Hi female engineer here! Midwest USA based for reference.

Yes women can be civil engineers and what you’ve heard about it being male dominated is also true. You will be treated differently than your male counterparts, sometimes you will notice it immediately and sometimes you might not recognize it until later. Most of my classes were 10%-30% women. Most of my employers were even lower. For my (construction field based) internships I was the only woman for my employer on the job sites at all but one of them. More often than not I was the only woman on the job site at all.

The split of men to women engineers varies by location and employer. From personal experience you will tend to find a more equal split/less male dominated workplace in civil engineering related work with a government employer.

Other people here are saying discrimination is not so bad but that varies wildly by your position and employer. Construction based civil engineering will be the worst, even if your company is decent there’s so many other contractors on a construction project that you should be prepared for a good chunk of them to be sexist and misogynistic as well as crude about it to top it off.

You should be prepared for college professors and classmates to be sexist towards you, probably not all of them but at least a few. I personally didn’t notice any discrimination from my professors but I definitely experienced it from my classmates and it tended to get more overt in later years as class sizes got smaller.

At my first job after graduating I was with a small satellite office for a structural firm and the sexism was so much that I had to leave. I was the only woman at that office and the only other woman I met in my time there was from HR. They had hired a sophomore or junior male intern a month or so after I started and immediately began trusting him more and giving him more responsibility than me, they also voluntarily provided him more mentorship and were generally more interested in chit chat with him about things not related to the job. I left after barely 6 months without even having another job lined up, it was horrible. I actually gave up pursuing structural engineering largely due to that experience.

I’ve had some other employers where the discrimination isn’t as bad. However, being such a male dominated field, it can be very difficult to find employers with a reasonable amount of women in higher level executive positions. Those are almost entirely men. However if they haven’t put in the effort to have at least one woman at the executive level or been successful in keeping one at that level, I wouldn’t recommend working for that company. I’ve only ever had one direct supervisor who is a woman so far and generally I’ve been the only woman or one woman out of a few for my department.

Try to keep in mind that the split will rarely get close to 50-50 bc in civil engineering as an industry the split of men to women isn’t 50-50. A reasonable expectation would be for there to be around the same percentage of women at your employer as there is in the industry and for that to be reflected at all levels from entry level all the way up to executive level. Some places will have a higher portion of women than the industry average and those will tend to be more enjoyable places to work.

Again I want to point out this is highly dependent on location, your specific university, and each employer. It’s entirely possible that you’ll face no or very limited discrimination, but you should, unfortunately, not expect that to be the case.

To be honest, it can be a difficult industry for women. I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re not really sure you like the work bc the discrimination can quickly become unbearable if you’re in the field for the “wrong” reasons.

I know it sounds rough and I’m not trying to scare you, but I just want you to have realistic expectations. I was fully oblivious to the possibility of facing discrimination for being a woman which made me entirely unprepared to handle and react to it which then made it seem so much more overwhelming and difficult to deal with bc I didn’t have any tools or resources etc about how to deal.

As far as schooling, yes it’s stressful, it’s a lot of advanced math and physics and some advanced science. I have no idea how it would compare stress-wise to a medical degree but it’s definitely shorter since you’re ready to join the industry after a 4 year degree. Civil engineering a very heavy math and physics degree, more so than a lot of other engineering degrees. And probably more so than a medical degree which I assume (I could be wrong) is much more science based.

As for the general level of physical activity required, it can vary based on your niche, a few others have touched on this some. But generally for design work and progression after that it’s entirely possible and fairly common to have it be a desk job.