Exploring the positive factors supporting women's decisions to study undergraduate engineering

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study, the second phase of a two-part investigation, employs the Reasoned Action Approach (Ajzen and Fishbein 2015) to analyse women's intentions to pursue undergraduate engineering—an approach not previously applied to address the gender disparity in engineering disciplines (Ajzen and Fishbein 2015). Through three focus groups comprising women at various stages and disciplines of undergraduate engineering studies at University College Dublin, the research identifies unique motivations and common themes. The primary findings reveal that two key factors influenced female participants' decisions to pursue undergraduate engineering: the presence of positive injunctive norms and a gender-based confidence gap in mathematics, identified in stage 1, impacting perceived behavioural control. Women with strong mathematical confidence were more likely to choose engineering. The role of mathematical confidence has been found in this study to impact the decision to study undergraduate engineering among women. As such, improving women's mathematical confidence should increase the number of women who choose to study undergraduate engineering. Furthermore, the impact of specific individual encouragement on the decision to choose to study undergraduate engineering among the group of young women who do hold high levels of perceived behavioural control is a new insight of research in this area.