Persistence Is Cultural: Professional Socialization and the Reproduction of Sex Segregation

Abstract

Why does sex segregation in professional occupations persist? Arguing that the cultures and practices of professional socialization serve to perpetuate this segregation, the authors examine the case of engineering. Using interview and diary entry data following students from college entry to graduation, the authors show how socialization leads women to develop less confidence that they will “fit” into the culture of engineering. The authors identify three processes that produce these cultural mismatches: orientation to engineering at college entry, initiation rituals in coursework and team projects, and anticipatory socialization during internships and summer jobs. Informal interactions with peers and everyday sexism in teams and internships are particularly salient building blocks of segregation.

Full text

Article
Persistence Is
Cultural: Professional
Socialization and the
Reproduction of Sex
Segregation
Carroll Seron
1
, Susan S. Silbey
2
,
Erin Cech
3
, and Brian Rubineau
4
Abstract
Why does sex segregation in professional occupations persist? Arguing that
the cultures and practices of professional socialization serve to perpetuate
this segregation, the authors examine the case of engineering. Using inter-
view and diary entry data following students from college entry to gradu-
ation, the authors show how socialization leads women to develop less
confidence that they will “fit” into the culture of engineering. The authors
identify three processes that produce these cultural mismatches: orientation
to engineering at college entry, initiation rituals in coursework and team
projects, and anticipatory socialization during internships and summer jobs.
Informal interactions with peers and everyday sexism in teams and intern-
ships are particularly salient building blocks of segregation.
Keywords
sex segregation, engineering culture, professional socialization, STEM
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DOI: 10.1177/0730888415618728
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1
University of California Irvine, CA, USA
2
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
3
Rice University, Houston, TX, USA
4
McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada
Corresponding Author:
Susan S. Silbey, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, E53–335, 77 Massachusetts Avenue,
Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
Email: ssilbey@mit.edu
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Although the doors to professional occupations were formally opened for
women nearly half a century ago, sex segregation in professions persists
(England & Li, 2006). Professions like teaching and nursing remain
female-dominated and subsequently underpaid and undervalued, while
male-dominated professions like science and engineering remain presti-
gious and highly paid (Cotter, Hermsen, & Vanneman, 2011). Even fields
like law and medicine, which have reached gender parity in their incom-
ing cohorts, still have persistent intraprofession sex segregation by spe-
cialty area (Heinz, Nelson, Sandefur, & Laumann, 2011; Ku, 2011).
Much social science research has attempted to understand the per-
sistence of this segregation, looking for its roots in institutional-level
processes like labor market queuing (Reskin & Roos, 1990), individual-
level processes like the gendering of confidence and self-expression
(Cech, 2013a; Correll, 2001), and gendered interactional-level issues
such as exclusionary or “chilly” climates (e.g., Rosser, 2011; Valian,
1999), tokenism, and homosocial reproduction (Kanter, 1977). While
this work has identified important ways in which broad cultural gender
biases impact the likelihood that women and men will persist in these
fields, much less is known about how beliefs and practices particular to
the culture of each profession might contribute to patterns of retention
and attrition to produce sex segregation. Neophytes are first introduced
to this culture via professional socialization—a site where the impact of
professional culture on processes of segregation may be particularly
pronounced. Broadly, we argue that professional socialization is an
important factor in the reproduction of sex segregation within gender-
typed professional occupations because it is the formalized process
whereby young men and women are first introduced to the beliefs and
behaviors of the profession to which they aspire.
Professional socialization entails both mastery of the routine skills
and specialized knowledge of the profession as well as a match between
personal values and those expressed in the profession’s culture
(Dimaggio, 1992, p. 127, as cited in Rivera, 2012). A confident profes-
sional not only must be secure in his or her expertise to ground discre-
tionary judgments in moments of uncertainty but must also be
convinced that he or she embraces the roles, values, and identities
that come with the field (Cech, Rubineau, Silbey, & Seron, 2011). In
this article, we begin to address the conundrum of continuing gender
variation within an increasingly professionalized workforce by focusing
on the processes of professional socialization.
The field of engineering is a particularly robust site for understanding
gendered processes of professional socialization because it remains the
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most gender-segregated field among science, technology, engineering,
and math (STEM) occupations at all career stages, from college classes
to the workplace itself (National Center for Educational Studies, 2009;
National Science Foundation, 2009), representing an outlier case in
which it may be easier to observe dynamics that are diluted in more
moderate examples (Small, 2009; Van Velsen, 1967/1978). We make use
of a unique dataset tracking a cohort of students in engineering at a
stage when they have already surpassed gendered assumptions in pri-
mary and secondary education about who is good at math and sci-
ence—an essential prerequisite for success in STEM majors in college
(Correll, 2001, 2004; Ma & Johnson, 2008). We follow their experiences
across 4 years of engineering education. Pursuing a cultural analysis of
professional education, we ask whether phenomena in the rituals of
professional socialization and acculturation might help explain why
women intend to exit the profession at a higher rate than men.
In the analysis that follows, we revisit traditional conceptions of pro-
fessional socialization, showing how successful socialization may simultan-
eously embrace gender diversity while reproducing sex segregation. Focusing
on the habitus of engineering pedagogy through which “people come to
accept and absorb the institutional logics they purportedly enact” (Turco,
2010, p. 6), our data show that men and women succeed equally in the
formal, direct, and technical educational experiences. The informal and
indirect contexts of required learning in project teams and internships,
however, relegate women to traditional gender specific roles and perform-
ances. The explicit curriculum brings with it the unanticipated but salient
residues of everyday “micro inequities” (Ku, 2011) that raise questions
among women about whether they can or want to “fit” into this culture.
We begin by laying out the conceptual framework of cultural analysis
guiding our inductive inquiry. In the section following that framing, we
describe our methodology, including the use of diaries as a form of
qualitative data. We then present our findings organized by the standard
events of professional socialization displaying with our respondents’
words and accounts how, at each step in the process following entry,
engineering education slowly excludes women from full participation.
Bringing Cultural Analysis to the Study of
Professional Socialization and Occupational
Sex Segregation
Theories of professional socialization argue that the formal and infor-
mal experiences of education shape students’ orientation toward
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professional practice (Becker, Strauss, Hughes, & Greer, 1961;
Granfield, 1992; Merton, Reader, & Kendall, 1957; Stover, 1989).
Training experiences communicate and inculcate the institutional
logics neophytes go on to enact and inhabit as working professionals
(Lounsbury, Fisher, Levy, & Welsh, 2009; Schleef, 2006). This homo-
genizing socialization unfolds as trainees receive, interpret, and experi-
ence a profession’s culture through the sequenced tasks, trajectories,
and spaces of educational training (Elder, 1985, as cited in Abbott,
1997, p. 88). These processes of professional socialization include both
direct learning of technical knowledge and skills as well as “indirect
learning, in which attitudes, values, and behavior patterns are acquired
as by-products of contact with instructors and peers” (Merton et al.,
1957, p. 41). The particular sites of this socialization in higher education
range from classes to study groups to moments of mentoring and intern-
ships; messages or professional signs are also conveyed through the
amount and scope of classroom assignments, styles of teaching, curricu-
lar priorities, joking and hall talk, class projects, team learning, intern-
ships, and summer jobs as well as late night study sessions (cf.
Gusterson, 1998).
