Beyond ‘Gender Differences’: A Canadian Study of Women's and Men's Careers in Engineering

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between gender and career paths for a group of women and men who graduated as engineers during a period of labour market turbulence in western Canada during the 1980s. Using a model adapted from Brown (1982), the article uses 'career path' as a device to organize data drawn primarily from telephone and face-to-face interviews with 317 graduates. Three career paths provide the focus for the study: the 'organizational', characterized by stable employment with one employer; the 'occupational', characterized by mobility between employers; and the entrepreneurial, characterized by self-employment. The use of the career path framework moves the study beyond global comparisons (of the dichotomized 'gender differences' kind) between 'the women' and 'the men'. As well as allowing for comparison between the paths, it allows more refined and contextualized comparisons within each path. Such comparisons produce patterns of similarity and difference that sometimes transcend gender.

Career experiences of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields: A systematic literature review

“…Interviewing was used almost exclusively as the means to collect qualitative data. The remaining nine publications include six quantitative studies (Fouad et al, 2016; Glass et al, ; S. A. Nolan et al, ; Schmader et al, ; Settles et al, ; Singh et al, ) and three mixed methods studies (Ecklund et al, ; Ranson, ; Servon & Visser, ). All six quantitative studies relied on survey as the only source of data.…”

Personality-Major Congruence among the Hearing-Impaired Students in Malaysian Polytechnics

“…Previous studies have reported that more males were found in Investigative majors who require more scientific abilities as compared to females (Gitonga et al, 2013;Ranson, 2003;Smart et al, 2000). We believe that unequal distribution of enrolment between male and female students in Polytechnics might be partly due to absence of establish academic major selection system.…”

Towards the actors' occupational movements of technical innovation system

“…Ranson [21] firstly employs the three generic career paths proposed by Brown [9]: (i) the 'organizational' career path pertains to a progressive work history that materializes within one organization; (ii) the 'occupational' career path denotes professional advancement attained through movement between organizations; and (iii) the 'entrepreneurial' career path refers to self-employment. Ranson [21] analyzes the career paths of 317 engineers who have graduated from a Faculty of Engineering at a Canadian university over a 10 year period extending from 1980 until 1990. A majority of career paths from the study align with Brown's framework but also a number of additional groups are identified.…”

“…And finally, we observe the efforts of scholars to strive towards typologies of career paths available to managers. Interestingly, the contributions of Ranson [21] and Tremblay Wils and Proulx [24] underline the possibility of alternative typologies to capture career trajectories of the same occupational context, in this instance, engineers. Collectively, this overview motivates us to propose a career path typology for CTOs with some freedom as to the choice of empirical method.…”

“…By tracing the occupational sequence of CTOs, we purport to derive generic career paths that are available to this particular actors of technological innovation system. In this regard, we follow the lead of prior scholars such as Tremblay, Wils and Proulx [24] and Ranson [21], who have identified career paths of Engineers, and Joseph, Boh, Ang & Slaughter [18], who have examined career paths in the Information Technology (IT) sector. Hence, this study aims to contribute to the existed literature on career path in order to explore whether we can apply them on TIM career path argument and identify new career path types in the TIM field, while concurrently exploring connections with the educational background of the studied sample.…”