Transitions Into and Through the Workforce: Women Engineers' Development of Professional Identity

• In Event: Change Is Hard: Transitions Into and Through Engineering Graduate Education

Abstract

Gender disparities in engineering fields have remained an unsolved challenge for the past several decades. Despite continuous ongoing efforts and funding to, recruit, develop, and retain women in engineering, women’s representation in the engineering workforce has only seen marginal gains, from 11% in 2003 to 16% in 2017. Past studies have investigated how to recruit and retain students from marginalized identities, finding that engineering and STEM identity have been recognized as a fundamental factor for students’ career decision-making in educational settings. However, most retention literature ceases after formal education, and professional engineering identity development through the entire career trajectory has received little attention. To this end, this qualitative research explored the experience of women engineers in the workplace answering the broader research question: How do women engineers at various stages in their careers develop professional identity working in engineering industry?
In this study, 15 participants identifying as women working in engineering industry were recruited through personal networks and snowball sampling methods. All hold at least a bachelor’s degree in an engineering discipline, and represent different stages in a career trajectory, characterized as entry level (up to three years in the workforce), junior level (between three and ten years in the workforce), and senior level (more than ten years in the engineering workforce). In-depth semi-structured initial interviews (60-80 minutes) were conducted to understand women’s motivation to pursue engineering as a career and understand how positive and negative experiences in the workplace impacted their professional identity development. Interview transcripts were analyzed using thematic analysis and abductive analysis methods.
Findings indicate that professional identity development is influenced by individuals’ multiple identities related to different roles in their work (e.g., team member, team leader, manager) and life (e.g., wife, mother, pet owner). Of note, these multiple identities constantly negotiate to find equilibrium given shifting saliencies of these factors as women engineers progress in their career and life. Participants often associated their professional identity development as an engineer with persistence through their career despite work-life balance challenges, stereotypes, biases, and discrimination at work. In addition, the ways in which professional identity development transitioned over time was seen in the salient experiences for women in each career stage: One particularly important experience key to professional engineering identity development was the transition into leadership roles after they become junior-level engineers. Junior and senior level participants reported that a lack of leadership experience in their formal education, caused by discrimination and marginalization, translated to a lack of confidence in their current leadership roles that must then be overcome in the workplace. From this research, we posit that a lens on women’s retention and identity development must necessarily extend past the formal academic setting. This research also emphasizes how professional skills like leadership training may help to facilitate the professional identity development process for women in engineering industry, thus promoting retention.

Authors

• Mi Hee Park
  Presenting Author

• Catherine Berdanier, Pennsylvania State University
  Non-Presenting Author