CAMBRIDGE, MA – A new MIT study explains why college-educated women stay in the engineering profession less often than men: The negative group dynamics women tend to experience during team-based work projects makes the profession less appealing.

The study, coauthored by an MIT sociologist, finds women often feel marginalized, especially during internships, other summer work opportunities, or team-based educational activities. In those situations, gender dynamics seem to generate more opportunities for men to work on the most challenging problems, while women tend to be assigned routine tasks or simple managerial duties.

“It turns out gender makes a big difference,” says Susan Silbey, the Leon and Anne Goldberg professor of humanities, sociology, and anthropology at MIT and coauthor of a paper on the study.

As a result of their experiences, women can become disillusioned with their career prospects. Overall, about 20% of undergraduate engineering degrees are awarded to women, but 13% of the engineering workforce is female.

“It’s a cultural phenomenon,” said Silbey, regarding the way this group-dynamics problem crops up at a variety of key points during students’ training.

The paper, “Persistence is Cultural: Professional Socialization and the Reproduction of Sex Segregation,” appears in the latest print issue of the journal Work and Occupations. Silbey’s coauthors are Carroll Seron, a professor at the University of California at Irvine; Erin Cech, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan; and Brian Rubineau, an associate professor at McGill University.

To conduct the study, the researchers asked more than 40 undergraduate engineering students to keep twice-monthly diaries. The students attended four institutions in Massachusetts: MIT, the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. That generated more than 3,000 individual diary entries the scholars systematically examined.
Silbey has recommended institutions develop directed internship seminars, in which student internship experiences could be dissected to help many people grasp and learn from the problems women face.

Funding for the study was provided by the National Science Foundation.

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