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02.10
Satisfaction
Why do people give
up engineering? Surveys of men and women
engineers tell an unexpected story.
By Lisa Frehill
“Don’t follow in my footsteps.”
These days, seemingly every conversation about
the future of engineering includes an apocryphal
story about an engineer who advises his children
to find another line of work because engineering
has no future. Yet until a recent set of surveys
and analyses, we knew little about who stays in
engineering, why people leave the field, and
what happens to them after they leave.
I have read those surveys and I
can tell you that engineering still offers many
of its traditional rewards to men and women who
pursue it, and also for those who use it as a
springboard into other careers.
Our investigation into the
career path of engineers grew out of similar
concerns, especially about women in engineering.
Members of the Corporate Partnership Council of
the Society of Women Engineers were concerned
about retaining women in the field. They had
heard many stories about women who had left
their companies to become full-time mothers or
when they sought some accommodation to their
family life. In addition, for years there were
vague stories about women who left engineering
because of mistreatment by their colleagues.
These stories seemed to zero in
on women’s leaving as problematic, without
understanding the larger context of job turnover
in engineering. In fact, many people—men and
women—leave the field, and not always under a
storm cloud of hostility.
In 2005, the council decided to
fund a survey to look at engineers’ experiences
in the workforce after they had graduated from
college, including whether they had remained in
engineering or not.
Council members compiled a list
of 25 colleges and universities with which they
had personal connections. They then contracted
Harris Interactive, a major polling firm, to
complete the survey. Some colleges provided
lists of engineering bachelor’s and master’s
degree recipients from 1980 onwards. Other
schools did not provide lists, but allowed the
polling firm to place advertisements about the
survey in their alumni magazines or listservs.
All but one of the colleges was in the United
States.
The survey questions asked about
general workplace experiences, such as the size
and industry of employer, impressions about the
connections between work and engineering school,
post-graduation educational experiences, and
satisfaction with workplace.
Some of the questions were
repeated from a 1991 survey that Society of
Women Engineers had conducted with a number of
other professional societies, most notably the
National Society of Professional Engineers. The
earlier survey was randomly drawn from the
membership lists of professional engineering
societies. Because those members were engineers
at the time of the survey, it was impossible to
use their answers to determine anything about
engineers who had left the field, which has been
an important on-going issue for companies.
Harris collected the data and
completed an initial report for Society of Women
Engineers. The Society of Women Engineers then
turned to the Commission on Professionals in
Science and Technology, an organization with a
strong research background in engineers and
engineering, to analyze the data and use it to
better understand the career outcomes of
engineers.
CPST has studied the science and
engineering workforce since it was founded in
1953 as the Scientific Manpower Commission, and
it has worked with a variety of professional
engineering associations. What’s more, I had
experience with the previous engineering
employment dataset.
Based on our analysis of the
Corporate Partnership Council survey, we’re
pleased to report that our key findings about
engineering retention are not as bleak as one
might think from listening to the doomsayers.
Retention is a key issue. To
look at that, we broke down the respondents into
groups based on when they had earned their
engineering bachelor’s degree. We did that
because many engineers start out in the field
after they graduate and then, over the course of
their careers, move into new careers or into
allied areas such as engineering management.
Also, the labor market that new engineers face
differs each year. While we do not explore these
specifics, this enables us to look at groups of
engineers that face broadly similar economic
conditions.
In order to be able to make
appropriate comparisons of men and women, women
were oversampled by Harris Interactive so that
they represent 30.7 percent of the 3,349
engineers surveyed who were in four major
fields: chemical, civil and architectural,
electrical and electronics, and mechanical
engineering. Without this oversampling, we would
expect that only 11 percent of the sample would
have been women, which would have been far too
few cases to understand the career outcomes of
women or to make comparisons with the careers of
their male peers. Therefore, in this survey,
women accounted for as much as 48 percent of the
sample of chemical engineers and 26 percent of
the sample of mechanical engineers.
(click to enlarge)
These figures are much higher
than women’s representation in either the
engineering workforce or in bachelor’s degree
production at the national level. Women account
for only 11 percent of the nation’s engineers,
and between 18 to 20 percent of new engineering
bachelor’s degrees each year. The survey sample,
however, follows the general national pattern:
women are more highly represented in chemical
and civil and far underrepresented in mechanical
and electrical.
The survey data show that there
was not much difference in women’s and men’s
retention in engineering when looking at new
graduates. The gap widened, however, among
groups that had graduated earlier. (This data
had been originally presented in the Fall 2007
issue of SWE Magazine.)
For instance, within three years
of graduation, 71 percent of men and 61 percent
of women who earned a bachelor’s degree in
engineering were still in engineering jobs. But
among those who graduated in 1985-1987, only 35
percent of women and 53 percent of men who had
engineering bachelor’s degrees reported that
they were in engineering jobs.
But it’s important to further
break down the retention rates by engineering
discipline. We know that women are distributed
across engineering disciplines differently than
men. Therefore, much of the overall gap in
retention that had been published in 2007 can be
attributed to gender differences in engineering
discipline.
Interestingly, in mechanical
engineering, men’s and women’s retention is on
par except for the one degree group: women who
received degrees between 1985 and 1989 were more
likely to leave the field than were men. In that
cohort, 57 percent of men are still in
mechanical engineering, but only 31 percent of
women remain in the field. But it is important
to note that both men and women tended to leave
the field over time.
