CAEE - Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education

2009 WEPAN National Conference Keynote Luncheon Presentation

Women in engineering: Interests, perspectives, confidence…and experiences

CAEE Director, Cindy Atman, delivered the 2009 WEPAN National Conference Keynote Luncheon address based on results from the Academic Pathways Study on June 18, 2009. The title of Dr. Atman's talk was "Women in engineering: Interests, perspectives, confidence…and experiences." The presentation included an interactive session with audience members who recorded their thoughts on a response form handed out at the beginning of the session. Selected quotes from this interactive session are shown below with links to the full transcript of all the comments and the presentation slides.

A major theme in the comments was the issue of women's confidence in engineering:

If neglected, women’s beliefs and confidence will be unsupported and dissuade them from the value of engineering. They may not/probably not practice as engineers. This is the chilly climate. Perceptions are important to women – especially to know that their own are valued by others.

Importance that they don’t have to be perfect at every class. Women feel less confident than men in classes even though they may be doing better academically.

Experience builds the confidence (its affirmation), broadens perspective and builds the interest. Now they’ll spend less time questioning themselves, proving themselves, now they transition to 'being' the engineer/scientist.

Another recurring theme related to how women become interested in, and learn about, engineering:

Their experiences in engineering school may spark other interests in engineering – they may learn about engineering applications they hadn’t known of before. On the other hand, if their experience in engineering school does not open new options for them, i.e., are more narrow, their interest and confidence that engineering is a good fit for them may decline.

Presentation slides from the 2009 WEPAN Keynote Luncheon presentation are located here, (pdf, 740kb).

Participant thoughts (anonymized transcript) from the 2009 WEPAN Keynote Luncheon presentation are located here (pdf, 236kb).

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	This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. ESI-0227558. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).