Are Women Engineers Left Out?

Does feeling like you "belong" in your workplace matter? If you feel left out, shouldn't you just be able to tough it out? Too often, a sense of belonging is regarded as a luxury or a bonus to an otherwise acceptable workplace and culture. Unfortunately, belonging is not a luxury; it is not a want; it is, in fact, a need that all human beings have and seek to fulfill.  And, to that end, a lack of belonging has been proven to hurt work satisfaction, well-being, career advancement, and myriad other outcomes that define a successful and fulfilling career.    

In the big picture, not just as reflected by anecdote but as proven in social science research, women are often left out of engineering work and left without opportunities to belong. And many women face intersectional factors (e.g., women of color, young women, lesbian women) that make it even more difficult to belong.  A recent review of the literature on belonging has shown that a majority of research studies on the subject have demonstrated that the need to belong often goes unmet for women in engineering work. Consistent, positive interactions with coworkers and a relational space that is safe and stable is required to develop the reliable social bonds that are a hallmark of a sense of belonging. Unfortunately, these are more frequently lacking for women engineers. Instead, many women engineers find the workplace to be a place where they experience isolation, are not valued, and do not feel free to be themselves. 

Six out of seven engineering workplace studies of belonging reported that isolation or lack of belonging were major concerns among the female engineers. For example, according to a multinational survey of over 4,400 professionals conducted in the early 2000's, 44% of female engineers feel extreme isolation in their workplaces. More recently, a qualitative 2016 study showed that women continue to report feelings of isolation, and much more often than men. Among these workplace studies, the only one that did find belongingness among engineering women intentionally studied only women who had happily persisted in civil engineering work into mid-career. And, in this one study, the researchers inferred that those women who did not experience belonging had already left engineering!  

Women engineers often experience a tension between being seen as a woman or an engineer.  The fact that so many engineering workplaces are highly male dominated means that engineering work has come to be defined, conducted, and perceived as masculine.  This leaves women constantly negotiating their own identity and struggling to be recognized as engineers while simultaneously sticking out as the only one or one of only a few women in their workgroups. This in/visibility paradox often creates a space where women engineers rarely feel that they can simply be themselves, which all but guarantees that belonging needs will never be fully met in engineering work.   

The current #MeToo era adds its own wrinkles. Obviously, eliminating sexual harassment is an absolutely critical step in allowing everyone to feel belonging. However, this is a necessary but not sufficient step - and it must be done thoughtfully to avoid causing even more trouble. As harassment training continues to proliferate in the workplace, we are (thankfully!) likely to see a continued decrease in egregious or overt acts of sexual and gender harassment. Yet, in the process of "being certain not to harass," male engineers may end up withdrawing from appropriate and necessary interactions with women - further compounding the problem of isolation and lack of belonging. This calls for a need for trainers and trainees alike to be aware of the unanticipated consequences that may emerge from sexual harassment training. Further, it calls for, at the very least, raising awareness at the local workgroup level of what isolation and lack of belonging looks like. To go a step further, adding additional, well-designed, practical training to the organizational toolbox on how to support belonging for a diverse workgroup would go a long way to help women working in male dominated engineering fields.  

Interested in the belonging conversation? Follow our blog, Belonging in Engineering, where you can also learn about and keep up with the progress of Engineering CAReS, a research study of the climate and culture of engineering and computer science workplaces. While you're there, please consider clicking the link to complete the online survey yourself and be a part of the study!

More about Belonging:

Cornell University Diversity and Inclusion (2022). Sense of belonging. 

Huang, Steven (2020). Why does belonging matter at work? Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). 

University of Washington. Understanding and evaluating belonging in higher education. 

References:

Ayre, M., Mills, J., & Gill, J. (2013). ‘Yes, I do belong’: the women who stay in engineering. Engineering studies, 5(3), 216-232.

Faulkner, W. (2011). Gender (in) authenticity, belonging and identity work in engineering. Brussels economic review, 54(2/3), 277-293.

