– Exposure to role models and opportunities to apply classroom learning to real world problems were found to increase the likelihood of long-term career success for female technology graduates.
– Participation in campus life was not found to be significantly correlated with long-term career success.
– The correlations between career success and caring, motivating undergraduate professors had a medium-sized effect, indicating that these factors were more highly correlated with career success than were mentoring opportunities.
– Interactions with academic advisors were not significantly correlated with long-term success for female technology graduates.
– The correlation between career success and internship participation had a small size effect. Working on projects that took at least one semester to complete as well as participating in research with professors or faculty members were not significantly correlated with long-term success for female technology graduates.
– Both male and female technology graduates were more likely to experience long-term success if they reported an internship or job related to their major field of study during their undergraduate careers.
– Diversity was positively and significantly correlated to long-term success for female technology graduates, while living on campus was negatively correlated with long-term success.
2017 - Women in Technology: College Experiences that are Correlated with Long-term Career Success
This study leveraged the Gallup-Purdue Index, comprised of survey data from a nationally representative sample of United States residents, weighted to account for unequal selection probability and nonresponse and to match national demographics of gender, age, race, ethnicity, education, and region. The data were gathered between December 16, 2014 and June 29, 2015 from a random sample of 30,151 adult respondents with at least a bachelor’s degree and internet access within the United States. For this study, the data were filtered to female respondents who reported having a bachelor’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, or management information systems. The final sample contained 902 cases.
DV: Three dummy variables were created to serve as the components of the dependent variable in this study, Success. The first dummy variable was Income, the second is employment engagement and the third one is well-baing. The author also created a proxy for career success by adding the dummy variables of Income, Employee Engagement, and Well-Being.
IVs: “Professors cared about me,” Excited about learning, Having a mentor, Frequency of meetings with academic advisor, Internships, Long-term projects, Research participation, Extracurricular activities, Diversity, Sorority/Fraternity membership, Athletics participation, Intramural sport participation, Student organization participation, Leadership positions, Living on campus; also three dummy variables that were mapped to hypotheses.