Difference between engineering men and women: How and why they choose what they do during early career

Abstract

Retention of the engineering workforce is of national importance for global competitiveness. Retention of women engineers is of particular interest because of the impact of their lower starting representation and higher attrition rate on workforce diversity. Exit rates from engineering careers are highest in the first 10 years after graduation. Thus, unlike most workforce retention research, this study focuses on participants who are still in the midst of this critical phase of their careers. We investigated what engineering graduates say about how and why they make early career pathway choices. The motivations for their choices were examined through the lens of gender differences (and similarities) while resting on the fundamental psychological framework provided by self-determination theory (SDT). SDT has demonstrated that the more behaviors are autonomously motivated, the more stable, the more fulfilling, and the more persistent those behaviors become. The current qualitative study is based on interviews with twenty-two early-career engineering graduates (eleven men and eleven women) from three geographically and culturally distinct institutions. While a majority of both men and women expressed autonomous motivations, the ways in which they were expressed imply different outcomes for career persistence. While the results presented herein do not have statistical significance because of small sample size and qualitative methodology, they do provide insight into the types of patterns that emerge from men and women in terms of how they view their careers from past, present, and future perspectives. Understanding these patterns will be helpful in identifying them among early career graduates in engineering and taking appropriate steps to support continued persistence in the field. Identification of these patterns is also helpful for designing a quantitative study that can point to the significance of gender differences in a larger population.