Resumen de The impact of gender on engineering students’ group work experiences

Prisca Aeby, Roger Fong, Siara Isaac, Mila Vukmirovic, Roland Tormey

• Women remain significantly underrepresented in engineering education, a cultural milieu which is stereotypically seen as amasculine domain. Laboratory studies and some questionnaire-based studies suggest being numerically under- or over-represented in student working groups may have an impact on the group work experiences of both female and maleengineering students, however this has not previously been adequately explored in realistic engineering education teamwork settings. Using a quasi-experimental survey design with 217 participants, we document a number of micro-discriminations with respect to women in student work teams in engineering education. Both male and female studentsseem primed to anticipate potential difficulties arising for female students to a greater extent than for male students, evenamong high performing students. This suggests a cultural, implicit bias. As such, student group work in engineeringprogrammes may need to be accompanied by teaching and learning strategies which seek to actively question suchstereotypes and implicit biases.