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1、288 Journal of Engineering Education April 2012, Vol. 101, No. 2, pp. 288318 2012 ASEE. http:/www.jee.org Women in Industrial Engineering: Stereotypes, Persistence, and Perspectives CATHERINE E. BRAWNER, MICHELLE M. CAMACHOa, SUSAN M. LORDa, RUSSELL A. LONGb, AND MATTHEW W. OHLANDb Research Triangle
2、 Educational Consultants, University of San Diegoa, Purdue Universityb BACKGROUND Industrial engineering (IE) draws in and graduates women at among the highest rates compared with most engineering majors in the U.S. Popular stereotypes suggest this is because IE is easier than other engineering majo
3、rs. PURPOSE (HYPOTHESIS) This research interrogates prevailing assumptions about industrial engineering to explore why undergradu- ate women are drawn to industrial engineering over other engineering majors. DESIGN/METHODS Our mixed method approach used three sources of data. Quantitative analyses o
4、f a large, longitudinal dataset allowed us to draw empirical generalizations about academic performance, attraction to, and per- sistence within industrial engineering among men and women. We triangulated this with qualitative focus group data among women majoring in IE. Finally, we used content ana
5、lysis of university IE Web sites to understand context and discourse. RESULTS In our dataset, industrial engineering is the only engineering major that gains women and men from the third semester through six-year graduation and among all race-gender combinations (except Black men). Women in focus gr
6、oups reveal that they are drawn to IE for a myriad of social factors including: warmth, flexibility, a sense it is more feminine, and career opportunities, among others. Content analysis of Web sites reveals that IE emphasizes collegiality and leadership opportunities as intrinsic to the discipline.
7、 CONCLUSIONS Using a social capital framework, we showed that the context of IE, including prevailing norms and possi- bilities for networking, promotes ideologies of success that lead to greater attraction to and persistence within the major. KEYWORDS industrial engineering, social capital, women I
8、NTRODUCTION Industrial engineering (IE) is an enigma among engineering majors. In this study of multiple universities, it draws in more students at every semester than other engineering majors, and it also graduates more women than any other. Thus, it has been described as a Pocket of Success in eng
9、ineering (Lord et al., 2008). In this paper, we apply a mixed- methods approach to examine the characteristics and experiences of women majoring in 289 Journal of Engineering Education 101 (April 2012) 2 industrial engineering. Using constant comparative analysis, a qualitative technique where- by w
10、e compare students responses to explore and develop common themes to examine our data (Corbin & Strauss 2008), we theorize that there is something different, perhaps even special, about industrial engineering that makes it more attractive to women than most other engineering disciplines. Combining t
11、hree sources of data: (1) a large quantitative data set of over 70,000 students at 8 institutions, (2) focus groups with women industrial engineering majors at three of those institutions, and (3) content analysis of industrial en- gineering Web sites from those institutions, we show that industrial
12、 engineering has the most women graduates of any engineering field, communicates to potential students in a manner that emphasizes inclusivity, and that the women have internalized that message in their descriptions of the department. We focus here on women, who comprise more than 36% of the industr
13、ial engineering graduates in our data set, compared with only 22% of en- gineering graduates overall. This aligns with National Science Foundation (NSF) data that show that women represent 32% of all IE graduates in the U.S. but only 20% of all engi- neering graduates (NSF, 2008 tab 5-4; NSF, 2008 t
14、ab 5-5). Our focus group data and Web site analysis provide a qualitative context for understanding what attracts women to IE and frame their experiences more broadly within the field. This multi-method ap- proach contributes nuance to our understandings of womens successes in IE. We note that Indus
15、trial Engineering is also referred to as Industrial and Systems Engi- neering at some schools. Throughout this paper, we will refer to the discipline simply as in- dustrial engineering or IE. This analysis is part of a long-term study to explore how climate and pedagogy affect the persistence of wom
16、en in undergraduate engineering programs via a longitudinal, multi-institutional, and multivariate study. Specifically, the larger project examines the re- search questions How does the persistence of women engineering students vary by race, engineering major, and institution? and Can pockets of suc