If professional cultures are systems of circulating messages, signs,
and rituals built into and around professional practices and knowledge
(Abbott, 1988; Sewell, 1992), socialization is the practice of making
familiar to members the communally approved meanings, norms, and
practices. For socially competent members, however, the systematicity
of culture becomes invisible and tacit, simply known and unproblem-
atic, no longer a matter of explicit articulation or instruction. As tea-
chers and colleagues tell stories and exchange anecdotes from their
experiences, they display for would-be professionals and other new-
comers “what sorts of practices are ‘natural’” (Van Maanen & Schein,
1979, p. 210), “normal” (Jablin, 2001, p. 756), and “proper” (Van
Maanen & Barley, 1984, p. 238) for that “social context” (Leonardi,
Jackson, & Diwan, 2009). Small talk, as much as formal lectures, helps
to develop a sensibility for knowing how to act like a professional.
For engineers, the commonly circulating norms and practices in
engineering culture include an essential commitment to solving prob-
lems by mobilizing the ostensibly objective and value neutral laws of
science and techniques of quantitative measurement. Engineering know-
ledge is valued for its purported objectivity. Membership in the com-
munity of engineers is also understood to be achieved through objective
criteria—a meritocratic selection of those who can do engineering,
talent that is believed to be unevenly distributed but which the
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profession expertly selects and trains using carefully crafted and tested
standardized metrics (also see Fisher, 2012 for similar logics in Wall
Street professions). As a consequence, young engineers have been
observed to purposely exclude from their workgroups those they believe
do not have equally high technical skills, paradoxically undermining the
apprenticeship model the profession advocates (Dryburgh, 1999) and
the collaborative work teams that employing firms expect (Leonardi
et al., 2009, p. 401).
Despite the coercive power of professional socialization, each person
brings his or her own biography to the experience where, indeed, stu-
dents “try on possible selves” (Ibarra, 1999), interpreting the profes-
sion’s values and practices and imagining themselves as professionals
with the requisite confidence in their expert knowledge and career pro-
spects (Cech, 2015). Would-be professionals experience this normative
trajectory in varied, sometimes unanticipated ways, disrupting the
powerful pull of the professional socialization narrative. If those disrup-
tions are patterned for members of particular groups, such as women,
they may lead to alternate and unintended consequences for intentions
to remain in the profession.
Prior research suggests that the unexplained exit rates from STEM
fields “is at least partially a result of the quality of match between the
individual’s interest and the requirements of the occupations” (National
Science Board, 2012; Preston, 1994, p. 1459; Xie & Shauman, 2003)
where the nub of the mismatch is embedded in subtle and tacit cultural
signs and practices and speaks to the role of professional socialization in
reproducing existing patterns of gender imbalance within male-domi-
nated fields. If men and women perceive or experience a mismatch
between the profession’s culture and their own personal values, beliefs,
and identities, they are likely to seek out other career paths more con-
sonant with their personal values and ambitions. To the extent that
professional cultures within male-dominated fields emphasize a homo-
social, hegemonically masculine culture, we would expect that this
socialization process may reproduce—or even exaggerate—the under-
representation of women.
To explore the possible gendered processes of professional socializa-
tion, we conducted a longitudinal study of engineering students moving
along a trajectory of professional socialization from (a) college entry to
(b) initiation rituals in classwork and team projects to (c) anticipatory
socialization such as summer jobs and internships. We examine men’s
and women’s experiences and interpretations of those experiences as
they reported them during their college years.
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Method and Data
We followed cohorts of students at four schools who entered college
intending to be engineering majors: Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering (Olin), Picker
Engineering Program at Smith College (Smith), and the University of
Massachusetts Amherst. Although our sample is not representative
of all engineering students in the United States, the variety in type of
institutions in our study (elite private college; large, public land-grant
institution; engineering-only college; and single-sex college) allows for
an examination of professional socialization processes across a broad
spectrum of approaches to engineering education.
Diaries and Interviews
We tracked students from their freshman orientation through the end of
their fourth year, when most of them have graduated from college.
Rather than asking them to describe retrospectively their experiences
at the end of the process, we asked a subset of students to tell us about
their experiences in their own words through twice-monthly diary
entries. With these data, we were in a position to consider the develop-
mental process of becoming an engineer in situ, that is, as the experience
unfolded. Students’ diary entries were informative in three respects.
First, they provided evidence of their interpretations of events and rela-
tionships that constitute their education over the 4 years and described
the educational and career decisions they make as they are taking place.
Second, the twice-monthly diaries provided insight into the culture and
social organization of the field of engineering itself as enacted through
engineering education. Third, by asking students to write to us about
anything of interest happening in their lives at the time, we avoided
priming informants through questions, even if subtle, about what
may, or may not, be key to their lived experience. In three instances
over the 4 years (3 out of 96 submissions), however, we did ask these
diary writers to comment on specific topics: the 2008 presidential elec-
tion, the World Series between the Yankees and the Red Sox (2004), and
Larry Summers’ comments on women scientists (2005). In all other
times, we were as nondirective as possible.
We composed the sample of diary writers by random selection of
students at each site. As appropriate, we oversampled women and
racial or ethnic minorities. Because the proportion of racial or ethnic
minority students is very small, in this article, we focus only on gender
differences. As Sampson and Laub (1993) note, collecting prospective,
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longitudinal data is “maddeningly difficult” (p. 276) to do, but as they
also note, it is the only way to begin to understand sequencing. We
offered each student $100 per month to participate in the diary writing
over the course of the 4 years. Budget constraints limited the sample to
40 students across the four schools. See Table 1 for sample (see Tables 1
and 2).
1
In addition to the diary data, we also conducted face-to-face inter-
views with 100 students (25 at each school) during their college years
one and four. For this article, we reviewed students’ interviews to iden-
tify the ways in which they articulated expectations concerning their
career as an engineer, their confidence in the role of engineer, and
their prospects in the labor market on the brink of graduation. The
interview data in combination with diaries provide rich accounts of
the educational experiences of these would-be engineers.
Data Analysis
All diary entries and interviews were coded using Atlas.ti. After the first
semester of diary submissions and first set of interviews, Seron and
Silbey independently read each diary entry and inductively developed
codes to capture the range of topics discussed by students. Our analysis
of the textual data developed from general understanding of the litera-
tures on engineering, higher education, professional socialization, and
gender, with an openness to the need to reformulate questions and
developed additional categories as new themes emerged from the stu-
dent diaries and interviews. Table 3 shows the codes and definitions
used in this article.
Intercoder Reliability
As Table 2 reveals, we were dealing with an enormous sample of diary
submissions; resources did not permit us to have each entry coded by
two individuals for purposes of intercoder reliability. Yet, we were con-
cerned about the consistency of coding across coders. To address con-
cerns about intercoder reliability, we developed a process that combines
independent coding with collaborative evaluation and recoding. Teams
of three to four undergraduate students, under the supervision of Seron
and a graduate student, coded diary entries by semester. In addition,
each member of the team coded one common diary entry. At weekly
team meetings, each assistant reported his or her codes for the com-
monly coded diary. On average, we achieve about 75% to 80%
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agreement across coders. While this score is not as high as one would
like for conversion to quantitative data (Nachmias & Nachmias, 1987),
the goal here is quite different. Interpretation is a fundamental and
inevitable aspect of analyzing qualitative data (Emerson, Fretz, &
Shaw, 1995).
Becoming an Engineer: Entry, Initiation Rituals,
and Anticipatory Socialization
Are professional socialization processes, events, and rituals differentially
experienced and interpreted by men and women engineering students?
To answer this question, we organized the coded data by the particular
events being discussed. Professional socialization into engineering can
be described by three kinds of experiences: (a) entry and orientation into
a program of study with an unusually heavy dose of course require-
ments relative to other students’ programs and majors, (b) initiation
rituals such as collaborative team projects that familiarize students
with the ways in which engineers work, and (c) anticipatory socialization
through internships and summer jobs where students practice being a
Table 1. Number of Diary Writers by School.
