Why Do Women Leave Engineering?

New data out of MIT and the MD+DI Medtech Salary Survey sheds light on gender discrimination problems in engineering, including in the medical device industry. 

Nancy Crotti

More women leave engineering than men because they feel marginalized during internships and team-based work, according to a new study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

In those settings, men are more likely to to be chosen to work on the most challenging problems, while women are assigned routine tasks or simple managerial duties, the study found. The problem, then, isn't the curriculum or the classroom; it's men in the profession treating women as inferiors.

"It turns out gender makes a big difference," said Susan Silbey, a professor of humanities, sociology, and anthropology at MIT, and co-author of the paper, "Persistence is Cultural: Professional Socialization and the Reproduction of Sex Segregation," which appears in the journal Work and Occupations.

The result? Women who expected to make positive social change as engineers can become disillusioned with their career prospects.

In the medical device industry, women who continue working as engineers appear to face more discrimination. According to data from the MD+DI Medtech Salary Survey 2016, male and female respondents said they enjoy their work about equally, but the women are paid an average of $111,105, compared with the average male salary of $130,667. Only 20% of respondents were women; both the men and women were in their 40s on average. (Download a copy of the full report here.)

Just two years ago, a Qmed survey found blatant sexism among males in medtech.  Responses to a question about women leaders in the industry included ,"There are none," and, "Are you going to provide some training for them?"

More recently, a Minnesota medtech firm agreed to pay more than $1 million to settle a federal gender, age discrimination, and retaliation lawsuit. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed suit in March 2014 accusing PMT Corp. (Chanhassen, MN) of refusing to hire women or any applicants over age 40 as sales reps between Jan. 1 2007 and Oct. 27, 2010. The company's phone number is 1-800-MANKIND.

Fixing Engineering Education

Engineering schools are facing a "cultural phenomenon" that educators could address, Silbey said of the way this group-dynamics problem crops up at a variety of key points during students' training.

Overall, about 20% of undergraduate engineering degrees are awarded to women, but only 13% of the engineering workforce is female, according to the MIT researchers.  The new study supplements previous explanations for this discrepancy, including a lack of mentorship for women in the field; a variety of factors that produce less confidence for female engineers; and the demands on women to maintain a balance between work and family life.

The researchers asked more than 40 undergraduate engineering students from MIT, the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst to keep twice-monthly diaries. From the more than 3000 diary entries they examined, the researchers found that old gender roles prevailed in team-based activities outside the classroom.

Here's how one female student described a design class: "Two girls in a group had been working on the robot we were building in that class for hours, and the guys in their group came in and within minutes had sentenced them to doing menial tasks while the guys went and had all the fun in the machine shop."

Many women's first encounter with collaboration "is to be treated in gender stereotypical ways," the researchers found. "Almost without exception, we find that the men interpret the experience of internships and summer jobs as a positive experience."

Such experiences lead women who entered engineering to reconsider their career choices, the study says.

Silbey recommended that institutions develop "directed internship seminars," in which student internship experiences could be dissected to help people understand and learn from the problems women face.

Nancy Crotti is a contributor to Qmed.

Like what you're reading? Subscribe to our daily e-newsletter.

[Image courtesy of MIT]