17、cess be identified? Industrial engineering was identified as a pocket of success. We explore the social conditions of IE that make it gain students and particularly women from third semester to graduation and we ask what it is about IE that makes it different from other engineering disciplines. Is I
18、E attractive simply because it is considered easier than other engineering disciplines or is it because of a different value system that has evolved in the discipline that makes it attractive to both women and men? LITERATURE REVIEW Popular stereotypes circulating among engineers suggest that indust
19、rial engineering is easier than other engineering majors and that industrial engineering majors are imagi- nary engineers (Foor & Walden, 2009; Trytten et al., 2004). While these ideologies may serve to devalue and delegitimize the educational arena of industrial engineering, how is this devaluation
20、 related to the historical sex segregation within engineering? Specifically, does IE actively market itself in a way that recruits more women, and does this result in stereotyping the field as imaginary or easy? Or can the stereotypical devaluation of IE be attributed to the fact that more women are
21、 attracted to, and subsequently graduate from, this field? History of Industrial Engineering The Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE) defines industrial engineering (IE) as: 290 101 (April 2012) 2 Journal of Engineering Education Concerned with the design, improvement and installation of integrat
22、ed systems of people, materials, equipment, and energy. It draws upon specialized knowledge and skill in the mathematical, physical, and social sciences together with the principles and methods of engineering analysis and design to specify, predict, and evaluate the results to be obtained from such
23、systems. (History of IIE, 2010) Practitioners also describe IE as the study of: Human-centered engineered systems. This was the basis of our profession at its origin, and, although the form of the study has evolved, it is the basis of our profession today. As other engineers foster advances through
24、innovative new technologies, industrial engineers deal with those technologies in their implementation and use. (Kimbler, 1995) Scholarship by historians of science and technology suggest that the context, case histo- ry, and historical narrative need to be examined within the systems and networks p
25、roduced by social actors and their organizations (Hughes, 1986); conceptualizations of industrial engineering are similarly produced. From its beginnings, industrial engineering has tran- scended boundaries of disciplines and content. Pioneers in industrial engineering came from a variety of backgro
26、unds including psychology, mathematics, engineering, and man- agement and include Frederick W. Taylor, Charles Babbage, Henry R. Towne, Henry Gantt, Frank, Gilbreth, and Lillian Gilbreth. IE continues to explicitly include the con- nection between people and technology as part of the definition of t
27、he discipline. Frank and Lillian Gilbreth are credited with bringing this human element to the forefront in the study of work flow. It is especially interesting that Lillian Gilbreth, the first person to earn a Ph.D. in in- dustrial psychology in the U.S. and mother of 12 children, played such a key
28、 role in the de- velopment of the field of IE at a time when there were virtually no women in engineering and those few were considered oddities or engineeresses (Bix, 2004). The Gilbreths pub- lished widely, yet several books listed only Frank Gilbreth as the author likely because at that time, inc
29、luding a female author was believed to detract from the credibility of the work. After Franks death, Lillian continued to work in industrial engineering and was rec- ognized with many awards. Dubbed the First Lady of Engineering, in 1965 Lillian Gilbreth was the first woman elected to the National A
30、cademy of Engineering (NAE), one of the highest honors bestowed on engineers in the U.S. (Graham, 1998). This history frames current IE programs. The social implications of a human-centered engineering system allude to the co- production of gendered ideologies and engineering. Since gender is intric
31、ately interwoven with engineering, as it is with any other social institution, gender and engineering are co-produced or co-constructed. For example, the nerd stereotype is of men who are passionate about technology but a- social; the fact that these two are posited as mutually exclusive to be techn
32、ical is to be not-social - is one of the more powerful symbolic ways in which engineering appears gender inauthentic for women, given the strong association of women/femininities with caring about people. (Faulkner, 2007, p. 334) While engineering is a heterogeneous practice, scholars have character
33、ized the history of its curriculum as rigid (Hacker, 1989). The theories presented by feminist technology studies examine the easy-hard binary and the social construction of what it means for a 291 Journal of Engineering Education 101 (April 2012) 2 discipline to be labeled hard. What is characteriz