School Number of diary writers
Olin 9
MIT 8
Smith 12
UMass 12
Total 41
Note. MIT ¼ Massachusetts Institute of Technology;
UMass ¼ University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Table 2. Diary Submissions by Year of Study.
Year of study Total number of submissions
Year 1 615
Year 2 941
Year 3 1,167
Year 4 476
Total 3,383
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professional engineer. Table 4 presents an overall roadmap of our find-
ings; we discuss our findings by way of these experiences—entry, initi-
ation rituals, and anticipatory socialization—focusing on the (a)
experience and (b) interpretation of that experience by men and women.
Our previous analysis of the longitudinal data from the surveys we
administered each year to a panel of 700 students across the four schools
found that school was not a significant factor in an explanation of
Table 3. Codes and Definitions.
Code Definition
Confidence Self-confidence about school, able to do work, or not able
to do work; assessing one’s performance; competence to
handle work; losing confidence in oneself
Engineer (a) Any explicit discussion of engineering per se, (b) defin-
ition of, (c) profession of, (d) why engineering and me,
(e) doubts about, and (f) social responsibility
Future (a) jobs, (b) graduate school, (c) children, (d) marriage,
(e) looking ahead, (f) making money
Gender Any mention of gender with respect to self/other, compos-
ition of classes, and so forth
Identity (a) Explicit discussion of discovery of social identity,
(b) crises of identity (can be related to race, class,
gender, etc.)
Jobs (a) References to employment now or in the future,
(b) concerns about, (c) getting a job for the summer,
(d) internships, (e) resume, (f) making money, (g) careers
Professionalism Habits of work, self-presentation; reliability, clean, tidy pres-
entations; learning to “think like” an engineer; appreciating
role of “clients”; joining professional associations; integrity;
presentation of self as professional; going to other schools
to meet with
Teams And sports, class projects, informal study groups, free riders,
left out/left behind, making a new group
Feedback From teachers, grades, and so forth (no data for women on
code)
Acceptance
of oneself
Range of reflection on myself; coming to terms with self;
reassessing self with this new experience; working harder,
not doing as well; learning about oneself; not accepting self
as is; how I am doing and want to do; how I am going to
change (no data for men on code)
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Table 4. Rituals of Professional Socialization.
Events Women’s experiences Women’s interpretations Men’s experiences Men’s interpretations
Entry College major
in engineering
High achievement in math
and science in elemen-
tary and high school
Confidence in math and
science skills, looking for
secure career with
advancement and oppor-
tunities to help people
High achievement in math
and science in elemen-
tary and high school
Confidence in math and
science skills, looking for
secure career with
advancement and oppor-
tunities to solve
problems
Initiation rituals Membership
in a cohort
Discovering a pecking
order among initiates,
no longer top of the
class, uncertainty
Coping with pecking order.
Seek validation from tea-
chers and grades but
don’t question the
circumstances
Discovering a pecking
order among initiates,
no longer top of the
class, uncertainty
Coping with pecking order.
Explain position by
pointing to external
factors
Collaboration in
engineering teams
Experiencing exclusion,
relegated to helping role
in design teams, can be
managerial/leaders
Begin to question expert-
ise, question whether
engineering is merito-
cratic, some gender
segregation
Applying math and science
expertise to real-world
problem, feed off group
interactions and “show
their stuff”
Begin to envision self as
engineer
(continued)
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Table 4. (continued)
Events Women’s experiences Women’s interpretations Men’s experiences Men’s interpretations
Anticipatory
socialization
Internships Fewer opportunities to
practice, assigned sup-
porting roles, coworkers
assume lack of expertise,
also experience some
confirmation of
expertise
Begin to question the
attraction of the
job, and culture of
engineering; the
awkwardness of
engineers.
See work as mundane;
lacking meaning;
Problem solving for own
sake consequences.
Being a cog in a wheel.
Some experience syn-
ergy/expertise and
future work as engineer
Continuation of collabora-
tive experience, confi-
dence from previous
experience that they
bring, not alien but
familiar
Confirmation of achieved
skills, anticipation of
career as an engineer.
Experienced as support-
ive turning point
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persistence (Cech et al., 2011). Hence, we examine students’ diaries as a
window into engineering culture at the stage of professional socializa-
tion as a group, rather than parsing out experiences by specific
institution.
Entry Into Engineering Culture
To set the stage and discover students’ experiences in their own words,
we begin by briefly describing students’ decisions to major in
engineering.
Experience of entry. As Table 4 shows, men and women express similar
reasons for entering an engineering major; both men and women
describe being good at math and science in high school and are often
rewarded for their strong performance (also see Correll, 2001; McIlwee
& Robinson, 1992; Seymour & Hewitt, 1997). In addition, many think
about college through a careerist or practical lens. They opt for engin-
eering, often contrasting the choice to basic science because of an articu-
lated concern about securing professional opportunities in the future.
In many respects, the students’ descriptions of their decision to opt
for engineering suggest a simple equation: Being skilled at math and
science plus curiosity about how things work and logical thinking add
up to the choice of an engineering major. Cecilia notes,
I decided to pursue engineering simply because it sounded like the type of
work I would enjoy and be successful at. I have always liked math and
science, especially chemistry. I tend to think logically and rely on analysis
over emotions.
In the privacy of a diary entry, Jennifer, echoing many of her peers,
prizes being “good” at math and science and enjoys a certain added
confidence and superiority (or perhaps “arrogance” she notes) com-
pared with those who are outside this elite “bubble.”
Women’s interpretation of entry. In addition to the confidence that comes
with talent in math and science, women (and men as we shall see) tend
to enter college with a strong careerist orientation. It is not unusual for a
first-year student to be thinking about courses in preparation for a job:
Megan captures this sentiment and speaks for her peers, when she
writes, “my goal for college basically is to graduate in four years
[and] gain experience so that I’ll be competitive in the job market.”
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Interestingly, women’s interpretation of their entry into the profes-
sion is often coupled with a commitment to directing their career in
socially responsible ways, or to use engineering as a career path to
make a difference in people’s lives. This theme is corroborated by
research showing that women are significantly more likely than their
male counterparts to be interested in engineering work that is “socially
conscious” (i.e., specializations such as environmental vs. electrical
engineering; Cech, 2014). For example, Juliette and Graciela express a
desire to use their engineering skills to improve the situations of their
countries of origin in Africa and Latin America. Megan, corroborating
the hopes of a number of others, would like to use her engineering skill
in “some type of humanitarian work”; she goes on to observe that, for
the most part, men’s priority revolves more around the “competitive”
edge of engineering. This is not to suggest that women do not see them-
selves as “competitive” but rather that for many they express a more
robust range of identities in pursuit of an engineering career (Cech,
2015).
Jennifer expresses a careerist narrative when she states that “this is
the most convenient career,” but she is also concerned about whether
her image of engineering as “innovative” and “creative” is consistent
with “real-world” practices: Does engineering really prepare one to only
work on a small part of a larger project in relative isolation with little
question about its contribution to society, or can one really “do some-
thing and call it my own” that, she seems to imply, embraces “commu-
nity work?”
Men’s interpretation of entry. Men also emphasize the importance of
majors that will fulfill their long-term career goals in their decision to
pursue engineering. With some delight, Brian, echoing many of his
peers, writes,
Last night while writing up my [engineering course] assignment, I all of a
sudden realized that I loved chemical engineering. It was like an epiphany!
