Collaborative Research: TLS: Where are all the Female Engineers?

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Perhaps no issue is more important for US science policy than understanding why qualified women (and men) do or do not choose careers in science and engineering. The quality of a nation's scientific workforce determines, in large part, the quality of its science. If qualified women avoid careers in science and engineering, science and the nation suffer. Since World War Two, women have been increasingly attracted to technical fields. Women have recently become a majority of college students and college graduates, they represent a majority of applicants to medical school, a majority in accounting and auditing, and they apply to law programs in numbers equivalent to men. In addition, women have been gaining in performance on quantitative skills tests. In 1979, women had a 2 percentile point deficit relative to men on the mathematical ability test on the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth; but in the 1997 cohort they had a 4 percentile point advantage. Yet women constitute less than a third of degree holders in the physical sciences and hold only ten percent of recent degrees in engineering.This project seeks to understand why women have flooded into some traditionally male fields, but not into others, despite their increasingly strong technical qualifications. The research team addresses this question via analyses of the effects of starting careers in science and engineering on marriage rates, divorce rates and fertility rates. They will also consider how labor market interruptions affect the lifecycle path of women's earnings in various fields. These analyses directly address concerns in the literature that science and engineering impose relatively (compared to other fields) large costs on family formation. The researchers will compare the results from US data with results from parallel analyses of British data conducted by collaborators in the UK.