Understanding the importance of salient factors associated with sustainability challenges that engineers are known to solve in influencing women’s choice of engineering is particularly important in this present world where a combination of these sustainability issues, the underrepresentation of women and the need for more engineers remain a challenge to the profession. However, little is known about the degree of importance of more detailed themes within the social, environmental and economic sustainability pillars in such career decisions. Consequently, the aim of this paper is to understand the relative importance of specific sustainability-themed factors influencing women’s choice of engineering, using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). An AHP structurally designed online survey was used to gather and analyze data from a sample of 414 UK and Nigeria respondents. The results showed that of all the ten sustainability-themed factors examined in this study, water quality/quantity, climate change, waste management, biodiversity, and material consumption/energy use, had a greater influence on the respondents’ choice of engineering relative to other factors. The data revealed specific rather than general sustainability themes that appeal to women’s choice of engineering. This could offer valuable insight from a recruitment strategy perspective to help engineering stakeholders to focus their attention and recruitment efforts on the most salient areas of influence.
Despite the growing demand for more engineers associated with the profession’s relevance in addressing the world’s most challenging sustainability problems, more young girls are choosing other career paths with similar relevance such as healthcare, compared to engineering. This scenario has been attributed to their lack of understanding of engineering roles in addressing such issues and thus indicates the relevance of research that not only provides such understanding, but also shows how women engineers’ career choice is influenced by sustainability topics. Previous research has only identified such topics that appeal to women’s attraction to engineering. However, knowledge about how this decision is reached is currently lacking. Consequently, this paper aims to uncover the process of how sustainability topics influence women’s choice of engineering using a grounded theory approach to collect and analyse the data. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 women engineers who were purposively and theoretically sampled. The results show that the link between sustainability topics and women’s choice and engagement in engineering is largely manifested through four primary interrelated factors: exposure, awareness, interest and direct involvement (EAID). The study outcome is a novel EAID process model indicating that women’s interest and direct involvement in engineering could be influenced through two main routes—either by creating exposure or by awareness of engineering roles that cause or address sustainability challenges. It offers practical implications for engineering institutions, which could inform strategies for recruiting and attracting more women to engineering, and possibly enhance gender diversity and sustainability practices in the profession.
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