It's not on most Americans' radar, but U.S. technical education is in crisis. The country graduates, in a good year, 50,000 engineers; China and India each graduate two to three times as many. Few scientists are found among America's political class; the opposite is true in India and China. U.S. popular culture still stigmatizes tech-track kids as misfits, and EE Times' 2005 State of the Engineer survey found respondents distressed about the state of K-12 science programs. Our multipart series will illuminate the problems and, ultimately, offer some solutions. Here, we look at the gender gap. — Brian Fuller, Editor

Tamra Kerns was the lone female among a dozen engineering interns at IBM in the Dallas suburb of Westlake 15 years ago. It was an eye-opener.

"They'd go to lunch, and most often you wouldn't get invited," recalled Kerns, who today is director of software product strategy at National Instruments Corp. "Or they'd make plans to go a Texas Rangers game, and you didn't get invited."

At Texas A&M, where she had majored in computer science engineering, the situation hadn't been much better. There were often no more than two or three women in a class of 50 students. If five people were needed for a project group, she said, "there weren't five girls in the class [to make up their own team] — and the male students didn't want to be in your group."

The situation may have improved, but engineering still suffers from a serious gender imbalance.

In 2003, there were 196,000 female engineers in the work force, or 10.4 percent of the 1,879,000 total, according to Nathan Bell, research associate at the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology, a Washington-based nonprofit. (The statistics don't include software engineers.)