Does the nuclear engineering field perform worse in utilizing women? Evidence from South Korea

Abstract

Despite its remarkable socioeconomic development, South Korea underperforms in terms of female labor force participation and women in leadership positions. As women appear to avoid nuclear engineering, we aim to evaluate its relative performance in attracting women to its labor force compared to other college majors. Using college-major level information from 2000, we test whether the female faculty share in nuclear engineering is lower than its counterparts. Although nuclear engineering has one of the lowest female faculty shares, its share exceeds that of agricultural science, business and economics, chemical engineering, chemistry, civil engineering, and industrial engineering once we properly control for gender composition among students and other compounding factors. In other words, once female students major in nuclear engineering, they are less likely to leave their fields compared to their counterparts in other disciplines. This result implies that if the nuclear engineering field aims to attract more women to its workforce, it is important to target them from the early stage of their careers.