– Women’s representation among first-year engineering students has increased since the early 1970s.
– Interest in engineering fluctuates from year to year, generally declined between 1980-2007, and has rebounded. The decline in men’s representation, rather than the forward strides of women, is a significant contributor to women’s growing share of prospective engineers.
– Women now represent 57% of college graduates. Thus, a combination of declining interest on the part of men and increasing numbers of women in college accounts for the growing share of women in engineering, rather than a substantial increase in the fraction of female college students who express an interest in this field.
– Predictors that remain stable over time for both genders include having a father in a STEM career; identifying as Asian/Pacific Islander, Latino/a, or other/multiracial; and being Catholic. Students who earned higher grades in high school and who aspire to earn a terminal master’s degree are also more likely to pursue engineering. Compared to students in other majors, students in engineering have consistently attended college farther from their families.
– Characteristics that consistently divert students from engineering include having an artistic orientation or more liberal political views.
– Having a mother in a STEM career is a significant positive predictor of majoring in engineering for men, but not for women.
2016 - Understanding the Changing Dynamics of the Gender Gap in Undergraduate Engineering Majors: 1971-2011
Study utilizes Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT). SCCT’s Model of Career-Related Choice Behavior (MCRCB) posits that personal characteristics and backgrounds lead to learning experiences that influence one’s perceived self-efficacy (the belief that one will be successful at a given task) and their expectations of career-related outcomes. All of these factors influence the determination to undertake specific pursuits, such as the choice of a college major or future career.
This study uses data from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP), housed at the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. The CIRP Freshman Survey is a national longitudinal study of college students in the United States. The survey gathers information from entering college students regarding their demographic background, high school experiences, affective traits such as self-concepts and values, and goals and aspirations related to college and beyond.
Regression analyses relied on unweighted data from five specific years: 1976, 1986, 1996, 2006, and 2011. These years were selected because they contained the most consistent set of survey items at evenly-spaced decade (and one half-decade) intervals. The regression sample across all years was composed of 93,616 students who indicated intent to major in engineering (16,995 women and 76,621 men) and 817,802 students (476,061 women and 341,741 men) from all other majors.
The main outcome variable is self-reported intent to major in engineering (versus all other fields). Independent variables include time, personal inputs (religion, race, political views), background characteristics (parents’ education, parents’ career), learning experiences ( high school GPA), self-efficacy (self rating math ability, scholar (factor)), outcome expectations, interests, contextual influences, and choice goals (degree aspiration vs. BA).
Authors ran separate models for subsample of women and men