The effect of skewed gender composition on student participation in undergraduate engineering project teams

Abstract

In the United States only about one quarter of all undergraduate students in engineering are female. Because there are significantly fewer female than male engineering students, the composition of small groups of engineering students assigned to complete group projects is likely to be skewed towards male-dominant membership. The underrepresentation of women both in the field of engineering generally, and in engineering group project teams specifically, can leave women vulnerable to stereotype threat, experiencing concern that one will be judged in terms of a stereotype. In this project, we investigate the effect of skewed gender compositions on active participation in group projects in a required introductory engineering course. Using video records of 175 final group design project presentations (4-6 students per group, 660 students total), we performed a systematic investigation of student's active participation, i.e., the roles and behaviors adopted by male and female students as a function of gender composition of the group. Independent judges viewing each videotaped presentation classified roles and behaviors adopted by participants. Parameters that were collected include presentation content type (on a spectrum from technical to non-technical), student roles in the mechanics of the presentation (e.g., as explaining technical aspects or simply introducing others), and perceptions of leadership, effectiveness and appearing knowledgeable as rated by the independent judges. These data were combined with ancillary data consisting of student demographics and overall GPA. In addition, we administered a survey instrument to a subset of the sample (n = 222) at the end of the Winter 2010 term. The questionnaire included student perceptions of their own leadership and performance on the group project. Evaluation of the videotaped presentation footage revealed that men presented more technical information for longer than expected periods during the oral presentations, while women presented significantly more of the non-technical material, speaking for a shorter than expected period of time. Although limited in scope, survey results show that male students tended to rate their leadership and performance higher when there were fewer other men in the group. This research suggests that male students adopt more active roles and may have better outcomes than female students in project presentation groups. © 2011 American Society for Engineering Education.