2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Understanding the Male Student Perception of Culture Climate for Women in Engineering Education

Presented at Women in Engineering Division (WIED) Technical Session 7

It is well known that female students often experience a “chilly” culture climate in engineering, affecting many student outcomes, including persistence in engineering programs. What is lacking in the literature is how women’s experiences compare between different engineering disciplines. Furthermore, their male students’ perspectives on gender equity and perception of culture climate across different disciplines are missing. We studied three engineering disciplines, aerospace, civil, and chemical, with varying female-student-body representation to address the following research questions: (1) What is the current state of the culture climate for women studying engineering in their respective disciplines at the studied university? How does female-student-body representation impact the culture climate in the engineering discipline? (2) What is the male student’s perception on the culture climate for women in their engineering discipline? (3) Is there a disconnect between the culture climate female students experience and the perception male students hold of the culture climate for women? (4) What can be done to create meaningful changes to the culture climate for women at the university level? To answer these questions, we designed a survey and semi-structured interview to be administered to female and male engineering students across the three engineering disciplines.
Our findings are consistent with the literature that women are still experiencing a chilly culture climate through peer tensions, types of gender discrimination, and feelings of isolation. From our data, we saw some trends indicating that women in engineering fields with greater female-student-body representation report experiencing fewer instances of gender discrimination and feelings of isolation than those in fields with less female-student-body representation. However, based on the demographics of our study, these results are inconclusive. As for the male-student-perspective, our findings show there is a large disconnect between what women are experiencing and what the male-student perception of the culture climate is. We argue that understanding the male-student perspective of the culture climate for women is critical to developing meaningful interventions for gender-related issues in engineering education. Lastly, we discuss intervention suggestions from participants to spread awareness and create meaningful changes to gender-related issues in engineering education across engineering disciplines. We compare these new perspectives to the suggestions for meaningful changes already established in the literature.

Authors
  1. Ms. Alexis Nicole Barney Iowa State University [biography]
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