Women in Industrial Engineering: Stereotypes, Persistence, and Perspectives

Home , Equality (mathematics)

CATHERINE E. BRAWNER, MICHELLE M. CAMACHOa, SUSAN M. LORDa, RUSSELL A. LONGb, AND MATTHEW W. OHLANDb Research Triangle Educational Consultants, University of San Diegoa, Purdue Universityb

BACKGROUND Industrial engineering (IE) draws in and graduates women at among the highest rates compared with most engineering majors in the U.S. Popular stereotypes suggest this is because IE is “easier” than other engineering majors.

PURPOSE (HYPOTHESIS) This research interrogates prevailing assumptions about industrial engineering to explore why undergraduate women are drawn to industrial engineering over other engineering majors.

DESIGN/METHODS Our mixed method approach used three sources of data. Quantitative analyses of a large, longitudinal dataset allowed us to draw empirical generalizations about academic performance, attraction to, and persistence within industrial engineering among men and women. We triangulated this with qualitative focus group data among women majoring in IE. Finally, we used content analysis of university IE Web sites to understand context and discourse.

RESULTS In our dataset, industrial engineering is the only engineering major that gains women and men from the third semester through six-year graduation and among all race-gender combinations (except Black men). Women in focus groups reveal that they are drawn to IE for a myriad of social factors including: warmth, flexibility, a sense it is more feminine, and career opportunities, among others. Content analysis of Web sites reveals that IE emphasizes collegiality and leadership opportunities as intrinsic to the discipline.

CONCLUSIONS Using a social capital framework, we showed that the context of IE, including prevailing norms and possibilities for networking, promotes ideologies of success that lead to greater attraction to and persistence within the major.

KEYWORDS industrial engineering, social capital, women

INTRODUCTION

Industrial engineering (IE) is an enigma among engineering majors. In this study of multiple universities, it draws in more students at every semester than other engineering majors, and it also graduates more women than any other. Thus, it has been described as a “Pocket of Success” in engineering (Lord et al., 2008). In this paper, we apply a mixed- methods approach to examine the characteristics and experiences of women majoring in

288 101 (April 2012) 2 Journal of Engineering Education industrial engineering. Using constant comparative analysis, a qualitative technique where- by we compare students’ responses to explore and develop common themes to examine our data (Corbin & Strauss 2008), we theorize that there is something different, perhaps even special, about industrial engineering that makes it more attractive to women than most other engineering disciplines. Combining three sources of data: (1) a large quantitative data set of over 70,000 students at 8 institutions, (2) focus groups with women industrial engineering majors at three of those institutions, and (3) content analysis of industrial engineering Web sites from those institutions, we show that industrial engineering has the most women graduates of any engineering field, communicates to potential students in a manner that emphasizes inclusivity, and that the women have internalized that message in their descriptions of the department. We focus here on women, who comprise more than 36% of the industrial engineering graduates in our data set, compared with only 22% of engineering graduates overall. This aligns with National Science Foundation (NSF) data that show that women represent 32% of all IE graduates in the U.S. but only 20% of all engineering graduates (NSF, 2008 tab 5-4; NSF, 2008 tab 5-5). Our focus group data and Web site analysis provide a qualitative context for understanding what attracts women to IE and frame their experiences more broadly within the field. This multi-method approach contributes nuance to our understandings of women’s successes in IE. We note that Industrial Engineering is also referred to as Industrial and Systems Engi- neering at some schools. Throughout this paper, we will refer to the discipline simply as industrial engineering or IE. This analysis is part of a long-term study to explore how climate and pedagogy affect the persistence of women in undergraduate engineering programs via a longitudinal, multi-institutional, and multivariate study. Specifically, the larger project examines the research questions “How does the persistence of women engineering students vary by race, engineering major, and institution? and Can pockets of success be identified?” Industrial engineering was identified as a pocket of success. We explore the social conditions of IE that make it gain students and particularly women from third semester to graduation and we ask what it is about IE that makes it different from other engineering disciplines. Is IE attractive simply because it is considered easier than other engineering disciplines or is it because of a different value system that has evolved in the discipline that makes it attractive to both women and men?

LITERATURE REVIEW

Popular stereotypes circulating among engineers suggest that industrial engineering is “easier” than other engineering majors and that industrial engineering majors are “imaginary engineers” (Foor & Walden, 2009; Trytten et al., 2004). While these ideologies may serve to devalue and delegitimize the educational arena of industrial engineering, how is this devaluation related to the historical sex segregation within engineering? Specifically, does IE actively market itself in a way that recruits more women, and does this result in stereotyping the field as “imaginary” or “easy”? Or can the stereotypical devaluation of IE be attributed to the fact that more women are attracted to, and subsequently graduate from, this field?

History of Industrial Engineering The Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE) defines industrial engineering (IE) as:

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[C]oncerned with the design, improvement and installation of integrated systems of people, materials, equipment, and energy. It draws upon specialized knowledge and skill in the mathematical, physical, and social sciences together with the principles and methods of engineering analysis and design to specify, predict, and evaluate the results to be obtained from such systems. (History of IIE, 2010) Practitioners also describe IE as the study of: [H]uman-centered engineered systems. This was the basis of our profession at its origin, and, although the form of the study has evolved, it is the basis of our profession today…. As other engineers foster advances through innovative new technologies, industrial engineers deal with those technologies in their implementation and use. (Kimbler, 1995) Scholarship by historians of science and technology suggest that the context, case history, and historical narrative need to be examined within the systems and networks produced by social actors and their organizations (Hughes, 1986); conceptualizations of industrial engineering are similarly produced. From its beginnings, industrial engineering has tran- scended boundaries of disciplines and content. Pioneers in industrial engineering came from a variety of backgrounds including psychology, mathematics, engineering, and management and include Frederick W. Taylor, Charles Babbage, Henry R. Towne, Henry Gantt, Frank, Gilbreth, and Lillian Gilbreth. IE continues to explicitly include the connection between people and technology as part of the definition of the discipline. Frank and Lillian Gilbreth are credited with bringing this human element to the forefront in the study of work flow. It is especially interesting that Lillian Gilbreth, the first person to earn a Ph.D. in industrial psychology in the U.S. and mother of 12 children, played such a key role in the development of the field of IE at a time when there were virtually no women in engineering and those few were considered oddities or “engineeresses” (Bix, 2004). The Gilbreths published widely, yet several books listed only Frank Gilbreth as the author likely because at that time, including a female author was believed to detract from the credibility of the work. After Frank’s death, Lillian continued to work in industrial engineering and was rec- ognized with many awards. Dubbed the “First Lady of Engineering,” in 1965 Lillian Gilbreth was the first woman elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), one of the highest honors bestowed on engineers in the U.S. (Graham, 1998). This history frames current IE programs. The social implications of a “human-centered” engineering system allude to the co- production of gendered ideologies and engineering. Since gender is intricately interwoven with engineering, as it is with any other social institution, gender and engineering are co-produced or co-constructed. For example, the nerd stereotype is of men who are passionate about technology but a- social; the fact that these two are posited as mutually exclusive – to be technical is to be not-social - is one of the more powerful symbolic ways in which engineering appears gender inauthentic for women, given the strong association of women/femininities with caring about people. (Faulkner, 2007, p. 334) While engineering is a heterogeneous practice, scholars have characterized the history of its curriculum as rigid (Hacker, 1989). The theories presented by feminist technology studies examine the “easy-hard” binary and the social construction of what it means for a

290 101 (April 2012) 2 Journal of Engineering Education discipline to be labeled “hard.” What is characterized as hard often translates into technical. While engineering practice in general contains elements of both technical and social, the technical is normative, while the social is less visible—these distinctions map onto the dualism of technology as masculine and sociality as feminine (Faulkner, 2000, 2007). This dualism between the technical and social is at the heart of the so-called “imaginary” con- ceptualization of industrial engineering (Foor & Walden, 2009).

