Despite widespread efforts at various levels of our educational system to engage greater numbers of females and minorities in STEM, fewer than nine percent of today’s mechanical engineers are female. There is also a disturbingly high attrition rate of females from engineering programs and professions, especially in mechanical engineering. In a previous paper \[IMECE 2017_72597\], we explored the reasons behind the extreme gender imbalance in engineering, arguing its traceability to differential and discriminatory college experiences of women and men that result in greater discouragement of women to persist in chosen engineering fields. This discouragement and corresponding attrition also afflicts minority and non-minority male students. Our investigation also revealed that the organizational culture throughout much of engineering can be described as low-empathy and guided by norms and practices based on extreme traditional male stereotypes. This culture alienates many students at a time when large STEM and engineering organizations like ABET call for the need for greater empathy and social responsibility among engineers. A lack of empathy and social responsibility concerns has been cited as key in the discouragement of women from persisting in programs like mechanical engineering, but much less so in disciplines like bioengineering. We conducted a survey of 400 of our students from various engineering disciplines and compared their responses to elicit data on “stempathy” (human empathy in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and fair or equitable treatment across gender, race (any basis for differential treatment) across engineering sub-disciplines. Participants also completed a personal measure of “empathy quotient” based on Simon Baron-Cohen’s systemizing-empathizing dichotomy, in addition to self-ratings on predictors of eventual persistence in their chosen engineering fields that included: engineering self-efficacy; a sense of belongingness in department or program; involvement in departmental, institutional and professional activities; peer support; faculty/mentor encouragement; disappointment or satisfaction with program; being valued in program; and intention to persist. To test the hypothesis that persistence is a function of level of program stempathy *and* of departmental lack of discrimination; and more specifically whether empathy quotient score (EQ) would moderate the influence of either independent variable on the persistence indicator criterion, a hierarchical multiple regression analysis was performed. The analysis revealed strong main effects in the model, as well as a moderating effect of empathy quotient on departmental discrimination. Having a higher EQ is associated with a decreased likelihood of persisting in a department or discipline perceived to be discriminatory, in this case: mechanical engineering.


STEMpathy Study on Persistence in Mechanical Engineering

Division / Sponsors: 
Aerospace, Bioengineering, Applied Mechanics, Design Engineering Division, Advanced Energy Systems, Manufacturing Engineering Division, Noise Control and Acoustics, Nondestructive Evaluation, Diagnosis, and Prognosis (NDPD), Nuclear Engineering Division, Process Industries Division, Fluids Engineering, Heat Transfer, Materials, Microelectromechanical Systems, Safety Engineering and Risk Analysis, Computers & Information in Engineering


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2020/volume/84478

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