Pay, Promotion, and Women in Engineering

A friend of mine shared a journal article with me on why women leave engineering. In the article, Hunt concludes that women generally leave engineering to enter non-related fields (as opposed to leaving to non-employment) and that pay and promotion are the strongest motivating factors pushing women out of engineering (as opposed to childcare, as the stereotype suggests).

I find this conclusion incredibly interesting. Jack Welch and one of his VPs, a woman who sacrificed her family for her work, declared in a conference that it was largely the concerns of childcare which prevented women from advancing in their careers, so Hunt’s conclusion directly contradicts Welch’s. Of course, nothing save anecdotal experiences and gut instinct actually support Welch’s conclusion, but given Welch’s experiences at the helm of GE, a huge, global, and diverse company in dozens of different businesses, I am reluctant to dismiss Welch too quickly. I have a certain amount of personal experience that also contradicts some of Hunt’s sub-conclusions, though again, this is certainly no evidence that her conclusions are incorrect at large.

Hunt’s analysis certainly begs a number of interesting questions. First and foremost, given these surveys are using self-reported data, it very well could be an issue with the manner in which the survey was conducted whether “leaving for pay and promotion” reasons is strictly conveyed as independent of childcare or family reasons. Any self-reported survey is susceptible to this sort of skew or bias, but I would be especially careful of surveys regarding employment–especially leaving jobs–as this topic tends to be deeply personal and sensitive, and questions on this topic are difficult to answer honestly. Unlike taking polls in a product focus group, for instance, here, the polltaker’s ego is intimately connected to the answers he or she is providing.

Another interesting question is why women trained in engineering tend to have a higher percentage in non-engineering fields. The article itself cites that workers (men and women in aggregate here) face an 11.6% wage penalty when leaving engineering. If pay and promotion are the strongest motivating factors pushing women out of engineering, why would women settle for less? One possible answer is that they don’t. Hunt does not segment wage penalty by gender when leaving engineering, but it is possible women may actually, in a majority of cases, earn more by leaving engineering than by staying in it.

Yet another point that seems contradictory is that women trained in engineering tend to have an employment advantage when entering into their careers in engineering versus entering into other fields. Taken in conjunction with the earlier point, this means that women trained in engineering have a greater affinity, statistically, for the field over other fields. Furthermore, pay and promotion are the main reasons they wish to leave engineering. Somehow, other fields for which women show less affinity for and which pay less tend to present a stronger draw to women than to men, despite women citing pay and promotion as the main reasons for their leaving. It could be the case that women, more than men, somehow discover and develop a greater affinity for other fields while in engineering, though this possibility seems far-fetched at best.

I would be very curious if further analysis could reveal answers to the questions above and to other questions the article does not try to tackle. For instance, I notice the longer one stays in engineering in particular the more “stuck” one becomes, and this effect could be investigated and further analyzed. In comparison to many other fields, my experience suggests engineering has substantially less sideways mobility. As a result, many folks I know, in hopes to avoid getting stuck, simply desire a wide breadth of experiences in a diverse range of industries. Many of these individuals pursued engineering in the university to acquire a technical and quantitative background, for the broad merits such a background supposedly offers, often with the explicit intention to avoid getting stuck. Career “stickiness,” and the positive or negative implications thereof, could also be an additional area for Hunt’s regression.

Lastly, another area I would find interesting is the distributions, by university and university tier, of the reasons women leave engineering. Again, I have only my own anecdotal evidence, but in my graduating class of electrical engineering students, out of my friends who entered the workplace out of college, I estimate almost 25% have left engineering, much more than the 10% for men and 13% for women that Hunt cites. Even worse, practically no one in my graduating class is an actual electrical engineer. Higher-tiered universities tend to train their engineers more broadly, with a base in arts and humanities, and place them into more prestigious and competitive environments. In other words, such institutions may actually be training and enabling engineers to leave their field. It would be very interesting to investigate this effect on the engineering-exit gender gap by institution.

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