Gender Differences In High School Student’s Views Of Technology

There are significant gender differences between the numbers of undergraduates and graduate students who study technology related fields. For example, although females make up more than half of all undergraduate students, they make up considerably less than half of all students in professional schools and even less in technical graduate schools like engineering. This research carried out an analysis of high school students’ perceptions of technology and their intent to select an engineering/technology major in college in order to determine if there were any gender differences among them. A survey instrument was designed to obtain data on a number of variables, such as the students’ general knowledge about various technologies, the influence of their parents, peers, and teachers, as well as their Locus of Control (their perception of control over their life’s outcomes) and their intent to major in a technology related field (including engineering, math, and science). The word ‘technology’ was left undefined for the students so as not to prejudice their answers. The analysis investigated if there were any statistically significant differences between the opinions of boys versus girls. The validated instrument was administered to a sample of 81 students from a high school in a different school district than the pilot study. The data was analyzed using bivariate correlation techniques in SPSS, a statistical software package. The results of this study are that as a group, boys displayed higher confidence in performing technology tasks, showed more knowledge of technology, were more likely to consider technology work as fun and were more likely to consider technology majors for college compared to girls. However, both boys and girls agreed that teachers encourage boys more than girls to pursue technology majors and careers. There was a strong correlation between girls’ sense of control of their lives and choosing a technology major. Parents appeared to have a stronger positive influence in boys’ decisions to select technology majors compared to girls. Both boys and girls indicated that their schools were giving somewhat gender biased messages in providing more support for boys to consider technology majors but to a lesser extent than has been reported in the last decade.