Differences by Student Gender in Engineering Service-Learning

Attracting and retaining women in engineering is critical in the USA today. While women are coming to college in overrepresented numbers, they are not represented equally to men in engineering majors. Though a university can only have limited impact on the attrition of women in the engineering workforce, we can (and must!) work to improve recruitment and retention and to graduate women with adequate preparation for an engineering career. An increasing number of engineering programs are integrating service-learning (S-L) into their curricula. For the past eight years of one S-L program, students in a college of engineering have been widely surveyed at the beginning of their studies and at the end of each academic year. The purpose of the ongoing study is to investigate the impacts of S-L on the students, faculty, institution and community. Quantitative analysis of student survey responses over the years reveals a consistently marked difference in attitude between genders toward community engagement generally, and S-L specifically. For example, in the spring of 2012, 465 surveys were collected from engineering students of all grades and majors, of whom 57 identified as female. Among several other items, statistically significant differences (at the 5% level) arose in responses between the genders in their rating of Helping as a career value, their belief that service should be an expected part of the engineering profession, and their belief that S-L projects have helped them learn how to apply the concepts they learned in class to real life problems. A quarter of all spring 2012 survey participants reported that S-L was one reason they came to this college, or that it would have been if they had known about it. This included 23% of the men, but 47% of the women. Considering this study's finding that S-L is especially attractive for women, engineering departments hoping to improve their female-male ratio should consider the integration of S-L into their curriculum.