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Schaueretal.
International Journal of STEM Education (2025) 12:3
https://doi.org/10.1186/s40594-025-00528-4
RESEARCH Open Access
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International Journal of
STEM Education
Internal andexternal inuences onrole
stereotype adherence andgender dynamics
onengineering design teams
Anastasia M. Schauer1, Jessie Liu2, Christopher Saldaña2 and Katherine Fu3*
Abstract
Background Even among women who persist in the gender-imbalanced engineering fields, women on engineering
design teams tend to take on non-technical roles. Understanding the mechanisms that inform this phenomenon
is important for encouraging more women in STEM in order to close the gender gap. Although factors such as self-
efficacy, task allocation, and occupational prestige have previously been examined through a gender-based lens,
this study considers all of these factors together in order to better understand the role of internal and external
effects on role stereotype adherence in engineering design teams. A survey was administered to computer science
and engineering students in the United States presenting a scenario in which they are members of an engineering
design team. Participants reported their interest, self-efficacy, and anticipated contribution to the project. All
participants were then assigned a documentation role by a teammate and asked the same questions again
after a brief reflection.
Results While all participants exhibited higher interest in a more socially impactful project, participants’
interest in the project decreased significantly after they were assigned the non-technical, feminine-stereotyped
role of documentation. Women reported significantly higher experience, interest, and self-efficacy levels
in documentation compared to men. After being assigned the documentation role, men anticipated that their
contribution to the project would be significantly lower compared to women, indicating a decrease in interest
or a devaluation of their role on the team. Perceived sexism may have also played a part in how women reacted
to role allocation, as it is hypothesized that reactance theory led women’s interest in a mechanical design role
to increase post-role allocation.
Conclusions These results support existing literature related to the likelihood of (1) women taking on non-
technical roles on engineering teams and (2) society devaluing work that is stereotypically associated with feminine
stereotypes. Participants’ reactions to role allocation were most closely related to internal factors, such as self-efficacy
and the implicit devaluation of femininity. Findings can be used to inform curriculum development in hands-on
design project courses and management of design groups in industry.
Keywords Engineering education, Project-based learning, Gender stereotyping, Team dynamics, Task allocation, Self-
efficacy, Social impact, Gender gap, Stereotype threat
*Correspondence:
Katherine Fu
kfu26@wisc.edu
Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
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Introduction
In 2024, women comprised only 16.7% of the United
States architecture and engineering workforce, with
electrical and mechanical engineering around 11%
women (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2024). is
gender disparity, while improving in recent years,
remains an active area of research with room for
additional interventions in pursuit of demographic parity.
One particular area of concern is that women have lower
self-efficacy than men even when exhibiting same levels
of ability, resulting in lower perseverance and retention
rates in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics) fields (Marra et al., 2013). Women also
tend to perform non-technical communication-heavy
roles, such as documentation or report-writing, in design
teams, whereas men perform more technical roles,
such as design and fabrication (Linder etal., 2010). is
contributes to women’s lower self-efficacy as it robs them
of enactive mastery experiences, a key component to
building self-efficacy (Bandura, 1977; Fowler & Su, 2018).
ere are several arguments to be made for diversity
in engineering. One is in the name of social justice,
that offering equal opportunities to underrepresented
minorities prevents reinforcement of systems that
disenfranchise them. Another is that by barring a
significant portion of the population from STEM fields,
the world may be missing out on brilliant minds that
will never get the opportunity to innovate (Intemann,
2009). Studies have shown that increased gender equity
and decreased gender segregation leads to better
economic outcomes, high-tech growth, innovation,
and productivity (Scarborough et al., 2023). Research
has also shown that intellectual diversity in student
engineering teams improves complex problem-solving,
learning outcomes, and long-term economic growth
(Intemann, 2009; Sulik etal., 2021). On the other hand,
some studies have suggested that demographic diversity
may negatively impact cohesiveness or communication,
and therefore productivity, preventing diverse teams
from outperforming their homogeneous counterparts
(Hamilton etal., 2012; Keller, 2001; Smith-Doerr etal.,
2017).
is paper aims to quantitatively investigate the
effects of task allocation on self-efficacy and project
interest through the lens of gender. Previous work has
investigated the phenomenon where men seek out
technical tasks and women seek out non-technical tasks
in design groups and sought to both quantitatively and
qualitatively describe the nature of this phenomenon
(Fowler & Su, 2018; Hirshfield, 2018; Hirshfield &
Chachra, 2015; Linder etal., 2010). However, there is a
gap in engineering literature separating the effects of
other members on the team (external effects) and existing
factors such as self-efficacy and stereotype threat within
an individual (internal effects). is work will contribute
to the understanding of task allocation dynamics
within engineering design teams by investigating
the overarching research question: How are gender,
internal/external influences, and the social impact of an
engineering project related to students’ role allocation
preferences? A deeper understanding of these factors will
aid in the development of more effective and equitable
engineering curricula and interventions.
Literature review
Task allocation onengineering teams
Understanding the dynamics at play during task
allocation on engineering teams is critical because of
the prevalence of team-based work in industries such
as engineering and business (Paulus et al., 2012). A
study of academic papers and patents over the past
decades has revealed a dramatic decrease in single-
authored publications, such that more than 50% of
patents had multiple inventors and 80% of STEM
articles had multiple authors by the mid-2000s (Wuchty
etal., 2007). Although teams are more likely to produce
innovative, sustainable, high-quality outcomes compared
to individuals, teamwork can present a higher risk of
failure and inefficient resource allocation (Sachmpazidi
et al., 2021). While contributing to a collaborative goal
has been found to improve academic performance
for some students (Marra et al., 2016), group work in
undergraduate STEM courses can also present barriers to
participation and learning for neurodivergent students,
highlighting the need for mindful instructor support and
facilitation during group work (Salvatore etal., 2024).
As a result, research related to team size, team
member ability and perceptions, and diversity has been
conducted on best practices for creating effective student
teams (Von Solms et al., 2018). To promote desirable
team outcomes, instructors can focus on promoting
shared vision, psychological safety, and team cohesion
(Sachmpazidi etal., 2021). For example, teams with more
balanced participation among team members perform
significantly better compared to teams with unequal
participation (Menekse etal., 2019). In scrum practices,
one method of ensuring balanced participation and
role assignment, project roles related to technical work
and communication skills may be rotated by all team
members throughout the course of a project (Magana
etal., 2023). Although team membership and roles can
be assigned by students, randomly, or by the instructor,
research supports the use of instructor-assigned teaming
due to its likelihood of producing more balanced teams
in terms of demographic diversity as well as problem-
solving approaches (Oakley et al., 2004), which are
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important attributes for high-performing teams (Finelli
etal., 2011).
Expectancy value theory (EVT), which combines self-
efficacy with the perceived value of an activity to inform
students’ motivation and persistence, may help explain
students’ motivations for their selection of roles within
an engineering design team. e perceived value of a task
iscomprisedof four factors: attainment value (“Why is it
important I do well?”), intrinsic value (“Do I enjoy doing
the task?”), utility value (“What do I get out of doing
the task?”), and costs such as time and effort (Wigfield
& Eccles, 2000). Expectancy beliefs (“How well can I
do?”) are discussed in further detail in the Self-efficacy
subsection of this literature review.
