Welcome to engineering: gender equality in learning and integration among first year students

• Autores: Raquel Torres, Manuel Torres, Sara Ferreira, Armando Sousa, Luciano Moreira
• Localización: The International journal of engineering education, ISSN-e 0949-149X, Vol. 34, no. 1, 2018, págs. 45-55
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The presented research explores four years of newcomer engineering students atFEUP, one of the largest faculties ofengineering in Portugal. The students are surveyed in a mandatory course common to all engineering programs at thementioned faculty, totalling an involvement of about four thousand. This research explores the perceptions of 1198newcomer students regarding learning and satisfaction, workload, integration into academic work environment andinstitutional support whilst trying to find gender differences regarding the following variables: engineering program,academic year and change of residence. The questionnaire used in the presented research was validated and its internalconsistency was excellent. The findings reveal that students’ perceptions on learning and satisfaction as well as oninstitutional support (two out of four factors) are consistently similar between genders throughout the four years of thestudy. The differences found between male and female students on integration and workload, however consistent, are smallif not marginal. The study is significant because it shows the relevance of the optimization efforts for integration (in theacademic work environment) introduced in a mandatory course at the start of engineering degrees in order to bridge thegapbetween male and female students.Thisresearch shows that we are walking towards gender equalityin engineering, butwe feel that there is still some effort to be done, namely through inspiring scholars to analyse and act upon academiccontexts and higher education governance without prejudice and with an open mind: a commitment that is as hard asnecessary.