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Studies Shed Light on Retention of Female Engineers |
Posted on: 10/28/2011 12:00:00 AM... Recently released findings from two different studies examine factors impacting on the retention of women in the engineering professions.
A study published in the October issue of the American Sociological Review concluded that female engineering students lack “professional role confidence.” This can influence the decision to finish school as engineering majors and pursue a career in the field. Among other things, this term encompasses people’s faith in their ability to go out into the world and be professional engineers and their belief that engineering fits their interests and values, which the study authors refer to as “expertise confidence” and “career-fit confidence,” respectively.
“Women engineering students go to the same classes, take the same tests, and get the same GPAs as men, sometimes even higher,” said the study’s lead author Erin Cech, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research. “But, what we found is that the women in our study developed less confidence in their engineering expertise than men did and they also developed less confidence that engineering is the career that fits them best, even though they went through the same preparation process as men.”
As result of these confidence issues, women who begin college as engineering majors are less likely than men to remain engineering majors and less likely than men to believe that they will be professional engineers in the future.
“It stems from very subtle differences in the way that men and women are treated in engineering programs and from cultural ideologies about what it means to be a competent engineer,” Cech said. “Often, competence in engineering is associated in people’s minds with men and masculinity more than it is with women and femininity. So, there are these micro-biases that happen, and when they add up, they result in women being less confident in their expertise and their career fit.”
The Stanford study considers 288 students who entered engineering programs in 2003 at four institutions of higher education: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, and Smith College. As part of the study, the students were surveyed in 2003 and again in 2007.
Preliminary findings of another study being undertaken by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee looks at issues affecting female engineers once they enter the workforce.
Nearly half of women in the survey who left an engineering career indicated they did so because of negative working conditions, too much travel, lack of advancement or low salary, the study shows. One in three of the more than 3700 survey respondents left engineering because they did not like the workplace climate, their boss or the culture. One in four left engineering to spend more time with family. The study sample encompassed women with engineering degrees from 230 universities.
Other key findings include:
- One-third of the women in the survey who did not enter engineering after graduating said it was because of their perceptions of the field as being inflexible, or the workplace culture as being non-supportive of women.
- Women’s decisions to stay in engineering are best predicted by a combination of psychological factors and factors related to the organizational climate.
- Women’s decisions to stay in engineering can be influenced by key supporters in the organization, such as supervisors and co-workers.
- Being given opportunities for training and development was a key factor that influenced current engineers’ career and job satisfaction.
- Women in the survey who wanted to leave their companies were also very likely eventually to leave the field of engineering altogether. .
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