not the only effort to recruit women into male-dominated fields. Locally, women are making inroads beyond STEM into such male-dominated career fields as police officers, firefighters and truck drivers.