Why do newer engineering disciplines like biomedical and environmental engineering have far better gender representation than mechanical engineering?
According to Kim Porter, newer disciplines like biomedical and environmental engineering have better gender representation because they were built without the institutional legacy that older fields carry. Mechanical engineering still sits at roughly one woman for every nine men — the exact same ratio as when Porter was a student in the early 1980s — while biomedical engineering has reached approximately 50-50 and environmental engineering stands at around 30 to 40 percent women. The core difference, as Porter frames it, is simple: newer fields never accumulated 50 years of institutional misogyny.
Porter raised this point during a discussion in HatchOne's Women in Engineering group, where a participant had queried ChatGPT on exactly this question. The AI's answer aligned with Porter's own lived observation: mechanical engineering's culture was cemented decades before women were meaningfully present, and it has changed at a glacially slow pace since. Biomedical and environmental engineering, by contrast, emerged as formal disciplines later, and simply never built the same exclusionary infrastructure into their foundations — hiring norms, culture, mentorship pipelines, and professional identity all formed in a less homogeneous era.
For Porter, these numbers are not abstract. She spent nearly her entire 40-year career as the only woman in all-male engineering environments. That the mechanical engineering ratio has not shifted in four decades — despite decades of awareness campaigns and diversity initiatives — is, in her view, a structural problem, not a pipeline one. You can hear this argument developed in full in the episode on Listenly.
"No opinions, all data, no emotion. Here's the data, here are the results, this is my recommendation — and then you don't say anything. Silence is power."
— Kim Porter, Ordinary To Badass, episode 452About Kim Porter
Kim Porter earned an engineering science and mechanics degree with an emphasis in biomedical engineering from Iowa State University in the early 1980s — at a time when biomedical engineering was not yet an established field of its own. She entered the profession within one month of the Challenger disaster in January 1986, joining the project to develop next-generation spacesuit gloves. From there, her career took her to product design at Nike before she built her own consultancy, Kim Porter Consultancy, which she ran for much of her working life. Across every role over a 40-year span, she was consistently the only woman in an all-male engineering environment — a lived reality that gives her analysis of gender ratios in the field rare firsthand weight. Porter founded HatchOne, an online engineering community that hosts a dedicated Women in Engineering subgroup, where she now channels her experience into mentoring the next generation of engineers. She has recently retired from full-time work while continuing to run the community and her consultancy. Her authority on the structural barriers facing women in engineering stems not from research at arm's length, but from four decades of navigating those barriers herself.
See also
Kim Porter argues that engineers are trained to be precise, accurate, and perfect — traits that must be partially unlearned to become an effective leader.
Kim Porter coaches that once you have presented a data-driven recommendation, you should stop talking completely and let silence sit. She explains that silence is a powerful tool, not a void to fill.
Kim Porter says early in her career she would apologize and promise to do better, but later she pushed back directly with facts — pointing out, for example, that the same behavior praised in male colleagues was being penalized in her.