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Both the government and industry recognize the need for an innovative and diverse engineering workforce for the US to maintain global competitiveness. Because women comprise less than a fifth of engineering undergraduates, it important to identify practices that may counteract this gender gap in engineering. Unlike other work focused on recruitment and retention of women, this study relies on research and theory on college students to inform the overall research design. It explores how variations in curricular emphases, instructional practices, and students' perceptions of climate across disciplines are related to gender disparities across engineering disciplines. Data are drawn from a nationally representative survey of students from 121 programs at 31 institutions. No research to date has systematically examined the relationship between curricular experiences and gender disparity on such a large scale. Analyses clearly demonstrate differences in gender diversity across the engineering disciplines−programs in mechanical and electrical engineering are significantly less diverse by gender than biomedical/bioengineering, chemical, civil, general, and industrial engineering. Thus, efforts to recruit and retain women students should develop strategies for specific disciplines, perhaps looking beyond traditional efforts that have focused on climate and instead examining curriculum or instructional strategies. This research indicates that females may gravitate toward or persist in disciplines that emphasize thinking from a broad, systems perspective in which instructors explicitly link topics across disciplines in their courses. The less diverse electrical and mechanical engineering disciplines could place a greater emphasis on such topics as an effort to boost their attractiveness to females.
Knight et al. (Sun,) studied this question.