EVT can help explain why students may choose certain
roles within design teams as well as their motivations
and persistence in STEM. EVT indicates that women’s
beliefs related to gender can shape their beliefs about
their competence in various academic pursuits (Robinson
etal., 2022). For women, a combination of low expectancy
beliefs and high cost often overrides the attainment,
intrinsic, and utility value that technical roles provide
within a design group. e high costs of participating
in technical roles may contribute to disparities in task
allocation. Although men and women report similar
levels of interest in tasks, there is often a difference in
which ones they end up doing (Hirshfield & Chachra,
2015). Students in an assessment of undergraduate
student design teams reported gender-based differences
in the roles that men and women participated in as well
as the roles that they specialized in. Women were more
likely to operate in less technical, more communication-
heavy roles, while men were more likely to operate in
more technical roles. Students often only operated in the
roles which they had taken responsibility for. Although
this specialization is reflective of how professional teams
operate in industry, the paper expresses concern over
reduced learning outcomes. Stereotype threat and a focus
on avoiding failure are presented as possible explanations
for the task specialization (Linder etal., 2010).
Even when students report equal distribution of work
across roles by gender, this is often not indicative of the
whole truth. One mixed-gender design team in a study
of a first-year engineering design course reported mostly
equitable division of tasks when members quantitatively
reported the time they spent on each task (Hirshfield,
2018). However, qualitative data collected by observing
team meetings throughout the course of the project
revealed that the men in the group were disengaged
during meetings dedicated to working on the report or
presentation, despite logging the meeting as time spent
working on the report, leaving the responsibility for
the report to the woman on the team. During technical
meetings, the woman was hesitant to contribute due to
low self-efficacy, and other men team members often
sent her on errands instead. is case study shows
that inequitable task division can be insidious and
inaccurately reflected by self-reports from students
(Hirshfield, 2018).
e variety of factors further discussed in the Self-
efficacy section contributes to a lower sense of self-
efficacy for women in an academic STEM or engineering
contexts (Marra etal., 2013; Robinson etal., 2022). is
results in a feedback loop that exacerbates inequitable
task allocation and therefore discrepant learning
outcomes. People tend to choose tasks that they are most
confident in, increasing their experience and confidence,
leading to them choose that same task over others in the
next project. is contributes to women repeatedly taking
on secretarial and documentation roles in project groups
rather than participating in technical roles (Fowler & Su,
2018). Students have cited differing levels of self-efficacy
and prior mastery experiences as reasons they defaulted
to a role or stepped aside for a teammate to complete
the role instead. Interestingly, a lack of self-efficacy was
the reason for both women avoiding technical roles and
men avoiding communication-heavy roles (Fowler &
Su, 2018). Another study finding that there was not a
gendered difference in role interest found a significant
difference in the roles students self-identified with, with
women relating to less-technical roles while men claimed
more technical roles. Even men who reported more time
spent working on non-technical tasks such as the report
and presentation only self-identified with technical
roles (Hirshfield & Chachra, 2015). Gender roles and
socialization likely play a part in this experience, identity,
and self-efficacy gap between the two roles.
In men-dominated fields, the cost of failure is higher
for women than it is for men. Women are viewed as
less competent following a mistake in areas that are
stereotypically masculine, such as engineering, and they
are often seen as unlikeable even in the case of success
(Brescoll etal., 2010). Women in the financial advisory
industry, also a men-dominated field, are more likely to
be fired and less likely to be hired following misconduct
(Egan etal., 2022). Women’s failures in men-dominated
fields are often attributed to a lack of ability, and their
successes are attributed to luck or mere effort, while the
opposite is true for men (Swim & Sanna, 1996). Women
also report more negative consequences when engaging
in risk-taking, a masculine-stereotyped behavior, in the
workplace when compared to men (Morgenroth etal.,
2022). is can discourage women from further risk-
taking, such as advocating to do a more technical and less
familiar task on a design team. Women are conscious of
the high cost and discrimination that comes with working
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Schaueretal. International Journal of STEM Education (2025) 12:3
in a men-dominated industry. It both discourages women
from pursuing leadership positions and harms women
already in those positions (Fisk & Overton, 2019),
contributing to the cost associated with EVT and leading
to women being less likely to take the risk of volunteering
for technical positions in design teams.
Self‑ecacy
Self-efficacy, as first defined by Albert Bandura, is a
person’s belief in their own ability to succeed (Bandura,
1977). It is different from other concepts like self-
confidence in that it is goal- or task-specific, rather than
pertaining to generic abilities (Pajares, 1996). ose with
high self-efficacy exhibit higher resilience, perseverance,
and overall lower stress and depression. With higher
motivation and confidence, students with high self-
efficacy achieve greater academic success due to their
increased willingness to seek out challenges (Pajares,
1996; van Dinther etal., 2011).
ere are four main factors that contribute to self-
efficacy (by order of influence): enactive mastery
experiences, vicarious experiences, social persuasions,
and physiological/psychological states (Bandura,
1977). e most influential factor, enactive mastery
experiences, are successful hands-on experiences of
the task. Vicarious experiences are seeing other people,
particularly demographically representative role models,
successfully complete a task (van Dinther et al., 2011).
Social persuasions can include both overt social cues,
such as feedback from teachers and peers, as well as
subtle social cues, such as identity denial and ambivalent
sexism (Chachra & Kilgore, 2009; van Dinther et al.,
2011). Lastly, physiological and psychological states
refers to stress reactions and internal anxiety factors such
as stereotype threat (Marra etal., 2013; van Dinther etal.,
2011). Various aspects of gender identity and equity have
been found to influence the four factors of self-efficacy
for women in engineering spaces (Schauer, Schaufel, and
Fu, 2023).
i. Mastery experiences
Mastery experiences, or successful first-hand experiences
with a task, are the strongest contributors to self-efficacy
(van Dinther etal., 2011). As discussed previously, there
exists a feedback loop where women are more likely to
choose non-technical roles in design teams, leading to
a loss of mastery experience opportunities. is lack
of mastery experiences will in turn decrease their self-
efficacy, contributing to the feedback loop (Fowler & Su,
2018). However, women report lower self-efficacy levels
than men even when they display similar levels of ability,
which shows that the benefits of mastery experiences
may be obfuscated by confounding factors such as
self-perception of skill, attribution of success to internal
or external factors, or the perceived relevance of a skill/
experience. As a result, men’s self-efficacy beliefs tend
to be more closely tied to mastery experiences, while
women value vicarious experiences and verbal persuasion
(Zeldin & Pajares, 2000).
ii. Vicarious experiences
Vicarious experiences, seeing others successfully perform
a task, are the second largest contributors to self-efficacy.
While seeing anyone complete the task can be a boost
for self-efficacy, having more in common with them,
such as sharing a demographic trait, can increase the
effectiveness of the vicarious experience. ereis a sense
of “they can do it, so can I” when seeing someone similar
to oneself successfully complete a task (Bandura, 1977).
ese vicarious experiences can even help mitigate
stereotype threat, as shown in a study where women
performed better on a difficult math test when told it was
written by a woman, and thus seeing a role model in the
domain, rather than a man (Shapiro & Williams, 2012).
Because of the significant underrepresentation of women
in both engineering workforces and academic faculty
(National Center for Science & Engineering Statistics,
2021; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2024), there is
a lack of women role models both in academia and in
engineering fields. e lack of women in leadership in
men-dominated industries is not just due to lower self-
efficacy in women but also due to the discrimination
and high cost of failure faced by women, as discussed
previously. With the lack of women role models due
to the gender gap in engineering, women are severely
lacking in sources of vicarious experiences to nurture
their self-efficacy.
iii. Social persuasions
Social persuasions, the messages (both overt and
subliminal) that society and those around us convey, play
a large role in the persistent gender gap within STEM
fields. Bias and disparaging messages are communicated
by parents, peers, teachers, and the environment of
STEM fields. Not only do women tend to rate their own
self-efficacy and abilities lower than men despite similar
skill levels, but external observers are prone to this bias
as well (Hand etal., 2017; Muenks etal., 2020). Parents,
both women and men, rate their sons as having higher
overall intelligence than their daughters, especially in
mathematical and spatial areas (Furnham et al., 2002).