Perception of Industrial Engineering as an “Easy” Discipline To understand the basis and consequences of the stereotype that industrial engineering is easy, we explored the foundation of how disciplines have previously been classified in a hierarchical sense. Specifically, the description of industrial engineering as “Imaginary En- gineering” recalls the notion that the sciences can be classified on a spectrum from “soft” to “hard.” A hierarchy of disciplines was published over a century ago by Auguste Comte (1896), classifying disciplines focusing on positivist approaches as “hard,” and by inference, superior to other disciplines. Subsequent work by Beyer, Lodahl, and Gordon (1972) and Smith, Best, Stubbs, Johnston, and Archibald (2000) paralleled Comte’s conclusions and advanced the measurement of “hardness” from an ordinal scale to an interval scale. The trend toward refining the measurement of “hardness” is an indication that it is a widely ac- cepted notion. Two perceptions that Foor and Walden (2009) identified as separating industrial engineering from other engineering disciplines were distance from technology and a less rigorous curriculum. What Foor and Walden call “distance from technology” has strong parallels to themes in earlier research that would describe this distinction as “less likely to use graphs,” “softer,” and “less positivist.” Students in the 2006 study by Murphy et al. attribute some of the perception that IE is easier than other engineering disciplines to a lack of understanding of what IEs do. Murphy et al. label this as the “invisi- bility” of IE. We interpret this to mean that students coming to college do not know what IE is and therefore do not choose it as a major on entry, rather they make this choice after they learn what the major offers them and how it fits with their academic and career needs. If industrial engineering is stereotyped as easier than other engineering disciplines, it is easier to marginalize the discipline, because engineering has been found to operate as a meritocracy of difficulty (Stevens, Amos, Garrison, & Jocuns, 2007). Engineering students are socialized to believe that engineers work harder than others. The higher starting salaries engineering graduates earn reinforce this belief, given that a meritocratic value system informs their beliefs. Once students adopt this belief, working hard is the primary way to judge the value of an engineer or a discipline of engineering. Further, this belief enables a willingness to sacrifice experiences common to other college students and shapes how engineering students define who belongs in engineering and how they view and interact with non-engineers. This belief supports the hegemony of engineering as a major and, most important to this discussion, a hierarchy of engineering disciplines—as students in the Stevens et al. study indicated, “EE is more prestigious than Industrial Engineering because it is harder” (2007, p. 8). Im- portantly, Stevens et al. found that this belief is well supported by the faculty and cultures of engineering education. The message that engineering is hard, therefore, is a part of the discourse of engineering students, and that difficulty is a source of prestige and pride. If IE is perceived as less difficult, we can conclude it will be devalued within the cultural context of engineering’s hierarchical and socially constructed meritocracy.

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Industrial Engineering Attracts Women Many studies that focus on the climate for women in science and engineering aggregate engineering with other STEM disciplines or at best only discuss engineering in the collec- tive (Blakemore & Low, 1984; Hill, Corbett, & St. Rose, 2010; Jacobs, 1995; Seymour & Hewitt, 1997). The relative attractiveness of the individual disciplines within engineering is not discussed, only that the field in its entirety does not generally attract large numbers of women. However, in a cultural analysis, Godfrey (2007) showed that different engineering disciplines exhibited different cultures, which affected women’s participation. Thus it is important to examine specific disciplines. Studies that do include separate results for industrial engineering are highlighted below. Following a cohort of about 1000 students at one institution, Humphreys and Freeland (1992) found differences in retention by gender and department. Industrial engineering had 35% women at matriculation and was third among the eight engineering disciplines studied in percentage of women at matriculation and graduation. Marra, Bogue, and Shen (2008) found that women and men majoring in engineering at one university were statistically indistinguishable on 95% of items on a lengthy survey about classroom activities such as instructor-student, student-student, and teaching assistant-student relationships. They found, however, that there were many statistically significant differences when answers to these same questions were compared among the industrial, mechanical, and engineering science and mechanics departments. Lord et al. (2009) showed that there were gender differences in major selection within engineering, but did not explain why these differences exist. In one of the few studies to examine critically sex segregation across engineering majors, Litzler (2010) combined data from the Engineering Workforce Commission (EWC) and the Project to Assess Climate in Engineering (PACE) survey to explore both individual and institutional factors that might explain why certain engineering majors have relatively higher or lower percentages of women compared with the representation of women overall in engineering. The EWC data contains information from all of the schools of engineering in the U.S. while the PACE data includes 21 generally large, public, research in- tensive universities. Litzler’s analysis included the implications of human capital theory (which would allow easy exit and re-entry into the field), status beliefs related to the social- ization students receive about the discipline, and discrimination and hostile climate. She examined nine engineering majors that were common to most of the PACE schools, specifically aerospace engineering, biological engineering, chemical engineering, civil engineering, computer engineering (including computer science), electrical engineering, industrial engineering, material science engineering, and mechanical engineering. At the individual level, Litzler (2010) found that prior experience with engineering pulls students toward highly male-dominated fields such as electrical, computer, and mechanical engineering. A positive climate generally pulls students into majors with a higher proportion of women. Similarly, she found a higher proportion of women in majors that were perceived to be family-friendly with greater support from faculty. The proportion of women in the major, however, was not the defining characteristic for women’s choice of major. Rather, individual-level characteristics were more important than institutional variation in women’s major selection overall. Forty percent of the variation in the choice of industrial engineering over bioengineering (her reference discipline), however, is attributable to variation between schools compared with less than 5% of the variation for chemical and mechanical engineering relative to bioengineering. The main point here is that context is important, particularly in the choice of industrial engineering by women. Litzler’s findings

292 101 (April 2012) 2 Journal of Engineering Education are generalizable to large public institutions that are highly ranked and have a high level of research activity, similar to most of the institutions in our data set. The most extensive study of women (and men) in industrial engineering was carried out by a team at University of Oklahoma (OU) in the early 2000’s (Foor & Walden, 2009; Foor, Walden, & Trytten (2007); Murphy, Shehab, Reed-Rhoads, & Trytten, 2006; Murphy et al., 2007; Shehab, Reed-Rhoads, & Murphy, 2005; Trytten et al., 2004; Walden & Foor, 2008). During that time, the industrial engineering department at OU achieved gender parity among undergraduates, doubling from 27% in 1996 to a high of 58% women in the Fall of 2001 without any particular programs in place to address the gender balance in the department (Murphy et al., 2007). The authors note that after the study, female enrollment in the department reverted to 39% and 34% in the Fall of 2004 and 2005 respectively. They attribute the decline to the graduation of student “ambas- sadors” for the IE program and to one of the female faculty members giving birth to two children which limited her visibility among students. In the OU case, as in the Litzler (2010) study, context framed outcomes. The OU study included interviews with 185 women and men from IE departments at OU and three other universities and from three other engineering departments at OU to provide contrast. They also interviewed most of the IE faculty at OU. Students from all four institutions described IE as a discipline using terms such as (in decreasing order of frequency): people-oriented (80%), emphasizing efficiency (77%), emphasizing business aspects of a problem (64%), breadth of the discipline (61%), problem solving (56%), communicators (51%), systems-oriented perspective (49%), expedient way to advance into management (47%), and status potential, which was particularly important to women (57% vs. 40% of the men). With respect to department culture, the authors note the IE department at OU had a relatively large proportion of women faculty (4/13) and that women were in positions of authority—one was department chair and another was associate dean. The department also actively recruited students by personal invitations from the department chair, presentations by faculty and students at Society of Women Engineers (SWE) events, freshman seminars, and College of Engineering (COE) recruiting events; and through brochures and on a continually updated Web site. Students were given personal attention by faculty and considered themselves to be friends with other students. Overall, the department exuded a sense of community for the faculty and students. Using the same set of interviews, Foor and Walden (2009) discuss how men and women negotiate gendered identities for themselves in the “borderland” that is industrial engineering. In this borderland, IE serves as a boundary between the harder and more technical engineering disciplines, like chemical or electrical, and the academic world that lies outside of the college of engineering, particularly business. The pejorative concept of “imaginary engineering” is used by the interviewees who have internalized messages received from peers in other majors that IE, because it is perceived as less technical, must somehow be easier and the last stop on the road to a business degree for people who are not able to succeed as engineers. It is in this context that women and men both have created identities that allow them to feel comfortable with their choice. For women and men, IE offers the ability to be engineers while not being “weird.” For women, this means that they can be feminine and have families, while still being professional, something modeled by the women IE faculty at OU. For the men, they can be engineers without being socially isolated or geeky—they can be “normal” people. The authors conclude that IE, as a borderland, is a place where the renegotiated identities “might shift boundaries and produce real transformations in engineering diversity” (Foor & Walden, 2009, p. 58).

