Kathleen Buse

Personal vision: enhancing work engagement and the retention of women in the engineering profession

This study examines how personal vision enhances work engagement and the retention of women in the engineering profession. Using a mixed method approach to understand the factors related to the retention of women in the engineering profession, we first interviewed women who persisted and women who opted out of the profession (Buse and Bilimoria, 2014). In these rich stories, we found that women who persisted had a personal vision that included their profession, and that this personal vision enabled them to overcome the bias, barriers and discrimination in the engineering workplace. To validate this finding on a larger population, we developed a scale to measure ones personal vision conceptualized as the ideal self (Boyatzis and Akrivou, 2006). The measure was tested in a pilot study and then used in a study of 495 women with engineering degrees. The findings validate that the ideal self is comprised of self-efficacy, hope, optimism and core identity. For these women, the ideal self directly impacts work engagement and work engagement directly impacts career commitment to engineering. The findings add to extant theory related to the role of personal vision and intentional change theory. From a practical perspective, these findings will aid efforts to retain women in engineering and other STEM professions.

Why They Stay: Individual Factors Predicting Career Commitment for Women Engineers

Women remain underrepresented in the engineering profession comprising only 10% of the employed engineers in 2009 while in that same year − according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics − women exceeded more than half of those employed in professional, managerial and related occupations. While others have studied the reasons women leave engineering careers, this study focused uniquely on women who persist in a career in engineering. A rigorous field experiment was conducted which surveyed 495 women ages 21 to 60 with engineering degrees to develop a model of the individual factors that lead women to commit to a career in engineering. The model is operationalized within the context of the development of a new construct − the ideal self. The results may aid universities and government agencies hoping to recruit and retain more women in the engineer profession and to organizations in search of women who are committed to engineering.

Establishing the Research Agenda for Increasing the Representation of Women in Engineering and Computing

While there is an extensive body of research on gender equity in engineering and computing, there have been few efforts to glean insight from a dialog among experts. To encourage collaboration and to develop a shared vision of the future research agenda, a 2 day workshop of 50 scholars who work on the topic of gender in engineering and computing was held at a rural conference center. The structure of the conference and the location allowed for time to reflect, dialog, and to craft an innovative research agenda aimed at increasing the representation of women in engineering and computing. This paper has been written by the conference organizers and details the ideas and recommendations from the scholars. The result is an innovative, collaborative approach to future research that focuses on identifying effective interventions. The new approach includes the creation of partnerships with stakeholders including businesses, government agencies, non-profits and academic institutions to allow a broader voice in setting research priorities. Researchers recommend incorporating multiple disciplines and methodologies, while expanding the use of data analytics, merging and mining existing databases and creating new datasets. The future research agenda is detailed and includes studies focused on socio-cultural interventions particularly on career choice, within undergraduate and graduate programs, and for women in professional careers. The outcome is a vision for future research that can be shared with researchers, practitioners and other stakeholders that will lead to gender equity in the engineering and computing professions.

The Leadership Lab for Women: Advancing and Retaining Women in STEM through Professional Development

Innovative professional development approaches are needed to address the ongoing lack of women leaders in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers. Developed from the research on women who persist in engineering and computing professions and essential elements of women’s leadership development, the Leadership Lab for Women in STEM Program was launched in 2014. The Leadership Lab was created as a research-based leadership development program, offering 360-degree feedback, coaching, and practical strategies aimed at increasing the advancement and retention of women in the STEM professions. The goal is to provide women with knowledge, tools and a supportive learning environment to help them navigate, achieve, flourish, and catalyze organizational change in male-dominated and technology-driven organizations. This article describes the importance of creating unique development experiences for women in STEM fields, the genesis of the Leadership Lab, the design and content of the program, and the outcomes for the participants.

Eco-communal management, transition engagement, and connectedness A moderated mediation model for the performance of renewable energy projects in emerging economies

The International Energy Agency (IEA) forecast of 2014 indicates a 37% energy demand increase in the next 25 years primarily coming from emerging economies in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. To meet the forecasted energy demand increase and ameliorate the ecological stress associated with such increases, substantially increased deployments and effective operations of renewable energy projects is of paramount importance. This study sought to understand the factors impacting successful renewable energy projects and identifies integrative measures for the performance of these projects in the context of emerging economies. Our research suggests well-developed and deployed eco-communal management practices, a type of business model innovation, is the best way to translate the value proposition of RE projects into sustainable value. Our research further suggests level of managerial responsibility bifurcates the translation of strategic objectives of RE projects and the relatedness of the key decision makers into sustainable value through its eco-communal management practices. The impact of knowledge creation on sustainable value is primarily indirect through hastening and affecting transformational changes, hence deploying effective transitions engagements and instituting accurate methods to measure the efficacy of knowledge creation are imperative. Market creations insignificant and negative relationships with sustainable value and meaningfulness is nuanced from extant literatures, and it may be attributed to a lag in the deployment of sustainable marketing orientation, shift to personal network marketing, and the difference between marketed and perceived benefits of RE projects. To our knowledge, this is the first research paper that combines the high impact applications of renewable energy projects in emerging markets with cognitive, and perceptual performance drivers to develop a systemic and integrative renewable energy project performance measures and the associated predictor variables. Overall, the predictor variables explain 57%, and 72% of the variance in the outcome variables sustainable value, and meaningfulness respectively.