34、ed as hard often translates into techni- cal. While engineering practice in general contains elements of both technical and social, the technical is normative, while the social is less visiblethese distinctions map onto the dualism of technology as masculine and sociality as feminine (Faulkner, 2000
35、, 2007). This dualism between the technical and social is at the heart of the so-called imaginary con- ceptualization of industrial engineering (Foor & Walden, 2009). Perception of Industrial Engineering as an “Easy” Discipline To understand the basis and consequences of the stereotype that industri
36、al engineering is easy, we explored the foundation of how disciplines have previously been classified in a hierarchical sense. Specifically, the description of industrial engineering as Imaginary En- gineering recalls the notion that the sciences can be classified on a spectrum from soft to hard. A
37、hierarchy of disciplines was published over a century ago by Auguste Comte (1896), classifying disciplines focusing on positivist approaches as hard, and by inference, superior to other disciplines. Subsequent work by Beyer, Lodahl, and Gordon (1972) and Smith, Best, Stubbs, Johnston, and Archibald
38、(2000) paralleled Comtes conclusions and advanced the measurement of hardness from an ordinal scale to an interval scale. The trend toward refining the measurement of hardness is an indication that it is a widely ac- cepted notion. Two perceptions that Foor and Walden (2009) identified as separating
39、 industrial engineering from other engineering disciplines were distance from technology and a less rigorous curriculum. What Foor and Walden call distance from technology has strong parallels to themes in earlier research that would describe this distinction as less likely to use graphs, softer, an
40、d less positivist. Students in the 2006 study by Murphy et al. attribute some of the perception that IE is easier than other engineering disci- plines to a lack of understanding of what IEs do. Murphy et al. label this as the invisi- bility of IE. We interpret this to mean that students coming to co
41、llege do not know what IE is and therefore do not choose it as a major on entry, rather they make this choice after they learn what the major offers them and how it fits with their academic and career needs. If industrial engineering is stereotyped as easier than other engineer- ing disciplines, it
42、is easier to marginalize the discipline, because engineering has been found to operate as a meritocracy of difficulty (Stevens, Amos, Garrison, & Jocuns, 2007). Engineering students are socialized to believe that engineers work harder than others. The higher starting salaries engineering graduates e
43、arn reinforce this belief, given that a meritocratic value system informs their beliefs. Once students adopt this belief, working hard is the primary way to judge the value of an engineer or a discipline of engineering. Further, this belief enables a willingness to sacrifice experiences com- mon to
44、other college students and shapes how engineering students define who belongs in engineering and how they view and interact with non-engineers. This belief supports the hegemony of engineering as a major and, most important to this discussion, a hier- archy of engineering disciplinesas students in t
45、he Stevens et al. study indicated, EE is more prestigious than Industrial Engineering because it is harder (2007, p. 8). Im- portantly, Stevens et al. found that this belief is well supported by the faculty and cul- tures of engineering education. The message that engineering is hard, therefore, is
46、a part of the discourse of engineering students, and that difficulty is a source of prestige and pride. If IE is perceived as less difficult, we can conclude it will be devalued within the cultural context of engineerings hierarchical and socially constructed meritocracy. 292 101 (April 2012) 2 Jour
47、nal of Engineering Education Industrial Engineering Attracts Women Many studies that focus on the climate for women in science and engineering aggregate engineering with other STEM disciplines or at best only discuss engineering in the collec- tive (Blakemore & Low, 1984; Hill, Corbett, & St. Rose,
48、2010; Jacobs, 1995; Seymour & Hewitt, 1997). The relative attractiveness of the individual disciplines within engineering is not discussed, only that the field in its entirety does not generally attract large numbers of women. However, in a cultural analysis, Godfrey (2007) showed that different eng
49、ineering disciplines exhibited different cultures, which affected womens participation. Thus it is important to examine specific disciplines. Studies that do include separate results for in- dustrial engineering are highlighted below. Following a cohort of about 1000 students at one institution, Humphreys and Freeland (1992) found differences in retention by gender and department. Industrial engineering had 35% women at matriculation and was third among the eight engineering disciplines studied in pe