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Social Capital Framework for Industrial Engineering In deepening our analysis of the context of IE, some of the findings in the literature cited above may be related to the acquisition of “social capital.” According to Stanton- Salazar and Dornbusch (1995), social capital refers to “a set of properties existing within socially patterned associations among people that, when activated, enable them to accom- plish their goals or to empower themselves in some meaningful way” (p. 10). Researchers in engineering education have begun to use the theoretical framework of social capital to understand how social networks and social norms are valued (Brown, Flick, & Williamson 2005; Daily, Eugene, & Prewitt, 2007; Trenor, Yu, Waight, & Zerda, 2008). Foor, Walden, and Trytten (2007), for example, suggest that social capital in engineering education comes in a myriad of forms, including “having a parent who is able to forward their child’s resume for a summer internship to a friend working at a company that hires engineers” (p. 106). These researchers draw on sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s influential work on social reproduction in which he identifies the social and cultural mechanisms that promote success and social status (Bourdieu, 1984). Applied to IE, the theory of social capital refers to instrumental relationships between IE students and institutional agents (e.g., faculty, administrators, advisors) who promote perceptions of success. The theory of social capital would suggest that the successful social integration of students in IE depends upon constructing instrumental relationships with institutional agents who will transmit information about and cultivate student opportunities for success. For example, in IE this includes transmitting information about diverse career paths, the importance of IE’s leadership for improving business flows and processes, and the intellectual contributions and transformative potential IE possesses to make an impact on the industrial economy. In other engineering majors, social capital is, arguably, more difficult to acquire for women because of the gendered, male-dominated, context that dates back to the milita- rized history of engineering as a discipline with its notoriously rigid curricular structure that limits migration into the major (Hacker, 1989). With its emphasis on social rela- tions and networks, IE promotes social capital and challenges some of these barriers. Throughout this work, we assert that IE broadens the social frame of reference for students and makes evident the importance of connections to people in industry and their potential impact. It also provides experiences that produce attitudes conducive to network building. It emphasizes the necessity of a plurality of voices in the workforce, shows value for diverse modes of operation, and promotes innovation and flexibility as creative skill sets. IE is oriented to enhance student support networks and develop skills as a strategy for success. Therefore IE conveys social capital as a set of actual and potential resources. IE communicates to students that they have the ability to tap a range of ties within the broad network of the IE field and benefit from these ties. Using a mixed- methods analysis, our goal in this paper is to build upon the theories presented by others and use a social capital framework to expand the conception of industrial engineering as a unique space for women.

METHODS

We use a mixed methods design, combining quantitative and qualitative research to learn about the systemic issues that cause a relatively high percentage of women to choose to be industrial engineering majors. Our quantitative study is anchored in the MIDFIELD database, described below, and allows for generalizability of student major

294 101 (April 2012) 2 Journal of Engineering Education selection behavior to large public institutions. Qualitatively, we use focus groups and content analysis of IE program Web sites to develop a more complete understanding of students’ motivation for selecting industrial engineering and the messages they receive about the discipline. We describe what the students are experiencing and how they are experiencing it both through their voices and through formal channels such as Web sites. Using these qualitative data as part of our overall analysis helps us to validate, interpret, clarify, and illustrate the quantitative findings from MIDFIELD (Miles & Huberman, 1994). The choice of this design stemmed from our analysis of MIDFIELD data. We found a relatively large number of women graduating in IE. We wanted to explore this further through focus groups to learn the meanings and motivations behind why women major in IE. During the focus groups, students often discussed the impact of the IE departmental Web sites in attracting them to the major. We conducted an exploratory content analysis of the IE Web sites to provide a backdrop for the women’s narratives. These three sources allow us to explore and explain findings from each.

Quantitative Data This study uses the Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Lon- gitudinal Development (Long, 2008; Ohland et al., 2008), a data set with more than 79,000 students matriculating in engineering at nine southeastern U.S. institutions that awarded 1/12th of all U.S. engineering bachelor’s degrees from 1987 to 2004. Included in MIDFIELD are two historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Because we are studying only industrial engineering in this research, we excluded from this study the one MIDFIELD school that did not offer an IE degree during our timeframe. This resulted in approximately 3,000 students being deleted. We focus on first-time-in-college U.S. citizens and permanent residents. Gender and race/ethnicity are self-reported by students choosing among Asian, Black, Hispanic, Native American, Non-Resident Alien, Other, and White. We exclude those students who chose Non-Resident Alien or Other from this study since those categories each aggregate students such that findings are uninter- pretable. Since we have whole population data, inference is unnecessary—all reported differences are valid within this population. Graduation is defined as having graduated by the sixth year following matriculation, the standard of reporting used by the Integrated Post- secondary Education Data System (IPEDS) (U.S. Department of Education, 2007). Thus, we consider students who matriculated from 1988–1998 and had graduated six years later. While we did not include transfer students, they are the subject of a separate study currently under way by MIDFIELD researchers. Two institutions in this data set have first-year engineering (FYE) programs, meaning that students at these institutions cannot matriculate directly into any specific engineering major including IE. Thus, to include students at all institutions, we do not report numbers of students at matriculation but instead report numbers of students enrolled in IE at the end of Semester 3 (by which point first-year engineering students are expected to have chosen a major) and six-year graduation. Note that there are over 12,000 engineering students in the database who had not declared a major by the end of Semester 3. They may be undecided or still in an FYE program (Brawner et al., 2009). Some of these students, along with people who transfer into engineering from non-engineering majors, do appear in the graduation data as they declared an engineering major after the third semester and subsequently graduated. We use six-year graduation because it is a measure of

295 Journal of Engineering Education 101 (April 2012) 2 educational progress that can be compared to other published data (U.S. Department of Education, 2007; National Collegiate Athletic Association, n.d.). We count only enrolled semesters to Semester 3 to ensure that this earlier measure also measures actual educational progress.

Focus Groups We held focus groups with a total of 20 women undergraduates majoring in industrial engineering at three MIDFIELD institutions during the 2009-2010 academic year. The institutions chosen represent the range of institutions in MIDFIELD with respect to the size of the IE program and the participation of women. These focus groups were three of 10 that we conducted as part of our larger study. All women majoring in industrial engineering at the three campuses were invited to participate. The invitations were sent to the students on each campus by a person who had access to contact information and was known to the women majoring in industrial engineering. Participants who volunteered may have done so because of the honorarium and were selected based on their availability and interest in the subject. As with any focus group study, we only included students who volunteered to participate; this method’s weakness is self-selection bias. Some students indicated that they would attend but did not. The desired number of students for each group was eight to ten since larger groups are too difficult to moderate. Each student received $20 for her participation. Students ranged in age from 19 to 23 and were sophomores through seniors. One group had four students, one had six, and one had 10. Eight of the students were African American, seven were White, four were Asian and one was Hispanic. Com- pared with third semester enrollment and graduation in IE in MIDFIELD, Blacks and Asians are overrepresented and Whites are underrepresented in these groups. Focus groups are a way to get information from groups that are often marginalized and might be put off by or unresponsive to direct questioning in an interview setting or through surveys (Madriz, 2003). Focus group methods offer “a unique opportunity to study individuals in their social contexts, by generating high-quality interactive data, by contributing to the social construction of meaning, and by accessing women’s shared, and often ignored, stocks of knowledge” (Madriz, 2003, p. 383). Madriz suggests that within the cultures of women of color, particularly Blacks, Asians, Latinas, and Native Americans, conversations with other women about problems and feelings are the norm and that a group setting is more familiar and comfortable than a one-on-one interview where power clearly rests with the interviewer. The purpose of the focus groups was to have students address the following research questions: (1) Why did these women choose to major in industrial engineering? (2) Why do they stay in industrial engineering? and (3) Why is industrial engineering more popular with women than most other engineering majors? We used a systematic process as described by Krueger (1998) to prepare and analyze our data. This process includes: (a) sequencing the questions to allow the participants to clearly understand the purpose of the study and collect their thoughts, (b) recording each group with notetaking by an assistant moderator, (c) coding each theme with a label that is used each time it appears, (d) debriefing between the moderator and assistant moderator and (e) sharing findings among the research team. The findings, though not generalizable in the strictest sense, may be transferrable to other similar environments. The themes, as they were coded, fit into clusters. Clustering helps us bring order to the many themes offered by the participants by putting them into similar groupings. (Miles &

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Huberman, 1994). The titles for many of the clusters, such as “warmth” and “passion,” were provided by the participants themselves as part of their dialog. Other cluster titles were inferred from the conversation so phrases such as “you can do anything with this major” became “flexibility” and “faster, better, cheaper” became “efficient.” It is common, of course, for thoughts to fit into multiple themes that overlap. For instance, one respondent said “you could excel up the ladder a little bit faster knowing that we’re a little bit more well rounded than any other discipline,” which was coded in both the “generalist” and “career opportunities” clusters. The richness of the descriptions of their experiences shared by the students is one of the key advantages of focus group research. We use direct quotations but edited them to eliminate verbal crutches such as “uh,” “er,” “you know,” and excessive repetition to enhance readability. Unrelated digressions have also been removed and are represented by ellipses (…). Words in square brackets [ ] are added for context and words in parentheses ( ) indicate verbal cue such as “laugh” or “others chuckle.” Moderator prompts are preceded by “Moderator.” Respondents are identified by school (A, B, C) and seat number. In this article, we report common themes, derived from student comments, but leave institution-specific elements out, even if they had a great bearing on students’ decisions at a particular institution. This is in part because revealing institutional settings could lead the alert reader to identify the institutions and the purpose of this article is to report on findings common to industrial engineering in a variety of settings. The Institutional Review Board at each institution approved our study and each student signed a consent form. Stu- dents were assured confidentiality in published articles to the extent possible with a focus group.

