Achieving Parity of the Sexes at the Undergraduate Level: A Study of Success

Murphy, Teri J.; Shehab, Randa L.; Reed-Rhoads, Teri; Foor, Cindy E.; Harris, Betty J.; Trytten, Deborah A.; Walden, Susan E.; Besterfield‐Sacre, Mary; Hallbeck, M. Susan; Moor, William C.

doi:10.1002/j.2168-9830.2007.tb00933.x

Cited by 27 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 11 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…All of the cited studies seem to point to a sense of belonging as a strong motivating factor for female students who persist in engineering programs, consistent with Tinto's higher education model of social integration that emphasizes the "fit" between a person and an institution [7]- [9]. A student's sense of belonging and sense of community has already been shown to affect the drop-out rates of K-12 students [10] and in the higher education context an interesting success story is reported in [11] where parity between the number of male and female engineering students is reported in an engineering department that fostered a community like environment. Because women who are isolated are more likely to drop out of engineering [2], it would follow that female students who persist in engineering are likely to develop a strong sense of community to scaffold persistence in these programs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 76%

The role of gender in belonging and sense of community

Kissinger

Campbell

Lombrozo

et al. 2009

2009 39th IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper reports differences in belonging and connection to various levels of community between distinctly different technical fields: electrical engineering, civil & environmental engineering, and computer science. Established (reliable and validated) constructs have been used to assess community strength in these three fields at a major research university. The results emphasize gender differences within fields and between technical fields.Belonging (and sense of community) has been implicated in drop-out rates and lack of engagement in grades K-12; likewise, isolation (lack of belonging) has been cited as a persistent reason that female undergraduates leave engineering early in their programs. Our results show that sense of belonging (and connection to community) is consistently higher for women in engineering fields where women are present in higher numbers. In addition, these important affective constructs are higher overall in fields where women are more highly represented. These results may suggest that greater numbers of women enable a stronger sense of community or alternatively, the inherent nature of the field provides increased opportunity for belonging and developing a strong sense of community. In either case, related technical fields with stronger community can serve as role models for those that demonstrate less robust connection to community in helping these fields to improve their recruitment and retention of women.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 76%

The role of gender in belonging and sense of community

Kissinger

Campbell

Lombrozo

et al. 2009

2009 39th IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…However, mentoring is not always available to female engineering students. Without a mentor, women students have to fight social and institutional barriers alone, which prevents them from being better prepared, academically and in their future professional careers [9,10].…”

Section: Women and Engineering Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Engineering Doctoral Degree Trend of Asian-American Women in the United States, 1994-2013

Tao¹

2015

TOSSCIJ

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In the U.S., while Asian-Americans are overrepresented in engineering, women are underrepresented based on their share of the U.S. population. Asian-American women are unique because they belong to both groups. Using data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates, this paper compares the engineering doctorate trends of Asian-American women with those of other demographic groups and describes Asian-American women's doctoral degree trends in selected engineering subfields in two decades (1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013). The findings show a consistent but somewhat narrowing gender gap in earning engineering doctorates among Asian-Americans during this period. Asian-American women's share of doctorates relative to Asian-American men was lower in many years than those of African American and, to some degree, Hispanic women but higher than that of white women relative to men of their respective races/ethnicities. Furthermore, among Asian-Americans, the gender gap was smaller in chemical and materials engineering than in electrical and mechanical engineering. For Asian-American women, the influence of Asian tradition or preference for engineering for social mobility has been somewhat counteracted by the social and institutional barriers that women experience in engineering.

show abstract

“…The most extensive study of women (and men) in industrial engineering was carried out by a team at University of Oklahoma (OU) in the early 2000's (Foor & Walden, 2009;; Murphy, Shehab, Reed-Rhoads, & Trytten, 2006;Murphy et al, 2007;Shehab, Reed-Rhoads, & Murphy, 2005;Trytten et al, 2004;Walden & Foor, 2008). During that time, the industrial engineering department at OU achieved gender parity among undergraduates, doubling from 27% in 1996 to a high of 58% women in the Fall of 2001 without any particular programs in place to address the gender balance in the department (Murphy et al, 2007). The authors note that after the study, female enrollment in the department reverted to 39% and 34% in the Fall of 2004 and 2005 respectively.…”

Section: Industrial Engineering Attracts Womenmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Sixty-one percent of the students in the OU studies (Murphy et al, 2006;Murphy et al, 2007) used breadth of the field as a descriptor for IE ranking it fourth of the eight descriptors they used. Nearly all (11/12) of the faculty they interviewed at OU used breadth as a term to describe IE, which is due to the intentional design of the curriculum to expose students to that breadth.…”

Section: Student Voicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Women in Industrial Engineering: Stereotypes, Persistence, and Perspectives

Brawner

Camacho

Lord

et al. 2012

J of Engineering Edu

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

b BACKGROUNDIndustrial engineering (IE) draws in and graduates women at among the highest rates compared with most engineering majors in the U.S. Popular stereotypes suggest this is because IE is "easier" than other engineering majors. PURPOSE (HYPOTHESIS)This research interrogates prevailing assumptions about industrial engineering to explore why undergraduate women are drawn to industrial engineering over other engineering majors. DESIGN/METHODSOur mixed method approach used three sources of data. Quantitative analyses of a large, longitudinal dataset allowed us to draw empirical generalizations about academic performance, attraction to, and persistence within industrial engineering among men and women. We triangulated this with qualitative focus group data among women majoring in IE. Finally, we used content analysis of university IE Web sites to understand context and discourse. RESULTSIn our dataset, industrial engineering is the only engineering major that gains women and men from the third semester through six-year graduation and among all race-gender combinations (except Black men). Women in focus groups reveal that they are drawn to IE for a myriad of social factors including: warmth, flexibility, a sense it is more feminine, and career opportunities, among others. Content analysis of Web sites reveals that IE emphasizes collegiality and leadership opportunities as intrinsic to the discipline. CONCLUSIONSUsing a social capital framework, we showed that the context of IE, including prevailing norms and possibilities for networking, promotes ideologies of success that lead to greater attraction to and persistence within the major. KEYWORDS industrial engineering, social capital, women INTRODUCTIONIndustrial engineering (IE) is an enigma among engineering majors. In this study of multiple universities, it draws in more students at every semester than other engineering majors, and it also graduates more women than any other. Thus, it has been described as a "Pocket of Success" in engineering (Lord et al., 2008). In this paper, we apply a mixedmethods approach to examine the characteristics and experiences of women majoring in 289 101 (April 2012) 2 Journal of Engineering Education industrial engineering. Using constant comparative analysis, a qualitative technique whereby we compare students' responses to explore and develop common themes to examine our data (Corbin & Strauss 2008), we theorize that there is something different, perhaps even special, about industrial engineering that makes it more attractive to women than most other engineering disciplines. Combining three sources of data: (1) a large quantitative data set of over 70,000 students at 8 institutions, (2) focus groups with women industrial engineering majors at three of those institutions, and (3) content analysis of industrial engineering Web sites from those institutions, we show that industrial engineering has the most women graduates of any engineering field, communicates to potential students in a manner that emphasizes inclusivity, and...

show abstract

Achieving Parity of the Sexes at the Undergraduate Level: A Study of Success

Cited by 27 publications

References 11 publications

The role of gender in belonging and sense of community

The role of gender in belonging and sense of community

Engineering Doctoral Degree Trend of Asian-American Women in the United States, 1994-2013

Women in Industrial Engineering: Stereotypes, Persistence, and Perspectives

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About