Before, I had the attitude of “well, I like chemistry, and engineering seems
neat, so I’ll do chemical engineering. And besides, I don’t know what else
I would do.” Now, my attitude has changed ...to one of “I wouldn’t want
to do anything else(!)” It was amazing; I was just writing along, minding
my own business and it hit me like a sack of flour. It made me feel very
good about chemical engineering, and it made me more confident in my
decision to pursue a degree in chemical engineering here .... A moment of
self-confirmation, if you will. Beautiful, absolutely beautiful.
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In contrast to their female counterparts, however, men do not
express concern about leveraging engineering expertise to improve soci-
ety. Also, social consciousness or social responsibility is not a significant
predictor of men’s choice of engineering specialization (Cech, 2014).
In our analysis of both interviews and diaries, the absence of such con-
cerns is systematic and underscores the ways in which men and women
articulate their initial decision to pursue engineering somewhat
differently.
Initiation Rituals
To understand the role of initiation rituals, we first examine how stu-
dents cope with the discovery of their membership in a cohort, or the
inevitable pecking order of talent, an initiation that is typical of social-
ization across the professions (Becker et al., 1961). Second, we turn to
the initiation ritual of collaborating in engineering teams, the core of
modern engineering culture (Tonso, 2007). In preparation for the real
world of work in engineering, students are required to work on team-
based projects, often beginning in their first year (Seron & Silbey, 2009).
Experience of membership in a cohort. Echoing findings from a vast body of
research on professional socialization (see e.g., Becker et al., 1961;
Granfield, 1992; Stover, 1989), engineering students compare themselves
with members of their cohort almost immediately. As Table 4 suggests,
students discover what they suspected: Even in these elite bubbles, there
is a pecking order. Here too we find that while both men and women
discover the pecking order, their interpretations of that discovery
diverge.
Laced through students’ discussions about why they decided to enter
engineering, including the confidence that comes with recognizing that
one is gifted in math and science, some students nonetheless express a
lingering doubt about how they will fare in these competitive bubbles.
These young men and women were at the top of their high school
classes, took Advanced Placement courses and did well, earned SAT
scores that put them among the top students in the country, and
found time to excel at many extracurricular activities. Yet, our diarists
write at length about their first exams, expressing general anxiety and
concerns about time pressures. For example, Sam, expecting that he had
failed a test, describes how he was “extremely happy” when he got the
test back and learned that he had done very well—a 94%. Not surpris-
ingly, the experience left him feeling “confident” that he would do well.
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Now with this first sorting exercise successfully behind him, college did
not seem “as scary as many people have always told me.”
A ritual of the first year is a shared concern that one may no longer
be at the top of the class and then assessing where one fits into the
pecking order among these high achieving peers. As Caroline writes,
You have the geniuses that are really smart without even trying, those
who are pretty smart and work hard, and those who really just have to
work extremely hard to get the grades they want .... I’m not exactly sure
where I fit in but I think somewhere between the second and third group.
As a general pattern, these students’ expectations are confirmed:
There are many peers whom they perceive to be smarter. After
scoping out where one fits, the next step is to figure out how to come
to grips with the realization of the stratifying categories and one’s place
in them.
Women’s interpretation of membership in a cohort. On balance, many of the
women (and men, as we show later) bounce back and move along to the
next step in the credentialing process. Illustrating this, Rachel writes,
The fact I came out with all A/B’s was of course just icing on the cake of
being done with my first ever college exams! I know they only get harder
from here on out, but this is me we are talking about, I’m not worried, I’m
not stressed, I simply can’t wait, bring on a challenge!! I mean a challenge
to learn is why I am here, right?
But, recovery from initiation rituals for women also reveals an inter-
pretation of this experience that is not broadly shared by their male
counterparts. For some women, the experience triggers a more funda-
mental doubt about their abilities to master the technical constructs of
engineering expertise. Ashley describes her experience this way:
The biggest problem I seem to be having [is] self-doubt. I would look at a
problem, and think of a way to solve it, but then I would second guess
myself, and convince myself that my way of answering the question must
be wrong, but then, it would turn out that I was correct the whole time.
I don’t understand why I keep doubting myself so much .... Lack of
confidence has never ever been a problem for me, even when I was a
little girl ... ...Hopefully, this talk with my physics professor today
helped.
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In addition to coping with the new experience of questioning her con-
fidence, Ashley’s last point here—“hopefully, this talk with my physics
professor today helped”—captures a theme that distinguishes the
experiences of many women. That is, women are much more likely to
write about looking to others for positive cues and sources of approval,
including teaching assistants, professors, and advisors. Men do talk
about this, but, as we show later, they do not necessarily externalize
the searching process by explicitly looking for confirmation (see also
Valian, 1999). As we show in findings regarding anticipatory socializa-
tion, this search for positive cues carries over into expectations for feed-
back from supervisors at jobs and internships.
Against the backdrop of a “master narrative” of a lock step, time-
intensive professional socialization, many women carve out a strategy to
cope with these rituals by turning to peers and teachers to affirm, and
reaffirm, their confidence. For example, Taylor reflects on an encounter
with a teacher following a class quiz:
When I went up there [to his office], he asked me if I had gotten my last
quiz back .... I said no and he then proceeded to tell me that I had done
well and that I was improving .... [H]aving a professor take the initiative
and recognize me was really encouraging. It boosted my confidence and
helped me to stay focused on my next quiz. I think it is really incredible
how much recognition and positive support from a teacher can motivate a
student .... But one negative comment or one action that makes them feel
stupid and not worth a professor’s time can drop a student’s self-confi-
dence. It makes them second-guess themselves and think badly of
themselves.
Men’s interpretation of member ship in a cohort. As other research has shown
(Dryburgh, 1999), it is typical of men in engineering to interpret the
discovery of the pecking order in a positive way, bouncing back with
confidence and ready to move on. As this quotation illustrates, Brian is
still fairly confident and what he thought might be hard to take has
turned out to be exciting.
It’s really weird coming from high school, where you can understand
things faster than most people, to a place where everyone is at your
level. After I was accepted, I was a little intimidated about the idea of
not being as smart as everyone around me. However, once I got here,
I found it more exciting than disappointing. While it was humbling to see
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that everyone here had more talent or “brains” than me in one area or
another, I found it to really be amazing that people were so cooperative,
and willing to all contribute their individual strengths to make a group
work—it really makes for some great potential to do things.
Some of Brian’s male counterparts have the new experience he did not
have, of earning a poor grade on a first exam. Typical of what
many others have found, the men tend to chalk it up to not studying
as hard as was required, spending time on other things, not managing
time, or blaming some other external set of pressures (Valian, 1999).
The poor grade does not become a source of expressed uncertainty
about ability to do the work. Most men come out of the sorting process
finding that, as Aaron puts it, his “self-esteem has risen back to a pretty
normal level.” These men cope with this initiation ritual by tending
to take their competencies for granted; they did not articulate the
moments or experiences of self-doubt. Many will describe instances
where they receive a complement, or positive feedback, but it is not
interpreted as an indication of whether engineering is right for them.
Or, as Dylan notes, he’s not all that worried about his grades and
accepts the fact that he may not get straight A’s his experience in
high school. Rarely, if ever, do men mention the effects of a professor’s
comment on their self-confidence, positive or negative. Even in the priv-
acy of their diaries, many of the men exhibit the “macho” culture of
engineering that no doubt contributes to the “chilly climate” experi-
enced by women (Dryburgh, 1999; Sandler, Resnick, Silverberg, &
Hall, 1996).