Content Analysis of IE Web sites To understand the broader social context in which these narratives about industrial engineering emerge, we conducted a content analysis of departmental Web sites of the MIDFIELD institutions. Content analysis is a well-established method used in the social sciences for systematically analyzing text and images (Holsti, 1969; Krippendorff, 2004). Content analysis has recently been applied to the analysis of internet/web content (Herring 2010; Herring, Scheidt, Kouper, & Wright, 2006; McMillan, 2000). University Web sites provide insights as primary sources of data in which ideas about the mission, values, and objectives of the curriculum and the institutional character of the program are transmitted. These Web sites provide one view into how engineering programs represent themselves to their audience, including potential and current engineering students. A primary information source for many students, these Web sites provide centralized information used by students to make decisions about a major, and as a roadmap for those already enrolled. Here, departments and programs welcome students, describe the faculty and their areas of expertise, provide descriptive information about requirements for degree fulfillment, and share news. In our focus groups, students often made reference to their departmental Web site, indicating its influence in their decision to major in industrial engineering. So frequently was reference made, that we were drawn to conduct this exploratory review of the Web sites to provide a broader context in which to understand their narratives and to triangulate the focus group data by providing a textual analysis. While not originally a part of the research design, we conducted content analysis of IE Web pages, following a “grounded-theory” approach (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). The grounded theory approach allows concepts and categories to emerge from the codes; women’s narratives provide the codes used as a baseline to study IE Web sites. It is important to

297 Journal of Engineering Education 101 (April 2012) 2 note that the emergent categories are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive. Rather, they provide a backdrop and additional layer of “manifest content,” text that is physically present (Berg, 2001), through which we can triangulate the narratives that emerged in the women’s focus groups. The social capital theoretical framing, described above, emerged in- ductively from this approach as a useful lens to examine the dynamics of IE.

FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS

Migration into Industrial Engineering Table 1 shows the numbers of students in the MIDFIELD database in various engineering majors at the end of Semester 3 and graduation disaggregated by gender. As stated earlier, Semester 3 rather than matriculation was chosen to enable inclusion of students at all institutions, including those with FYE programs who are not permitted to matriculate directly into a major. Note that between Semester 3 and graduation, most engineering majors lose students; only industrial and materials engineering gain students (civil engineering gains a few men, but that is offset by the loss of over 100 women). In fact, more women graduate in IE than any other engineering major and IE has the highest percentage (37%) of graduates who are women. Chemical Engineering is the most popular major for women at Semester 3 but falls behind IE by graduation, even though the proportion of women graduates is also relatively high at 36%. For men, mechanical is the most popular major at each time point. IE is the sixth most popular out of the 8 majors shown for men at Semes- ter 3 and rises to fourth by graduation. Materials engineering also gains students from Semester 3 to graduation. However, in MIDFIELD, materials engineering is actually a combination of programs at different schools with diverse curricula. These include majors such as ceramics engineering, materials science, and textiles engineering. Thus, it is difficult to investigate materials

TABLE 1 Students in Various Engineering Majors at Semester 3 and Graduation

298 101 (April 2012) 2 Journal of Engineering Education engineering further without looking at variation by institutional differences, which is beyond the scope of this paper. Rather, we focus on industrial engineering, which is a single department at each school with similar curricula. IE is a much larger major than materials and gains many more students after Semester 3. To examine the demographics of the students involved in the increase in IE students from Semester 3 to graduation, Table 2 shows the number of U.S. citizen and permanent resident students enrolled in industrial engineering at Semester 3 and graduation disaggregated by race/ethnicity and gender. Only populations with greater than 10 students are included. Note that the number of students increases from Semester 3 to graduation for women of all race/ethnicities and men of all race/ethnicities except Blacks. This demonstrates that IE attracts a wide variety of students once they are in college: Black women as well as Asian, Hispanic, and White women and men. Students coming from first-year engineering or undecided engineering are more attracted to IE than those matriculating directly into a discipline (Brawner et al., 2009). Thus IE is doing a good job of making itself attractive to students who are already enrolled in college as we describe below. This finding is consistent with Walden and Foor (2008) who found that six of their 52 interviewees (12%) chose IE from their engineering undecided category. The focus group data we present below allows us to triangulate our data and explore this finding in greater depth. Other studies (Litzler, 2010; Ohland et al., 2011) have found that there is substantial institutional variation in the percentage of women entering and graduating from engineering and the various disciplines. The average percentage of women in MIDFIELD schools in IE at Semester 3 is 38% and at graduation is 37%. At Semester 3, the range is 31% to 48% and at 6-year graduation, the range widens further from a low of 30% to a high of 58%. Women make up 50% or more of the IE graduates at 3 institutions. The percentage of women graduating in IE at the three institutions where we held focus groups was 50% at Institution A, 38% at Institution B, and 33% at Institution C, well representing the range in MIDFIELD. This corresponds with Litzler’s (2010) finding that certain institutions and programs are better able to recruit a diverse population than others.

TABLE 2 Race and Gender of IE Students from Semester 3 Through Graduation

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Curriculum Expectations for IE and Other Engineering Disciplines Table 3 compares the required engineering core courses for industrial engineering programs to those required for chemical, civil, electrical, and mechanical engineering programs at the nine institutions in MIDFIELD. The expectations of students in IE are very similar to those in other engineering majors. The IE core curriculum is typical of other engineering curricula. Thus, the attraction of students to IE does not appear to be based on a desire to avoid engineering core requirements. Since the courses included in the IE core curriculum are so similar to those of other engineering disciplines, it cannot be argued that the design of the preparatory curriculum for IE is “weaker.”

Performance Measures of Students Choosing Industrial Engineering To explore whether the students choosing IE were “weaker” in some way, we studied the grades earned in the most universal courses from Table 3, namely Calculus I, II, and III, Physics I and II, and Chemistry I. Litzler (2010) notes that fields with greater representation of women had higher average GPAs. While Litzler expresses concern that this finding may be interpreted to mean that women are more likely to choose “easier” disciplines, our study compares the performances of students in various majors in a common set of courses to bring clarity to the issue. We calculated the grade point average of students in these core courses disaggregating by third-semester major namely IE, chemical, civil, electrical, and mechanical. The population for each major therefore includes: (1) the students matriculating in that major who

TABLE 3 Engineering Course Requirements at MIDFIELD Institutions, 1999

300 101 (April 2012) 2 Journal of Engineering Education persist in that major through the third semester and (2) students who switch into that major from other engineering majors, FYE programs, or from outside engineering and are enrolled at the end of the third semester. Transfer students are not easily compared to first- time-in-college students, and are not included in this study. Each major’s third-semester population excludes students who matriculate in that major or switch into that major before the third semester, but leave the major (or the university) prior to the end of the third semester. Women enrolled in IE in the third semester are performing academically well, with an average grade in these six core courses of 2.63, compared to chemical (2.79), mechanical (2.66), civil (2.63), and electrical (2.59). The average core course grade of chemical engineering students at the third semester stands out, which is not surprising given that chemical engineering students exhibit the highest level of pre-college performance indica- tors among engineering majors (Zhang, Thorndyke, Anderson & Ohland, 2003). Men enrolled in IE at the third semester do indeed have the lowest average core course grade (2.49) compared to men in chemical (2.77), electrical (2.64), mechanical (2.60), and civil (2.54). Thus, while men who are weak academically may gravitate toward IE, the same does not appear to be the case for women who enroll in IE. Studying the overall GPA at the third semester (rather than the grades in selected courses) of students enrolled in various disciplines, women enrolled in IE have a cumulative GPA at the end of the third semester of 2.88 compared with a 2.89 cumulative GPA for all women enrolled in engineering in the third semester. The GPA and average core course grade are limited measures; they are computed at the third semester and are only valid at the third semester. In addition to changes in the GPAs of students that can occur as the students take additional coursework, this calculation is particularly affected by changes in population, changing as students move into and out of various engineering majors. The subject, therefore, deserves a more focused treatment, and a more complete study is under way to describe the course performance of students in various engineering disciplines and the role that performance may play in migration and attraction. The comparison here is intended to provide evidence that the relatively high fraction of women in IE cannot be explained away simply because IE is easier or more tolerant of weaker students—it is important therefore, to listen to the reasons described by women in IE.

