Leveraging Peer Relationships for Retaining Women Engineers

Moving the focus from the individual to the social group offers novel and promising tools to help ensure the success and retention of entry-level women engineers. In recent years, SWE has endorsed and partnered with several researchers who focus on women’s lack of advancement in the engineering profession.

In early 2015, SWE agreed to collaborate on a research project and report authored by Brian Rubineau, Ph.D., assistant professor of organizational behavior at McGill University. The research seeks to examine the ways peers, or near-peers (peers who are close to our social, professional and/or age level), may be used as a tool to help women succeed in engineering and technology when transitioning from school to work. Within the report, funded by the Canadian government, Dr. Rubineau notes that the paucity of new policy ideas is part of the reason little progress has been made integrating women into male-dominated professions such as engineering. Much of the report synthesizes data from years of research on the impact that peer relationships have on women’s persistence in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers.

Read full article: All Together, 18 January, 2016