Fortunately, for this young woman, her school had a co-op program:
After a summer spent working around high voltage switching equipment where I was forced to figure things out by myself, I came to realize that I actually could do these things. My summer jobs progressed to the point that I spent my last summer working as an electrician in a remote underground mine in the High Arctic. This experience increased my self-confidence immensely and made the academic work far more rewarding and relevant.

CCWE recommendations to engineering faculties include increased efforts to attract and retain women graduate students who could be both role models for undergraduate women and potential engineering faculty members. Retention initiatives include the establishment of voluntary mentorship programs for men and women students, appointment of an advisor to the dean on issues of concern to women students, and comprehensive social and academic adjustment and support programs for all students. Addressing the environment in engineering faculties, the CCWE recommended a code of behaviour be adopted for all students, and gender-sensitivity programs be provided for all faculty, students and administrative staff.

Perhaps the most isolated of all are women graduate students who represented only 10% of Master's students and 6.1% of Doctoral student in engineering in 1990. In a private brief, a woman reported that she experienced support through her undergraduate studies, but that graduate school was quite a different story: Power and domination became such an issue in one working relationship that I changed supervisors. I experienced for the first time, systemic discrimination. The situation brought me to the point of withdrawing from graduate school which would almost certainly have happened without the intervention of my present supervisor and a very supportive family.

Role models can play a critical role in supporting women in non-traditional fields. At the Prairie Region Forum, one woman described how she felt:
I didn't even meet a woman engineer until the end of my final term at university. A female mentor or role model during grade school would have helped me battle my insecurities. She also could have satisfied my pre-teen curiosity, like "Do women engineers wear skirts or do they dress like guys?" I had to wait until I started work to discover the answer to that one.

More women faculty would ensure both men and women students had women role models and would alleviate the tremendous burden on female professors who are often the only female in a faculty.

I would really have liked to have had a female engineering professor in university. Somehow there is a big difference between knowing that it is possible (to become an engineer) and seeing that someone has really done it. I get the same hunger for a real role model from my female undergraduates today.

The CCWE recommends proactive recruitment of women faculty and redesign of tenure and promotion criteria to take into account the impact of family responsibilities on career progression. An action plan to increase the number of women faculty would include financial incentives, a mentoring system, and part-time faculty positions.

One woman professor suggested that the men students need role models too:
The young men in the (engineering) program need to see their role models (male) behaving in a non-sexist fashion, by the use of appropriate language and even changes in the curriculum (what kind of examples are used in the classroom). If the young men perceive that it is acceptable for the concept of the non-sexist male to be an engineering role mode, the ideas of stupid jokes or outright harassment disappears.

The CCWE is grateful to dozens of women who have told their stories. They have brought to life the dilemma of women who have chosen engineering, and there is a pioneer spirit in their storytelling.

At the Montreal forum, a young engineering student spontaneously told her story before delivering her written brief She began by saying that she was the only female among 20 engineering students who participated in a tour of an electronics company. After the tour, the students were addressed by a company official.

An older gentleman came in to tell us what his company was looking for in its new employees. He said they were looking for bright, young; innovative minds, people who could come up with creative solutions to problems. But there was something more. His company was looking for people with social skills, people who could interact well with others, people who one day would make good managers.

Then he turned to me and said "You may be pleased to find out that most of the women we interview are better at these social skills than men are. So don't feel too bad, dear, if they beat you at math because your head's above them in social skills.

I said, “I can beat them in math too.”