Erin A. Cech

Professional Role Confidence and Gendered Persistence in Engineering

Social psychological research on gendered persistence in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professions is dominated by two explanations: women leave because they perceive their family plans to be at odds with demands of STEM careers, and women leave due to low self-assessment of their skills in STEM’s intellectual tasks, net of their performance. This study uses original panel data to examine behavioral and intentional persistence among students who enter an engineering major in college. Surprisingly, family plans do not contribute to women’s attrition during college but are negatively associated with men’s intentions to pursue an engineering career. Additionally, math self-assessment does not predict behavioral or intentional persistence once students enroll in a STEM major. This study introduces professional role confidence—individuals’ confidence in their ability to successfully fulfill the roles, competencies, and identity features of a profession—and argues that women’s lack of this confidence, compared to men, reduces their likelihood of remaining in engineering majors and careers. We find that professional role confidence predicts behavioral and intentional persistence, and that women’s relative lack of this confidence contributes to their attrition.

Culture of Disengagement in Engineering Education

Much has been made of the importance of training ethical, socially conscious engineers, but does US engineering education actually encourage neophytes to take seriously their professional responsibility to public welfare? Counter to such ideals of engagement, I argue that students’ interest in public welfare concerns may actually decline over the course of their engineering education. Using unique longitudinal survey data of students at four colleges, this article examines (a) how students’ public welfare beliefs change during their engineering education, (b) whether engineering programs emphasize engagement, and (c) whether these program emphases are related to students’ public welfare beliefs. I track four specific public welfare considerations: the importance to students of professional/ethical responsibilities, understanding the consequences of technology, understanding how people use machines, and social consciousness. Suggesting a culture of disengagement, I find that the cultural emphases of students’ engineering programs are directly related to their public welfare commitments and students’ public welfare concerns decline significantly over the course of their engineering education. However, these findings also suggest that if engineering programs can dismantle the ideological pillars of disengagement in their local climates, they may foster more engaged engineers.

Consequences of Flexibility Stigma Among Academic Scientists and Engineers

Flexibility stigma, the devaluation of workers who seek or are presumed to need flexible work arrangements, fosters a mismatch between workplace demands and the needs of professionals. The authors survey “ideal workers”—science, technology, engineering, and math faculty at a top research university—to determine the consequences of working in an environment with flexibility stigma. Those who report this stigma have lower intentions to persist, worse work–life balance, and lower job satisfaction. These consequences are net of gender and parenthood, suggesting that flexibility stigma fosters a problematic environment for many faculty, even those not personally at risk of stigmatization.

Persistence Is Cultural: Professional Socialization and the Reproduction of Sex Segregation

Why does sex segregation in professional occupations persist? Arguing that the cultures and practices of professional socialization serve to perpetuate this segregation, the authors examine the case of engineering. Using interview and diary entry data following students from college entry to graduation, the authors show how socialization leads women to develop less confidence that they will “fit” into the culture of engineering. The authors identify three processes that produce these cultural mismatches: orientation to engineering at college entry, initiation rituals in coursework and team projects, and anticipatory socialization during internships and summer jobs. Informal interactions with peers and everyday sexism in teams and internships are particularly salient building blocks of segregation.

Engineers and Engineeresses? Self-conceptions and the Development of Gendered Professional Identities:

Do men and women in the same field develop different professional identities? This paper theoretically articulates and empirically explores a mechanism of such gendering: Self-conceptions may filter the identity traits emphasized by professional cultures so that only traits consistent with one’s self-conceptions are likely to be adopted into one’s professional identity. As such, systematic gender differences in self-conceptions may be relayed into gender variation in professional identities. Using longitudinal survey data of engineering students from four U.S. colleges, I find that four self-conceptions, two gendered and two gender-neutral, predict students’ adoption of four professional identity traits: problem-solving prowess, technological leadership, managerial/communication skills, and social consciousness. Two of these traits are gendered: Women are less likely than men to value technological leadership but more likely to value social consciousness. Suggesting possible career consequences of professional identities, I find that three professional identity traits predict students’ intentions to remain in engineering.

Who Likes Math Where? Gender Differences in Eighth-Graders' Attitudes around the World.

Some of the most male-dominated science, technology, engineering and mathematics occupations and degree programmes are found in the world’s most affluent societies. This article assesses whether gender gaps in attitudes follow similarly surprising patterns. Multivariate analysis of eighth-graders’ affinity for mathematics and aspirations for mathematically related jobs in 53 countries shows that the attitudinal gender gap is indeed larger in affluent ‘postmaterialist’ societies. Moreover, both girls and boys view mathematics more negatively in these societies. The authors suggest that cultural ideals of individual self-expression, highly prevalent under conditions of broad-based existential security, operate to reduce girls’ and boys’ interest in pursuits thought to be economically practical but personally non-expressive. Girls may be particularly susceptible to this negative effect, because taken-for-granted cultural beliefs about core female personality traits (and girls’ gendered understandings of their own authentic inner selves) are often at odds with dominant representations of mathematical and technical work.

