Factors affecting the educational and occupational trajectories of women in engineering in five comparative national settings

Issues surrounding women's participation in engineering have confounded policymakers around the globe for a number of years. While substantial progress has been documented for women in engineering and in computing and information technology in the Middle East, the recruitment and retention of women in these fields continue to face substantial challenges. The primary objective of our new multi-site case study is to identify the factors underlying and contributing to the educational and occupational trajectories of women in engineering and computing in Jordan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and the US. These countries vary substantially in their economic, educational, cultural, historical, legal, geographic, and political contexts AND in women's engineering and computing representation. Perhaps most importantly, they differ in their levels of prosperity, the democratization of their political and social institutions, and in the prevailing cultural understandings of engineering and computing, including its gender labeling. Our research questions are: (1) What motivates women's choice of engineering or computing as an educational/occupational path? (2) How do women perceive professionals in these fields and the work they do? (3) What societal, cultural, legal, and policy factors are perceived to support or constrain women's participation in engineering or computing fields of study and occupations? (4) What common themes emerge in different national sites and for women at different stages of study or professional practice? (5) What can we learn from one another? In addition to these general research questions, our collaborating teams in each of the five case study contexts (Jordan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and the USA) have created context-specific questions based on relevant literature and national metrics for each respective site. Our collaborators in Saudi Arabia have developed a set of context-specific research questions related to computing as well, which has enjoyed strong female participation in that nation. We will include Saudi's first female engineering program, opened in 2011, in the second phase of our study when its first cohort has graduated. In this paper, we describe general and country-specific research questions and solicit input from diverse stakeholders in the IFEES community on the relevance, validity, and scope of these questions. By eliciting varied and broad perspectives, the research questions and resulting interview protocol for this study will gather rich qualitative data and will encourage buy in from the IFEES community for scale up survey work during our next phase.