Engineering remains one of the most gender-segregated occupations in the United States. Women represent about 15 percent of the overall engineering workforce, and as little as 8 percent in specialized fields such as mechanical engineering. Engineering organizations have actively sought to promote women to account for such disparity, but a University of Illinois expert says a purposeful increase of female representation in the managerial ranks may foster some unintended consequences. It may even add another layer of sex segregation on top of the one it’s meant to mitigate.
“There are typically two career paths in engineering organizations – technical or managerial,” notes M. Teresa Cardador, a professor of labor and employment relations at Illinois. “The number of female engineers who choose or are ushered into the managerial career path is disproportionate to those who choose the technical path.” Cardador’s paper, recently published in the journal Organization Science, makes the case that this may foster a form of “intraoccupational segregation.”
The paper’s analysis discusses the existence of an inverted role hierarchy in engineering – valuing technical roles over managerial roles. “In business, the highest-status positions tend to be managerial,” Cardador said. “But in engineering, technical ability is revered while management is what you do if you have good organizational and communication skills.
“Women are stereotyped as having less technical competence in engineering, which perhaps explains why men are much more likely to remain on the technical side and women are tracked into the management side,” Cardador continued.
According to the paper, the negative consequences for women include fostering reduced identification with engineering as an occupation; reinforcing stereotypes about women’s suitability for technical work; and increasing work-life balance tensions. Having women in managerial roles also tends to validate the idea that women have “soft skills” like the ability to socialize and communicate with co-workers – but lack the technical capability to be in a highly specialized role.
Cardador notes that factors such as these have the potential to increase a woman’s chances of leaving the profession – a result that runs contrary to a firm’s goals of retaining female engineers.
