Published Covers: A Snapshot of the Visibility of Women in Safety and Engineering

Abstract

Much effort has gone into recruiting women into nontraditional fields such as engineering. It has been assumed that providing role models in the form of women faculty members would increase the number of female students entering the field; i.e., seeing the success of women similar to themselves would increase young women's confidence in themselves. More recent efforts are looking into what happens after these women graduate, e.g., the problem of women leaving the field soon after they begin working. Visual images can have a powerful impact on perceptions, thus this project was conducted to address the questions of whether and how often women see themselves as practicing members of their profession on the covers of field-relevant (safety and engineering) journals and magazines. Women were found to have a visible presence on the covers and their presence is approximately proportional to their membership in the professions.