Collaboration in Engineering Teams
The initiation rite of scoping out where one stands in this new, some-
what more rarefied pecking order is typical of all professional socializa-
tion processes, whether in law, medicine, or engineering. Each
profession, however, also introduces students to its distinct culture, its
distinct skills, language, practices, and values. For example, in her study
of law students across multiple schools, Mertz finds what she describes
as a “metapragmatic structure” of learning legal language to “think like
a lawyer” (2007, p. 130). In engineering, one finds a similar
“metapragmatic structure” in preparation for the organization of engin-
eering work itself, work that is structured through collaboration on
team-based projects (also see Seron & Silbey, 2009). Engineering stu-
dents quickly discover that mastery of collaboration and teamwork
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constitute a core component of being an engineer and they set out to
“try it on” (Ibarra, 1999).
Women’s experience of collaboration in engineering teams. Rachel discovers
the advantages of teamwork and writes in her diary:
Its also really nice when its Tuesday night and you are trying to defeat
your Physics homework and there are fifteen other people trying to defeat
it too. Say I struggle and I get number ten, but I struggle and I can’t get
number thirteen. I walk down to [Jay’s] room to find that he got number
thirteen but he spent the last twenty minutes not being about to get
number ten. I explain ten, and then he’ll explain number thirteen ...
Kelsey writes of her preference to work alone, “believing it was quicker
and more efficient.” But her experiences of team projects corroborate
what her father (a software engineer) has told her, “cooperation I can
see, is instrumental in engineering.”
But, women diarists and interviewees also report that initiation into
collaborative engineering teams can include some fairly negative
moments (cf. Koput & Gutek, 2010, p. 97). Typical of others,
Kimberly describes how these negative aspects of collaboration unfold:
There was this one case where, in our design class, two girls in a group
had been working on the robot we were building in that class for hours,
and the guys in their group came in and within minutes had sentenced
them to doing menial tasks while the guys went and had all the fun in the
machine shop. We heard the girls complaining about it—in fact, one of
them ended up on the group who was doing the project with me, which
was cool. Hmmm maybe we were a little biased, but I’d rather be biased
as a woman than biased as a man; men are way too biased anyway.
Sara describes how she found the men on her team projects to be
“nerdy” and arrogant; she asks herself “is this really the kind of
people I want to work with?” This exclusion is often based on implicitly
held (and sometimes explicitly expressed) gender biases about the “natural”
talents of men and women.
In our interview with Ramah, a student who believes that what she
has learned in her engineering classes will help her to solve some of the
development problems in her home nation, told us that in her experience
women students are not marginalized. “Didn’t you see,” she said during
our interview “that women students were in charge of four out of five of
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the final teams in the project competitions this semester?” Ramah recog-
nized that women were managing the projects rather than actually
building the design. Like the Australian women engineers studied by
Avre, Mills, and Gill (2013) who redefined the work of engineering to be
about management, communication, and leadership (also see Fisher,
2012), Ramah did not think this a subordinate or outsider position as
did other women students. Ramah interprets this as an agentic position
within the teams and feels empowered in the managerial roles.
Rachel describes her experience with a design competition where her
“girl group” developed a system to “make it easier to get a full trash bag
out of a trash can.” She goes on to note that “we were the only girl team
and we got in second place! There were a total of 15 teams and we
rocked it out.” After being judged by professors, teaching assistants,
businessmen, and other students,
our professor wanted to get a picture of our prototype and us. We picked
up our prototype and were all smiling and looking all professional; then
he said: “You guys look like professional catalog models; this picture
could go in a catalog and you could sell big time.” It was kind of out
of the blue, but at least it was meant to be a compliment ...at least that is
what I would like to think.
When these negative experiences unfold through team-based projects
at school, women often describe the importance of debriefing with
friends to vent their anger and move on. Reflecting on her education,
Natalie describes this process:
I think ...women in—as engineers—we need [support] because I think
our learning style is a little different at times, and communications
styles. And, so when there’s a lot of, you know, typically outspoken
guys in class, then you end up feeling like you don’t know anything
because they are talking a lot, and answering the questions. So, it’s
good to talk to other people who have similar experiences.
Interestingly, and importantly, this student goes on to describe a team
she is working on “with a couple of guys” to “design a car, fundraise,
and build it”; for her the venting works and she moves on.
Women’s interpretation of collaboration in engineering teams. In their diaries,
many women describe the support that they receive from the Society of
Women Engineers (SWE). Founded in 1950 by pioneering women in
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engineering, its mission is captured in the motto, “Aspire, Advance,
Achieve.” SWE seeks to encourage women to find agency and power
in their pursuit of engineering and, in doing so, to stay in the profession.
Inviting public speakers and organizing networking events as well as
conferences, SWE plays an active and well-institutionalized role in
women’s professional development as engineers. Most of the women
at the four sites describe interactions with SWE, attending campus meet-
ings and seminars, national conferences or becoming officers of their
chapter. As many women reveal through their diaries and interviews,
SWE is integral to their socialization into the culture of engineering.
They describe SWE as a site where they begin to discuss and interpret
their negative encounters with their male peers in collaborative projects.
An oft-repeated phrase, “Fake it ‘til you make it,” comes up in the
context of discussions about SWE where it apparently circulates. Our
respondents describe how participation in SWE activities teaches them
how to “try on” engineering (and professional) personas and develop
professional networking and negotiating skills. After attending a sem-
inar on the “Cost of Not Negotiating,” a seminar organized around a
strong motif of feminism with a different voice (Gilligan), Taylor notes,
It was talking about what you need to do when you are going for a job.
Both with money and with job benefits and opportunities. It was inter-
esting to learn how women negotiate differently than men and sometimes
do not ask for what they deserve. We play a game [at the SWE workshop]
where we had to negotiate splitting $10 between two people, but you
could not split it in half. It was a weird position to be in because you
are negotiating with your friends, but it was a good experience to be
willing to put yourself out there.
For many women, their first encounter with collaboration is to be
treated in gender stereotypical ways. As they debrief with peers, and in
some instances female professors, they interpret such encounters
through a lens of individual responsibility to develop the strategies
that seem to them to come naturally to their male counterparts. They
recognize that they need to develop to be taken seriously as profes-
sionals with expertise and authority, while they fail to notice that they
develop these skills in collaboration with other women rather than indi-
vidually by themselves. Their descriptions suggest that they do not ques-
tion the individualist and meritocratic ethos of engineering culture;
rather, they vent their anger and then brainstorm with female peers or
professors to navigate the experiences, avoiding consideration of the
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structural or collective aspects of their experiences. SWE celebrates an
individualistic and meritocratic ethos “while also advocating for specific
tenets of liberal and cultural feminism, such as gender equality and the
celebration of gender differences” (Fisher, 2012, p. 8). In many respects,
the role of SWE in the culture of engineering mimics what they may
likely encounter on their future jobs as corporations set up affinity
groups where women and other minority groups may find a comfort
zone to air their concerns around their “marginalized status”—and, to
then move on with the work at hand (Williams, Kilanski, & Muller,
2014, p. 468; also see Dobbin & Sutton, 1998).
Men’s experience of collaboration in engineering teams. Dylan observes the
teamwork of his professors and begins to extrapolate “lessons” for
himself:
The professors [in my team taught course] are very cool, although very
different. One is very laid back, while the other is much more professional.
The laid back one is much more willing to explain things, but the profes-
sional one is much more helpful in the long run. Explaining something to
me will help me now, but I will just have similar questions in the future.
The professional teacher helps me in much less specific ways. For exam-
ple, he will tell me that my presentation took the wrong approach in
presenting my data to the audience, or he will question me in such a
way as to show me the weakest part of my presentation. I end up learning
things about how to act in the professional world, which I think will be
much more helpful in the long run.
