2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Women remain underrepresented in engineering, and implicit biases have been shown to significantly shape environments where career choices are made. While bias has been widely studied in general populations, less is known about how it differs across rural and urban communities and how these differences may influence the pipeline of women pursuing engineering. This study examines adult variation in implicit bias using Project Implicit data, with the goal of understanding the community contexts that influence young women’s career pathways.

Guided by social cognitive career theory, we hypothesized that adults in rural communities would hold stronger implicit biases about which careers are appropriate for women than those in urban communities. We also examined broader demographic patterns to identify how implicit gender–career and gender–science biases vary across gender, education, and other characteristics. Using open-source Gender–Career and Gender–Science Implicit Association Test (IAT) data linked with demographic and geographic indicators, we applied comparative analyses to assess rural–urban and demographic differences across two decades of responses.

Findings show that implicit bias is widespread, and that while the hypothesis that rural respondents demonstrate stronger associations linking men with careers in science and engineering is validated, it is by no means the strongest trend observed in the data. The most striking finding is that women themselves demonstrate significantly stronger implicit bias regarding their own place in male-dominated fields compared to men. This suggests that community norms and self-perceptions reinforce barriers that may limit women’s entry into engineering, particularly in rural contexts where role models and counterexamples are less visible and highlights the need for targeted, context-specific strategies to counteract implicit bias and broaden women’s participation in engineering.