Research: Characterizing Gendered Socialization of Early Career Civil Engineers to Promote Inclusive Practices and Retention of a Diverse Workforce

我们迫切需要更好地理解工程职业的高流失率，特别是在他们工作的头十年。因此，本项目将研究新土木工程师的组织社会化，并将特别关注社会化过程如何以性别方式促进专业人员的流失。它将建立在先前对同一主题的纵向研究的基础上，并将继续发展对工程专业的文化适应过程的长期工作，通过改进和扩展经验支持的和工程特定的性别社会化模型，使其与交叉的非规范性身份兼容。教育和研究综合计划将对工程教育领域产生巨大影响，它将优先考虑未被充分利用的性别理论，将男性纳入性别研究和制度变革，并解决工程工作场所研究的差距。除了本项目所建立的原始研究之外，没有现有的研究系统地考察了新入职的男性和女性工程师的性别组织社会化经验。最终，该项目将促进新工程师社会化的更大公平，以减少工程职业的流失，并扩大工程中代表性不足群体的参与。此外，该项目将同时对工程教育、工程研究、组织研究和性别研究等领域作出贡献。该项目的目标是完善和扩展土木工程工作场所性别社会化的理论模型，并为更具包容性的社会化创造基于研究的干预措施。这项研究将涉及两组参与者。第一组将是来自全国各地的早期职业土木工程师，他们自2018年以来一直参与类似的研究。他们在工程公司工作，也在联邦、州和县级的政府机构工作。当项目开始时，他们将在职业生涯的第五年和第六年。对于这个群体，混合方法的数据将通过双月的个人社会化日志（在上一个项目过程中开发的工具）和每年两次的深度访谈来纵向收集三年。调查和访谈将探讨他们在工作场所的经历，包括他们最大的挑战，他们正在学习的最重要的东西，他们最难忘的互动，以及他们与同事的关系。研究结果将用于完善和扩展基于他们职业生涯头几年创建的模型。第2组将是离开工程专业从事非工程职业的早期土木工程师。他们将参加一次面试，面试将探讨他们离开工程学的原因、做出这一决定的思维过程和时间线、他们现在对自己的决定的看法、可能产生影响的工作经历，以及大学如何让他们做好更好的准备。根据这些数据，将创建离职原因和组织社会化因素的类型学。然后将该类型学与现有的理论模型和测量工具进行比较，以确定根据那些离开土木工程的人的经验需要对两者进行哪些补充。项目成果将包括组织社会化（例如，实践，过程，关系和社会网络）的性别方面的识别和特征，包括它们是如何交叉性别的。研究成果和基于这些成果的模型将被用来制作土木工程专业人员的专业信息材料。专业的形成材料将在全国和地方实施。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

There is a pressing need to better understand the high rates of attrition from engineering careers, particularly within their first decade on the job. Therefore, this project will examine the organizational socialization of newcomer civil engineers and will focus specifically on how the socialization process is gendered in ways that contribute to attrition from the profession. It will build on a previous longitudinal study on the same topic and will continue the long-term work of developing processes of acculturation to the engineering profession that are compatible with intersecting non-normative identities by refining and expanding an empirically-supported and engineering-specific model of gendered socialization. The integrated education and research plan will yield a dramatic impact on the field of engineering education by prioritizing the importance of underutilized gender theories, enrolling men in gender research and systems change, and addressing the gap in research on engineering workplaces. Other than the original study that this project builds on, no existing research has systematically examined the gendered organizational socialization experiences of newcomer men and women engineers. Ultimately, this project will facilitate greater equity in the socialization of newcomer engineers in order to decrease attrition from engineering careers and broaden participation of underrepresented groups in engineering. Furthermore, this project will contribute simultaneously to the fields of engineering education, engineering studies, organizational studies, and gender studies, among others.The objectives of this project will be to refine and expand a theoretical model of gendered socialization in civil engineering workplaces and to create research-based interventions for more inclusive socialization. The study will involve two groups of participants. Group 1 will be early career civil engineers from around the country who have been participating in a similar study since 2018. They work in engineering firms, as well as in governmental organizations at the federal, state, and county levels. When the project begins, they will be in the fifth and sixth years of their careers. For this group, mixed-methods data will be collected longitudinally for three years through bi-monthly Individual Socialization Logs (an instrument developed during the course of the previous project) and twice-yearly in-depth interviews. The survey and interviews will explore their experiences in the workplace, including their biggest challenges, the most important things they are learning, their most memorable interactions, and their relationships with co-workers. Findings will be used to refine and expand the model that was created based on the first few years of their careers. Group 2 will be former early career civil engineers who left the engineering profession for a non-engineering career. They will participate in a one-time interview that will explore the reasons they left engineering, thought processes and timelines leading to that decision, what they think about their decisions now, workplace experiences that could have made a difference, and ways university could have better prepared them. From this data, a typology of the reasons for leaving and organizational socialization factors that played a role will be created. That typology will then be compared to the existing theoretical model and survey instrument to determine what additions need to be made to both in light of the experiences of those who have left civil engineering. Project outcomes will include identification and characterization of facets of organizational socialization (e.g., practices, processes, relationships and social networks) that are gendered, including how they are gendered intersectionally. Research findings and the model based on them will be utilized to create professional formation materials for civil engineering professionals. The professional formation materials will be implemented nationally and locally.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.