This diary entry from Dylan suggests that he is thinking broadly about
the skills he needs to develop if he is to advance from initiate to profes-
sional. He uses a classroom experience to model what he believes will be
required in, as he puts it, the “professional world.” Dylan is acquiring a
robust sense of his professional role confidence, one that moves comfort-
ably between his emerging expertise and his confidence in his comfort
with engineering, his career-fit. His experience is by no means unique,
however. Brandon reports that he is working on a research project for a
professor, describing the ease with which he is able to correct his profes-
sor and the pleasure he took in contributing to the group’s work:
I made a pretty big stroke of progress last week, where I ended up proving
the professor wrong on something she had done last year, which actually
helped us find better results (well, also more correct results) .... [I]t’s really
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a blast working on something like that—kind of my “stress relief” for the
week.
In guiding the professor’s lab team through this correction, Brandon
displays both the specific expertise and more general habits of mind
required to fit and succeed in his chosen field.
Men’s interpretation of collaboration in engineering teams. The men in our
sample describe overwhelmingly positive collaborative experiences,
even when they might have expected otherwise. These moments provide
an opportunity to test and to gain confidence in their increasing expert-
ise and, even at this early stage, to try out being an engineer. Typically,
the men interpret their collaborative, team-based projects in great and
often technical detail. While perhaps more detailed than many, Eric’s
description of a design project echoes that of many of his male peers:
We set about coupling our 7.2 volt cordless drill motor to the dynamom-
eter to determine its no-load speed, stall torque, and its current draw at
different torques. From this data we were able to create a rough torque-
speed curve and determine what size sprockets we would need to build for
our chain-and-sprocket transmission .... We obtained precision-ground
rods for our axles, more acrylic, and ball bearings (which we eventually
did not use). We actually did use the large machine shops once on Friday
to have them fabricate acrylic wheels for us on the laser cutter, and this
was a wise move, for the wheels were of impeccable quality. Over the
weekend, after I took my math test on Saturday, the home stretch of car
building lasted through 2 a.m. in the mini shop on Sunday, at which time
I had visualized, sketched, and built an adjustable angle solar canopy
structure within just a few hours. The chassis, bearings, and axles were
complete, and I attached my canopy before catching four hours of sleep.
Eric speaks with confidence about the nuances of this hands-on design
activity. His comfort with the tasks and language involved in this design
project suggests his emerging professional confidence. Also corroborat-
ing the description of many of his male peers, they focus on the technical
aspects of a project.
Anticipatory Socialization
Team-based projects in classes serve as a prelude to students’ internships
and summer jobs where work is inevitably organized into teams.
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Students often look forward to internships and summer jobs with great
anticipation, providing an opportunity to practice being an engineer
with real clients and in the kinds of workspaces and groups they will
enter after graduation. However, the masculinist culture of engineering
extends to engineering workplaces (McIlwee & Robinson, 1992). Even
in engineering subfields where women are more represented or are
otherwise seen as more “woman-friendly” (e.g., industrial engineering),
women are more often assigned to more “social” work activities like
communication with customers, while men are assigned to more “tech-
nical” work activities like design (Cech, 2013b).
As Table 4 suggests, women’s experiences in internships or summer
jobs are, in many respects, a continuation of the gender stereotyping they
experienced with peers through school projects. This second round of
gender stereotyping in the workplace, coupled with the somewhat greater
isolation from supportive peers, faculty, and SWE, lays the foundation
for a revised interpretation and questioning of whether engineering is
really what these women want to do. In contrast, the experiences of
men in internships continue to be synergistic, providing multiple oppor-
tunities to experience the link between theory and practice and to begin to
envision themselves as engineering professionals. Almost without excep-
tion, we find that the men interpret the experience of internships and
summer jobs as a positive experience, indeed often as a highlight of
their education. Women’s reports are not as uniformly positive.
Women’s experience of internships and summer jobs. Among the women,
internships often come with some unintended effects. It is important
to note at the outset however, that many of these women have experi-
enced internships and summer jobs as opportunities to undertake
empowering professional tasks and experience positive feedback.
Speaking for others, Kimberly and Rachel describe internships or jobs
at large corporations in positive terms. For example, after a slow start
and many questions, Kimberly is “firmly entrenched in her new job,”
that the place is “intense! I like it ...[and] now I am ...a little assistant
and we’re working with nanopowders and making samples. [It] has
turned out to be so much fun.” Rachel describes a “successful
month” where she has “made about 6 different drawings and a whole
model/assembly .... I can actually tell other people, with confidence,
around there that they are wrong and that things should be done a
different way.” She goes on to note that she has been “stealing the
show, at least in my mind .... Oh c’mon I’m just trying to make
myself feel as important as possible!”
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Besides positive experiences with the actual engineering activities in
the internships, several women encountered stereotypes, sexism, and
marginalization in their internships, as Rachel elaborates:
But, one thing that really bugs me about being an intern and a young girl
is that the people whom I work with don’t take me seriously. Not every-
one does this, but a fair amount of the older men in my working envir-
onment do this. They’ll treat me like I know nothing, and I am only
working at [a large defense contractor] because my dad works there.
What they don’t know is that I have a 3.7 GPA and am practically
acing all of my grades .... Anyways, I just can’t stand it when men look
at me as being a dumb blond; I mean they end up treating me with no
respect. They never give me the time of day and just ignore what I have to
say, especially since I am a young woman. But, don’t get me wrong, there
are absolutely amazing people working at [the company]. The majority of
people do give me respect .... There are just some people who you can’t
avoid; they are everywhere and always look down on woman. I never used
to really care, but now when it interferes with my profession it just irri-
tates me.
This experience is by no means idiosyncratic. Aurora describes her cur-
rent internship in positive terms but makes clear that this is in distinct
contrast, she notes, to an earlier experience:
So I’m two weeks into my research position and for the first time in my
“working career” I’m really enjoying what I’m doing. The last two sum-
mers I’ve been working in an engineering internship position at X, the
military defense government contractor .... The environment was creepy,
with older weirdo man engineers hitting on me all the time and a sexist
infrastructure was in place that kept female interns shuffling papers while
their oftentimes less experienced male counterparts had legitimate “engin-
eering” assignments.
Invited to visit a building site during an internship, Jennifer describes
how she was “seriously offended” when a supervisor spoke to her about
appropriate dress for the occasion and reminded her “No tank tops,
now. We wouldn’t want to distract the guys.” As she goes on to reflect
on this inappropriate comment, she notes, “That’s all that he thinks that
I’m good for—a piece of meat.” While she felt like taking him on, she
realized that because he is a “supervisor and all that,” it was best to not
say anything. After the incident, she learns that “he does this a lot so
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either he is really inconsiderate or he doesn’t know that he is an unpleas-
ant person that makes inappropriate comments. I will try my very best
to be pleasant towards him tomorrow.”
Haley reflects on her confidence in engineer’s fit with her aspirations,
focusing on whether the career path is too “boring” and “unfulfilling:”
The problem is that now I’m not sure if I can see myself being happy with
an engineering job .... And there are so many other things that I find
interesting as well .... I’m worried about getting stuck for too long.
Brooke ruminates on the “socially awkward” stereotype of engineers
and questions whether she wants to be part of this professional com-
munity. She realizes that her studies in pursuit of an engineering degree
have narrowed her horizons and she feels less educated that her class-
mates who are not engineers. She feels the engineering world is limited.