Student Voices We have shown that IE is a major that attracts students of all races and both genders and that the core curriculum expectations for IE students are very similar to those found in the other engineering disciplines. From this point, we sought to explore with women what it is that attracted them to IE and why they believe the major is attractive to women in general. In our focus groups we asked for the key reasons why they chose the IE major and how it differed from other majors that they considered. We asked them to speculate about why women were more attracted to IE than other engineering majors. Finally, we asked why they persist in IE. The common themes about the attractiveness of IE expressed by the women are: warmth, flexibility, passion, efficient, sociability, generalists, feminine, career opportunities, and finally, least often mentioned, was easier. They are highlighted below ordered by decreasing frequency of mention. Warmth. More than any other reason, students described the atmosphere in their departments as warm, inviting, positive, and familial. “The whole department is just really, they’re really enthusiastic (all start to voice agreement at once). It’s just – they made you feel

301 Journal of Engineering Education 101 (April 2012) 2 so welcome and warm” (A1). Along the same lines, one of the male students in Trytten and colleagues’ (2004) study coined the term “inviteful engineering” to capture the positive perceptions of IE at Oklahoma. Like the IE department at OU, most of the IE departments in MIDFIELD are relatively small compared to other engineering departments at those institutions with fewer than 200 undergraduate students in the major at any one time. In our study, although Institution B has more than 350 students, Institutions A and C have fewer than 200 undergraduate students in the major. This small size leads to a family atmosphere. “It’s just one big family, especially at [school A] in the industrial engineering department. …You can ask any other major, we actually look like one big family” (A3). I definitely agree with like the small family aspect. And you can still go and talk to professors you may have had like another semester, and they’ll just sit down and just talk, see how you’re doing, and stuff like that. And, once I got to know them I was like, I definitely want to stay here. I just knew. I was like, I love the people that I’m in here with. (C2) Students seem to genuinely like the people that they come across in their majors. One student said “it’s just no drama in the major…no one has any problem with anyone” (A1). Faculty are also described as relaxed and helpful. I mean it doesn’t feel like the atmosphere in our classes – it’s not like, oh, they’re just the professor and we’re just sitting here taking notes. It’s more laid back I guess. So it’s easier to learn and…you feel more relaxed in class because they make it that way. (C2) Everybody’s so relaxed. All the professors are relaxed. You walk in the class and they [just say] “hey, how ya doin’?” They know your name. They know your face. Even when you think they don’t know your name (giggles) they know your name. (A6) Students find the faculty and staff to be approachable. Professors, advisors, and even department chairs are willing to help with homework and personal issues. The departmental advisor at School A helped students deal with the death of another student, made students feel welcome in their first year, and found scholarship money so one student could continue in the program. To be perfectly honest, my freshman year here, I didn’t do so well. But after my freshman year I had to do a lot of things and my advisors and my professors were there to help me get back on track my following years. So that was the biggest…I guess the only and biggest obstacle I’ve faced since I’ve been here, but the department was so willing. You know, if I did my part, they were willing to help me through the process. (A2) The chairperson of our department, and he just made… my situation, feel a lot better because I used to work like a lot. I used to go straight from class into work. And … my GPA was just dropping and dropping …. And [the department chair] actually called me up … and then I went to the office and talked to him about the situation, … and he actually made me feel a lot [more] comfortable with it, because he [said], “I did the same thing you did when [I was in] college, and…I can relate to you.” (A3)

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[I had a family issue and] was very tired and had two IE classes. And my professors were very flexible, very nice about it. One of them actually [let me complete] some work just from home so that I can take care of [my family issue] and work…. So he’s definitely helped me out a whole lot. And the other one also - if I ever needed anything, I could stop by and he’d catch me up on the assignments, that kind of thing. (C1) Lyon (2009) found that successful women in engineering all had a faculty or staff mem- ber who supported them academically and personally when necessary and that was one of the key reasons that students persisted in spite of the difficulty, isolation, and lack of balance between academic and personal lives that they felt as engineers. Litzler (2010) found that students (men and women) in majors with the highest proportion of women (including IE) report a greater sense that their professors care and a greater sense of community and that students in IE, along with materials science engineering, appear to be doing a particularly good job of creating community of the nine majors studied. Finally, this sense of warmth connects to the concept of social capital. Through the cul- tivation of social relationships students perceive unique bonds with professors that lead to opportunities. This student made the connection apparent: But I would say that all the professors I’ve ever had are very approachable… if you make the time to go and talk to them, they’ll talk to you about anything, and you can develop the relationship of a mentor. And that was kind of my experience… I went to a couple of office hours with my probability professor and obviously, you know, you get sick of talking about probability, so I’ll say hey, what’re you doin’ this weekend? And so we just kind of started a friendship from there. And then, whenever I needed, you know, help in other classes or a recommendation for a scholarship or anything like that, we just kind of email, even though he’s not at [this institution] any more. (B3) In this example, we see that the student’s perception of a valuable social network grew from the rapport established between the professor and student, which fits within the student’s sense of the “approachable” environment cultivated overall by the faculty. The connection between a positive climate and the perceived potential for the acquisition of social capital in IE is clear. Flexibility. While students believed that IE departments were nice places to be, they also liked the flexibility of opportunities they had both during their time at the university and once they embarked on a career. Students at two of the schools mentioned the opportunity to study abroad and how this was possible for them due to the flexibility of course sequencing in the major. All three schools offer study abroad opportunities specifically for industrial engineering majors. The prospect of being able to apply what they have learned to a number of fields is a very strong attraction for these women. “I also liked its versatility compared to the other majors. With industrial engineering you can work in so many different fields, but you’re not limited to one area” (C3). Even if they do not yet know what they want to do, they believe that they will have a lot of options “With our discipline, we can do absolutely anything….We can build schools, phones, theme parks, I mean, anything you can think of we can do” (A2). The theme park example she cites refers to an IIE video that appears on School A’s Web site, suggesting that the content in the recruitment video resonates with the theme of flexibility.

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No matter what I want to do, I can go into any field…. So I mean, having a degree like that under my belt and then making the decision, oh, now, what are my interests? How can I apply my major and the things that I like here with my outside interests and make it a career? (A6) There are so many different fields within IE. And some of them are pretty different, so I knew that I could if I wanted to go somewhere in finance or management, I could. Or if I want to do something more technical, or operations, or even social science/human related – they’re all pretty different but they still…[use] problem solving skills. (B6) Sixty-one percent of the students in the OU studies (Murphy et al., 2006; Murphy et al., 2007) used breadth of the field as a descriptor for IE ranking it fourth of the eight de- scriptors they used. Nearly all (11/12) of the faculty they interviewed at OU used breadth as a term to describe IE, which is due to the intentional design of the curriculum to ex- pose students to that breadth. This descriptor had the lowest spread among institutions (16 percentage points), indicating that it is a very common feature of the various curricula. They conclude that a majority of students they interviewed chose IE “not because of a particular interest in an IE sub-field, but for the variety of work available to an IE and the potential to shift among the types of work within one career” (Murphy et al., 2007, p. 245). Six of our participants who initially thought they wanted to be business majors chose industrial engineering instead. The ability to combine engineering skills with management skills was very attractive to them. “I looked into industrial engineering and I was like, wow, this is like a twist of business and engineering. I mean you can’t go wrong with it” (A4). I’ve always just been like a math and science person. So when I applied here, I was thinking more of management, but I talked to some other students and they [told me] industrial engineering is kind of management but with more math and science. So it just made sense. (B6) I kind of like that it’s a lot of business, actually. And I was trying to decide between a business major and engineering. I almost went to [another university with a strong undergraduate business program]. And so it’s a lot more focused on business than the other engineering disciplines. I like that for sure. (C1) The OU studies also found that the business aspects of IE were attractive to a majority of the students they interviewed (Murphy et al., 2007; Shehab et al., 2005). Like our students, they found that people were attracted to the prestige and at some level the difficulty of being engineers while embracing the business side. A very appealing quality of the discipline for some of the students is that because of its flexibility, one does not need to embark on an engineering career upon graduation. “I didn’t necessarily want to be an engineer when I graduated but I wanted to be able to think like an engineer and be able to use that in a … variety of fields” (B2). I want to go into law. And going to law school would eliminate me taking the FE [Fundamentals of Engineering exam] or being a professional engineer. It kind of gets me straight to the product. I can be studying engineering and in law which makes things a little bit easier, not being a professional engineer. (A4)

