Women are underrepresented in engineering. Not only do fewer women than men choose to study the subject in the first place but they don't stay in the profession as long as men either, according to research from North America.
The research, by Carroll Seron from the University of California at Irvine; Susan Silbey from MIT; Erin Cech from the University of Michigan; and Brian Rubineau from McGill University in Canada, found that the negative group dynamics women tend to experience during team-based work projects makes the profession less appealing.
The say that during internships and other work opportunities, men are given more opportunities to work on the most challenging problems, while women tend to be assigned routine tasks or simple managerial duties.
“It turns out gender makes a big difference,” said Silbey.
The researchers asked more than 40 undergraduate engineering students from four institutions to keep twice-monthly diaries, which generated more than 3,000 individual diary entries.
What emerged was a picture in which female engineering students were negatively affected at particular moments of their educational terms, most notably team-based activities outside the classroom, where, in a less structured environment, older gender roles re-emerge.
They give the example of a student named Kimberly, who described an episode in a design class in which “two girls in a group had been working on the robot we were building in that class for hours, and the guys in their group came in and within minutes had sentenced them to doing menial tasks while the guys went and had all the fun in the machine shop. We heard the girls complaining about it.”
Silbey felt the findings suggest that engineering’s gender gap is not precisely rooted in the engineering curriculum or the classroom, which have often been the focus of past scrutiny in this area.
“We think engineering education is quite successful by its own standards,” she said. “The teaching environment is for the most part very successful.”
She suggested new kinds of remedies could be explored, which might have a positive impact on women’s experiences as engineers in training.
One suggestion she proffered was directed internship seminars, in which student internship experiences could be dissected to help many people grasp and learn from the problems women face.
[Photo: Michele Mossop]
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