[I]t’s not just the extreme workload that sucks; I have recently noticed
that I cannot keep up or contribute anything of value to conversations
about politics and current events. I simply have no idea or understanding
about what is going on in the world right now. All through high school
I loved having political debates with people, but I haven’t been able to
take a single class in public policy, government, or social science in col-
lege, which are the subjects that Smith is known for .... No wonder engin-
eers are stereotyped as being socially awkward. The typical first meeting
question of “what are you majoring in” never really leads to interesting
conversation. In fact, I got so many awkward silences from telling people
my real major that I started telling people that I was majoring in archi-
tecture. Trust me, architecture majors have much more interesting con-
versations than engineering majors.
Women’s interpretation of internships and summer jobs. Overall, we find that
collaborative moments in internships and summer jobs carry mixed
messages that compromise women’s career-fit confidence. More isolated
from their campuses, affinity groups, and their support networks, these
experiences begin to raise questions, if not doubts, for women’s assess-
ments that an engineering career is where they will be able to find sat-
isfying and rewarding work, be successful, and fit with their interests
and values. Reflecting on her summer job at a computer company out-
side of Boston, Megan captures the turning point as a “quarter life
crisis,” a label that many of her female peers would recognize from
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their own accounts. The details of the crisis play out differently among
these women, but the effect is to raise questions about whether engin-
eering is the right career path.
Graciela has a summer internship in England and describes an inci-
dent where she did not complete an assignment in the timeframe
required. Her boss, probably appropriately, made clear that she had
cost the company a significant sum of money. However, the reprimand
shakes her confidence, leaving her asking, “Am I ready for the corporate
world?” Taylor and Heather describe their jobs as “boring,” in part
because they are not given assignments that are sufficiently meaty or
they spend long stretches of time without anything to do. They begin to
wonder, as Megan and Kimberly put it, if engineering is really what they
want to do, whether as another student puts it, there is a certain
“mundaneness” about working in industry as an engineer.
Another pattern emerges from these descriptions: Laced with the
excitement of a synergistic moment when expertise and career-fit come
together, these women are equally likely to encounter demeaning com-
ments about women that suggest that it may all be a part of engineering
culture. These students come to realize that sexism is not just an annoy-
ance but may be part of her everyday workplace experiences after
graduation (Faulkner, 2007, 2009). Some informants are able to find
agency despite these disadvantages and uphold their confidence in spite
of this sexism and, indeed, may stay the course in engineering. But other
women’s confidence might not be so resilient in the face of such direct
challenges.
At the entry to college, these women took seriously the idea that
engineering is a path that they would find enriching and fulfilling if
leavened by careerism, but with increasing experience in actual engin-
eering workplaces, they find the path uncertain if not actually taking
them in the wrong direction. The accumulation of these micro encoun-
ters that begin with school projects and then continue through intern-
ships and jobs raise many women’s concerns that engineering might not
be the right fit for them. Interestingly, as they contemplate departure
from engineering, many are well aware of the data on women’s persist-
ence in engineering and, indeed, wonder if, as Laura comments, “in
abandoning” her trade, she will be “just another figure in a women in
engineering survey that says X numbers drop out after their last year.”
Whether in encounters through work or contemplating research on
career trajectories for women in engineering, the process of facing the
reality of sexism and the routine work they see themselves doing plays a
role in undermining their confidence that they fit within engineering.
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Men’s experience of internships and summer jobs. Typical of his peers,
Brandon describes a summer job where he finally feels that he is learning
what it is like to really “work,” to please a boss, and to understand the
social requirements or skills of a workplace. Travis notes that an intern-
ship at a large corporation demonstrated that the things he’s learning in
class are
definitely good to know, [but that] it’s not really important to memorize
all the specifics of everything ...because when you get a job, you know
how to look it up .... I think having common sense and just a general idea
of how things work is most important.
Adam ruminates about the importance of “putting yourself out
there,” making “mistakes,” and having the confidence that “people
are there to tell me if I mess things up.” As he notes, “that is the
exact point of getting an internship [because] you can’t get these experi-
ences by taking classes or doing campus research.” Or, Dylan describes
a presentation before faculty and representatives from the Air Force
that was “an amazing experience of presenting to people who were
older, more experienced and better educated than I am but nonetheless
interested in what I am doing.” For these young men, there is a synergy
between expertise and career-fit confidence across the porous boundary
of school and work that, together, lays the foundation for professional
role confidence.
Men’s interpretation of internships and summer jobs. Typical of many of his
peers, Adam describes and reflects on how he’s doing at landing a pos-
ition after graduation:
In one sense, I felt “like a pro” walking around the booths [at the job fair].
I still felt reservation in approaching companies. I thought twice about
who I should talk to. To a certain extent, that is good, because time is
limited and I need to filter out the companies that I truly am not inter-
ested in. But then on the other hand, extra experience never hurts and an
interview with a company that I’m not 100% interested in could still help
me in my interviewing skills. While I still don’t have a strong sense of
specifically what I want to do, I’m pretty acquainted with how the system
works of approaching company representatives.
Not all men are as convinced as Adam that the engineering profession is
the right fit. Some students reflect on how they enjoy problem solving
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and think that engineering is the right path but are still drawn to other
fields like mathematics or medical school. Nonetheless, the positive
experiences from school to work tend, if with some setbacks for a
few, to be confidence builders for these young men.
Overall, men’s experiences of internships and summer jobs are of a
piece with the confidences they gained through team-based projects at
school. For the most part, these high-achieving men continue to enjoy
robust confidence in their engineering expertise, and this translates into
confidence in pursuing engineering employment or graduate school. As
the quote from Adam reflects, men’s questioning tends to focus more on
practicalities of engineering work and less on ruminations about
whether it will be the right career-fit for them. We do not read that
the men are concerned that their jobs will be boring or lack meaning.
The anticipated turning points in the “master narrative” of engineering
professionalization works as expected for men, regardless of whether
they translate that confidence into a job in engineering postgraduation
or pursue a different path.
Discussion
How do engineers in-the-making experience and perceive engineering
culture? Initiates’ entry into the profession is one of immersion in a
language (math and science); needed to think and speak like engineers,
encouraging, if not channeling, aspiring engineers to appreciate the
ways in which this technical expertise is essential to design practical
solutions to real-world problems. Initiation rituals and anticipatory
socialization combine to introduce initiates to modern engineering
work through further, if sometimes reluctant, immersion in required
team-based projects. Recent changes in work organizations—specific-
ally the emphasis on project-focused work teams—have infiltrated the
culture of engineering education (Gorman & Sandefur, 2011; also see
Tonso, 2007). This “metapragmatic structure” (Mertz, 2007) of team-
work has become the lynchpin of engineering socialization and culture
in higher education, from entry through anticipatory socialization.
Our findings show, however, that this modern master narrative of
engineering and metapragmatic structure of socialization into the pro-
fessional culture plays out differently for men and women students in
subtle but powerful and cumulative ways and suggests how and where
sex segregation begins. At entry, men and women share an interest in
engineering for its practical, hands on, careerist orientation to solve
“real-world” problems. But, men and women interpret the real world
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differently: Whereas men do not specify what this term means to them
or for their emerging identity as engineers, more or less taking it at face
value, women often specify real world to mean a commitment to solving
problems that will improve the quality of life or serve the public. As
their diary entries and interviews reveal, these young women often elab-
orate on their attraction to engineering as a field that will allow them to
make a difference through socially conscious engineering projects.
