Exploring the Odds: Gender Differences in Departing the Engineering Profession

Women’s departure or nonentrance into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics professions, particularly engineering, has been a lively source of scholarly inquiry for the past three decades. Much of the literature in this area has been with solely female samples of participants, begging the question as to whether or not men and women either choose to leave the profession or not enter for the same or similar reasons. This present study collected a large sample of men (n = 1,273) who had either left or never entered the engineering profession and compared their responses to a large sample of women (n = 1,235) on a set of categorical response variables. Using the perspective of the Theory of Work Adjustment, our results suggest that there are gender differences in reasons for departure, raising the possibility that engineering climates differentially reinforce needs for men and women. Implications of this research are discussed.