"Gender diversity remains a key issue in the engineering sector with females accounting for only 9% of all engineering and technology employees (IET, 2015). The dissertation aims to investigate the reasons for this and to suggest solutions and policies that could help to increase this number. Questionnaires will be distributed to females within the engineering community, either as current students or working professionals, to gain a quantitative and qualitative insight into the opportunities, experiences and views of women within this sector. An analysis of the results will form the basis of more in-depth qualitative information gathering through one-on-one interviews. Professionals with first hand experience will be interviewed to provide further detail of the characteristics and issues of the industry. A range of feminist literature and information on governmental policy will be used to identify potential reasons for the lack of female representation in the sector, to link the empirical results of the dissertation to key debates, and to provide the basis for offering solutions. The research is expected to suggest that the majority of female engineers believe that gender imbalance is a problem and that changes need to be made in order to improve this. However, depending on people’s experiences, solutions will differ. Government policy via education which addresses the stereotypes of engineers and encourages the study of STEM subjects is expected to be the best method to resolve the gender imbalance."
Permanent link to this resource: https://doi.org/10.24384/000480
Rose, Hanna
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences\Department of Social Sciences
Year: 2018
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