The Role of Gender in Pre-college Students' Perceptions of Engineering

The study reported in this paper is motivated by a larger study to broaden pre-college students’ perceptions of engineering by engaging them in engineering activities that broaden the context of engineering. The goal of broadening perceptions through broad contexts is to appeal to a more diverse group of students, underrepresented minority groups. This paper presents analysis regarding gender and perceptions of engineering. The work presented here shares the analysis of how students from both genders perceive engineering and then relate it to their own personal interests. For this exploration, data was collected from a summer engineering workshop conducted for approximately 175 students ages 8-14 who were all from a mid-sized Midwestern city and who all qualified for the free or reduced lunch program. Students were interviewed prior to engaging in the engineering activities and asked to share their personal interests (i.e., what do they do for fun, extracurricular activities, favorite school subjects) as well as what they thought engineering was. Additionally, the research team observed these students as they engaged in the engineering activities to gather further understanding of their personal interests and whether they connected them to the engineering activity. The analysis of the interview transcripts and videotaped observations led to the identification of various themes across the participants. In this paper, we chose to compare and contrast the themes with relation to gender and knowledge of engineering. We compared the responses from males and females as well as detected for the gendered language embedded in both male and female responses. Future work based on this understanding may include how children describe role models in engineering and if the under representation of women in engineering affecting the view of an engineer in this age group.