Parents continue to underestimate their daughters’
intelligence in comparison to their sons’ even when there
is no difference in their actual spatial capabilities (Muenks
et al., 2020). Spatial ability and STEM achievement are
positively correlated, likely due to many STEM fields
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Schaueretal. International Journal of STEM Education (2025) 12:3
requiring visual–spatial skills (Wai etal., 2009), and the
disparaging messages may discourage young girls from
identifying with and pursuing these fields. Teachers also
report a belief that boys perform better in STEM and
girls perform better in humanities despite data showing
girls actually tend to outperform boys in mathematics
(Hand et al., 2017). Strangers are also more likely to
express surprise when a woman in engineering reveals
their major. is repeated identity denial by others
communicates that women are unsuited for STEM,
slowly reducing their self-efficacy and prompting them
to impose more stringent expectations on themselves to
“prove” they belong, or worse, quitting STEM altogether
(Chachra & Kilgore, 2009).
Ambivalent Sexism eory (AST), coined by Glick and
Fiske in 1997, divides sexism into two categories: hostile
and benevolent. While hostile sexism is more overtly
aggressive, benevolent sexism often has much more
insidious effects on women in STEM. AST defines hostile
sexism with three sub-behaviors: dominative paternalism
(e.g., men should control women), competitive gender
differentiation (e.g., men are better than women based
on gender stereotyping), and heterosexual hostility
(e.g., sexual harassment) (Glick & Fiske, 1997, 2001).
Benevolent sexism has three sub-behaviors: protective
paternalism (e.g., assuming inferiority and offering help),
complementary gender differentiation (e.g., women are
warm and nurturing), and intimate heterosexuality (e.g.,
every man needs a woman) (Glick & Fiske, 1997, 2001).
Hostile sexism does result in various negative outcomes
for women, but benevolent sexism has been shown to
have greater detrimental effects on women’s performance
(Dardenne et al., 2007). Explicit hostile sexism is now
socially unacceptable and illegal, and universities often
provide additional support for recognizing, coping with,
and reporting hostile sexism (Kuchynka et al., 2018).
Although these measures cannot completely prevent
hostile sexism—as demonstrated by one study that
found that 61% of the 685 women surveyed reported
experiencing STEM-related gender bias and 78%
reported experiencing sexual harassment in the last year
(Leaper & Starr, 2019)—it discourages some perpetrators
from overt hostility and allows victims to recognize it
more easily. Because hostile sexism is explicit in nature,
women can attribute it as prejudice and bigotry on the
offender’s part rather than a personal failing. Benevolent
sexism, on the other hand, is perpetuated more implicitly,
leading to self-doubt, anxiety, negative intrusive thoughts
occupying working-memory, and overall decrease in
performance and self-efficacy (Dardenne et al., 2007;
Kuchynka etal., 2018). ese factors, including identity
denial from parents, teachers, and peers as well as
ambivalent sexism—are ways that society persuades
women that they are lacking, contributing to the gender
gap and low retention rates in STEM fields.
iv. Physiological andpsychological states
Physiological and psychological states are the fourth
contributor to self-efficacy. A person’s anxieties and
fears, manifested both mentally and physically, can
have negative effects on their self-efficacy (Bandura,
1977; Maraj et al., 2019). A prevalent example of this
for women in STEM is stereotype threat, the anxiety of
fulfilling a negative stereotype within a domain (e.g., a
woman “proving” women are worse than men in math
by personally performing poorly on a math exam).
Stereotype threat can be divided into two types: self-as-
source and other-as-source. Self-as-source stereotype
threat refers to fear within oneself that a negative
stereotype may be true and anxiety that they might
fulfill that stereotype via failure and incompetence.
Other-as-source stereotype threat refers instead to
fears of others perceiving oneself as fulfilling a negative
stereotype, whether as a negative reflection of self or as a
bad representation for the stereotyped group as a whole
(Shapiro & Williams, 2012).
Stereotype threat can have tangible consequences on
women’s performance and perseverance in STEM fields.
In one study, when women were told that performance
on a math test had shown gender differences, they
performed markedly worse than their men peers. When
the gender differentiation information was omitted,
women performed the same as men (Spencer etal., 1999).
Women notice, whether consciously or subconsciously,
gender imbalances and a lower sense of belonging in
men-dominated areas. When shown gender-unbalanced
videos of a conference, women exhibited higher heart
rates, more vigilance, and lower desire to participate
in comparison with a gender-balanced video (Murphy
et al., 2007). Stereotype threat can result in decreased
self-efficacy, and subsequently, participation, for women
performing technical tasks in an engineering education
context (Linder et al., 2010). On the other hand,
reactance theory proposes that women who perceive that
negative stereotypes are being applied to them may view
the stereotype as an infringement upon their personal
freedom. is may result in greater motivation to prove
the stereotype wrong, causing an individual to act in
opposition to the stereotype (Kalokerinos et al., 2014;
Rosenberg & Siegel, 2018).
Devaluation theory
Many industries throughout history, such as banking,
insurance, and medical fields (Little, 2021; Pan, 2015;
Pelley & Carnes, 2020), have experienced a “tipping
phenomenon” where an increase of women in fields
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Schaueretal. International Journal of STEM Education (2025) 12:3
results in a sharp decline in the number of men in
the field, sometimes accompanied by a decrease in
prestige and wages. One potential model to explain
this phenomenon is devaluation theory, an idea where
women and traditionally feminine tasks and traits are
inherently devalued in Western society (Leuze & Strauß,
2016; Magnusson, 2009). Devaluation theory argues that
it is this decrease in occupational prestige that results in
tipping phenomenon (Pan, 2015; Pelley & Carnes, 2020).
For example, the computer programming field used to be
primarily a women-dominated field with low wages and
low prestige. It was advertised directly to women using
feminine stereotypes, such as saying the job required
“patience and the ability to handle detail”, in contrast
with the masculine stereotypes and high pay and prestige
the field sees today (Cheryan et al., 2009; Little, 2021).
Devaluation theory holds up across several studies,
especially when measured using wages. However, when
measured using occupational prestige, findings are more
complicated and unclear.
One study found that men also show much less interest
in jobs advertised using feminine traits, and a high
disinterest rate when the same job is titled with a feminine
job title even when described in a gender-neutral way.
Studies have shown that men are more steadfast in
adhering to gender stereotypes compared to women, and
it is seen as less socially acceptable for men to work in
a gender-incongruent occupation than women (Crawley,
2014; Forsman & Barth, 2017). is is supported by
a study in which men college students showed more
interest in men-dominated fields rather than women-
dominated fields, whereas women in the same study did
not differentiate their interest based on gender (Crawley,
2014). Men tend to behave in masculinity-reaffirming
ways by emphasizing their masculine traits when their
masculine identity is threatened (Forsman & Barth,
2017).
