Career Expectations under the Glass Ceiling:
Women at the Start of an Engineering Career
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7577/sjvd.3247Keywords:
Management, gender, career, engineers, expectationsAbstract
Engineering is one of the most common educational backgrounds for managers in Norway. Earlier studies have shown that women engineers, compared to their male colleagues, less frequently become managers. This study investigates career ambitions and career expectations among male and female engineering students. The results reveal that women and men have equal ambitions, but different career expectations. Women report lower expectations of achieving a management position compared to men. The careful discussion of the findings surprisingly shows that the most common explanations of gender differences in careers do not get empirical support. Men and women students have equal career preferences, and women do not seem to have lower self-confidence than their male fellow students do.
Further, the effect of having children on students’ ambitions and expectations are similar for both genders. However, one explanation stands out as an important explanation of gender differences in management expectations: women’s anticipation of a glass ceiling. The study uses a survey carried out among engineering students in their last study-semester.
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Copyright (c) 2019 Aagoth Elise Storvik, Bente Abrahamsen
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