Recruitment and Retention of Female Undergraduate Engineers

Beverley Kwang

Annotated Bibliography

Abstract

California Polytechnic State University’s Women’s Engineering Program (WEP) has made it their goal to help recruit and retain female engineers. With the undergraduate student body of the College of Engineering amounting to 85 percent men and 15 percent women, WEP is still working hard towards finding out exactly what attracts and who encourages women to engineering and their opinions and feelings on how their gender has influenced or had no influence on their undergraduate engineering experiences.

Fox, M.F, Sonnert, G., Nikiforova, I. (Jun. 2009). Successful Programs for Undergraduate Women in Science and Engineering: Adapting versus Adopting the Institutional Environment. Research in Higher Education, 50(4), 333-353.

The focus of this study was to look at the size, creativity, and diversity that women contribute to the scientific and engineering workforce (2), and also to question at the idea of social equity in these workforces. The researches focused on forty- nine programs in forty-five institutions in the United States that involve undergraduate women in science and engineering in the years of 2000 and 2001. They selected 10 programs to look at more in depth and judge which one is the 5 most successful programs and also the 5 least successful programs. They judged this off of the growth or decline of the percentage of women among bachelor degree recipients. The researchers conducted interviews with the program directors in person and through the phone. Some of the interview questions include:

1. definition of what is “at issue” for the participation/performance of women in undergraduate engineering and science,

2. solutions represented by activities undertaken in programs,

3. perceptions of what is important for a director of a program (personal characteristics and educational background),

4. linkeage between program and broader environment, including institution, administration, faculty, in which it exists,

5. aspirations and directions for future of the program. (7)

Problems that the directors of the programs saw were the limited numbers of women recruited and enrolled, faculty and classroom bias against under-represented groups, grading system that “weeds-out” students, and a “pipeline of support” for graduate study that is less helpful to women than men undergraduates (8). This really relates to what we talked about in class with the pipeline for engineering education and the weeding out of women and people of color in engineering. The most successful programs also saw that solutions that can help out women undergraduates are mentoring, residence hall clusters, hands-on research experience, and faculty involvement (10). Also, those who are most successful found better relationships to institutional context. They saw a more active stance with the institutional environment and were seeking for broader associations and links to networks.

Harris, B.J., Rhoads, T.R., Walden, S.E., Murphy, T.J., Meissler, R., Reynolds, A. (Spring 2004). Gender Equity in Industrial Engineering: A Pilot Study. NWSA Journal, 16(1), 186-193.

This article studies the University of Oklahoma’s Industrial Engineering Department and found out that they have achieved gender equity in fall 2003. Fifty percent of the undergraduate program was females and forty percent of the faculty was females. They found out that only two of the six female undergraduates they interviewed had parents (in both case, the fathers) with a STEM background. They also found out that they relied on their mothers in regards to their undergraduate education (190). This may be a question that we may be interested in asking our interviewees: who do you go to for help or guidance regarding your undergraduate education (190). The researchers also found out that the female students were exposed to computers later than the male students (late childhood to adulthood and early childhood to early adolescence, respectively) (190). I thought it was a good question to ask the interviewees what they like about their majors (which all of the females responded that they liked the people orientation rather than the males’ response of interest in management (191)). I was also interested how they found out how some females encountered a series of male’s sexist behaviors. I would like to go further and ask how did they deal with or handle these negative responses from others.

Parviainen, M.L. (Fall 2008). The experiences of women in computer science: the importance of awareness and communication. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, 6(4), 87-94.

Although this study was not done on women in engineering, I believe women in computer science have experiences similar to women in engineering, due to the lack of women in these fields. Like other studies done, this study focused on the influence of parents, who have similar jobs (i.e. engineering, computer science), have on their own choice in their major. They also found a significant influence due to female teachers subjects had, which led them to that same choice. The researcher also found out that female students in computer science programs were far less exposed to computer science comparing to their male classmates. What was different about this article from other articles was that the author mentions the importance that stereotypes of computer scientists (i.e. white, antisocial males) have on women (4). This article suggested questions that I would like to add to our survey such as: what was the subject’s stereotypes of engineering and how has that affected them, in a negative or positive way? And if they did, how have they overcome those stereotypes? Also, how do they see themselves as a minority in their major and classroom atmosphere?

Sinkele, C.S, Mupinga, D.M. (Jan. 2011). The Effectiveness of Engineering Workshops in Attracting Females into Engineering Fields: A Review of the Literature. Clearing House, 84(1), 37-42.

Workshops are created to get more females interested in engineering. Questions that they listed that is relevant to our study are: what factors influence girls to study in engineering fields (3), does having a family member who is an engineer help increase the interests and knowledge in engineering (4). The researchers found out that workshops consisting of only females make it more comfortable for the girls because they won’t feel like they are being compared to boys and have less fear of failing.

Then, they focused on a study done by Anderson and Gilbride (2007) and listed specific questions from their study:

1. How knowledgeable of and interested in engineering were Toronto-area high school students?

2. Did having an engineer as a family member increase knowledge/interest in engineering?

3. Did the educational environment, co-ed versus all-girl, influence a girl’s knowledge/interest in engineering?

4. Did a hands-on engineering content workshop increase the student’s knowledge/interest in engineering?

Questions that I thought were good to ask are questions number 2 and 3. And also what workshops or activities did the students participate in.

Vogt, C.M., Hocevar, D., Hagedorn, L.S. (May/June 2007). A social Cognitive Construct Validation: Determining Women’s and Men’s Engineering Programs. The Journal of Higher Education, 78(3), 337-364.

This paper notes that women are the majority in humanities and arts, except only make up one-fourth of the degrees in computer science and less than one-fifth of the degrees in physics. In engineering, only nineteen percent of the undergraduate and master’s programs are women. The authors used seven hundred engineers to look at the environmental variables, which includes discrimination and academic integration, and also looked at self variables, which included academic self-confidence and self-efficacy. This qualitative study was helpful in mapping out the relationships between GPA and self-efficacy. They also found that discrimination had the biggest relationship with self confidence/ self efficacy. The findings had found that females felt greater discrimination than males. The flaws with this article were that the statistics were gathered in 2000, a decade ago. This can contribute to our study by seeing if GPA actually has a relationship with self confidence and their comfort with the major.