USA

Women’s engineering participation is crucial given that the shortage of engineers in the US weakens the country’s position as a leader in the global market and restricts the country’s capacity to solve infrastructural challenges. The research is significant because it promises to document factors that encourage women’s successful participation in STEM in social, political, and cultural contexts that are very different from the US. With its cross-national, in-depth exploration of women’s curricular and career choices and its attention to mechanisms producing gender-differentiated curricular and career decisions, this project promises to shed light more generally on how context shapes women’s successful participation in STEM in ways that inform our efforts to broaden participation in the US.

 Research team: Washington State University, Purdue University, Western Washington University