Did you know that approximately 20% of undergraduate engineering degrees are awarded to women, but only 13% of the engineering workforce is made up of females. There have been many explanations for this, including a lack of mentorship, less confidence for female engineers, as well as a woman’s need to maintain a work-home balance for her family.
A new study conducted by MIT sociologists the offers an explanation for why women leave engineering. Reasons for deterrence, according tot he study, include group dynamics of teamwork and internships.
According to the study, “The negative group dynamics women tend to experience during team-based work projects makes the profession less appealing.”
Susan Silbey, the Leon and Anne Goldberg Professor of Humanities, Sociology, and Anthropology at MIT, and co-author of a newly-published paper detailing the study, found that women often feel marginalized, especially during internships, other summer work opportunities, or team-based educational activities. These are situations where gender dynamics seem to generate more opportunities for men to work on the most challenging problems, while women tend to be assigned routine tasks or simple managerial duties.
In such settings, “It turns out gender makes a big difference,” said Silbey.
At this time, even women who had high expectations for their future careers, become discouraged.
The paper detailing the research, called “Persistence is Cultural: Professional Socialization and the Reproduction of Sex Segregation,” does not eliminate other factors as explanations, but instead, adds an additional element.
For their research, the team asked more than 40 undergraduate engineering students to keep twice-monthly diaries. The students were selected from four schools in Massachusetts: MIT, the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The team then examined more than 3,000 individual diary entries that were created by the students.
They found that female engineering students are negatively affected at particular moments of their educational terms, especially when they take part in team-based activities outside the classroom, in a less structured environment, where gender roles re-emerge.
For example, the team relayed a particular diary entry of one student named Kimberly:
“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. … “
Ac cording to the paper, “for many women, their first encounter with collaboration is to be treated in gender stereotypical ways.”
The also found that for men, the experience of internships and summers jobs was a much more positive experience.
Overall, group dynamics seem to affect aspiring women engineers by leading them to question whether other professions could be a better way to make a difference in the world.
According to Silbey and her colleague’s findings, engineering’s gender gap is not precisely rooted in the engineering curriculum or the classroom, which have often been the focus in the past.
“We think engineering education is quite successful by its own standards,” said Silbey. “The teaching environment is for the most part very successful.”
As a result of their findings, the researchers believe other solutions could be explored in order to positively impact women’s experiences as engineering — maybe even a student internship experience to help people learn from the problems women have to face.
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