Gender and graduate school: Engineering students confront life after the B. Eng.

Journal of Engineering Education, Jan 2002 by Baker, Sarah, Tancred, Peta, Whitesides, Sue

Insecurities about their qualifications for continuing academic work, about their ability to find a supervisor, but particularly about obtaining good letters of recommendation, are also cited by both women and men as reasons for not continuing to graduate school. In fact, our open-ended pilot interviews picked up numerous comments, particularly from women, concerning the difficulties in obtaining recommendation letters:

recommendation letters...I don't like having to ask them [referees] to take time out oftheir schedule to do that for me" (Fl).

"I don't know whether...usually they ask for the recommendation of a teacher that you had in a class...I don't really have anyone...I think there are two professors that I've had that actually know my name. And I feel like...those professors are amazing because all my classes have like a hundred and something people in them...." (M4).

Another woman student talks about being "too embarrassed or too shy" to ask questions in class and, as a result, wishes she had given potential referees "more to write about. I don't have a problem asking them, but I wish they'd have more to say" (F4).

In addition to exploring respondents' attitudes and concerns about graduate studies and funding, we wondered whether they had encountered either encouraging or discouraging input regarding these issues. With respect to graduate studies, respondents report moderate levels of encouragement from academic and personal networks, with men reporting slightly higher levels from their personal network than women. Interestingly, the women report higher levels of encouragement from engineering work environments than do the men. We emphasize that these are workplace experiences while still a student, thus differing from the workplaces described in reference 25, page 90. Our data, which cover a variety of student work experiences in engineering inside and outside the university, are coherent with observations on the importance of undergraduate research experience [26]. (However, reference 26 makes no distinction between women and men.) In brief, the reality of the workplace often does not affect women until after graduation when they are treated as potentially threatening colleagues rather than young students needing encouragement.

For funding applications, reports of encouragement are disturbingly low for both genders, and the rate of encouragement reported by women is even lower than that reported by men (see also reference 2, page 40). Of the women, 42 percent report receiving no encouragement, as compared to 27 percent of the men, and the women report an average of only 1.5 incidents of encouragement as compared to 2.5 incidents for the men.

As to negative feedback, over a third of women and a third of men report receiving discouraging input regarding graduate studies, and more than 10 percent of women and men are discouraged from applying for funding. The main negative comments are that: work experience is more important; there is a danger of overqualification; having graduate qualifications limits rather than expands job prospects; and others have had negative experiences in graduate school. While there are few gender differences in these reports of discouragement, as mentioned above, we suggest that women's more intrinsic motivational stance towards graduate work makes them particularly vulnerable to discouraging influences.