Abstract
Understanding the importance of salient factors associated with sustainability challenges that engineers are known to solve in influencing women’s choice of engineering is particularly important in this present world where a combination of these sustainability issues, the underrepresentation of women and the need for more engineers remain a challenge to the profession. However, little is known about the degree of importance of more detailed themes within the social, environmental and economic sustainability pillars in such career decisions. Consequently, the aim of this paper is to understand the relative importance of specific sustainability-themed factors influencing women’s choice of engineering, using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). An AHP structurally designed online survey was used to gather and analyze data from a sample of 414 UK and Nigeria respondents. The results showed that of all the ten sustainability-themed factors examined in this study, water quality/quantity, climate change, waste management, biodiversity, and material consumption/energy use, had a greater influence on the respondents’ choice of engineering relative to other factors. The data revealed specific rather than general sustainability themes that appeal to women’s choice of engineering. This could offer valuable insight from a recruitment strategy perspective to help engineering stakeholders to focus their attention and recruitment efforts on the most salient areas of influence.
Highlights
Introduction and BackgroundAddressing the demand for more engineers has been identified as one of the important tasks for the engineering profession
Female students showed more commitment to climate change than their male counterparts and expressed a desire to address these issues in addition to environmental degradation in their future careers as engineers [13]. These contradictory findings in Klotz et al [16] and Shealy et al [13] might derive from the different sustainability themes that both studies’ participants were exposed to and were familiar with, as defined by the two countries’ prevailing sustainability challenges [22,23,24,25]. These findings indicate the misunderstanding of the overlap among the three pillars of sustainability, where an environmental sustainability theme such as water pollution may be viewed as a social or economic theme, depending on the context of the study [26]
While distinctions will exist among women engineers in different countries, these findings provide practical implications for engineering stakeholders such as Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to utilize
Summary
Addressing the demand for more engineers has been identified as one of the important tasks for the engineering profession This task includes the need to develop a diverse pool of individuals who possess the required skills, knowledge and interests to tackle complex global sustainability challenges [1,2,3]. The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) [4] report cautions that this skill shortage problem poses a potential threat to the future of the industry and the sustainability agenda. This is amplified by the slow and persistent low representation of women in engineering. The Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) [7] data show that while the proportion of women engineering professionals increased from 8% to 10.4% in 2016 and 2020, respectively, the general percentage split for this period has remained low and static since 2018
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
