Persistent gender inequity in us undergraduate engineering: looking to Jordan and Malaysia for factors to their success in achieving gender parity

Abstract

For more than three decades, the US federal government, industry and professional engineering societies has contributed millions of dollars to increase the number of women in US engineering programs with minimal impact. The research published on how to address the on-going United States (US) national challenge of increasing gender parity in undergraduate engineering programs is almost entirely US centric. The authors of this paper reached across borders and outside the STEM education literature to gain a different perspective on the US problem of persistent gender segregation in undergraduate engineering education. As we compared the issue of gender parity between the US, Jordan and Malaysia, three previously unexplored areas began to take shape: 1. The US has potentially inaccurately scoped the problem, 2. Different factors seem to contribute to greater gender equity in undergraduate engineering programs in Jordan and Malaysia than in the US, and 3. A sociological framework for analysis and interpretation (not previously published in the engineering education literature) helps us better understand the core causes of gender inequity in advanced industrialized countries, such as the US. Once we better understand the core causes, effective solutions can be designed. The purpose of this paper is to begin to re-scope the problem of increasing the number of women in engineering education in the US, identify potential factors that contribute to gender equity in Jordan and Malaysia, and to propose future areas of robust cross-national engineering education research.