2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The purpose of this paper is to explore the correlation between growth mindset and endorsement of hegemonic masculinity for men and women in their 2nd, 3rd and 4th year of chemical engineering at a large R1 university. Hegemonic masculinity refers to the culturally idealized form of masculinity, which in contemporary U.S. society includes the belief that men should be powerful, high status, tough and nothing like women. Students with a growth mindset, who believe their intelligence can be developed, are better equipped to overcome challenges they encounter in engineering. Previous work has shown that women in engineering with a fixed mindset are more likely to drop out of engineering, although much of this work focuses on first-year students. A review study by Campbell et al. showed that growth mindset interventions for engineering students don’t necessarily lead to improved academic performance, prompting a call for researchers to examine other psychological factors and beliefs.

In this study, we explore the differences between growth mindset for women and men enrolled in the chemical engineering major and investigate how these mindsets correlate with the endorsement of hegemonic masculinity (HM). We included two of the sub scales in the validated HM instrument: the “power and status sub scale”, which measures the belief that men need to achieve power and status and the “anti-feminine” sub scale, which measures the believe that men should repudiate femininity and traits associated with women. To assess growth mindset, we used two questions: 1. You have a certain amount of intelligence, and you really can’t do much to change it. 2. Your intelligence is something about you that you can’t change very much.

Using Qualtrics, we surveyed students (n=136, 91 men, 44 women and 1 individual who did not specify a gender) in chemical engineering classes at a large R1 university. To explore differences between men and women on both growth mindset and endorsement of hegemonic masculinity and used one-way (gender: male, female) analysis of variance (ANOVA). We also estimated correlations between growth mindset and HM separately for men and women.

Our results indicate that women are more likely to have a growth mindset than men for the 2nd and 3rd year, though this difference disappears by the 4th year. Aligned with prior research on hegemonic masculinity, we found that women (vs. men) have a lower endorsement of hegemonic masculinity. When split by gender, we found a negative correlation between growth mindset and HM for men but no correlation for women. This means that men who endorse hegemonic masculinity are more likely to have a fixed mindset. This finding highlights the need for further exploration of how growth mindset and hegemonic masculinity interact in engineering education.