Retention for women is lower in
chemical engineering than the other fields, but
both men’s and women’s retention are fairly
comparable. At the other end of the spectrum,
overall retention is quite high in civil and
architectural engineering, with women’s
surpassing that of men’s for the cohort that
graduated from college in the early part of the
1990’s. In chemical, electrical and mechanical
engineering, there is declining retention in the
field for both men and women as engineers age.
(click to enlarge)
Among electrical engineers—with
mechanical, one of the two largest engineering
disciplines—women’s retention in the field tends
to be lower than men’s except for the cohort of
engineers that graduated in the late 1980’s,
where the rate is somewhat higher.
The findings demonstrate the
importance of drilling down to specific
disciplines in order to better understand
retention of engineers. Overall trend data tend
to obscure differences in each segment of the
profession.
While trends for men and women
often vary, there is one constant: Engineers
tend to leave their profession over time. This
shouldn’t be surprising. People’s interests
change over time, the economy creates new types
of jobs and new opportunities, and so on.
Another factor that might
contribute to this is job satisfaction. The
results from the survey that show that more than
one in five of all engineers said that they were
“very satisfied” with their job. We also looked
at people who held jobs that were related to
engineering and jobs that were not related to
engineering.
Why single out the “very satisfied” category?
Because it is quite common in surveys for people
to mark the midpoint answers, with
proportionately few people usually willing to
say the more extreme answer. Therefore, when
respondents do select answers at the extreme, it
reflects a strong opinion. If lots of engineers
said they were “very satisfied” while
proportionately few people who had left the
field were “very satisfied,” then we might
surmise that leaving engineering was a result of
negative issues. In other words, some sort of
pressure was driving happy engineers out of
their profession.
Instead, the data show a
complicated picture of job satisfaction that
depends on gender, discipline, and whether they
are still doing engineering work. The data here
is broken out by whether the respondent is now
an engineer, is doing engineering-related work,
or is doing non-engineering work.
(click to enlarge)
The most satisfied men were
chemical or electrical and computer engineers
who are now in non-engineering jobs. Among
women, mechanical engineering women in jobs that
were related to engineering were the most
satisfied followed by chemical or electrical and
computer engineering women in
engineering-related jobs. Women and men who were
still in engineering generally expressed similar
levels of satisfaction, except among chemical
engineers, where men were more likely than women
to report that they were “very satisfied” with
their jobs.
The issue of equity in
engineering is an important one for the Society
of Women Engineers as an organization and for
engineering as a discipline. In recent years,
there has been a lot of attention paid to the
“climate” for women and minorities in the field
as a potential source of stress and as a barrier
to full participation of the U.S. labor force.
Some wonder whether those climate issues are the
reason why women, who account for nearly half of
the U.S. labor force, represent only 11 percent
of all engineers. Clearly, many people are
interested in how engineers perceive their field
with respect to gender equality issues.
 The
survey asked engineers, those with jobs related
to engineering and those no longer working as
engineers about equitable treatment at their
workplaces. The results uncovered some important
differences across fields and job status.
For example, among women
employed as engineers, those in the civil and
architectural engineering field were most likely
(at 47.7 percent) to indicate that conditions
were equitable. Women mechanical engineers, by
contrast, were the least likely, with only 32
percent reporting equitable conditions.
Also, with only civil
engineering as an exception, women trained in
engineering and now in non-engineering jobs were
more inclined than women in engineering or
engineering-related positions to indicate that
women and men were “always” treated equitably in
their workplaces.
Among men in the survey, those
in chemical and civil engineering jobs that were
related to their engineering training—generally
managers of engineers—tended to be more likely
to report that things were not always equitable
with respect to gender in their workplaces. This
is not a big surprise because as engineering
managers, they may be likely to hear of
instances of inequity, especially if their own
employees may have a particular complaint.
Men and women leave engineering
over time, often at fairly comparable rates. Can
a look at larger labor market issues unique to
various engineering fields help explain why they
leave?
One part of the survey asked men
and women engineers who were employed, but not
in engineering or an engineering-related field,
why they were no longer engineers. The major
differences between men and women who had
completely left engineering are that men were
more likely than women to have left for “better
opportunities for advancement in another field”
or “better salary.” Nearly 40 percent of men
reported one of those responses, versus just 13
percent of women.
Women, on the other hand, were
more likely than men to indicate that they left
for a “more family-friendly work environment”—11
percent of women said this, compared to 2
percent of men.
The top reason, though, for both
women and men was that they were pursuing more
interesting work with 33 percent of men and 47
percent of women reporting this reason.
We have learned many things from
this survey. For instance, many engineers are
not profoundly satisfied with their jobs. This
may be because they are unhappy with their work,
or because turmoil in the economy and larger
changes in the workplace result in anxiety about
job security.
The data also show that, yes,
engineers do tend to leave the field, but we see
few important gender differences in this
attrition. Contrary to popular stories, it is
not the case that women are more likely than men
to leave the field. Instead, there are larger
differences in attrition across engineering
disciplines. In addition, the data show that
those who leave are not necessarily less
satisfied with their jobs than those who stay.
That’s an important finding. It
highlights that moving from job to job in a
career is a very individual phenomenon. The
market and larger social forces may play a role
at a structural level, but when it comes down to
an individual, he or she seems to do what
Americans have always done—make a move in the
hopes of greater satisfaction.
As published in
Mechanical Engineering
magazine. © 2010 ASME. Reprinted here with
permission.
Lisa Frehill is the executive
director of the Commission on Professionals in
Science and Technology in Washington, D.C. She
is also an adjunct faculty member in the
sociology department at New Mexico State
University.
Comments may be submitted to
todaysengineer@ieee.org.
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