As students move through initiation rituals, discovering the inevit-
able pecking order in highly selective professions and being thrown into
team-based projects, findings again reveal subtle differences in the inter-
pretations and strategies among men and women. Typical of the coer-
cive first year initiation rite of all professions, engineering students
describe their anxieties and fears about whether they can make it
through the program. Most men and women seek agency within this
ritual in different and telling ways. Corroborating other research (e.g.,
Valian, 1999), our findings show that men tend to weather the process
without it undermining their confidence. By contrast, many of the
women seek affirmation of their abilities to continue, often turning to
peers or professors for assurances that all is fine. Initiation into team-
work further highlights the ways in which men and women deploy dif-
ferent strategies to cope with the rituals of engineering culture. For most
men, teamwork is the first of many synergistic moments where theory
and practice come together. As they try on the role of being a member of
an engineering team, men tend to describe an exciting, often exhilarating
congruence between aspirations and accomplishment, giving them
added confidence that this career path is the right track. For women,
teamwork is often a rude awakening, their first exposure to not-so-
benign gender stereotyping. They discover that their male counterparts
assume that their role is to organize and manage the team while men do
the real work in the shop, tinkering with toys or running models to forge
an elegant design or efficient solution. Many women describe turning to
SWE for tips on how to effectively navigate teamwork so as to better
adapt to engineering’s normative practices but generally do not question
the underlying structure or culture of engineering.
Finally, anticipatory socialization underscores yet again the ways in
which the experiences of men and women diverge. Men describe intern-
ships and summer jobs as moments when they become true professionals.
They describe their growing competence in knowing how to ask ques-
tions, learning from mistakes, or enjoying their contribution to a project.
On balance, our findings show that, whether they plan to stay the course
in engineering or not, the master narrative of engineering has fulfilled its
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promise. In their diaries and interviews, women’s accounts of internships
and summer jobs differ from that of men. They describe a culture that is
isolating, that often assumes women are second-class experts, and where
sexism is normative. But, for many women, the most chilling discovery is
that engineering may not have room, or take seriously, a commitment to
a socially conscious agenda that, as we noted earlier, was a key motivator
for them in the first place.
As men and women move through the socialization processes for
transforming novices into expert professional engineers, their experi-
ences of these events differ and often lead to disparate interpretations
of the events and the profession. None of these differences, however,
suggest that engineering education has failed to inculcate the skills,
norms, and values of the profession. In fact, the socialization rituals,
including both the explicit expectations as well as tacit, metastructures
successfully reproduce the master narrative of the profession. However,
it is differentially embraced by men and women because the same sti-
muli, we might say, the same events, have differential effects on men and
women. Women’s socialization is often disrupted by encounters that,
taken together, make it difficult to discover that all-important match
between the self they recognize and the professional that would enable
them to embrace, embody, and take for granted the culture of the engin-
eering profession. At every point in professional socialization, these
findings reveal why and how men enjoy the opportunity to cultivate
increasing confidence that they belong in engineering whereas women
confront obstacles and innuendos that leave them questioning whether
engineering is the right field for them.
Conclusion
In concluding, we posit that the findings reported here have theoretical
implications for understanding the persistence of sex segregation within
professional occupations and consider the policy implications for the
enormous challenge of changing engineering culture.
Beyond the lingering effects of discrimination and harassment
(Acker, 2006), network effects or the challenges of work–family balance
(Jacobs & Gerson, 2004) in gendered patterns of departure, our results
suggest that day-to-day engagement with cultures of male-dominated
professions during professional socialization is potentially an important
factor in keeping men in and pushing women out.
The findings reported here suggest that subtle and cumulative
encounters with the values and norms of professional culture
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compromise women’s affiliation with the profession and raise the pro-
spect of departure. Immersion in the organization and culture of the
profession encourages estrangement rather than attachment and the
grounds are substantive and normative rather than instrumental. A
broader factor in the reproduction of sex segregation, at least in pro-
fessional occupations, is not only the gender biases and chilly climates
often documented in male-dominated professions (e.g., Rosser, 2011;
Valian, 1999), but the exclusionary practices and assumptions imbedded
in professional cultures of these fields and enacted through the profes-
sional socialization process. An important finding from this study is that
professional socialization itself mimics sex segregation that others have
identified in the workplace.
This finding has important policy implications for engineering. For
the better part of the 20th century, reform of engineering practice
has been accompanied by school-based curriculum change (Seely,
1999, 2005; Seron & Silbey, 2009). Many engineering programs
have introduced a greater emphasis on design and team-based learning
in the classroom, in essence mimicking and modeling the worksite, not
only because it is arguably more creative and effective work practice
but also because it is assumed that this will complement women’s
social talents and enhance their opportunities for persistence in
the field (National Academy of Engineering, 2004; Sullivan, Colby,
Wegner, Bond, & Schulman, 2007). We find, however, that a gen-
der differential in students’ professional role attachment tends to be
produced in exactly those collaborative encounters in team-based
design projects and in the workforce through internships in
organizations.
Reform of engineering education to encourage gender parity will,
however, never succeed as long as the focus is exclusively on the cur-
riculum at school because, as these findings make clear, it is often the
experiences in work groups at worksites that compromise women’s con-
fidence and commitment to pursue a career in engineering. Thus, pro-
grams in engineering that are indeed committed to making a difference
need to take steps to educate the leadership at worksites that recruit
their students to expose and repair the role they play in discouraging the
very incumbents they claim to want to hire (Koput & Gutek, 2010,
p. 94). While this is no doubt a challenging undertaking precisely
because the boundary of professional education is so porous, one may
envision starting with a program’s advisory board, or board of overseers
who, after all, bring a commitment to the quality of engineering educa-
tion at a particular institution. In bringing advisory boards into
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the conversation, it is equally important to migrate away from psycho-
logical or individualistic explanations of women’s confidence to analyses
that situate that confidence in structural and cultural contexts (also see
Williams et al., 2014). In the face of women’s attrition from engineering,
the tried-and-true response is to propose yet another curricular reform.
Without taking account of what is learned indirectly through initiation
rituals and anticipatory socialization and its attendant impact on
women’s professional role confidence is to miss yet one more opportun-
ity to achieve parity in a profession that has demonstrated remarkable
resilience in maintaining the status quo.
Note
1. Because there are a relatively small number of diary writers at the smaller
sites (i.e., Smith and Olin) and a relatively small class of engineers at
University of Massachusetts Amherst, to protect the confidentiality of the
writers, we do not report the exact years of data collection. These data were,
however, collected post-2000 and continued for 4 years.
Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful for the excellent support and assistance by Ayn
Cavicchi in maintaining the panel and integrity of both the sample and the
data over a decade.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the
research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study is part of a larger
project called “Future Paths: Developing Diverse Leadership for
Engineering,” funded by the National Science Foundation (Grant # 0240817,
0241337, 0503351, and 0609628). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or
recommendations expressed in this material are our own and do not necessarily
reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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Author Biographies
Carroll Seron is a professor of criminology, law & society and interim
dean of the School of Social Ecology at the University of California,
Irvine. Her most research examines gender inequalities in the profes-
sions and has appeared in the American Sociological Review, Work &
Occupations, Law & Society Review, and Criminology.
Susan S. Silbey is Leon and Anne Goldberg Professor of sociology and
anthropology and professor of behavioral and policy sciences at MIT.
Her work on governance, regulatory and audit processes in complex
organizations appears in the American Journal of Sociology,
Regulation & Governance, Law & Society, and the Annual Review of
Sociology.
Erin Cech is an assistant professor of sociology at Rice University and
earned her PhD from UC San Diego. Cech’s research investigates seem-
ingly benign cultural mechanisms of inequality, particularly in the
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workforce. Her work has appeared in American Journal of Sociology,
American Sociological Review, Social Forces, and Social Problems.
Brian Rubineau is assistant professor of organizational behavior at the
Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University. He received his
PhD from MIT Sloan School of Management. He studies the social
dynamics generating and perpetuating inequalities in occupations,
organizations, and labor markets, with an emphasis on the role of
social networks.
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