They're more likely to step up to the plate. This role of leadership can be seen as early as high school where 38.2 percent of females graduated with the required coursework for admittance into the UC and CSU systems in 1999 compared to 32.7 percent of male students. The report, put out by the California Department of Education, echoed the report on college enrollment in that the female majority carried across all ethnic groups. Females also dominate all areas of study on the campus except business where there is an equal percentage of male and female students and engineering where females account for only 18 percent. Women account for 56 percent of students majoring in the natural sciences or math, this is largely due to the high female numbers in biology.
Female enrollment is still low in male dominated fields such as physics, math and chemistry.
Bredin said this is due to a culture where instructors do not encourage young females to pursue these areas and where women lack internal confidence of their abilities in these fields. It's not everyone but many male and female teachers tend to see males and females differently. This in turn, Bredin said, causes females to lose confidence and desire to work in a field that they know is male dominated. Shahin Ghanzanshahi, one of two female professors in the engineering department, said she agrees that women need more encouragement in these fields. She said that the negative attitude towards subjects such as engineering often gets carried up from high school.