Study offers explanation for why women leave engineering

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-06/miot-soe061516.php

Public Release: 15-Jun-2016
Study offers explanation for why women leave engineering
Group dynamics of teamwork and internships deter many women in the profession.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Women who go to college intending to become engineers stay in the profession less often than men. Why is this? While multiple reasons have been offered in the past, a new study co-authored by an MIT sociologist develops a novel explanation: The negative group dynamics women tend to experience during team-based work projects makes the profession less appealing.

More specifically, the study finds, women often feel marginalized, especially during internships, other summer work opportunities, or team-based educational activities. In those situations, 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," says 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.

As a result of their experiences at these moments, women who have developed high expectations for their profession -- expecting to make a positive social impact as engineers -- can become disillusioned with their career prospects.

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What emerges is a picture in which female engineering students are negatively affected at particular moments of their educational terms -- especially when they engage in team-based activities outside the classroom, where, in a less structured environment, older gender roles re-emerge.

This crops up frequently in the diary entries. To take an example, one student named Kimberly described an episode in a design class in which "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. ... "

Or, as the paper puts it, "Informal interactions with peers and everyday sexism in teams and internships are particularly salient building blocks of [gender] segregation." The researchers add: "For many women, their first encounter with collaboration is to be treated in gender stereotypical ways." And by contrast, as the researchers note in the paper, "Almost without exception, we find that the men interpret the experience of internships and summer jobs as a positive experience."

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