Diversity and Disillusionment
What is it about engineering that pushes women away? A psychologist who inquired got an earful.
By Sarah Khan
If women remain underrepresented among engineering graduates, comprising 20 percent of the total, it’s not for lack of attention to the problem. In 2010 alone, the federal government spent $13 million on programs intended to encourage more women to enter STEM fields and areas of study. “For all we know, millions if not billions of dollars have been going to this effort over the past 30 years,” says counseling psychologist Nadya Fouad. She wanted to explore what is arguably a more disturbing anomaly, yet one that resonates less in academia: Women account for only about 11 percent of practicing engineers.
Fouad, a distinguished professor and department chair of education psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, has been interested in engineering since she was young. Her father, Abdel-Aziz A. Fouad, known as AA, is a distinguished engineering professor at Iowa State University and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Nadya Fouad’s Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, was on the vocational interests of engineers in Mexico and the United States compared with those of lawyers in the same countries. That initially got her studying the engineering marketplace, looking into the types of jobs engineers took and their career outlooks.
Starting in 2009, Fouad began surveying women engineers on why they had left the profession. The survey, funded by the National Science Foundation, drew a whopping response. She and her team expected 1,200 women to participate; they ended up with 5,700. In addition, thousands had their own comments and anecdotes to share about their experiences.
The results showed that nearly 40 percent of women who entered an engineering profession subsequently left. But it was the reasons given that made headlines nationwide. They included unpleasant working environments, overt harassment, and long hours in and out of the office, leaving no time for family. In the study, 30 percent cited as their main reason for leaving a climate of unsupportive supervisors and co-workers. Lack of advancement opportunities and low salary were also cited. One finding beamed a particularly harsh light on the profession: Most women who left went on to find success as executives or managers in other fields.
One Latina civil engineering graduate commented in the study, “Most of management is a male-dominated culture (male conversation topics, long hours, demanding lifestyle, career-focused expectation). Women usually choose to leave without fighting the uphill battle to make improvements. It’s a self-sustaining cycle!”
In some cases, the uphill battle predated entry into the profession. “We have quotes about teaching assistants who don’t want to put too much energy into grading the homework because they think the females in the classroom aren’t going to do anything with it in the future,” Fouad says.
Fouad says having a support system of others in a male-dominated profession may be the key to women really getting what they need out of an engineering career. It can be hard for women to speak up when they feel they’re one of only a few in the room, she says, especially as students in a middle school, high school, or college classroom. “We need to communicate that there is no room for incivility across the entire teaching spectrum. Being explicit about the context that you bring into the engineering classroom is important, because innovation really is stronger when you have a diverse team.”
The study is one in a series of three, all NSF funded. The second will survey former male engineers and their reasons for leaving, and the third will compare male and female engineers’ reasons for staying in the profession.
Fouad doesn’t just study gender differences. Her 30-year academic career also has focused on vocational outlooks for minorities, putting them in a socioeconomic context. She notes, for instance, that “you don’t have 12 percent of doctors and engineers [who are] black, even though 12 percent of Americans are black. Trying to get a handle on why that is has occupied me for a long time.”
A study she co-authored in the Journal of Career Assessment showed that, while students from different economic backgrounds might aspire to have the same successful careers, their expectation of what’s actually possible is dramatically different – those who are poorer don’t expect they’ll actually reach their goals, while more affluent students usually do.
Sarah Khan is assistant editor of Prism.
Image by Nadya Fouad/Thinkstock