“I Just Want to Help People”: Young Women’s Gendered Engagement with Engineering

Abstract

Research on women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) has focused scant attention on how young women engage with the gendered construction of engineering as they decide whether or not to enter the field. Drawing on data from a study of more than a hundred diverse girls who participated in a National Science Foundation intervention and research project titled Female Recruits Explore Engineering (FREE), the article shows that their involvement with engineering is strongly gendered. The study participants were aware that engineering is maledominated and not particularly open to women. They, especially the white and economically privileged girls, were also skeptical regarding the gendered messages they were receiving via programs designed to attract them to engineering. However, once the participants began to engage with engineering-through the selection of possible fields of study and by executing engineering projects-they did so in stereotypically gendered ways. The article's findings indicate that the girls' perceptions and choices are influenced by the presentation of engineering on websites, at career fairs, and through other venues designed to attract young women to engineering.Keywords: career exploration / engineering / gender / girls' studies / recruitment programs / STEM fields / women and girls in STEM A great deal of recent scholarship on women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) focuses on the slow entry of women into these male-dominated fields and the persisting barriers to women's full participation (Bystydzienski and Bird 2006;Etzkowitz, Kemelgor, and Uzzi 2000;Valian 1998Valian , 2006. Little attention has been paid, however, to girls' engagements

Developing a STEM Identity Among Young Women: A Social Identity Perspective

“…As part of a program intended for girls to learn about engineering and engineering careers, participants attended engineering career fairs where they met women in engineering professions (Bystydzienski & Brown, 2012). The girls noticed that the women who were there to tell them about how great it was being an engineer were not engineers themselves; they had since moved into managerial positions, muddying the message that girls are welcome in engineering (Bystydzienski & Brown, 2012). Girls also reported that the websites clearly made to target female students were too simplistic with only basic content that felt condescending to them (Bystydzienski & Brown, 2012).…”

Does How Pre-College Engineering and Technology Role Models See Themselves Relate to Girls' Engagement in the Fields? [Research To Practice]

“…By becoming cognizant of their own attitudes about gender roles, they can then attenuate their explicit and implicit messaging to ensure they are sending clear and relevant non-gendered messages about female roles and behaviors in a male-dominated workforce [92], rather than unconsciously echoing the gendered messages that have been perpetuated for the last hundred years or more. Bandura and Bussey [26] considered this tweaking of one's gender identity part of the lifetime continuum of gender development under social cognitive theory, as differentiated from the more typical psychological premise of fixed gender assignment by biologic sex: I am female, therefore I am feminine.…”

Constructions of Gender in Three Campaigns to Recruit Women to Engineering: Is Outreach Combatting or Reinforcing Gender Inequality?

“…The authors note, that they themselves were guided by gender appropriate assumptions, and that it was often inadvertent, as they drew on a feminized paradigm of helping in offering the girls information about certain projects. 22 While there certainly may be many women who are looking for a career that allows them to realize altruistic goals, starting from this assumption may falsely represent women (and men) and it may influence them as they construct ideas about what types of engineering might be a best fit. It may also lead women (and men) even if only subtlety, into one field of engineering over the other, without even being exposed to all the possibilities.…”

“…[12][13] Because engineering (and in Faulkner's analysis so called "real" engineering) continues to be so strongly aligned with masculinity and thus by implication men, a key aim of outreach is often to inform women about the various ways they can succeed in engineering. 22 From this perspective, outreach campaigns that seek to identify women as an underrepresented group, require women to be grouped together as a collective unit with some type of shared properties in order to appeal to them. Interestingly, however, people responsible for recruiting women may be failing to ask key questions that are at the center of feminist theorizing.…”