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Tiffany Williams will learn the basics of mechanical, civil and electrical engineering over the next three years in Suncoast High's math, science and engineering program. She'll graduate with a transcript rivaling that of a sophomore in a college engineering program.

But becoming an engineer isn't in her plans.

"I've always wanted to do something that helps children," said Williams, who hopes to become a pediatrician. "It's just a female instinct kind of thing to help."

For more than a decade, American public school administrators have acted on the belief that if they could give girls a better foundation in math and sciences, they could swell the ranks of female engineers.

Despite that push, the proportion of undergraduate engineering degrees being awarded to women is shrinking.

They earned just 18 percent of engineering bachelor's degrees awarded in 2007, according to the American Society of Engineering Education. That was the lowest share since 1996.

"What is turning girls off is the image of an engineer," said Maria Larrondo-Petrie, a computer engineer and associate dean of academic and international affairs at the College of Engineering and Computer Science at Florida Atlantic University. "They don't see engineering in relation to its impact on the world, on society, on the human condition."

Though it may sound sexist, Larrondo-Petrie said research has found that women such as Williams are drawn to "caring disciplines," jobs that make the world a better place.

Engineering may be responsible for bringing communities clean drinking water and designing prosthetic limbs for children, but it is still stereotyped as a number-crunching cubicle job.

In Palm Beach County, teachers try to promote engineering as a fun and potentially world-changing field starting in elementary school.

Through a club called Science, Engineering, Communication and Mathematics Excellence, students learn to build mousetrap cars and bottle rockets.

By middle school, there are five engineering magnet programs to nurture future engineers. By high school, there are seven.

Timothy Williams, a teacher in Roosevelt Middle's math and engineering magnet, buttonholes elementary teachers, asking which girls have shown an aptitude for math and science so that he can recruit them.

"Even at this age, you find there are very few females that elect to go into the program," he said. "I've made a special effort to try to pull girls into the program. I guess I have to go back to the drawing board."

For a time, it looked as if the effort to persuade girls to explore engineering was working.

Between 1966 and 1985, numbers of engineering bachelor's degrees awarded by American universities to women grew more than 7,000 percent, from 146 to 11,246.

Educators hypothesized then that numbers were suppressed by a math phobia they believed many girls suffered. If girls could become confident in their math and science skills, educators believed, the number of women in engineering and other technical fields would surely take off.

Instead, the gains in the ranks of women engineers began to stagnate.

Over the next 20 years, the annual number of women earning engineering degrees grew only 19 percent to 13,300 in 2006, while women flourished in other majors.

General Electric Co. researchers studying the phenomenon for a 2000 report called "Upping the Numbers" found that girls were leaving high school with knowledge and skills in math, science and technology equal to boys. They were simply choosing not to become engineers.

Karen Panetta, a Tufts University professor and founder of Nerd Girls, a program to promote women in engineering, said engineers have done such a good job of "embedding" what they do that people don't notice how engineering is part of so many things that have improved the world.

To reinforce that connection, Panetta takes her Nerd Girls out to work in the community. They recently rigged an entire island to run on solar power.

"Kids not only learn that I can solve a real community problem, but I can make sure the solutions are in harmony with the environment," Panetta said.

Bevlee Watford, director of the Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Diversity and an associate dean at Virginia Tech's College of Engineering, said what engineering needs is a good marketing campaign.

Watford estimates that 90 percent of her female students got hooked on engineering through a relative or someone close to them who is in the industry.

To show others the good that engineers can accomplish, Watford said, engineering needs its own TV show like CSI, which is credited with spawning an interest in forensic sciences.

"You tend to aspire to be what you see," Watford said.

Engineering's altruistic message is beginning to resonate with at least some girls.

Roosevelt Middle eighth-grader Jazmin Torres is a shy student, a kid who likes to take apart cellphones, remote controls and her dad's battery-operated cars. But ask her why she wants to be an engineer and she lights up about what the career can help her accomplish.

"I would like to help people in wheelchairs, people who are disabled to feel comfortable in our world," she said. "Engineering is not just about you have power and knowledge to do things - it's about helping other people."

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