While attending a Society of Women Engineers conference last fall in Nashville, Tenn., Sona Avetisian, then a senior at Carnegie Mellon University, tagged along with friends to a reception where they mingled with recruiters from big-name Wall Street financial houses.

Ms. Avetisian met a representative from Goldman Sachs but, "I wasn't showing any interest," recalled the civil engineering major. "I wasn't searching for anything in the business area."

However, when the Goldman Sachs recruiter mentioned he held a civil engineering degree and invited her to a preliminary interview, Ms. Avetisian became intrigued and accepted.

She passed the initial interview round, which he conducted with her and other students at the Nashville conference, and early this year flew to New York City for a series of on-site meetings with Goldman Sachs in its Wall Street and Jersey City offices.

By February, she had received an offer to work as an analyst in Goldman's operations department beginning next month.

"I was thinking about getting a master's in business," said Ms. Avetisian, who lives in O'Hara and graduated from Fox Chapel Area High School. "But this was almost a short cut to all of that. I think I'll really like this and after three years I can decide whether to go into a specialist's role or a managing role."

Ms. Avetisian, who graduated last month from CMU, is one of a growing number of female engineers being snapped up by Wall Street firms because of their strong technical and analytical skills. Some of them may find the path to the top might be easier in financial services than in traditional engineering companies where women frequently still encounter barriers to success. And because of lucrative Wall Street bonuses, many may earn more than those starting out at engineering firms.

"The perceived culture is friendlier" in the financial sector, said Laura Sherbin, director of research for the Center for Work-Life Policy, a New York-based organization that earlier this month released a study published in the Harvard Business Review about why women are dropping out of some technical fields, "The Athena Factor: Reversing the Brain Drain in Science, Engineering and Technology."

The Athena study found that 52 percent of highly qualified females working for science, engineering and technology companies quit because of the pressures of working in a male-dominated environment.

"There's a macho culture of boys clubs, and hard hats in engineering," Ms. Sherbin said.

Many women bail out of science and engineering jobs in their mid- to late 30s when career and family pressures seem to intensify.

Among the factors driving women away, according to the study, are sexual harassment on the job; isolation and lack of mentors or female support in the workplace; and a lack of clear-cut career paths for women.

Of the women who responded to surveys and participated in focus groups for the Athena report, 55 percent who worked in tech jobs for financial firms said the work culture at their firms was "more inclusive and collaborative" than at tech firms.

Money also may play a role in attracting engineers to financial services. Although there's a not a wide discrepancy in starting salaries, Wall Street workers do have the opportunity to earn significant bonuses.

In a survey of industries looking to hire new graduates, CBcampus.com found a financial analyst with a business degree could expect a median annual salary of $66,590 while a civil engineer could expect $68,600 and an electrical engineer could make $75,930. CBcampus.com used data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to compile its salary figures so it reflects nationwide medians, not just median salaries on Wall Street, which tend to be higher.

At CMU, the larger numbers of engineering graduates taking jobs in the financial services industry isn't confined to females, said career counselors.

While only about 1 percent of the school's engineering grads accepted financial services jobs in 2003, that number swelled to 13 percent in 2005. It was about 10 percent in 2007.

"It's being driven by the financial industry, which is actively pursuing engineering for analysts positions," said Carol Young, a consultant in CMU's career center who works primarily with electrical and computer engineering students. "They love our engineers and the quantitative skills they bring."

Some engineering students complete summer internships on Wall Street and eventually get offers from those places for full-time jobs after graduation, she said. And the financial firms are more open than some manufacturing and engineering companies to hiring international students and sponsoring them for H-1B visas so that they can work in the United States, she said.

Alcoa, which has its corporate center on the city's North Shore and some regional operations, was one of five companies that sponsored the Athena study. The others were Pfizer, Microsoft, Cisco, and Johnson & Johnson.

A year ago, the aluminum maker launched an initiative, Women in Line Roles, to help improve retention of women in operational jobs that lead to managerial positions.

"If you want women at the absolute highest levels in the company, operational and line experience are considered essential," said Ann Whitty, vice president and general manager for Alcoa's Rigid Packaging Division in Newburgh, Ind. "We looked at our representations in managerial and executive positions and saw that females in line and operations roles were lagging."

Ms. Whitty joined Alcoa in 1979 as an electrical engineer and also holds a master's in business administration.

"When I started, it was a big deal to be a woman engineer. It's not that anymore. I think engineering is a great career with a terrific amount of variety in the work you do and opportunities in technical, management, sales and financial jobs."

Alcoa's Women in Line initiative addresses a range of issues that affect women, including networking opportunities in remote company locations such as Suriname and Iceland.

"It's very hard for them to network, they're so far away physically. So we started a virtual network for them to learn more about the business," said Ms. Whitty.

It's too early to measure results of the initiative, she said.

"We're at the beginning of a journey. We have room for improvement like all companies do."