Equity ethic andcommunal values
Underrepresented minorities (URMs) are defined by the
National Science Foundation (NSF) as ethnicities with
less representation in a field than their representation
in the general U.S. population (National Science
Foundation, 2023). Due to the previously discussed
gender gap, both URMs and women are considered
members of underrepresented groups (URGs) in
engineering. Studies have shown that URGs value
altruism and communal goals more in their STEM
careers. Although both men and women value communal
goals, women value communal goals significantly more
than men (Boucher et al., 2017). Another study found
that URM students in STEM are significantly more
likely to have career goals centered around social change
compared to their non-URM peers (Garibay, 2015). is
phenomenon is called “equity ethic”, defined by McGee
and Bentley (2017) to refer to “students’ principled
concern for social justice and for the well-being of
people who are suffering from various inequities.” ey
found that Black and Latinx STEM students are strongly
motivated by collectivist (benefiting their community)
and altruistic goals in their STEM career (McGee &
Bentley, 2017).
ere is a correlation between social empathy and
equity ethic: those that have experienced oppression first-
hand, such as URGs in STEM, are more likely to attribute
those struggles to structural factors and place importance
upon working to improve the system (Naphan-Kingery
et al., 2019). In one study exploring PhD students’
motivations in pursuing academia, students from ethnic
majority backgrounds tended to cite freedom to explore
topics that interested them as their motivating factor.
In contrast, the vast majority of URGs cited external
values, such as community impact and altruism, as their
motivation for pursuing academia. Even among students
that decided to pursue nonacademic careers, several
women of color cited their desire to make an impact as
the reason they left academia (Gibbs & Griffin, 2013).
Emphasizing and nurturing equity ethic in students
has been suggested by many studies as a way for STEM
fields to recruit and retain more people, particularly
URGs (Boucher et al., 2017; Garibay, 2015; oman
etal., 2015). STEM fields are viewed as having less focus
on communal goals than non-STEM fields, acting as a
deterrent for URGs (Diekman etal., 2010; Schauer, Kohls,
& Fu, 2023). Cultivating diversity has important positive
effects on high-tech innovation, economic outcomes,
group problem-solving capabilities, and so much more
(Intemann, 2009; Scarborough etal., 2023).
Research questions andhypotheses
e overarching research question formed from the
motivations and gaps in literature detailed above is:
How are gender, internal/external influences, and
the social impact of an engineering project related to
students’ role allocation preferences?
is question will seek to understand the impact of
various factors on role allocation preferences. Interest
and self-efficacy will be the main metrics used to
understand participants’ reaction to the project and
role allocation. To guide data collection and analysis,
this research question has been broken down into two
more specific research questions that will be addressed
throughout this paper:
RQ1: Before role allocation on a design project
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Schaueretal. International Journal of STEM Education (2025) 12:3
team, how does the social impact of an engineering
project impact interest and self-efficacy levels for
individuals?
Hypothesis 1A: Women and men are expected to
have similar interest levels to each other for each of the
four tasks (mechanical design, coding, fabrication, and
documentation and report-writing), with lowest interest
in the documentation role, which is the task that is the
least directly related to their career and major choice.
Compared to men, women are expected to have lower
self-efficacy on the technical roles. is hypothesis aligns
with existing findings that women have lower self-efficacy
compared to men (Marra etal., 2013; Pajares, 1996) and
further explores self-efficacy differences in various tasks
related to engineering design projects.
Hypothesis 1B: It is expected that most participants,
regardless of gender, will find a project with more
real-world applications to be a more interesting and
appealing project to work on. However, it is hypothesized
that women will exhibit greater interest (McGee &
Bentley, 2017) and lower self-efficacy in a project with
higher perceived social impact compared to men. is
hypothesis was formed based on expectancy value
theory: participants exhibit lower self-efficacy in a
complex task due to the higher costs of failure for a real-
world application (Diekman & Steinberg, 2013; Wigfield
& Eccles, 2000).
RQ2: How does role allocation on a design project
team impact interest and self-efficacy levels for
individuals?
Hypothesis 2A: It is expected that most participants,
regardless of gender, will want to do report-writing and
documentation less following the role allocation or want
to do other more technical tasks more due to reactance
theory, where people respond negatively in opposition
to actions they perceive as infringing on their free will
(Rosenberg & Siegel, 2018). is will result in lower
interest in the documentation and report-writing role for
all participants.
Hypothesis 2B: It is expected that women will
experience a decrease in self-efficacy in technical roles
due to stereotype threat and potential benevolent sexism
when the task of report-writing and documentation is
assigned by Jacob, a stereotypically masculine name,
rather than Emily, a stereotypically feminine name. Some
may experience an increased desire to perform technical
roles and decreased desire to do report-writing and
documentation in reactance.
Hypothesis 2C: It is expected that men will see a
larger decrease in desire to do report-writing and
documentation when Emily, a stereotypically feminine
name, assigns the task. Literature has shown that
women experience greater negative consequences when
taking risks, such as assuming leadership, compared
to men (Morgenroth etal., 2022), which may lead the
participants to implicitly dislike “Emily” as their team
leader. Additionally, men face greater backlash for
violating gender stereotypes (Moss-Racusin, 2014), such
as performing a feminine-stereotyped task on a technical
project, which may contribute further to their lack of
desire to do the documentation and report-writing task.
Methods
Data collection
Study data were obtained through a Qualtrics survey that
was administered using Prolific, a subject recruitment site
where participants can be compensated for completing
a survey. Prolific verifies the identities of participants
through ID such as a driver’s license or passport. It does
not verify the student status of participants, although
it prompts participants often to check and update their
personal information, such as education- and career-
related information, that may have changed. Participants
were paid $0.50 to complete the Qualtrics survey, which
took an average of 2.5 min to complete. Participants
were filtered by Prolific as well as a screening question
at the beginning of the survey to ensure that only those
currently enrolled as engineering or computer science
students in the US participated in the survey.
e survey was divided into three parts: pre-role
allocation, post-role allocation, and demographics. In
the first section, participants were asked to imagine that
they are in an undergraduate design course on a team
with three other students. Participants were told that
their project was either a robot meant to clean radiation
from the area surrounding the Fukushima Nuclear Power
Plant or a robot meant to pick up marbles off the floor.
Participants were then asked to rate on a 1–5 anchored
Likert scale their interest in the project, interest in
each role on the project team, and how successful they
expected to be in each role (to indicate their self-efficacy).
e available roles listed were mechanical design, coding,
fabrication, and documentation/report-writing. Finally,
participants used a slider from 0 to 100% to indicate the
percentage of work that they expected to contribute to
the four-member team project.
In the second section, additional detail was given to
the hypothetical project scenario. Participants were told
that one of their teammates had assumed a leadership
role and assigned them the role of documentation and
report-writing. e teammate was named either Jacob
or Emily, based on the most common baby boy and girl
names in the US from the 2000s (U.S. Social Security
Administration, 2022), the decade in which the majority
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of the participants were born. e participants then
reported their reaction to being assigned this role as an
open-ended short response. is question was followed
by the same four questions from the pre-role allocation
section of the survey (project interest, role interest, role
self-efficacy, and anticipated contribution).
Finally, in the third section, participants provided
demographic information such as their gender identity,
race/ethnicity, what year they are in their university
studies, and their level of prior experience in each of the
aforementioned roles on an anchored 1–5 Likert scale
(1—Beginner, 2—Novice, 3—Proficient, 4—Advanced,
5—Expert). A free-form space was provided at the end
for any questions or comments the participants wanted
to provide to the researchers.
