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Since the 1970s there has been a variety of initiatives encouraging women to become engineers, and the proportion of women entering degree level courses in engineering is rising rapidly. In 1985 nearly 11% of engineering students on degree courses at universities were women. This trend parallels similar, although more dramatic, increases in the proportion of women engineers in the United States and France. However, these statistics must be set against the fact that women remain far more unusual as practising engineers; they represent 2.9% of technicians, 3.9% of professional engineers and approximately 1% of chartered engineers.

This study aims to focus on understanding the work–family conflict of Indian women engineers through the lens of identity conflict.

Semi-structured interviews conducted with 20 Indian women engineers working in India and abroad of varying ages and work experience helped in understanding the types, sources and coping decisions about work–family conflicts experienced by them. Thematic analysis was conducted to analyse the qualitative data.

The findings reveal that as women engineers negotiate their “engineering” and “woman” identities, work–family conflict manifests as a battle of time and responsibilities, psychological strain and behaviour-based conflict. Furthermore, self-expectations and negative social sanctions play an important role in augmenting the experiences of these conflicts. The results also reveal how women re-strategize their career decisions to conciliate their conflicting identities.

This study furthers the literature on resolving work–family conflict by taking an identity perspective. Recommendations in literature such as work flexibility and part-time work, place the onus on women to increase their capacities to perform different roles better. Examining work–family conflict from an identity perspective allows us to look at the psychological processes underlying the challenges women face in balancing work and home in a male-dominated profession. These give insights into the need to go beyond accommodations in the workplace to redefine gender roles and relations for equal participation of women in the modern workforce.

It has been suggested that organisations with a better balance, or critical mass, of women would be more tolerant of difference and foster the inclusion of other women. This paper seeks to investigate whether a strategy of critical mass can really work in the engineering sector.

The data are based on research funded by the ESRC, and problematise critical mass theory through semi‐structured qualitative interviews and focus groups with female students from a range of engineering disciplines.

The findings demonstrate that women engineering students accept gender discrimination, view the industry positively, value their “novelty” status, and are critical of other women.

While these attitudes may be a result of women's assimilation into the existing engineering culture, they do little to further women's cause in engineering. Furthermore, it points to both the necessity, and difficulties, of transforming the engineering culture to ensure that the engineering professions are a place where women can not only survive but also thrive.

While previous research has addressed the critical mass of women in science, engineering and technology, this research critiques critical mass theory, not only because women continue to remain isolated within the sector, despite increasing numbers, but also because many women engineers reinforce the masculine culture within engineering.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a potential mechanism through which gender segregation in the engineering profession is created and sustained. Specifically, boundary spanners for women and men were examined because they may be a source of valuable information to job seekers.

Applicant data for the role of a senior technical engineer (n=100) from an engineering organisation in the UK were analyzed.

A logistic regression analysis showed that women applicants were significantly less likely than men to be offered a job as a senior engineer. A mediation analysis revealed that women did not use networking with boundary spanners as a primary job search tool, providing a partial explanation for why women are less likely to be hired in senior engineering roles.

This study uses a dataset collected in 2009 to widen the investigative lens of processes that influence hiring outcomes for women in a male‐stereotyped job, namely, engineering.

The purpose of this study is to explore the perceptions of Afghan female engineers regarding opportunities and barriers to starting their own engineering/construction company in Kabul through three career trajectory chokepoints related to training through higher education, the engineering workplace and entrepreneurship, through the lens of feminist theory.

Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted. A Web-based survey was also conducted to collect data from participants who were not able to participate in the in-depth interviews. Thematic content analysis was used to analyze the collected data.

As a result of the analysis, three main themes were developed related to “chokepoints” that Afghan female engineers face along the path to starting their own construction companies: “entering and studying engineering,” “career development” and “starting her own engineering business”; the authors address the subthemes of barriers and opportunities confronted by Afghan women at each chokepoint.

Due to civil unrest, the authors are only able to reach a sample of Afghan female engineers working in the capital city of Kabul.

Afghanistan shows, perhaps, the most severe underrepresentation of female engineers of all countries in the world, yet no research gives them a voice to explain the challenges their face to starting their own engineering/construction businesses. The authors are able to report their perceptions and articulate recommendations to encourage female entrepreneurship in the engineering/construction sector in Afghanistan.

Afghan women face significant barriers to having meaningful careers in the science, technology, engineering and medicine professions. The findings provide information for regulators regarding why Afghan women do not start their own engineering firms.

As physical security and resource constraints generate difficulty in accessing Afghan women in general, this is the first paper to report the perceptions of Afghan female engineers regarding the barriers and opportunities they perceive on the path to engineering entrepreneurship.

Women remain dramatically underrepresented in the engineering profession and far fewer women than men persist in the field. This study aims to identify individual and contextual factors that distinguish women who persist in engineering careers in the US.

Qualitative research was conducted based on semi‐structured interviews with 31 women engineers, ten of whom had left an engineering career and 21 persisting for on average 21 years. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, coded and analyzed.