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I guess if I wasn’t studying industrial engineering I might not be studying engineering. I liked industrial engineering because of the problem solving skills that can be applied in different fields. (B6) It is not particularly surprising that a field notable for its breadth would attract people who want to have a good foundation for any endeavor that they might want to pursue, even if it is outside of the expected bounds of the discipline. Eight of the 20 women have non- engineering career goals. We do not have comparative data to know if this is common to women in all engineering disciplines or unique to IE. This is a question that should be explored in future research. The “big picture” nature of IE, however, gives these women con- fidence that they can work in many different disciplines. Interestingly, this is one theme that is not mentioned in others’ research outside of the context of breadth of the major. In those cases, the breadth that is discussed is within the field of industrial engineering as broadly defined, not as a springboard to careers completely outside of the discipline. Passion. Another theme that arose was the passion that students feel for their major. They reflected a real joy in being part of the department and learning the material. Stu- dents at School A, in particular were ebullient about being in the IE major. “I love, I love, I love industrial engineering. I can honestly say that. I love my major” (A4). “I mean industrial engineering is so…dynamic. It’s just a great major to have. It’s a great base, it’s a great – I dunno, it’s just great” (A6). “It’s a passion. Having a passion about this [makes us] even more dedicated to what we want to do and that’s what makes us so successful. Because we’re really dedicated to it” (A4). Students at Schools B and C were somewhat more reserved in their descriptions, but nonetheless expressed a similar joy in studying industrial engineering. “I think if you have a passion and if you’re attracted to something here, you’re obviously gonna do better than working at something that you’re not passionate about” (B5). “Overall, it’s been a wonder- ful experience. I have not been disappointed by the department. I love my classes. The material is fascinating for me. I love getting to work on different problems and our faculty and TAs are amazing” (B8). I just really liked the stuff I was doing. Like, it’s kinda hard to go into a class and [think] I really enjoy this. And I just knew that I enjoyed it when the classes were tough and when I came I [thought] I really like that class, even though I was up late some nights studying. I really enjoyed what I was doing. (C3) This passion extended to or perhaps evolved from the professors because of the perception that faculty also have a passion for teaching the material. And the professors are excited about what they teach. It’s not like the professors are up there like, uh, okay, well, another class, here we go. You know, they’re like this is what I’ve learned. This is how I’ve applied it and this is what I want to teach you so that you can apply it in a different way, in a better way. (A6) So I know for me it made a huge difference that when I came into the department, even my entry level classes, I had teachers who were really passionate about making sure that we really understood the material because they knew that would get us to the courses that they were passionate about. (B8) This theme of passion for teaching and the discipline appears to be something common among industrial engineering departments. The passion these students express is an

305 Journal of Engineering Education 101 (April 2012) 2 extreme expression of interest, which is acknowledged as a component of career choice (Holland, 1973). Murphy and her colleagues (2007) considered it “striking” (p. 245) how students talked about their peers and professors as being passionate about their field in the four institutions they studied and noted that faculty at Oklahoma were hired in part because they had a passion for teaching and mentoring. Efficient. The idea of continual improvement and efficiency was another theme. “If the economy’s good, people want to save money. If the economy’s bad, people want to save money” (B3). These women enjoyed making products and processes less expensive and more efficient. “What we do is make things faster, better, cheaper, and there’s not anything on this earth that doesn’t want to be made faster, better or cheaper” (A6). A lot of other engineers call us imaginary engineers (others chuckle). But for some reason, you can’t do anything without us. Might have a mechanical engineer that can design the same thing that we do, but we can do it cheaper. (A5) I worked at a summer camp which had hundreds of people and even looking at the lunchroom I was like, “you need to rearrange that line.” And so from practical things like that, I can see that that saved a certain amount of time. And I’m really interested in making things better. (B10) I wanted to be able to design really cool things like that [company] facility. That thing was awesome. They have three different stories of conveyor belts moving parts all over the place and bringing them exactly to where they need to be at the right time. And being able to work with a process and come up with something that’s that efficient and that amazing, that sold me. (B8) That was my thing because I feel like I can really help people with building stuff, putting stuff together. But we worry about making stuff better for the use of everybody. (C4) Making things more efficient is one of the founding concepts of IE. While it has evolved from the humans-as-cogs-in-a-process of Frederick Taylor’s scientific management to a discipline that is overtly concerned with the integration of people with processes and components, the central notion of efficiency and continuous improvement pervades the discipline. Murphy et al. (2006) found that efficiency was mentioned as a descriptor of IE second only to people-oriented by their 117 interviewees at four institutions. Sociability. As we have noted from the literature, industrial engineering is the discipline of choice for people-oriented engineers. These students likewise found the expecta- tion of working with people very attractive. Women who are extroverts believe that as industrial engineers they have the ability “to shine our personality a little bit more than any other [engineering] discipline would do” (A4). They liked the ability to be as technical or social as they felt comfortable with in their jobs. The social aspect of their anticipated work was a key attraction. The opportunities in IE are, as far as jobs go, they’re a little more social. I needed to work with people … it’s kind of like a connection. So it’s definitely still technical, but there’s also more of a personal aspect too. (B6) On a day-to-day basis I feel like industrial engineers talk to more people, have more kind of social aspects of what they need to do. And a lot of it is people-focused. A lot

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of it is, y’know, how can we make these people form a line that’s gonna go the fastest, or something like that. Whereas, with chemicals or mechanical you have only [a] technical role and you don’t get that interaction with other people. And that was really important to me – that I had a degree where they were just gonna hand me a toolbox of fundamentals, and I could go out and attack any problem I wanted, and really be able to interact with people at the same time. (B3) I didn’t want to be sitting at a desk my whole life. And I knew with industrial engineering I was pretty much guaranteed that I could find a job where I’d be out working with other people and I wouldn’t be sitting [in the] same place every day. (C3) This concept of working with people also goes back to the birth of the discipline. Lillian Gilbreth, while initially agreeing with Frederick Taylor on scientific management principles, later disagreed with him over his disregard for the human element as the discipline was evolving (Graham, 1998). In their 2006 study, Murphy et al. found that “people-oriented” was the most mentioned descriptor of IE in the aggregate among their 117 interviewees at four institutions, although there was some variation among institutions. Generalist. The broad curriculum in IE leads to a general knowledge of other engineering disciplines through mandatory coursework in those other disciplines. Students felt that this made them more “well-rounded,” allowed them a “big picture” understanding of a project or process, and an ability to take more coursework if they need to learn more about technical issues in other fields. As one student said, “we have to dibble-dabble in everything. But nobody really dibble-dabbles in what we do. So that kind of gives us the upper hand. So we know a little bit like an overview of everything” (C4). They found these qualities to be attractive for both furthering their education and making them highly desirable as employees. It’s dynamic, it’s the most complex discipline of engineering….So since we’re in the major and we know what we can do, we can mold our education or what we can do to fit whatever we’re applying for, whatever the position is. We can apply our knowledge and what we’ve been taught to excel in whatever that position is. And a lot of people are unaware of what an industrial engineer is capable of. So that’s one of those things that geared me to doing industrial engineering. (A2) Industrial engineers get to solve the big problems. They are the ones that determine how the whole project is going to run. And then they go tell the mechanical engineers, “I need you to build a machine that does this. I need you to make a chemical that can to this.” And I liked the piece of industrial engineering where it looks at the process. It looks at the whole big picture and allows you to zoom in and at the same time to zoom out and look at the whole thing. (B3) I think one thing that makes it different is with our curriculum we learn a lot about everything else. We don’t just do like computer engineering or civil engineering. We take classes in a lot of those other majors and we learn a lot about everything so we can tie it into what we’re supposed to be doing, which is making stuff efficient. (C3)

Feminine. We asked these women why they think women are more attracted to industrial engineering than other engineering disciplines. In response, they brought out what