Survey development
e duration of the survey was short in order to recruit
a high number of participants and understand their
initial reactions and responses. e first section, pre-
role allocation, was designed as a control for the second
section, post-role allocation, in order to directly compare
impacts of being assigned the documentation task
depending on the perceived gender of the assigner. A
secondary goal of this study was to investigate differences
in project interest depending on its real-world impacts
and ethics. us, participants were provided with one of
two project descriptions below.
For the Fukushima group:
Imagine you are in an undergraduate engineering
design course. You are on a project team with 3
other students working on a robot meant to clean
radiation from the area surrounding Fukushima.
For the Marbles group:
Imagine you are in an undergraduate engineering
design course. You are on a project team with 3
other students working on a robot meant to pick up
marbles from the floor.
In the second section, participants were assigned the
task of documentation and report-writing by either Jacob
or Emily:
Your teammate, [Jacob/Emily], has assumed the
role of team leader and has assigned you the role of
documentation and report-writing.
Upon beginning the survey, participants were randomly
assigned to one of four experimental conditions based on
the two levels of the two independent variables (Marbles
or Fukushima project topic, and Jacob or Emily as the
teammate’s name).
After reading the given scenario, participants were
asked four questions:
1. How interested are you in this project on a scale from
1–5?
2. How interested are you in each role on a scale from
1–5:
a. Mechanical design
b. Coding
c. Fabrication
d. Documentation/report writing
3. How successful do you think you would be in each
role on a scale from 1–5:
a. Mechanical design
b. Coding
c. Fabrication
d. Documentation/report writing
4. On the team of 4, what percentage of the work do
you anticipate doing for this project?
Participants responded to Questions 1–3 were
provided on an anchored Likert scale. For Questions
1 and 2, a scale labeled (1) extremely uninterested, (2)
uninterested, (3) neutral, (4) interested, and (5) extremely
interested was used. For Question 3, a scale labeled (1)
unsuccessful, (2) somewhat unsuccessful, (3) neutral,
(4) somewhat successful, and (5) successful was used.
Question 4 utilized a sliding bar for participants to
indicate a number between 0 and 100%.
Immediately after the role allocation description,
a brief free response question was provided prior to
Questions 1–4:
What is your reaction to being assigned this role?
is free response question was included in the
survey to encourage participants to briefly reflect on the
situation in addition to providing qualitative data for the
researchers.
Data analysis
Statistical analysis was conducted using R 4.1.2 and
RStudio. Various statistical tests were used to test the
between-subjects effects of participant gender, name
case, and project topic on the dependent variables
(interest, self-efficacy, and estimated work contribution),
as well as the within-subjects effect of role allocation.
Data were analyzed using analysis of variance (ANOVA)
tests at a significance level of α = 0.05 in order to consider
all variables as well as their potential interactions. When
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a significant relationship was identified, Dunn’s test was
used to perform multiple pairwise comparisons (Dunn,
1964). e Kendall rank correlation coefficient (τ) was
also used to check for statistically significant correlations
between variables. In total, 273 different analyses were
performed on this dataset (although not all of them
are reported in this paper), necessitating the use of the
Benjamini–Hochberg correction for false discovery rate
(Benjamini & Hochberg, 1995). All reported p-values
throughout this paper have been adjusted accordingly.
Demographics
e study had 475 participants who completed the survey,
but 37 responses were filtered out due to failure of initial
screening questions to ensure participants were currently
enrolled as engineering or computer science students in
university, leaving 438 participants. Of these participants,
115 were women, 301 were men, and 22 identified as
non-binary or another gender. Because gender was
considered an independent variable for the purposes of
analysis in this study, the 22 responses from participants
not identifying as women or men were removed, as
statistically significant conclusions were not able to be
drawn on the small sample size. Of the remaining 416
participants, 73 were graduate students and 343 were
undergraduate students, with 54 undergraduate students
in their first year of study, 107second-years, 88 third-
years, and 94 students in their fourth year or beyond.
e majority of participants identified as White (210),
followed by Asian (97), Black or African American (37),
Hispanic or Latino (35), and 37 identifying as more than
one race or another race. e breakdown of participants
of each gender into experimental groups based on project
topic and the name of the role allocator can be seen in
Table1.
Results anddiscussion
Project interest
Table 2 summarizes the interest expressed by
participants in the Fukushima and Marbles projects
before and after being assigned the documentation role.
Participants expressed a significant preference for the
Fukushima project over the Marbles project at both
the pre- (p < 0.001) and post-role allocation (p = 0.047)
stages of the study, as anticipated in Hypothesis 1B.
After role allocation, interest in both projects decreased
significantly (p < 0.001 for both). ese trends were
significant in both men and women participants,
contradicting Hypothesis 1B, which predicted that
women would exhibit higher interest than men in the
Fukushima project due to its higher social impact.
In order to fully explore the potential impacts of equity
ethic in this scenario, project interest was also assessed
for other underrepresented groups in engineering. Each
participant was assigned a URM (underrepresented
minority) or non-URM marker based on the NSF’s
definition of underrepresented minorities in STEM,
meaning that all non-White and non-Asian participants,
regardless of gender, were categorized as URMs (National
Science Foundation, 2023). Further contradicting
Hypothesis 1B was the finding that underrepresented
racial/ethnic minorities in STEM (URMs) did not exhibit
a preference for the Fukushima project over the Marbles
project pre- (p = 0.927) or post-role allocation (p = 0.525),
while the non-URMs expressed higher interest in the
Fukushima project compared to the Marbles project pre-
role allocation (p < 0.001) but not post-role allocation
(p = 0.060).
ese results contrast with established literature
that shows that members of underrepresented
groups prioritize projects with greater altruistic or
Table 1 Participant demographics by experimental group,
gender, and name case (416 total)
Emily Jacob Total
Women
Fukushima 29 28 57
Marbles 30 28 58
Total 59 56 115
Men
Fukushima 69 80 149
Marbles 71 81 152
Total 140 161 301
Table 2 Mean interest (on 1–5 Likert scale) expressed toward Fukushima and Marbles projects pre- and post-role allocation overall,
separated by gender, and separated by URM status
Overall Gender URM status
Men Women URMs Non‑URMs
Pre Post Pre Post Pre Post Pre Post Pre Post
Fukushima 4.023 3.380 4.007 3.356 4.034 3.448 3.846 3.404 4.079 3.372
Marbles 3.743 3.153 3.743 3.105 3.741 3.259 3.934 3.279 3.671 3.106
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community-driven impacts as a result of equity ethic
and communal goals (Diekman et al., 2010; McGee
& Bentley, 2017; Murphy et al., 2007). is conflict
may have resulted from confounding factors between
the Fukushima and Marbles projects. Rather than
emphasizing the difference in altruism and community
engagement, the project choices could also be
interpreted as differing in relative complexity and in
their applications as a real-world vs. “traditional” school
project. Additionally, the problem statement for the
Marbles project (“pick up marbles from the floor”) was
more direct, defined, and smaller in scope compared to
the problem statement for the Fukushima project (“clean
radiation from the area surrounding Fukushima”). e
high complexity and low specificity of the Fukushima
project—and higher perceived consequences for failure—
may have lowered participants’ self-efficacy, offsetting
any potential higher interest resulting from equity ethic.
Interest and self-efficacy will be explored further in the
following section of this paper.
