Survey reveals persistent gender differences in teamwork roles among engineering students, suggesting a need for targeted interventions.
This work explores the teamwork experiences of undergraduate and graduate engineering students at various points in their degrees. The results of two teamwork focused questions from a multi-year survey conducted at the University of Ottawa in 2022/23 and 2024/25 are evaluated, focusing on student self-assessment of teamwork activities such as report writing, organizing to meet deadlines, and performing technical tasks. The results show that a gendered experience of teamwork persists as students progress through their engineering education, with women identifying as performing more administrative tasks in group projects such as report writing and organizing to meet deadlines, while men identified as performing more technical tasks and troubleshooting of problems. This is despite men and women ranking report writing as their least favourite activity. This paper presents data to increase awareness of potential gender differences in engineering classes to support efforts to improve teamwork in engineering education.
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Kristufek et al. (2025) studied this question.
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