Why Women Leave Engineering

Source: Time Magazine, Barbara Kiviat

According to Jennifer Hunt, McGill University, women leave such jobs when they feel disgruntled about pay and the chance for promotion. In other words, they leave for the same reasons men do. To reach that conclusion, Hunt combed through data on some 200,000 college graduates collected by the National Science Foundation in 1993 and 2003. Her first finding was that women actually don't leave jobs in science at an above-average rate. The difference, Hunt found, comes from the engineering side of the equation.

About 21% of all graduates surveyed were working in fields unrelated to their highest college degree. That proportion held steady for both men and women. Yet in engineering, there was a gap. About 10% of male engineers were working in an unrelated field. Meanwhile, some 13% of female engineers were. Women who became engineers disproportionately left for another sector.

Why? The surveys that Hunt analyzed let respondents indicate why they were working outside of their field, picking from options such as working conditions, pay, promotion opportunities, job location and family-related reasons. As it turned out, more than 60% of the excess women leaving engineering did so because of pay and promotion opportunities. More women than men left engineering for family-related reasons, but that gender gap was no different than what Hunt found in non-engineering professions. "It doesn't have anything to do with the nature of the work," says Hunt.

The question then becomes why women engineers feel so stifled when it comes to pay and promotion. Women also left fields such as financial management and economics at higher-than-expected rates. The commonality? Like engineering, they are male-dominated. Some 74% of financial management degree holders in the survey sample were male. Men made up 73% of economics graduates. To take one example from engineering, some 83% of mechanical engineer grads were male.

How, exactly, being in a male-majority environment leads women to leave for reasons related to pay and promotion is unclear. It is easy to imagine discrimination, or simply the prizing of more stereotypically male behavior - speaking out in meetings rather than consensus building behind the scenes. Hunt's study did not formally evaluate possible root causes.

Nonetheless, she concludes that focusing on making engineering jobs more family-friendly - by offering flexible work schedules, say - misses an important part of the mark. If we have a desire to keep women working as engineers, whether for their own sake or society's then a better focus may be creating work environments where women feel more able to climb the career ladder.

A number of big banks have launched female mentoring networks, notes Hunt. If part of the problem in a male-dominated environment is that it's more difficult for women to network - grabbing a beer at a sports bar after work may appeal more to one gender than to the other - then deliberately trying to build those bonds might help. Although even that, at this point, is speculation. What's for sure is that "it's not about math or getting your hands dirty," says Hunt. "It's not because these women mistakenly wandered into engineering."

Date Published: 4/1/10