The negative group dynamics that female engineers tend to experience during team-based work projects lead them to stay in the profession less often than men, a new study suggests.

The study—whose results have been published in a report co-authored by Susan Silbey, professor of humanities, sociology and anthropology at MIT—finds that women often feel marginalized, especially during internships, summer work opportunities and team-based educational activities. In those situations, gender dynamics appear to generate more opportunities for men to work on the most challenging problems, while women are assigned routine tasks or simple managerial duties.

The researchers asked more than 40 undergraduate engineering students to keep diaries, which were then systematically examined. Image credit: MIT. Overall, about 20% of undergraduate engineering degrees are awarded to women, but only 13% of the engineering workforce is female. Numerous explanations have been offered for this discrepancy, including a lack of mentorship for women in the field; the demands on women of maintaining a balance between work and family life; and a variety of factors that produce less confidence in female engineers.

The current study does not necessarily preclude some of those other explanations, but it adds an additional element to the larger discussion.

To conduct the study, the researchers asked more than 40 undergraduate engineering students to keep twice-monthly diaries. The students attended four institutions in Massachusetts: MIT, the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, Smith College and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. More than 3,000 diary entries were generated that were then systematically examined.

What emerges is a picture in which female engineering students are negatively affected at particular moments during their educational experience—particularly when they engage in team-based activities outside the classroom in a less-structured environment.

As an example, one student described an episode in a design class in which “two girls in a group had been working on the robot we were building in that class for hours, and the guys in their group came in and within minutes had sentenced them to doing menial tasks while the guys went and had all the fun in the machine shop. We heard the girls complaining about it.”

“For many women, their first encounter with collaboration is to be treated in gender-stereotypical ways," the report's authors note. "Almost without exception, we find that the men interpret the experience of internships and summer jobs as a positive experience.”

According to Silbey, the findings suggest that engineering’s gender gap is not precisely rooted in the curriculum or the classroom, which have often been the focus of past scrutiny on this topic.

“We think engineering education is quite successful by its own standards,” Silbey says. “The teaching environment is for the most part very successful.”

According to the report, new kinds of remedies could be explored in an attempt to positively impact women’s experiences as engineers in training. For instance, institutions could develop “directed internship seminars,” in which student internship experiences could be dissected to help people grasp and learn from the problems women face.