Women who persisted in engineering careers articulated high levels of self efficacy, described themselves in terms of their identity as an engineer, and were motivated by the challenges and novelty of the profession. Women engineers' ability to adapt enabled them to persist and thrive despite working in a male‐dominated culture characterized by difficulties associated with the workplace, including discrimination. Women who opted out of engineering were less likely to recognize options in navigating the workplace and some felt as if they were pushed into engineering. Persistent engineers were less likely to be married and had fewer children.

Although appropriate for an inductive study using a grounded theory approach the sample was small and the data was self reported.

A model is developed that integrates individual and contextual factors explaining a woman's persistence in an engineering career and has potential to explain persistence in other professions. To retain more women in engineering careers, organizations and managers should provide opportunities to develop identified skills within the professional domain and should provide opportunities for women engineers that provide continuous learning, on‐going challenges and novel work.

Although numerous studies have addressed the retention of women in academic engineering programs and several recent studies have described why women leave engineering careers, the novelty of this study is that it addresses why women stay.

Building on work that explores the relationship between individual beliefs and ability to recognize discrimination (e.g., Kaiser and Major, 2006), we examine how an adherence to beliefs about gender essentialism, gender egalitarianism, and meritocracy shape one’s interpretation of an illegal act of sexual harassment involving a male supervisor and female subordinate. We also consider whether the role of the gendered culture of engineering (Faulkner, 2009) matters for this relationship. Specifically, we conducted an online survey-experiment asking individuals to report their beliefs about gender and meritocracy and subsequently to evaluate a fictitious but illegal act of sexual harassment in one of two university research settings: an engineering department, a male-dominated setting whose culture is documented as being unwelcoming to women (Hatmaker, 2013; Seron, Silbey, Cech, and Rubineau, 2018), and an ambiguous research setting. We find evidence that the stronger one’s adherence to gender egalitarian beliefs, the greater one’s ability to detect inappropriate behavior and sexual harassment while gender essentialist beliefs play no role in their detection. The stronger one’s adherence to merit beliefs, the less likely they are to view an illegal interaction as either inappropriate or as sexual harassment. We account for respondent knowledge of sexual harassment and their socio-demographic characteristics, finding that the former is more often associated with the detection of inappropriate behavior and sexual harassment at work. We close with a discussion of the transferability of results and policy implications of our findings.

The underrepresentation of women in engineering has important consequences for meeting the need for a larger, talented scientific and technological labor force. Increasing the proportion of women faculty in engineering will help increase the persistence probabilities of women undergraduate and graduate students in engineering, as well as contribute to the range and diversity of ideas toward innovations and solutions to the greatest engineering challenges. This study aims to examine the association among gender, family formation and post-PhD employment patterns of a cohort of engineering doctorates.

Using the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Doctorate Recipients data, 2001–2010, descriptive and multinomial logit regression analyses are conducted to illustrate the career trajectories of engineering PhDs over a ten-year period.

The career trajectories of engineering PhDs are nonlinear, and transitions between employment sectors commonly occur over the ten-year time period studied. Although women engineering PhDs with young dependents are less likely to be employed initially after PhD completion, they tend to enter the workforce in the academic sector as time progresses. Early post-PhD employment as a postdoctoral researcher or in the academic sector contributes to the pursuit of the professoriate downstream.

While previous studies tend to focus on the early career outcomes of science and engineering students, this study contributes to the literature by focusing on the long-term career outcomes of engineering doctorates. Research findings provide engineering PhD students and PhDs with more information regarding potential post-PhD career trajectories, highlighting the multitude of career options and transitions that occur over time. Research findings also provide higher education administrators and doctoral program stakeholders with foundational information toward designing and revitalizing professional development programs to help PhD students prepare for the workforce. The findings have the potential to be applied toward helping increase diversity by shaping policies and programs to encourage multiple alternative career pathways to the professoriate.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate gender differences in burnout, style of coping and the availability of peer support among high‐tech engineers

A longitudinal study investigated gender differences in burnout, style of coping and the availability of peer support among high‐tech engineers, an interesting occupational group from a gender perspective both because of the masculine culture of the engineering profession and the many prejudices against women engineers. Both the masculine culture and the prejudices help explain the paucity of women engineers and predict high levels of burnout among them.

The paper's findings supported this prediction. They revealed a significant gender difference in burnout, with women engineers reporting higher levels of burnout than men. The gender differences in burnout were interpreted as related to other findings: women's greater tendency to utilize emotion‐focused coping, their smaller peer support and greater work–family conflict.

In addition to their implications for gender theory and research and for burnout theory and research, the paper's findings point to the need to encourage and support the small and unique group of women engineers.

Women architects in the USA are generally satisfied with their work and feel that they are successful. Responses to a mailed survey form sent to women members of the American Institute of Architects throughout the USA allows a clear and unique profile of the woman architect to emerge. It appears that women architects have different values to women in general, and to women managers; but close to women engineers' values (with the exception of aesthetic value). There are, however, still many obstacles to be overcome by women architects before they achieve parity of treatment with their male counterparts.