As discussed above, there was an overall decrease in
project interest after participants were assigned the
role of documentation and report-writing. Neither
men nor women expressed different levels of interest
in the project based on whether the role was assigned
to them by Jacob (mean = 3.267 for men, 3.196 for
women) or Emily (mean = 3.186 for men, 3.500 for
women, p = 0.733, 0.176, respectively). Although
imagined scenarios have been found to induce similar
reactions to threatening stimuli (Reddan etal., 2018),
this result indicates that simply reading a hypothetical
scenario in which a team member assigned a group
role is insufficient to evoke stereotype threat and
other phenomena of interest to this work. The text-
based format likely also reduced the salience of the
gender-stereotyping of the team member’s name or the
documentation task.
Role interest, self‑ecacy, andprior experience
Analysis of participants’ interest, self-efficacy, and
reported experience with the four project roles will
mainly focus on the gender of the participant due to the
gender-stereotyping of the project roles. Participants’
interest in the various project roles is summarized in
Fig.1. While there was no significant difference between
genders in their interest in fabrication (p = 0.559)
or mechanical design (p = 0.192), men expressed
significantly higher interest in coding compared to
women both pre- (p = 0.023) and post-role allocation
(p = 0.025). is aligns with prior findings that women
would have lower self-efficacy than men on technical
group roles (Marra etal., 2013; Pajares, 1996). In contrast
with Hypothesis 2A, there was no significant change
1.0
1.5
2.0
2.5
3.0
3.5
4.0
Pre Post Pre Post PrePostPre Post
Mechanical Design Coding FabricationDocumentation
Men Women
Fig. 1 Participants’ interest in each role pre- and post-role allocation, separated by gender (error bars represent ± 1 SE)
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in participants’ interest in any of the roles post-role
allocation.
Additionally, women reported significantly higher
interest in documentation than men pre-role allocation
(p = 0.042) but not post-role allocation (p = 0.136),
although there was no statistically significant change in
either men’s (p = 0.874) or women’s interest (p = 0.960)
in documentation between pre- and post-role allocation.
e lack of a significant difference in self-efficacy post-
role allocation is likely due to a slight downward trend
in women’s interest accompanied by a slight upward
trend in men’s interest in documentation, resulting in
the non-statistically significant gap in interest. Various
confounding factors may have impacted these results. For
example, women’s interest in documentation may have
been impacted by stereotype threat, as documentation
tends to be a feminine-stereotyped role (Linder et al.,
2010; Shapiro & Williams, 2012). On the other hand,
men’s interest in documentation may have trended
upwards as being assigned the task of documentation
may have been seen as “permission” to explore a role
outside of masculine-stereotyped gender roles, as men
often receive greater backlash for straying from their
gender roles in society (Hoskin, 2020; Moss-Racusin,
2014; Rudman et al., 2012; Skočajić et al., 2020).
Bandwagon effect, or the pressure to be a good “team
player”, may have also impacted participants’ interest in
the role upon being assigned it (Leibenstein, 1950).
As anticipated in Hypothesis 1A, participants’ level
of interest differed for the different roles. Pre-role
allocation, women were significantly less interested
in documentation compared to mechanical design
(p = 0.006) and coding (p = 0.013). ese differences
persisted post-role allocation (p = 0.002, 0.042,
respectively). Men exhibited a similar lack of interest in
the documentation role, preferring all three other roles
to documentation pre- and post-role allocation (p < 0.001
for all). Men also exhibited an unexpectedly strong
interest in coding at both stages of the study, with their
interest levels in coding significantly surpassing their
interest in all three other roles (p < 0.001 for all).
e gender of the team member (Emily or Jacob)
assigning the documentation task impacted women’s
interest in fabrication and mechanical design roles.
Post-role allocation, women who were assigned
documentation by Jacob (mean = 3.946) had significantly
higher interest in mechanical design compared to women
who were assigned the task by Emily (mean = 3.317,
p = 0.005). Although the perceived gender of the
team member did not impact women’s interest in the
documentation role, it is possible that being assigned
a gender-stereotypical team role by a man may have
caused women participants to react to perceived sexism
by developing a stronger preference for a different role.
is finding may be an indication of reactance theory
among the women participants (Kalokerinos etal., 2014;
Rosenberg & Siegel, 2018), lending partial support to
Hypothesis 2B.
Role allocation did not impact participants’ self-
efficacies for any role, as there was no significant change
in self-efficacies between pre- and post-role allocation.
is indicates that stereotype threat did not significantly
impact women’s self-efficacy in technical roles when
assigned a role by Jacob, contrary to what was expected
in Hypothesis 2B. However, there were significant gender
differences in self-efficacies for some roles, as shown
in Fig.2. Similar to how men expressed higher interest
in the coding role than women, men also expressed
higher self-efficacy in their coding abilities both pre-
(p = 0.006) and post-role allocation (p = 0.006). Women
also exhibited higher self-efficacy for the documentation
role compared to men both pre- and post-role allocation
(both p < 0.001). ere were no significant gender
differences in fabrication (p = 0.389) and mechanical
design self-efficacies (p = 0.169).
Participants’ reported experience in each role is
displayed in Fig. 3. Women and men did not report
significant differences in reported experience for
mechanical design (p = 0.282) or fabrication (p = 0.265).
However, women reported significantly higher prior
experience with documentation than men (p < 0.001), and
men reported significantly higher prior experience with
coding than women (p = 0.042). e finding that women
reported more prior experience with documentation
aligns with the tendency of women to perform non-
technical roles, such as documentation and report-
writing on design teams (Hirshfield, 2018; Hirshfield &
Chachra, 2015; Linder et al., 2010). Likewise, because
men face increased backlash for straying from societal
gender norms compared to women (Hoskin, 2020;
Moss-Racusin, 2014; Rudman etal., 2012; Skočajić etal.,
2020), the finding that men are less likely to report prior
experience with documentation is unsurprising.
For each of the four roles, there was a significant
positive correlation between participants’ interest in the
project role and their self-efficacy for the task at both
pre- and post-role allocation stages (p < 0.001 for all).
Similarly, there were significant positive correlations
between participants’ interest in a role and their and
reported experience, as well as between self-efficacy
and reported experience, for all four roles at both pre-
and post-role allocation stages (p < 0.001 for all). ese
trends, summarized in Table3, show that participants
are more likely to be interested in a role if they report
prior experience or high self-efficacy in the role, which
was expected given the link between interest and
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Schaueretal. International Journal of STEM Education (2025) 12:3
self-efficacy (Rottinghaus et al., 2003). e finding that
reported experience was positively correlated with self-
efficacy aligns with Bandura’s classification of mastery
experiences as important contributors to self-efficacy
(Bandura, 1977).