307 Journal of Engineering Education 101 (April 2012) 2 they consider to be the feminine aspects of industrial engineering. Rather than drawing on perceived distinctions between the social and the technical, as might have been expected, women responded using essentialist terms. “You look through the list of the majors, like if I had to say girlier or guy, I would definitely [say] industrial engineering is girlier” (A1). I know it’s a little sexist, but I feel like women take things and make it better. That’s what we’re here for. I mean you have babies or whatever, you take this little thing and you make it into a person. That’s what we do, that’s our nature….We nurture. So in industrial engineering you take this little thing and you make it bigger, better, and cheaper (she and others chuckle). So I think women are more drawn to this major because it goes hand in hand with our nature. (A6) I think in terms of the subject of industrial engineering, girls, but I don’t mean that I think guys can’t do it, but girls tend to be better at it. Like scheduling and figuring out more efficient ways to do things, and sort of planning and I think that’s the big aspect of industrial engineering. And so I think it fits our strengths better than it would a lot of men’s strengths. … And I think it goes back to just growing up in general. Girls are more organized, schedule-focused…. And so I feel like the strengths of the gender in general fit industrial engineering pretty well, such that it would make us better. (B7) These responses echo those of some of those found by Foor and Walden (2009). They interpret them as women students, within the borderland that is industrial engineering, having the “freedom to enact culturally prescribed notions of heteronormative femininity” and “claim a nontransgressive feminine engineering identity” (p. 54). They attribute this to a comfortable culture and a community created in part by female faculty where “women can negotiate acquiring the status of ‘doing engineering’ without committing gender inau- thentication by ‘being an engineer’” (p. 59). However, Foor and Walden do caution that saying IE is a “natural fit” can lead to this rationale being used to justify continued exclu- sion of women from other engineering disciplines. Career opportunities. The perceived availability of good and even fun jobs immediately after graduation has tremendous appeal. A lot of people that major in things that aren’t careers, they’re stuck without jobs when they graduate, so that was important when I was looking for what I was going to major [in] and making sure that when I graduate I’d be able to find a job. (A1) I had [a social science major] as my first major and then when I was like a third year I started double majoring because I realized that there weren’t as many jobs in [that field]. And a lot of my friends weren’t getting jobs and so they would just delay here and go work at the mall and then go to grad school and it wasn’t really what I wanted to do. So I wanted a job straight after graduation. (B10) Like if you go to the career fair, you will find a job. I mean, last semester I got seven job offers. And you just kind of look at them and you’re like, look at all these interesting things that I could do. Look at all this fun that I could have and you have to choose. (B3) Not only are good jobs available, but these women also saw opportunities to advance quickly in their careers without having to go to graduate school.

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The time that you start off to the point where you can enter management is short (others mumble agreement). It’s like a zero to five year span that you can be in management and you’re talking management within five years of graduation, [with] just an undergrad [degree]. (A6) Since industrial engineers, if we were to do something in manufacturing or whatever job it may be or whatever corporation, I think we would be in charge (a few chuckles from others) of the other fields. Like if you’re a mechanical engineer, you work there, but I could be your boss a lot easier or quicker than you can move up in management. (A2) I think it has more opportunity for management. I didn’t know that before and I was researching it and then, I guess you have a lot of room to move up. When you get a career in industrial where you might not have the opportunity in other fields as much. (C2) Murphy, et al. (2006) found this sentiment to be more prevalent among the men that they interviewed than the women. It was also the only domain of the eight that they identified that had such a large gender gap. Men and women tended to respond in about equal percentages on their other domains. However, A2 reflected a nearly identical comment from one of the men in Trytten and colleagues’ 2004 study who said “industrial engineers will be the [other engineers’] bosses in the future” (p. 3). We cannot speak for the men, but the women we interviewed did get the message that IE is a road to advancement. The connection between perceived opportunities for career placement in IE and the acquisition of social capital during tenure as an undergraduate (as a mechanism to facilitate this transi- tion), is worthy of future study. Some evidence of this was found in the Web site content analysis later described in this paper. Easier? The theme of “industrial engineering is easier” was not a dominant one in the discourse of the students we interviewed. It was mentioned less frequently than the eight other themes we have discussed. However, we are able to shed some light on this much- discussed stereotype that students choose industrial engineering because it is easier or because they cannot succeed in “more rigorous” engineering disciplines. While many respondents suggested that popular ideas about industrial engineering being the easier major abounded, most offered a different narrative. I guess compared to all the other engineerings, people always say it’s supposed to be the easier one….That’s not why I chose it. Moderator: Why did you choose it if it was for other reasons? Respondent: Because of the social aspect of it and the versatility. I didn’t really hear about the fact that it was easier until after I had gotten in industrial engineering. And that’s when I started hearing it. So that wasn’t a reason why I did it actually. (C3) I think some people can legitimately say in a lot of ways IE is the easiest engineering, only because we’re not forced to take as many technical classes. So you don’t have to do as much like narrow, focused study in one field. You don’t have to take like three different electrical engineering courses in a row, to teach you the very specific details of how a computer works, or how to develop some kind of computer network. But it’s a much broader scope, and so with your technical electives, the chance that you can focus in on one thing

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and really narrow down… that is an option. You can take a more introductory level [in] other engineering fields, rather than being so narrow and focused on just one. (B8) I know people who are other majors, they get their masters in industrial engineering….They might call us imaginary engineering, but if you really do the statistics on that, you would know that they’ll come to industrial engineering by the end of the day. (A3) Of all our respondents, only one said the reason she chose the major was because “I heard it was easier. That you don’t take as [many] technical classes as mechanical or chemical would and that’s why I decided on industrial” (B1). The others all asserted that they chose the major for other reasons, and several were a bit defensive about the stereotypes of the IE discipline.

Web Site Content Analysis In the focus groups, women students referenced internet content, specifically the importance of the IE departmental Web page in shaping their selection of a major. Consis- tent with a grounded theory approach, the codes that emerged from the focus group data provided a basis from which to form concepts and categories for the Web site analysis. Our content analysis began with a research question: Do the departmental Web sites contain manifest content related to the coded themes that emerged in the focus groups? We then selected our sample of Web sites to be analyzed. Sample selection was deter- mined by subjects within the dataset. Thus, Web sites selected are only representative of the eight campuses with IE programs included in the MIDFIELD dataset. We use this limited sample not as a proxy for an exhaustive analysis, but rather to provide a cross- sectional snapshot of the context to which women referred during the open-ended focus group questions. One limitation to Web site analysis is that internet content changes over time, rendering some links invalid for future analysis. We used the coding units from the focus group data (that IE is warm and flexible; students’ sense of passion for the major, belief that there are opportunities to make products/processes more efficient, opportunities for sociability, IE is more general, more feminine, ample career opportunities, ease of major) to define categories for content analysis. We then reviewed the Web sites to investigate whether the coded focus group data were echoed on the departmental Web sites. Analysis of the Web sites’ content yielded information that helps understand the gendered construction of IE programs, shedding light on the strategies used to construct the profession of industrial engineering. In our review of the IE Web sites of MID- FIELD institutions, we found language that de-emphasized technological competence (traditionally a masculine domain), and instead emphasized solidarity and unity within the profession. Three important themes emerge in the content analysis of IE Web sites: IE differentiates itself from other engineering majors, collegiality, and potential for leadership. IE differentiates itself from other engineering majors. One Web site begins the page with: “Thinking of Becoming an Industrial Engineer?” followed by four key questions: Do you enjoy interacting with people? Do you enjoy working with computers? Do you enjoy solving problems? Do you enjoy making things easier for others? If

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you’ve answered yes to some of these questions, then industrial engineering just might be the right career choice for you! (http://www.eng.ncat.edu/dept/isen/ students_pros.htm) One IE program emphasized that IE majors “stand out in a crowd,” become versed in transcultural skills, work with a variety of people and emerge as team leaders. The language broadens the boundaries of engineering, blurring the technological with the social. This Web site text resembled student comments about working with people, and changing things to make them “faster, better, and cheaper,” as many students alluded to in our focus groups. Another Web site clarifies the nature of IE work: “Many people are misled by the term industrial engineer. It’s not just about manufacturing. It also encompasses service industries, with many IEs employed in entertainment industries, shipping and logistics busi- nesses, and health care organizations...” (http://www.ise.vt.edu/about/whatis.php). Simi- lar to other IE Web sites, the broad array of career possibilities are provided as examples of the potential impact students can have on their social worlds. As described earlier, students in focus groups were keenly aware of the broad range of career opportunities available to them, and spoke fluently about prospective futures with a degree in IE. Collegiality and community. One campus IE Web site boasts, “[The] mix of international students provides a fertile ground for exposing our students to a variety of cultures, developing in them an awareness of global issues. This diversity enriches the learning experience, creating engineers who can not only address the complex technical challenges facing us but who are also more sensitive and educated global citizens, a clear need for the Engineer of 2020.” (http://www.clemson.edu/ces/departments/ie/about_us/news_events/ news2010_international_collaboration.html) Another campus provocatively asks, “Is there a fun side to ISE?” and invites students to “attend frequent research meetings with faculty in two of the most popular tourist destina- tions in the United States!” (http://www.ise.vt.edu/about/index.php). Student quotes, em- bedded as textbox content on the Web sites, further highlight the social relationships between faculty and students. This student quote suggests that social capital can be acquired through both relationships with peers and with faculty: What I like best about the ISE Department are the people. All the students are friendly, respectful, and always eager to help their fellow classmates in one way or another. It seems that the ISE faculty as a whole is truly committed to seeing students succeed and excel in every aspect of their education as well as their future careers. (http://www.ise.vt.edu/about/whatis.php) The language suggests that individuals are valued, that there is a sense of community within the program and that these factors connect with students’ future careers. Pictures on the Web site also promote the idea that students and faculty will bond collegially. Leadership opportunities. Another salient theme suggests the capacity for industrial engineers to become problem-solvers that bring about change. Discussion of becoming a leader who could make things “better” and “easier” was common. Industrial engineers are facilitators who use teamwork and engineering management skills. The importance of communication skills and the ubiquity of communication as a skill set emerged hand-in-hand with the leadership discourse. These themes resonated with students in our focus groups who described that they would one day manage the other engineers. Many campuses used a