The (Mis)Framing of Social Justice: Why Ideologies of Depoliticization and Meritocracy Hinder Engineers’ Ability to Think About Social Injustices

Engineers will incorporate considerations of social justice issues into their work only to the extent that they see such issues as relevant to the practice of their profession. This chapter argues that two prominent ideologies within the culture of engineering—depoliticization and meritocracy—frame social justice issues in such a way that they seem irrelevant to engineering practice. Depoliticization is the belief that engineering is a “technical” space where “social” or “political” issues such as inequality are tangential to engineers’ work. The meritocratic ideology—the belief that inequalities are the result of a properly-functioning social system that rewards the most talented and hard-working—legitimates social injustices and undermines the motivation to rectify such inequalities. These ideologies are built into engineering culture and are deeply embedded in the professional socialization of engineering students. I argue that it is not enough for engineering educators to introduce social justice topics into the classroom; they must also directly confront ideologies of meritocracy and depoliticization. In other words, cultural space must be made before students, faculty and practitioners can begin to think deeply about the role of their profession in the promotion of social justice.

Mechanism or Myth?: Family Plans and the Reproduction of Occupational Gender Segregation

Occupational gender segregation is an obdurate feature of gender inequality in the United States The “family plans thesis”—the belief that women and men deliberately adjust their early career decisions to accommodate their anticipated family roles—is a common theoretical explanation of this segregation in the social sciences and in popular discourse. But do young men and women actually account for their family plans when making occupational choices? This article investigates the validity of this central mechanism of the family plans thesis. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 100 college students at three universities, I find that most women and men report no deliberate consideration of their family plans in their college major or post-graduation career choices. Only a quarter of men accommodate provider role plans in their choice of occupations, and only 7 of 56 women (13 percent) accommodate caregiving plans. Further, men who anticipate a provider role are not typically enrolled in more men-dominated fields, and women who seek caregiver-friendly occupations are not typically enrolled in more women-dominated fields. These findings question the validity of the family plans thesis and suggest instead that the thesis itself may reproduce segregation as a cultural schema that buttresses essentialist stereotypes about appropriate fields for men and women.

Epistemological Dominance and Social Inequality: Experiences of Native American Science, Engineering, and Health Students

Can epistemologies anchor processes of social inequality? In this paper, we consider how epistemological dominance in science, engineering, and health (SE&H) fields perpetuates disadvantages for students who enter higher education with alternative epistemologies. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Native American students enrolled at two US research universities who adhere to or revere indigenous epistemologies, we find that epistemological dominance in SE&H degree programs disadvantages students through three processes. First, it delegitimizes Native epistemologies and marginalizes and silences students who value them. Second, in the process of imparting these dominant scientific epistemologies, SE&H courses sometimes require students to participate in pedagogical practices that challenge indigenous ways of knowing. Third, students encounter epistemological imperialism: most students in the sample are working to earn SE&H degrees in order to return to tribal communities to “give back,” yet, because the US laws regulating the practice of SE&H extend onto tribal lands, students must earn credentials in epistemologies that devalue, delegitimate, and threaten indigenous knowledge ways to practice on tribal lands. We examine how students navigate these experiences, discuss the implications of these findings for SE&H education, and describe how epistemological dominance may serve as a mechanism of inequality reproduction more broadly.

Depoliticization and the Structure of Engineering Education

The need for engineering students to develop nuanced understandings of the cultural, social, and political contexts of socio-technical systems has never been more obvious to engineering leaders and decision-makers. Yet, engineers often have obtuse definitions of their responsibilities to the public and seem to engage with the socio-cultural contexts and consequences of their work only in times controversy. A central underlying factor in this disengagement from considerations of social justice and equality is the ideology of depoliticization, the belief that engineering is a purely “technical” space in which engineers design technological objects and systems stripped of political and cultural concerns. In this chapter, we ask, what role does the culture and structure of engineering education play in promoting depoliticization? After elaborating the ideology of depoliticization, we argue that the culture of engineering pedagogy and the traditional curricular structure of engineering education (both its accreditation process and its intra-program curricula) help support and promote an ideology of depoliticization in engineering and train students to adopt this ideology within their own understandings of their professional roles and responsibilities. We end by discussing the consequences of having depoliticization embedded in the culture and structure of engineering education, and suggest possible policy solutions to re-politicize engineering education.