Estimated work contribution
After evaluating their interest and self-efficacy in each
of the roles, participants were asked to indicate on a
scale from 0–100% the percentage of the work that
they anticipated doing for the project on their team
1.0
1.5
2.0
2.5
3.0
3.5
4.0
4.5
Pre Post Pre Post PrePostPre Post
Mechanical Design Coding FabricationDocumentation
Men Women
Fig. 2 Participants’ self-efficacy in each role pre- and post-role allocation, separated by gender (error bars represent ± 1 SE)
1.0
1.5
2.0
2.5
3.0
3.5
4.0
Mechanical Design Coding FabricationDocumentation
Men Women
Fig. 3 Participants’ reported prior experience with each role, separated by gender (error bars represent ± 1 SE)
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of four students. is metric may have been reflective
of participants’ interest in the project (and therefore
willingness to participate and contribute) as well as their
perceived value to the team. Participants’ estimations of
their percentage of work contribution are summarized
in Fig. 4. ere were no significant differences in
estimated contribution based on gender (mean = 36.2%
for men, mean = 36.1% for women, p = 0.422) or project
topic (mean = 34.8% for Fukushima, mean = 37.3% for
Marbles, p = 0.081) pre-role allocation. Examining the
impact of the role allocation on estimated contribution
to the project afforded insight into how taking on the
role of documentation and report-writing impacted
participants’ perceived contribution to the project,
although the name cases (Jacob, mean = 33.5%, and
Emily, mean = 31.9%) did not significantly impact
Table 3 Correlation coefficient Kendall’s b-tau indicating the relationship between self-efficacy, interest, and reported prior
experience for the four team roles, separated by gender and pre- or post-role allocation
Statistical signicance at the p = 0.050 level is indicated by *
Self‑ecacy vs interest Experience vs self‑ecacy Interest vs experience
Pre Post Pre Post Pre Post
Mechanical design
Men 0.654* 0.762* 0.589* 0.599* 0.505* 0.510*
Women 0.578* 0.667* 0.617* 0.594* 0.452* 0.411*
Coding
Men 0.669* 0.736* 0.513* 0.490* 0.468* 0.458*
Women 0.688* 0.783* 0.683* 0.679* 0.539* 0.524*
Fabrication
Men 0.615* 0.744* 0.568* 0.555* 0.444* 0.485*
Women 0.510* 0.695* 0.545* 0.607* 0.420* 0.469*
Documentation
Men 0.403* 0.500* 0.561* 0.501* 0.287* 0.327*
Women 0.361* 0.399* 0.484* 0.512* 0.310* 0.281*
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
PrePostPre Post
FukushimaMarbles
Estimated Work Contribution (%)
MenWomen
Fig. 4 Participants’ estimated work contribution percentage pre- and post-role allocation, by participant gender and project topic (error bars
represent ± 1 SE)
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participants’ estimates of their contribution (p = 0.939).
After being assigned the documentation role, there
was a significant drop in both men (p = 0.026) and
women’s expected contribution to the Marbles project
(p = 0.016). For participants on the Fukushima project,
only men exhibited a significant decrease in their
expected contribution (p = 0.001), while women’s
expected contribution did not change significantly
(p = 0.854). Although this resulted in no significant
difference between men and women’s expected
contribution to the Marbles project (p = 0.927),
women estimated that their contribution to the
Fukushima project would be significantly higher than
men’s estimates (p = 0.022), as shown in Fig.4. is is
likely a combination of two factors. First, feminine-
stereotyped roles and jobs tend to be undervalued in
society compared to men-stereotyped roles (Bose &
Rossi, 1983; Leuze & Strauß, 2016; Magnusson, 2009;
Pelley & Carnes, 2020), resulting in men devaluing
their contribution to the projects upon receiving
the feminine-stereotyped role allocation. Second,
women not only were less likely to undervalue the
feminine-stereotyped documentation role, but their
greater reported experience with documentation roles
may have also resulted in a more accurate estimate
of the amount of work required to complete the
documentation task.
Sentiment analysis
After being told that Emily or Jacob had assigned them
the documentation and report-writing role, participants
provided a written response to the question, “What is
your reaction to being assigned this role?” Responses to
this question were analyzed using the Python Natural
Language Toolkit (NLTK) version 3.8.1 (Bird etal., 2009).
With NLTK, the VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary and
sEntiment Reasoner (Hutto & Gilbert, 2014)) algorithm
was used to classify the sentiment of each participants’
response. VADER was selected due to the short nature of
the participant responses and its effectiveness at gauging
the sentiment of short social media posts, such as Tweets
(Bonta etal., 2019; Elbagir & Yang, 2019). e algorithm
assigned a score between -1 and + 1 to each response,
where -1 indicates extremely negative sentiment and + 1
indicates extremely positive sentiment.
As shown in Fig.5, women expressed more positive
sentiments overall (mean = 0.139) compared to men
(mean = 0.074), although this difference was not
statistically significant (p = 0.280). Neither the project
(Fukushima or Marbles) nor the gender of the role
assigner (Jacob or Emily) had a statistically significant
impact on the sentiments expressed by participants
(p = 0.686, 0.872, respectively). However, there
was a significant positive correlation between the
sentiment of the short response and the participants’
-0.10
-0.05
0.00
0.05
0.10
0.15
0.20
0.25
0.30
Emily JacobEmily Jacob
FukushimaMarbles
VADER Compound Sentiment Score
MenWomen
Fig. 5 Compound sentiment scores by participant gender, project topic, and role assigner name (error bars represent ± 1 SE)
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Schaueretal. International Journal of STEM Education (2025) 12:3
interest in the project (τ = 0.392, p < 0.001). In other
words, participants who expressed more positive
sentiments in their reaction to role allocation also
expressed higher interest in the project. This finding
is a preliminary validation of the ability of the VADER
algorithm to assess sentiments expressed by study
participants.
Overall, most of the participants were not happy with
the role assignment. A few participants mentioned
that they were willing to participate for the sake of the
team, and expressed hope that their other hypothetical
teammates’ roles were optimally assigned in relation to
their skills. A total of 42 participants stated that they
would prefer another role, with a few stating that roles
should be equally participated in by all team members.
There were a few standout results from the qualitative
analysis. Of the 21 participants that mentioned a
lack of confidence in their writing skills, 18 of them
(86%) identified as men. There were 17 participants
that stated the documentation role was either easy,
boring, or not a “real” part of the project. This could
be reflective of engineering students’ general disdain
for technical writing tasks (Wilson-Fetrow et al.,
2023). However, out of those 17 participants devaluing
the documentation role, 15 (88%) were men. These
results point towards a dichotomy in which men, in
comparison to women, simultaneously have low self-
efficacy in the role, as shown by these responses and
prior quantitative data, while devaluing the role, as
suggested by literature in devaluation theory (Bose
& Rossi, 1983; Leuze & Strauß, 2016; Magnusson,
2009; Pelley & Carnes, 2020). This may be an
indication of “weaponized incompetence” or “strategic
incompetence”, a phenomenon in which people feign
difficulty or inability to perform a task in order to
avoid it (Leavitt, 2022). It is also possible that men
experienced stereotype threat when instructed to
perform the feminine-stereotyped role, leading them
to distance themselves from the task by devaluing it as
“easy” in order to preserve their self-esteem.
There were 8 women participants, all in the
Jacob group, that mentioned gender-stereotyping
sentiments, such as being unsurprised, assuming the
assignment was motivated by gender stereotypes, or
prior experiences with role stereotyping. While the
number was low, it represented 14% of the 56 responses
from women in the Jacob group, the experimental
group most expected to experience stereotype threat.
This gives a small glimpse into the experiences of
women in STEM struggling with stereotype threat,
although the format of this study was not conducive to
further exploration into this phenomenon.
Conclusions
Limitations andfuture work
e nature of the survey methodology used in this
study meant that some effects may not have the same
impact as in-person interventions. Simply reading a
hypothetical scenario about a team project likely did
not evoke the same magnitude of stereotype threat and
emotional response compared to experiencing the same
phenomena in a real-world scenario, although explicitly
asking participants about their views on any gender
stereotypes encountered during the intervention would
clarify this point and should be done in the future. Future
work can be done to validate the phenomena explored in
this study via an in-person study. Literature on emotional
response in simulated versus real-world environments
also indicates that simulated experiences on a computer
(Uhr etal., 2003) or in virtual reality (Chirico & Gaggioli,
2019) can elicit similar emotional responses compared
to real-world environments. e standard error of
some results was also notably high among women
participants. is was due to the difficulty of recruiting
women participants, as the demographic breakdown of
engineering students in the United States is still heavily
skewed towards men.
