The Common University Data Ontario (CUDO) website has lots of accessible information about Ontario universities, and it’s been quite a while since I looked at it. Since there’s nothing more fun for engineers than compiling and looking at data, I’ll post some now and then. Today, let’s start by looking at female, full-time enrollment in some Ontario engineering programs, and how it has trended over the past few years.
First, let’s look at enrollment as a percentage of the total engineering enrollment at each university. There have been efforts over years to encourage more female participation in engineering. and in the chart we can see the results over 2017 to 2022 period. Looks like positive trends for several universities, especially McMaster, but most trend upwards. A few are kind of static, like Guelph and TMU (Toronto Metropolitan University, formerly known as Ryerson). York seems to be going downwards slightly, for some reason.
I have no useful insights into why some go up and some are static. Could be just random short term fluctuations, or maybe the effects of recruiting efforts? Or, maybe it’s the mix of programs that various places offer. The CUDO data doesn’t break it down into specific engineering programs so it’s hard to tell. At Waterloo certain programs tend to have higher proportions of women than others, such as Architectural (65%), Biomedical (63%), Chemical (39%), Environmental (44%), Management (49%) and Systems Design (55%) (see this link if you want the full data).
Percentages of females is interesting, but not the entire picture. The actual numbers can be important too. A larger number will be a bigger community to interact with for friendships, collaborations, etc. So there are the actual enrollment numbers.
In this chart we can see that some universities have a few hundred female engineering students, while others have a thousand or more spread across all the programs. Waterloo clearly has the most in terms of numbers, reflecting the large overall size of the multiple engineering programs. It also looks like McMaster has recently overtaken Toronto for the #2 spot in 2022 (the last year for which data is available from CUDO).
A Professor in Waterloo Engineering 
As a student at McMaster, I’d say some of it is recruitment efforts and some of it is the introduction of Biomedical Engineering programs in 2017l
Thanks for the insights!
I’ve recently noticed in the CUDO dataset footnotes that McMaster’s enrolment numbers include their BTech program, which is not an accredited engineering program. I’m not sure how that affects the numbers, but maybe I’ll look into it someday.
I’m quite familiar with the BTech program (at least the biotechnology part of it). It’s a nice program, a combination of business and engineering principles, and is accredited as a business program. Not the right content and structure to meet engineering accreditation requirements though, and that wasn’t the university’s intention in the program design. Not sure why CUDO puts it into the “engineering” category, where every other university has accredited engineering programs, as far as I can tell.