The paper focuses on retention in the Rowan University undergraduate engineering program with many “female‐friendly” features despite its design as best practices for all students. Both male and female “stayers” in the program are compared to “leavers” on a variety of characteristics, including pre‐college and family background, grades, satisfaction with the Rowan program, engineering self‐confidence, and future expectations about their engineering major and career. Data come from a special survey of all Rowan engineering students.

This paper compares perceptions of problems for women and men in the fields of science, math, and engineering among undergraduate engineering students surveyed at a mid-Atlantic American university over a period of 5 years. Gender differences in these perceptions are analyzed, as are changes in these perceptions over the course of the undergraduate years. Undergraduate exposure to female role models in these fields has little impact on these perceptions, but exposure to professional engineering experiences reduces the seriousness with which some problems are perceived, especially by women. While perceived problems do not seem to be related to engineering self-confidence, they are related to men's satisfaction with engineering, and to women's intentions to persist in the engineering field after graduation.

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