Retention and Performance of Female and Male Undergraduates in Freshman Engineering

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Although women now enter undergraduate engineering programs with higher math SAT scores than men, many of them fail to process beyond the first year. There is considerable evidence in the literature that there may be a threshold or critical- mass effect: if a sufficient proportion of students in a class are women, attitudes toward the subject, performance, and retention are improved. Why such an effect may operate is not understood. This research study proposes to vary gender balance across different sections of the first course in engineering, statics, in the undergraduate engineering programs of 30 large universities, over a period of two semesters. In each institution, the instructors, syllabus, teaching style, overall class size, and other aspects of instruction will be held constant. Without doing harm to individual students, different proportions of women in the various sections will be achieved. Persistence beyond the first course will be tracked, and grades and other aspects of performance will be measured or obtained by structured interviews, in both men and women. The hope is that a critical zone for gender balance may be established, either for all institutions or for subtypes of institutions. If so, universities with multiple sections of beginning engineering courses ought to be able to improve retention of women in a fairly straightforward and administratively easy way.