In addition, the two project topics used in this study
may have introduced more complicating factors beyond
the degree of altruism and community impact. e
projects topics differ in level of complexity, specificity,
and real-world impact, with the Fukushima project
therefore being associated with higher consequences for
failure compared to the Marbles project. Further research
can be done to separate these factors from the results
of the different project groups in this study. Different
interpretations of the metrics used in the survey may have
also confounded the results. For example, participants
were asked to report the percentage of the work they
anticipated doing for the project. is metric was
intended to assess the change in value students assigned
to their project contribution after being assigned the
documentation role. However, students’ responses may
have reflected other factors, such as a decrease in project
interest and a corresponding decrease in engagement. In
future work, the perceived value of a role should be more
directly assessed, perhaps using Likert-scale questions
similar to the ones used to assess participant interest in
the roles.
Because the survey was designed to be short in order
to maximize completion rate, future work should involve
deeper investigation into some of the trends discussed
in this work. For example, although neither men’s nor
women’s interest in documentation changed significantly
post-role allocation, a significant difference between men
and women’s interest pre-role allocation disappeared
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Schaueretal. International Journal of STEM Education (2025) 12:3
post-role allocation. Additional metrics could be used to
assess participant interest in the project, as well as the
various roles. e qualitative prompt in the survey was
intended to gauge participants’ “gut reaction” to the role
allocation, which led to mostly short answers containing
participants’ feelings rather than critical thoughts on
team dynamics. Although this format lent itself well
to the sentiment analysis performed in this work, the
longer, more detailed answers that were provided showed
promise for future work. Collecting additional free-
response data would permit deeper qualitative analysis
investigating attitudes devaluing documentation as a
role, assumptions of the role allocation being sexism-
motivated, and participants’ willingness to sacrifice
their own preferences for the sake of team success and
cohesion.
Contributions
While much research has been conducted surrounding
gender differences in self-efficacy, role allocation, and
occupational prestige, there is a gap in the literature
exploring how these various factors cumulatively affect
design team role stereotype adherence. erefore, the
main research question guiding this work was:
How are gender, internal/external influences, and
the social impact of an engineering project related to
students’ role allocation preferences?
e primary finding and contribution of this study is
that internal effects, such as self-efficacy and backlash to
perceived sexism, can impact role stereotype adherence
in teams in addition to biases that are externally applied
to an individual. e main internal influences that were
significant throughout the results were participants’
self-efficacy and pre-conceived gender biases, such as
devaluation theory and stereotype threat. e main
external influence investigated was the effect of the
perceived gender of the teammate assigning the project
role. Self-efficacy was significantly correlated with
participants’ interest in a role, while external influence
did not have a significant effect on role self-efficacy
or interest. e gender differences in documentation
self-efficacy also manifested as gender differences in
documentation role interest, while that difference in role
interest was negated by role allocation. e gender of the
role allocator did not have a significant effect. Internal
effects, such as devaluation theory and egocentrism,
also likely played a large role in the gender differences in
work contribution percentage estimations. ese main
findings were revealed by exploring the two more specific
research questions and their hypotheses:
RQ1: Before role allocation on a design project
team, how does the social impact of an engineering
project impact interest and self-efficacy levels for
individuals?
Regardless of the project topic, both men and
women exhibited significantly lower interest in the
documentation role compared to the other role options,
as expected by Hypothesis 1A. Men exhibited an
unexpectedly strong interest in coding compared to
the other roles. As a result, men expressed higher self-
efficacy in the coding role compared to women, while
women expressed significantly higher self-efficacy
compared to men in the documentation role. Compared
to men, women did not exhibit significantly different self-
efficacy toward the fabrication and mechanical design
tasks, contradicting Hypothesis 1A.
Although participants exhibited significantly higher
interest in the Fukushima project, the project with
greater social impact, there was not a significant
difference in men’s and women’s levels of interest in the
project. Further contradicting Hypothesis 1B were the
findings that underrepresented racial/ethnic minorities,
or URMs, did not express a significant preference toward
the Fukushima project over the less-impactful Marbles
project. is result may have been due to confounding
factors such as the perceived complexity, specificity, or
repercussions associated with the two projects, leading
participants to exhibit lower self-efficacy and therefore
lower interest than expected in the Fukushima project.
RQ2: How does role allocation on a design project
team impact interest and self-efficacy levels for
individuals?
In contrast with Hypothesis 2A, there was no
significant change in participants’ interest in any of the
roles post-role allocation, even for women who were
assigned the documentation role by Jacob. However, both
men and women exhibited significantly lower interest in
the general project after being assigned a role.
Neither men nor women exhibited a significant change
in self-efficacy as a result of role allocation, possibly due
to the hypothetical nature of the study. However, women
who were assigned the documentation role by Jacob
exhibited significantly higher interest in the mechanical
design role compared to women who were assigned the
task by Emily, indicating that women’s reaction to this
scenario may have been driven by reactance theory and
backlash to perceived sexism by Jacob, as predicted in
Hypothesis 2B.
e gender of the team member did not significantly
impact men’s interest or self-efficacy in any of the project
roles, contradicting Hypothesis 2C. eir interest in the
documentation role was significantly lower than either
their interest in the more technical roles or women’s
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Schaueretal. International Journal of STEM Education (2025) 12:3
interest in the documentation role regardless of whether
they were assigned the role by Jacob or Emily. However,
men’s anticipated contribution to the project decreased
significantly after they were assigned the documentation
role, aligning with their decrease in project interest
and potentially indicating that men devalued their
contribution to the project upon being allocated a
feminine-stereotyped role.
Findings of the comparative effects of internal and
external biases on role stereotype adherence can be
used to inform classroom interventions, curriculum
development, management methods, and policy
decisions. While the primary effects motivating role
stereotype adherence were internal, those internal
factors, such as self-efficacy and feminine-role
devaluation, are informed by external systemic societal
factors. e findings surrounding participants’ estimated
work contributions pre- and post-role allocation also
contribute to the existing literature of how women and
men may view and interact with feminine-stereotyped
roles on teams.
Abbreviations
AST Ambivalent sexism theory
EVT Expectancy value theory
NSF National Science Foundation
STEM Science, technology, engineering, and math
URG Underrepresented group
URM Underrepresented minority
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the participants of this study for their time,
as well as Dr. Noah Kohls for his assistance with sentiment analysis and Dr.
Amanda Glazer for her guidance on statistics. We would also like to thank the
anonymous reviewers for their time and effort spent reviewing this paper.
Author contributions
All authors collaborated on the experimental design and data collection
methods for this study. AS completed the majority of data analysis and the
writing for the manuscript. JL contributed to the writing of the manuscript
and conducted the literature review, data collection, and preliminary analysis.
All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
Funding
This work was funded by the Department of Energy (DOE) grant
DE-EE0008303.
Availability of data and materials
The datasets used and analyzed during the current study are available from
the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Declarations
Ethics and consent
This study was conducted under the guidance of the Institutional Review
Board at the Georgia Institute of Technology as protocol H23004. Informed
consent was obtained from all participants at the beginning of the survey.
Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Author details
1 Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Texas
at Austin, 204 E. Dean Keeton Street, Austin, TX 78712, USA. 2 George W.
Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology,
801 Ferst Drive, MRDC 3340, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA. 3 Department
of Mechanical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering Building Room 2055,
University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1513 University Avenue, Madison, WI 53706,
USA.
Received: 1 July 2024 Accepted: 8 January 2025
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