The University of Technology Sydney will allow female school leavers to enter its engineering courses with a lower ATAR than males under a plan to boost the number of women in the field.

The university applied to the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board for permission to give 10 Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) adjustment points to female students applying for engineering and construction degrees next year.

UTS is offering female high school graduates bonus points to study the course, meaning they'll be able to achieve a lower entrance score than their male counterparts. Steven Siewert

Many universities allocate adjustment points based on disadvantage or illness, but UTS Director of Women in Engineering and IT, Arti Agarwal, said she believed the university would be the first to base them on gender.

Dr Agarwal said a better gender balance will lead to improved student outcomes and better buildings and design in the wider world.

"Lots of research has shown that teams are more productive when they are gender balanced. They come up with better ideas and better solutions," she said.

"We (women) ride in cars, we use public transport, we do all kinds of things," she said. "If they are only being designed and engineered by one gender, then the requirements and needs of the other gender can get missed a bit."

Dr Agarwal said female participation in some UTS engineering programs, such as mechanics and mechatronics - was as low as four per cent, leading to a heavily male-dominated workforce.

The faculty's research also found that bonus points could boost female enrolments in some engineering courses by more than 10 per cent.

"The decision would not lower the quality of the graduates," she said. "I really cannot stress this enough - we are not taking people who don't deserve to be here.

Jessica Massih, a fifth-year student in Civil and Environmental Engineering at UTS, said gaining entry to a course was just the beginning, and the female students would still have to prove themselves during their degree.

"Some people I've spoken to think it's a handout, but I think it's a hand up," she said. "I hope it does [act as an incentive]. They will still be able to prove themselves throughout the degree by doing just as well, if not better."

But Andrew Norton, the director of higher education at the Grattan Institute think tank, doubted ATAR concession would encourage more women to study engineering.

"It's a very male-dominated workplace, and work we did recently showed that even when women have the qualification they don't work in the area because of the nature of the workplace," he said.

More than half of all students starting a bachelor degree at an Australian university are now admitted on a basis other than their ATAR, with many universities using bonus points, interviews, or offering places based on HSC results alone.

Adjustment points raise a student's tertiary entrance rank for the university that allocates them. If a female applicant's ATAR is 69, then UTS would consider it to be 79 after adding the ten extra points, but the revised rank would not be recognised by any other university.