311 Journal of Engineering Education 101 (April 2012) 2 common video to highlight leadership opportunities available in industrial engineering careers and to define the scope of the field. One of our interviewees pointedly referred to “that awesome video” as the reason that she chose industrial engineering. The video was produced by the IIE and demonstrates the wide range of job opportunities, in workplaces that range from NASA to Hershey’s Chocolate to Disney. The video highlights the diversity of industrial engineers by race, gender, and age, in their own voices. They use language such as “fun and creative” and highlight the leadership services provided to diverse customers. (http://www.clemson.edu/ces/departments/ie/undergraduate_program/index.html) Foor and Walden (2009) examined the IE Web site at University of Oklahoma and found many of the same themes as we have. They conclude that the “unintended consequences from the school’s recruitment materials seem to contribute to the perception that IE is a soft, nontechnical engineering discipline, ‘naturally’ suited for women” (p. 51). There are some exceptions. Two MIDFIELD campuses refrain from ebullient language, emphasizing instead a high national ranking and reputation, the premier connections of their faculty and at one, only at the very bottom of the Web page, is there a mention of collegiality. Students, too, in one of the focus groups addressed the prestige and rank of their campus in much the same manner as it is communicated on that campus’s Web site; however, rank and reputation were not common reasons for choosing IE among students at all campuses. What was common was that the students presented themselves in much the same way as their departments presented themselves on their Web sites.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

This paper has examined what it is that makes industrial engineering attractive to women. Using quantitative data, we show that students are attracted to IE from Semester 3 through graduation unlike any other engineering discipline. While the ability of industrial engineering programs to attract women may be particularly noticeable, we found that such programs attract both women and men, and members of all racial and ethnic groups. We found no quantitative basis for the persistent stereotype that industrial engineering is easier than other engineering disciplines or that its students are less qualified. In the first two-to-three semesters when students take courses common to most or all engineering disciplines, institutional data show that students enrolled in IE at the third semester are not academically inferior to other engineering majors. While we realize that our results will not immediately dispel the popular perception, we argue that there is something different about the culture of IE that attracts students, something beyond the stereotype of being “easier.” Social capital theory is useful to understand our qualitative data findings, which draw on the voices of the IE majors and make clear reference to the norms and networks attracting them to IE: warmth of the faculty, sociability within the departments, and good job prospects. Our findings support the notion that women in IE perceive the acquisition of social capital to be related to the climate of IE departments. Social capital is one mechanism that affects attraction to and persistence in IE. In addition, consistent with other research on IE, students suggest the major is inviting and the coursework provides flexibility. Women in IE are able to find an authentic way of combining the prestigious social creden- tial of being an engineer with practices they value, without losing their sense of self. In de- scribing the major, women assert a sense of passion towards the field of IE. The least frequently mentioned attribute was the notion that IE is an easy major; yet some women expressed a keen awareness of the negative stereotypes attributed to IE as an easy major. 312 101 (April 2012) 2 Journal of Engineering Education

Finally, our content analysis of the Web sites suggests that many of the themes that emerged in the focus groups were culturally salient. That is, Web sites featured much of the same language and content suggesting, for example, that a plethora of workplaces are adaptable to IE skill sets and that IE graduates make organizations and workflows “faster, better, and cheaper.” The acquisition of social capital is also evidenced in the themes of collegiality, inclusion, and diversity, present in both focus groups and Web sites. Our findings suggest the need for more research incorporating both the voices of those social actors who facilitate the acquisition of social capital and the myriad of forums, including web content, through which students receive messages.

Generalizability One of the guiding principles of the scientific study of education is that it yields findings that replicate and generalize across studies (Feuer, Towne, & Shavelson, 2002). Al- though our focus group participants were self-selected from among women majoring in IE at three institutions, our findings corroborate those of the researchers at the University of Oklahoma studying a different set of institutions. Because of this, the findings of this qualitative research are more generalizable than would normally be expected. Perhaps the only aspect of IE mentioned by the respondents in the 2006 article by Murphy et al. that was not mentioned by any of our respondents was that IE’s are good communicators. We do not know if that is due to different research objectives, programmatic differences among institutions (institutional results varied widely from 31% to 76% mentioning communica- tions at their four schools), or some other reason. Our theory is that there appear to be universal characteristics that make IE relatively more attractive to women than most other engineering majors. We argue that it is not because industrial engineering is perceived as easier, since similar proportions of women also choose chemical engineering, by most ac- counts a “hard” discipline. Rather that the combination of coursework, career possibilities, and gestalt of industrial engineering is both different and attractive. As Litzler (2010) con- cludes, “culture and climate may be the most important factor for student decisions to choose one major over another” (p. 158).

What This Means for Other Engineering Disciplines Whether other engineering disciplines lack the qualities that make industrial engineering attractive to women, those other disciplines certainly lack the concentration of women. As part of our larger research project, we have spoken to women from many other engineering disciplines and they do not generally indicate that they “love” their major, their faculty, and the other students in their major in the way that the IE students describe. Our quantitative evidence shows that the foundational courses of the industrial engineering curricula and the academic performance of the student population at the third semester are very similar to the curricula and performance of students in other engineering disciplines. This suggests that IE has not attracted a higher fraction of women by diluting their curricula, and that it should be possible for other engineering disciplines to take measures to attract higher fractions of women as well—by creating a warm and positive atmosphere in a department where faculty and students genuinely care about each other and their success. It is possible for faculty to demonstrate a passion for their discipline and an excitement about passing this knowledge to the next generation of engineers. Further, programs or disciplines making this paradigm shift can be marketed in such a way as to promote their breadth, flexibility, and in- clusiveness of diverse people and ideas. Most engineering disciplines afford excellent career potential that can be marketed such that prospective students can understand and become

313 Journal of Engineering Education 101 (April 2012) 2 excited about the broad array of possibilities for themselves in that field. By understanding what it is that makes industrial engineering attractive to women, other engineering disciplines can apply this knowledge to diversify their populations.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation Grant No. REC-0337629 (now DRL-0729596) and EEC-0646441, funding the Multiple- Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development (MID- FIELD, a collaboration of nine partner universities) and a collaborative NSF Gender in Science and Engineering Research Grant (0734085 & 0734062). The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Nation- al Science Foundation. The authors wish to thank Laura Bottomley, Donna Llewellyn and Cindy Waters for their valuable assistance with this project as well as Sharron Frillman for acting as assistant moderator and transcribing the focus groups.

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AUTHORS

Catherine E. Brawner is president of Research Triangle Educational Consultants, 3504 Corin Court, Raleigh, NC 27612-4100; [email protected].

Michelle Madsen Camacho is associate professor in the Sociology Department and af- filiate faculty in the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of San Diego, 5998 Al- cala Park, San Diego, CA 92110; [email protected].

Russell A. Long is director of Project Assessment in Purdue University’s School of En- gineering Education, 500 Central Drive, Potter Engineering Center, Room 270, West Lafayette, IN 47907; [email protected]. 317 Journal of Engineering Education 101 (April 2012) 2

Susan M. Lord is professor and coordinator of Electrical Engineering at the University of San Diego, 5998 Alcala Park, San Diego, CA 92110; [email protected].

Matthew W. Ohland is associate professor in Purdue University’s School of Engineer- ing Education, 701 West Stadium Avenue, Neil Armstrong Hall of Engineering, West Lafayette, IN 47907-2045; [email protected].

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