Left Out: A Review of Women's Struggle to Develop a Sense of Belonging in Engineering (original) (raw)
Related papers
Sustainability
The low participation of women in STEM fields is well-known and has been well documented around the world. Closing this gap plays a central role in achieving a more equal society and thus sustainable development. The gender gap in STEM must be understood as a complex problem which can be explained through various factors (cultural, economic, and social) and therefore requires the efforts of different disciplines and actors. This article proposes that the hegemonic masculinity theory together with the concept of belonging, understood from the point of view of feminist studies and cultural studies, can contribute a necessary conceptual framework for understanding the causes behind the gender gap in engineering.
Ac 2011-724: Engineering Identity and the Workplace Per- Sistence of Women with Engineering Degrees
2011
Based on studies of engineering students, it is recognized that engineering students who pursue engineering due to altruistic intent or intrinsic interest in engineering are more likely to persist to graduation. We sought to identify similar factors that promote persistence for women in the engineering workplace. Since we know that women leave the engineering workforce more frequently than men, identifying these factors is as important to retaining women in the engineering workplace as previous work to identify similar elements in the undergraduate years. The retention studies of women in the engineering workforce have largely focused on the structural features of the workplace, rather than on the women, themselves, who are making the decisions to stay or leave. While examining the workplace is important, identifying factors related specifically to the women is also an important and essential step to modifying or supplementing workplace culture to retain women in engineering for lon...
Examining Gender Differences in Engineering Identity Among High School Engineering Students
Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, 2017
Identity is an emerging lens to view entry and persistence in the STEM fields. Less is known about engineering identity specifically, yet examining the factors that contribute to shaping it could increase our understanding of gender disparities in this field. Building from theoretical and empirical work on identity in STEM fields, this study considers interest and self-efficacy as likely contributors to young women and men's engineering identity, and also considers the role of attainment value. Furthermore, this study distinguishes between the potential influence on engineering identity of recognition of domain experts, specifically teachers, from the influence of support from family and friends. The study examines two research questions. First, do self-efficacy, interest, attainment value, recognition by teachers, and support from family and friends predict engineering identity of high school engineering students? Second, do these factors contribute to explaining the gender gap in engineering identity? Survey data was collected from 459 students enrolled in a high school engineering course. Engineering identity was predicted using regression analyses. Results indicated that with the exception of recognition, all factors significantly predicted engineering identity. Additionally, while most of the gender gap in identity could be explained by gender differences in interest and self-efficacy, attainment value and support also contributed to explaining gender differences. The implications of these results for future research on identity are discussed.
Engineering Identity and the Workplace Persistence of Women with Engineering Degrees
Based on studies of engineering students, it is recognized that engineering students who pursue engineering due to altruistic intent or intrinsic interest in engineering are more likely to persist to graduation. We sought to identify similar factors that promote persistence for women in the engineering workplace. Since we know that women leave the engineering workforce more frequently than men, identifying these factors is as important to retaining women in the engineering workplace as previous work to identify similar elements in the undergraduate years. The retention studies of women in the engineering workforce have largely focused on the structural features of the workplace, rather than on the women, themselves, who are making the decisions to stay or leave. While examining the workplace is important, identifying factors related specifically to the women is also an important and essential step to modifying or supplementing workplace culture to retain women in engineering for longer periods of time. We hypothesized that women who strongly self-identified as engineers would be more likely to persist in the engineering workforce and those who did not would be more likely to leave the workforce. If we knew that strong engineering identities would lead to higher workforce retention, then educators could employ interventions to intentionally develop this identity in their students before graduation. To assess the validity of this hypothesis, we conducted semi-structured interviews (similar to psychology’s Identity Status Interview) of 33 women with engineering degrees, including those who persisted in the engineering workforce and those who did not. We preceded the interviews with Likert scale measures of identity taken from the engineering education literature. We conducted theme-based coding of the interview transcripts for the workplace issues known to impede persistence and for engineering identity. Further, we took a grounded theory approach for other factors that might appear in the data. Finally, we sought to determine the women’s reasons for staying or leaving the engineering workforce. Our findings revealed that strong engineering identification does generally correspond to increased persistence, while a weaker identification corresponds to increased consideration of leaving engineering. We did find, though, that some non-persisters had a strong engineering identification and some persisters had a weaker engineering identity. Thus, other factors were influencing the validity of our hypothesis. The most prominent unexpected factor was that some women were pulled by a strong desire to pursue a vocation or passion that conflicted with engineering workplace persistence, such as teaching in K-12 or staying home with her children. We have named this phenomenon a competing vocation. Two other influencing factors arose to a lesser extent: persistence was sometimes affected by the degree to which the workplace met the women’s a) need for relatedness and b) expectations for employees being encouraged to help one another and/or the end customers (prosocial motivation). Thus, we found engineering identity to be an influential factor in the workplace persistence of degreed women engineers, followed by the level of workplace relatedness and opportunities to serve others within the workplace. Each of these findings has potential implications for engineering educators.
Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 2021
Women and underrepresented minority (URM) undergraduates declare and complete science, technology, engineering, and mathematics majors at different rates in comparison to majority groups. Explanations of these differences have long been deficit oriented, focusing on aptitude or similar characteristics, but more recent work focuses on institutional contexts, such as academic climate and feelings of belonging (fit). This study examines the experiences of women and URM students in engineering undergraduate programs, focusing on how they fit, experiential factors affecting fit, and how fit is mitigated by social relationships from their networks and organizations in which they participate (i.e., social capital). Thematic analysis of 55 women and URM interviewee responses shows that students who fit well were those with majority characteristics, including race (i.e., White, White-passing) and gender (i.e., men, masculine appearance), and those in groups well represented in their programs numerically (i.e., men, Asian). In contrast, women and Black students encountered threats to their fit due to stereotyping from bias and differential treatment from others (i.e., being excluded from group work). However, students received advice from their social networks (i.e., family, professors) in which they were warned to expect discrimination, or through organizations in which they participated (i.e., National Association of Black Engineers) where their sense of community was expanded. The advice and resources provided through this network-based and participatory social capital mitigated fit for women and Black students, albeit in different ways, helping to preserve their feelings of belonging and promote their persistence in engineering. We offer suggestions to enact university policies to increase access to social capital with homophilious alters and educational opportunities for majority groups.
Gendered by Design: The Socialization of Women in Engineering School
The under-representation of women in engineering is a well-known phenomenon. This study explores the potential role of university experiences in derailing the journey of would-be female engineers, focusing on how engineering school may socialize women in ways that discourage them from the field. Semi-structured interviews with 16 female Ontario university undergraduate engineering students were conducted and were analyzed from a feminist epistemological standpoint, privileging the experiences and voices of participants. Organizational socialization, gender socialization, and social identity theories guided the identification of important themes and issues. Results suggest that women are receiving information pertaining to the proficiencies, people, politics, and organizational goals and values of this space, potentially shaping their self-and field-based perceptions in negative ways. Many participants expressed pessimistic views about engineering, and often alluded to and discussed sexism. Some women also expressed feelings of visibility, discomfort, and/or feeling "unsafe". The normalization of gender-based (mis)treatment via interactions with peers and role models may foreshadow women's future careers in engineering.
Intersectionality as a Framework for Understanding Diverse Young Women's Commitment to Engineering
Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, 2015
In the literature on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) diversity, women and minorities typically are treated as distinct groups. However, this approach is challenged by nearly two decades of scholarship on "intersectionality," i.e., the idea that social categories and markers of difference and identity-such as gender, race, ethnicity, and class-never operate independently of each other. In this paper, we discuss the cases of three high school women, who demonstrated varied forms of commitment to engineering as they participated in a three-year, National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded project, Female Recruits Explore Engineering (FREE). We introduce the young women, describe salient aspects of their career exploration experiences during high school, and apply an intersectional framework to their cases. The analysis illuminates how influential social factors and identity markers intertwine to affect the girls' commitment to the academic and career choice of engineering. We demonstrate how the interconnections of gender, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic factors influence perceptions and decisions about whether to pursue engineering in college. EY WORDSS: K young women in STEM exploration of engineering gender, race and class, girls' interest in engineering intersectionality
Pilot Intervention to Improve "Sense of Belonging" of Minorities in Engineering
2020
and is now pursuing a Ph.D. in engineering education at the Ohio State University. She is a former GEM Doctoral Fellow and King-Chavez-Parks Future Faculty Fellow. Her research experience includes engineering for sustainability, and she is currently studying engineering self-efficacy of minority students at predominantly white institutions.