So many women Studied Engineering Leave the field? - By Susan Silbey

Engineering is the most male-dominated field. It may perhaps be the most male-dominated profession in the U.S., with women making up only 13% of the engineering workforce. For decades, to attract more women to the field, engineering educators have focused on curriculum reform (e.g., by promoting girls’ interest in math and science). While these efforts have brought in more women to study engineering, the problem is that many quit during and after school. Focusing solely on education doesn’t address the fact that women tend to leave the profession at a higher rate than men. Women make up 20% of engineering graduates, but it’s been estimated that nearly 40% of women who earn engineering degrees either quit or never enter the profession. Clearly, some elementary and high school reforms are working, but those at the college level are not.

So why do women who study engineering leave to pursue careers in other fields? We explored how the culture within engineering—the shared values, beliefs, and norms—might contribute to the under-representation of women in the profession. We conducted a longitudinal study of engineering students to see how “socialization,” or learning about the culture of engineering, affects their future job decisions. We found that female students do as well or better than male students in school but often point to the hegemonic masculine culture of engineering itself as a reason for leaving.

The biggest problem I seem to be having [is] self-doubt. I would look at a problem, and think of a way to solve it, but then I would second guess myself, and convince myself that my way of answering the question must be wrong, but then, it would turn out that I was correct the whole time. I don’t understand why I keep doubting myself so much… Lack of confidence has never ever been a problem for me.

Exposure to the workplace causes concern 

Internships and summer jobs provide students additional opportunities to “try on” the role of engineer—and the culture. We found that these work sites echoed the gender stereotyping experienced in school projects: men were assigned interesting problem-solving tasks where they could develop their analytic and technical skills, while women were often assigned jobs sorting papers, copying, collecting equipment, writing notes, and coordinating—tasks they felt did not value or cultivate their skills.

This second round of gender stereotyping in the workplace, coupled with unchallenging projects, blatant sexual harassment, and greater isolation from supportive networks, leads many female students to revisit their ambitions. Women begin to question whether engineering is what they really want to do. For example, Haley, Taylor, and Heather explicitly articulated worries that the career path looked too “boring” and “unfulfilling.” Jennifer described how she was “seriously offended” when a supervisor spoke to her about appropriate dress, reminding her “No tank tops, now. We wouldn’t want to distract the guys.” Another student wrote,

But, one thing that really bugs me about being an intern and a young girl is that the people whom I work with don’t take me seriously. Not everyone does this, but a fair amount of the older men in my working environment do this. They’ll treat me like I know nothing… What they don’t know is that I have a 3.7 GPA… I never used to really care, but now when it interferes with my profession, it just irritates me.

Further, many women discover in their internships that the engineering profession is not as open to being socially responsible or as dedicated to tackling pressing national and global problems as they had hoped. This is a result of the assignments they are given, the values that are supported, and the messages that are communicated to them.

Our recent work helps explain why some women who go to college intending to be engineers end up leaving the profession before even starting their careers. Of course, not all of the men we studied decided to pursue engineering careers, but they wrote that they appreciated the tools that their education gave them. Women’s experience of their education differed along two critical dimensions they encountered a culture where sexism and stereotypes were left unaddressed, and they saw only lip service offered toward improving society and both of these disproportionately alienated them.

The number of women and men are nearly equal in law and medicine, and the number of women in basic sciences is growing annually. With such a low proportion of female engineers nationally, educators and businesses need to pay more attention to how an occupation founded on a commitment to complex problem-solving so consistently fails to repair its well-documented gender problem.

Efforts focused only on changing the curriculum are insufficient because they simply reproduce the norms and practices of the profession. In order to curb the high rates of women leaving the field, engineering programs need to address gendered tasking and expectations among teams, in class and at internship work sites. The culture has to learn to take women seriously.