Apr 20 2011
STEMMING THE TIDE: WHY WOMEN LEAVE ENGINEERING
Women comprise more than 20% of engineering school graduates, but only 11% of practicing engineers are women, despite decades of academic, federal, and employer interventions to address this gender gap. Project on Women Engineers’ Retention (POWER) was designed to understand factors related to women engineers’ career decisions. Over 3,700 women who had graduated with an engineering degree responded to our survey and indicated that the workplace climate was a strong factor in their decisions to not enter engineering after college or to leave the profession of engineering. Workplace climate also helped to explain current engineers’ satisfaction and intention to stay in engineering.
Work decisions of women currently working in Engineering:
• Women’s decisions to stay in engineering are best predicted by a combination of psychological factors and factors related to the organizational climate.
• Women’s decisions to stay in engineering can be influenced by key supportive people in the organization, such as supervisors and co-workers. Current women engineers who worked in companies that valued and recognized their contributions and invested substantially in their training and professional development, expressed greatest levels of satisfaction with their jobs and careers.
• Women engineers who were treated in a condescending, patronizing manner, and were belittled and undermined by their supervisors and co-workers were most likely to want to leave their organizations.
• Women who considered leaving their companies were also very likely to consider leaving the field of engineering altogether.
[1] http://www.studyofwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/NSF_Women-Full-Report-0314.pdf accessed 20APRIL2011
Questions:
1. Do the women engineers in your workplace feel part of the professional engineering resources?
How do you know?
2. Do women engineers in your workplace believe they can trust their career development to your management team?
How do you know?
3. Is your workplace organizational climate conducive to women professionals staying?
How do you know?
4. When a client asks to have a male engineer be the project’s main project manager, what happens next?
5 responses so far
Based on working about 30 years in the civil engineering profession, my answers are:
1. At my current place of employment there does not appear to be a consistent and clear message that someone’s ability and skills are welcomed in all situations. But I have discovered that this is regardless of gender because other males have expressed this same feeling to me.
At all of past jobs, with the exception of one city engineer who was obvious in his disdain for women, I was treated as a valuable employee and encouraged to use my abilities, skills, and knowledge to their maximum potential. I did also have a horrific experience in the past with a particular group of aldermen who treated me completely unprofessionally and with total disrespect. But because they were a highly political group, it was difficult to assess if being a male would have made a difference.
2. Again, where I work now, I try with my group to foster career development even though our funds for this have been drastically cut. But outside our group, I do not sense that people are trusting their career development to management. I think this is happening not due to a gender issue but other issues – one being financial. Our training funds have been severely limited. And it has been males primarily mentioning their frustration.
Where I worked before, again with the exceptions I noted in #1, I was fortunate to work for many men who went out of their way to ensure we had training and mentoring. So anyone working for them could trust them with their career development.
3. If there are any issues where I work now that make an employee question whether or not they would stay, I do not believe they are related to gender. The reason I believe this is because both males and females have left.
4. I don’t think I have ever had someone ask to have a male be the engineer instead of me. However, there were times I would show up on a job or to meet with someone, and if I had my summer help with me (who was a male), they would frequently assume he was the city engineer instead of me. But I have to admit to assigning a male to work on a project with a particular woman at an agency because she seemed to have issues working with other women. I knew if I had taken the lead, she would have thrown up roadblocks and caused us to jump through hoops, but with him, the project sailed right through as I suspected it would. As this story shows, we are sometimes are our own worst enemies.
I think the reason women might leave civil engineering go beyond the work environment with the employer. For those of us who work on construction, it still is very male oriented place. I have had to put up with the calendars of sometimes unclothed women, and more recently suggestive videos from vendors that have females demonstrating public works products, the language and insults – being called a stupid b**** by some drunk operator, having the crew expose themselves to me, being threated to be punched a few times, etc. You have to be ok with being the only person on the job on “your side” and still be able to stand up to a crew of sometimes 30 men or more who don’t want to do what you are telling them to do. And usually this is while their foreman is standing in your face yelling at you. Not even a lot of guys end up putting up with all that.
Posted on behalf of Janet Spencer:
• I read the document and honestly think this research got it mostly correct. I’m one of those who graduated with an engineering degree and after a few years left engineering. At that time, no spouse or children were in my life influencing the decision and I had no grand plan to become an entrepreneur, so much of it had to do with what social scientists consider Herzberg’s ‘hygiene’ factors.
Years later, I’ve come full circle and am again in the engineering fold, and I’m loving life. It is a fantastic profession, but I still find myself gently cautioning young women when they express an interest in engineering.
The referenced study looks at why women leave the engineering profession. Would readers be interested in seeing the results of a study on why men and women stay in the profession?
New Program Aims To Interest Girls In Engineering
MILWAUKEE — Engineering is a profession that affects every aspect of most people’s lives — from electronics to buildings to roads — and it’s dominated by men. . . . . Classes related to engineering are offered to every student at St. Joan Antida’s — an all-girls school on Milwaukee’s east side. . . . . .
To spark interest, St. Joan’s is part of a new program. Industry insiders and college students from the Milwaukee School of Engineering are brought in as role models.. . . . . ..
WISN 12 News did some checking and found that combined — women, African-Americans and Hispanics — make up less than a third of all engineers.
[1] http://www.wisn.com/r/27942455/detail.html accessed 19MAY2011.
Many women leave engineering because they were or felt discriminated in the workplace, leaving wounds that are sometimes very difficult to heal even if her next job is better. It is a very heavy baggage, and not many women can carry it. Even after counseling, those wounds may still haunt them.
I know a friend who went through this situation. She was discriminated to the extent that she was moved into a windowless workspace and under-considered in projects. After noticing this pattern, she told the company management, but after what she called an “independent” investigation from human resources, no evidence of discrimination was found. So she hired an attorney to help shield her from any retaliatory actions and to pave her way out of the company. She got a decent settlement and moved on. Her next job was better, but the ghost of her previous job kept haunting her that even affected her performance. Eventually she left the second company. She has been through counseling to deal with this situation, but it still affects her. She has been unemployed for 3 years now and has not been motivated to seek new engineering jobs, but has not sought other opportunities in other fields either, thus feeling in a state of limbo.
Is there any advice that you can give my friend?