Research has shown that women who pursue engineering careers are more likely than their male counterparts to be in less technical roles and careers paths, such as business analysis, technical supervision, and product management. In addition, these gendered career patterns increase attrition risk for female engineers. This project aims to serve the national interest of broadening participation by improving the representation of women in technically-oriented roles and career paths within engineering. This Institutional and Community Transformation, Exploration and Design project focuses on female engineering students' elective track choices as a predictor of gendered career patterns. Project personnel will investigate the driving forces behind elective track choices for female engineering students. Then, they will use the findings to inform faculty development and other administrative efforts to improve gender balance within technical elective tracks and technically-oriented careers.
The goal of the project is to identify individual and institutional factors that contribute to female students' elective track choices within engineering majors. This study builds on previous work that demonstrates gendered role and career patterns, and will contribute to filling gaps in understanding how and why these patterns develop. The investigators will collect data over multiple years through surveys and interviews of female undergraduates in engineering. The study will also include faculty and staff members who advise those students regarding elective track selection. The surveys will be developed by the PIs and will incorporate previously validated measures of math attitudes, role confidence, engineering identity, and related constructs. Using a longitudinal, multi-method and multi-level case study approach, the investigators will identify key relationships between female students' elective track choices and institutional demographics, culture, curriculum, and instructional approaches in both gender-balanced and imbalanced majors. The study, which includes oversight from an external evaluator, will produce recommendations for engineering faculty, advisors, and administrators who can directly affect the climate of engineering programs and career path decisions of engineering students. Moreover, the findings may inform similar investigations of gendered educational tracking in non-engineering majors (e.g., mathematics; physics), and may generalize to other educational settings beyond the study site. Thus, the study could help address gendered practices and identify strategies to minimize them throughout undergraduate STEM education. This project is supported by the NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Program (IUSE): Education and Human Resources (EHR). The IUSE Program supports projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all undergraduate students. Through the Institutional and Community Transformation track, IUSE : EHR program supports efforts to transform and improve STEM education across institutions of higher education and disciplinary communities.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