Hewlett, S. A., Luce, C. B., Servon, L. J., Sherbin, L., Shiller, P., Sosnovich, E., & Sumberg, K. (2008). The Athena factor: Reversing the brain drain in science, engineering, and technology. Harvard Business Review Research Report, 10094, 1-100.

Wilson, D., & VanAntwerp, J. (2021). Left Out: A review of women’s struggle to develop a sense of belonging in engineering. SAGE Open, 11(3), 21582440211040791.

Yonemura, R., & Wilson, D. (2016, June). Exploring barriers in the engineering workplace: Hostile, unsupportive, and otherwise chilly conditions. In 2016 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition.

Leadership for Building Belonging

by Jennifer VanAntwerp, May 1, 2022

There are piles of evidence that an organization benefits when its members feel a strong sense of belonging. These employees are more creative, more productive, more engaged and involved, happier, and likely to stick around with the organization longer.

As leadership consultant Alexis Zahner puts it, 

"IMAGINE showing up to work everyday and not needing to defend your worth because you're the 'only' person like you at the table." 

It doesn't take much, then, to imagine what it might feel like to show up to work everyday if this were not the case.

So how does this culture happen? It isn't by accident. An inclusive culture where everyone, including the organization, thrives, requires the members to embrace it. And that is much more likely to happen if the leadership, at every level, actively seeks and supports this. Again, from Alexis Zahner, 

"Actively creating a culture of inclusion and belonging by helping others to feel seen, heard and valued is a core competence of Human Leadership."

Wherever you fall in the organizational chart, you are a part of shaping the workplace culture. Next time you evaluate your professional goals, consider adding one goal related to improving the culture of belonging within your own corner of the organization.  Will you focus on listening more?  Withholding judgement?  Understanding your own biases? Helping others to collaborate more? Becoming more attentive to the culture of others? Restructuring meetings to give attendees equal opportunity to speak and be heard?  These are just a few of the proven techniques for supporting greater inclusivity and building belonging for everyone in the workplace. There are plenty of strategies out there - feel free top pick one below or customize one of your own to get started!

A few basic places to build your knowledge base...

• "The diversity and inclusion revolution: Eight powerful truths." Deloitte Review, 2018. 
• "Diversity wins: How inclusion matters." McKinsey & Company, 2020.
• "Diversity and inclusion efforts that really work." Harvard Business Review, 2020.

Jennifer VanAntwerp is a professor of chemical engineering at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She researches how engineers learn, work, and thrive, beginning in college and extending throughout their professional careers

Moving Forward with Phase 1

We are making steady progress toward the Phase 1 research study participation goal.

Phase 1 requires a few hundred people so that we can have results with statistical significance. So what will we do after we reach that goal?

First, we will determine which questions from the Phase 1 survey we can eliminate without losing information. When social scientists want to measure an abstract concept by asking the person involved, it is often necessary to ask the questions in several different ways. This rephrasing might make the concept clearer to the person being queried. Or the additional questions, when used together, might capture the concept more fully. Whichever the case, the job for statistics is to consider a series of related questions and determine which are the fewest ones that will reliably (and reproducibly) measure that abstract idea. 

Our Phase 1 survey is attempting to measure a number of abstract concepts. We may discover that some of these just aren't relevant to the issues of belonging in engineering workplaces. We will drop those altogether. We will likely discover that some of the abstract concepts can be measured with, say, only 2 or 3 questions instead of 8 or 9. For either case, the result will be a good thing: a much shorter survey for Phase 2.  

But the data from Phase 1 is still important in and of itself. With just a few hundred engineers sharing their experiences, we will also begin to analyze that data and report results that can be statistically supported as being meaningful.

That will be the beginning of the exciting part of the project! We can start to answer some of the questions that prompted our study. Who feels like they belong in the technial workplace? Who doesn't, and why? What is it about a workplace environment that makes it easier or harder to feel belonging? How common is it to (or isn't it) to feel a sense of belonging as a working engineer or computer scientist?

Want to be a part of it all? Take the survey!

https://forms.office.com/r/X12q7D3dH

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