Factors affecting the educational and occupational trajectories of women in engineering in five comparative national settings

Abstract

Issues surrounding women's participation in engineering have confounded policymakers around the globe for a number of years. While substantial progress has been documented for women in engineering and in computing and information technology in the Middle East, the recruitment and retention of women in these fields continue to face substantial challenges. The primary objective of our new multi-site case study is to identify the factors underlying and contributing to the educational and occupational trajectories of women in engineering and computing in Jordan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and the US. These countries vary substantially in their economic, educational, cultural, historical, legal, geographic, and political contexts AND in women's engineering and computing representation. Perhaps most importantly, they differ in their levels of prosperity, the democratization of their political and social institutions, and in the prevailing cultural understandings of engineering and computing, including its gender labeling.Our research questions are: (1) What motivates women's choice of engineering or computing as an educational/occupational path? (2) How do women perceive professionals in these fields and the work they do? (3) What societal, cultural, legal, and policy factors are perceived to support or constrain women's participation in engineering or computing fields of study and occupations? (4) What common themes emerge in different national sites and for women at different stages of study or professional practice? (5) What can we learn from one another? In addition to these general research questions, our collaborating teams in each of the five case study contexts (Jordan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and the USA) have created contextspecific questions based on relevant literature and national metrics for each respective site. Our collaborators in Saudi Arabiahave developed a set of context-specific research questions related to computing as well, which has enjoyed strong female participation in that nation. We will include Saudi's first female engineering program, opened in 2011, in the second phase of our study when its first cohort has graduated. In this paper, we describe general and country-specific research questions and solicit input from diverse stakeholders in the IFEES community on the relevance, validity, and scope of these questions. By eliciting varied and broad perspectives, the research questions and resulting interview protocol for this study will gather rich qualitative data and will encourage buy in from the IFEES community for scale up survey work during our next phase.

Sciencey Girls: Discourses Supporting Working-Class Girls to Identify with Science

“…Previous studies have found that careers in medicine tend to be a particularly desirable aspiration among South Asian students in the U.K. [104], with science playing an integral part in the path to success. South Asian students have also been argued to have particularly favourable dispositions towards science [84,105], which is evident also in high levels of participation of females in STEM subjects in several majority Muslim countries (Amna, Asqa, and Sharifa were Muslim) [106,107]. Among the girls in this study, pursuing careers such as medicine was seen as leading to positive recognition by their families and their community.…”

Factors Affecting Women’s Choice of Learning Engineering and Technology Education in Ethiopia

“…Kranov et al [37] women's participation in engineering is an issue worldwide for many years. They identify the factors contributing to women's education in engineering and computing in Jordan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and the USA.…”

“…Rankin et al [35]; Zamora-Hernández et al [36]; Großkreutz et al [29] Studied the role of families on women student's choice of learning engineering and technology. Kranov et al [37]; Sulaiman and AlMuftah [38]; Haworth et al [39]; Semali and Mehta [40] The author investigated recruitment and retention are also factors.…”

Sustaining girls' participation in STEM, gaming and making

“…The lack of girls and women engaging in STEM has long been acknowledged and researched. Large-scale studies point out why girls in Western countries do not take STEM careers or drop out and highlight to foster girls' interest at an early age [11] [15] but numbers of women's enrolment in STEM remain low. Many promising initiatives are reported in the context of child-computer interaction that attempt to change this trend and that are initiated by the public as well as by the private sector [6] [16].…”

“…It has been suggested to start early to foster girls' interest in STEM because a negative image of occupational profiles in CS seems to be manifested around the age of 14 [6]. Also, the influence of parents and teachers is discussed [21] but motivation of girls to enrol in STEM varies around the globe [15]. Many initiatives and research last only for a short period of time and are only visible on local or national level.…”