Professional Role Confidence and Gendered Persistence in Engineering
Name
cech, rubineau seron and silbey asr.pdf
Size
558.03 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Cech, Erin
Rubineau, Brian
Seron, Caroll
Silbey, Susan S.
Date Issued
October 2011
Journal
American Sociological Review
Publisher
Sage Publications
Citation
Cech, E. et al. “Professional Role Confidence and Gendered Persistence in Engineering.” American Sociological Review 76.5 (2011): 641–666. Web. 27 Apr. 2012.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Social psychological research on gendered persistence in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professions is dominated by two explanations: women leave because they perceive their family plans to be at odds with demands of STEM careers, and women leave due to low self-assessment of their skills in STEM’s intellectual tasks, net of their performance. This study uses original panel data to examine behavioral and intentional persistence among students who enter an engineering major in college. Surprisingly, family plans do not contribute to women’s attrition during college but are negatively associated with men’s intentions to pursue an engineering career. Additionally, math self-assessment does not predict behavioral or intentional persistence once students enroll in a STEM major. This study introduces professional role confidence—individuals’ confidence in their ability to successfully fulfill the roles, competencies, and identity features of a profession—and argues that women’s lack of this confidence, compared to men, reduces their likelihood of remaining in engineering majors and careers. We find that professional role confidence predicts behavioral and intentional persistence, and that women’s relative lack of this confidence contributes to their attrition.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Anthropology Program
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122411420815
