Engineering Women’s Attitudes and Goals in Choosing Disciplines with Above and Below Average Female Representation

Abstract

Abstract:Women's participation in engineering remains well below that of men at all degree levels. However, despite the low enrollment of women in engineering as a whole, some engineering disciplines report above average female enrollment. We used multiple linear regression to examine the attitudes, beliefs, career outcome expectations, and career choice of first-year female engineering students enrolled in below average, average, and above average female representation disciplines in engineering. Our work begins to understand how the socially constructed masculine cultural norms of engineering may attract women differentially into specific engineering disciplines. This study used future time perspective, psychological personality traits, grit, various measures of STEM identities, and items related to career outcome expectations as theoretical frameworks. The results of this study indicate that women who are interested in engineering disciplines with different representations of women (i.e., more or less male-dominated) have significantly different attitudes and beliefs, career goals, and career plans. This study provides information about the perceptions that women may have and attitudes that they bring with them into particular engineering pathways.

The Role of Empathy in Choosing Majors

“…Many of the general results we find are consistent with other studies of empathy and gender. They are also consistent in large part with the study by Verdín cited in the Introduction [2]. This study finds that women gravitate to various engineering disciplines based on their individual match with several male associated qualities found in that discipline.…”

“…Our research specifically addresses how empathy affects women and is aimed at understanding the differences we observe in the representation of women in various engineering disciplines. In this respect, our research is in line with the recent work by Verdín in which the attitudes and goals of women were examined and found to affect their choice of major [2]. Although the methods used differ substantially, the conclusions are very similar -traits associated to a greater degree with women (which would include empathy) are correlated with choices of major.…”

“…Verdín [2] studied the attitudes, beliefs, career expectations and aspirations of first year female engineering students. They found that women's attitudes match those of the sub-disciplines of their choice.…”

Staying or leaving: contributing factors for U.K. engineering students’ decisions to pursue careers in engineering industry

“…Personality is relatively stable, unlike other frameworks used in this study, and it has been shown to distinguish engineering students from other students (Scott and Sedlacek 1975). Among engineering students, personality distinguishes those students who choose particular engineering disciplines (Verdín, Godwin, Kirn, Benson, & Potvin 2018) or degree pathways (Moses et al 2011).…”

“…Belongingness is an essential part of a student's educational experience, at both the classroom and university levels (T. M. Freeman, Anderman, and Jensen 2007;Wilson et al 2015). Prior work has also found that beliefs about seeing oneself as the type of person who can be an engineer had a positive effect on students' sense of belonging in the engineering field and classroom (Verdín et al 2018). Students most often describe belongingness as a feeling of comfort, specific skills or attitudes they possessed that fit with their degree programme, or enjoyment of their subject (Rohde et al 2018).…”