What helps? Women engineers' accounts of staying on

• Date: 01 July 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12192
• Author: Laurie Cohen,Dulini Fernando,Joanne Duberley
• Published date: 01 July 2018

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

What helps? Women engineers'accounts of

staying on

Dulini Fernando

1

|Laurie Cohen

2

|Joanne Duberley

3

1

Warwick Business School, University of

Warwick

2

Nottingham University Business School,

University of Nottingham

3

Birmingham Business School, University of

Birmingham

Correspondence

Dr Dulini Fernando, Warwick Business School,

University of Warwick, Coventry, UK.

Email: dulini.fernando@wbs.ac.uk

Abstract

We have considerable understanding of the obstacles that women

engineers encounter and the reasons that they leave the field, but

we know less about what enables them to remain. Adopting an

interpretivist approach, this article examines how a group of British

women engineers in two FTSE 100 companies account for “staying

on”in their male‐dominated work settings. We delineate four spe-

cific forms of help that facilitate women's retention in the field.

We argue that exposure to help leads to women developing a hab-

itus that enables them to continue working in engineering. To con-

clude, we draw on our findings to outline HR practices that will

facilitate supportive relationships in the workplace and pave the

way towards developing more positive organisational climates.

KEYWORDS

career, engineering, gender, habitus, help, inclusiveness, retention,

support, women

1|INTRODUCTION

The field of engineering has a significant gender‐based retention problem. Despite all the efforts channelled towards

getting women to study STEM subjects, close to 40% of those who gain engineering degrees eventually decide to

leave the profession (Fouad & Singh, 2011). The majority of scholarly work focuses on explaining exit, providing

insights into the effects of inhospitable workplace climates, lack of opportunities for advancement (Fouad, Singh,

Cappaert, Chang, & Wan, 2015), unclear career paths (Hewlett et al., 2008), and difficulties in balancing work and fam-

ily roles (Bagilhole, Powell, Barnard, & Dainty, 2007). However, a smaller body of work examines those women engi-

neers who stay on in their fields, either within an organisation or across work settings. Some studies identify personal

aspects, such as confidence (Ayre, Mills, & Gill, 2013; Hughes, 2011) and hope for the future (Buse, Bilimoria, & Perelli,

2013), that enable exceptional women to remain in engineering. Fewer contributions highlight the significance of con-

text, emphasising the importance of support (Ayre et al., 2013; Fouad et al., 2015). Notwithstanding the important

insights they offer, however, we have very little qualitative understanding of how women experience support and

how it influences their thinking and action.

In this article, we adopt an interpretivist (Johnson & Duberley, 2000) perspective to examine how a group of

British women engineers account for staying on in their fields. Our focus is on women's interpretations. Explaining

Received: 2 May 2016 Revised: 30 January 2018 Accepted: 12 February 2018

DOI: 10.1111/1748-8583.12192

Hum Resour Manag J. 2018;28:479–495. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltdwileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hrmj 479

why they remained when many women engineers left, our respondents highlighted personalised forms of help

received from others within their organisations. Notably, respondents talked about help as largely ad hoc encounters

that they felt lucky to receive.

We draw on Bourdieu's (1984, 1990) notion of habitus to establish how the specific forms of help that women

identify enable them to stay on in engineering. Habitus is aschema of internalised, embodied ways of thinking, feeling,

and acting, which is shaped by social experiences (Bourdieu, 1984, 1990). We argue that it provides a useful frame-

work for understanding how some women engineers develop ways of operating that, taken together, facilitate their

persistence in the field. This paper addresses the central question: How does help foster the development of an engi-

neering habitus which encourages women to stay on in the profession? By investigating this issue, we aim to contrib-

ute new insights into the interplay of the individual and their social context in women engineers' career making, a

perspective that the extant literature has been slow to address.

In what follows, we review the literature on women's careers in engineering, highlighting limitations in our current

understandings of why some women engineers stay on when so many choose to leave. Next, we introduce our empirical

study and explain our use of the concept of habitus in our analysis (Dumais, 2002; Reay, 2016). Our findings provide

insights into 4 distinct forms of support that women engineers identified as helpful for them to stay in the field. Our

study extends existing understandings of women's retention in engineering, showing how participating in supportive

relationships in the workplace facilitates the development of an engineering habitusthat makes “staying on”a possibil-

ity. We conclude by highlighting the importance of support being equitably accessible to all employees, identifying HR

practices that may facilitate supportive relationships in the workplace and outlining the agenda for further research.

2|STAYINGONINENGINEERING:THESTORYSOFAR

There is a consensus that engineering cultures are influenced by assumptions that prioritise stereotypically masculine

attributes, characteristics, and actions over those that are stereotypically feminine (Hatmaker, 2013; Powell, Bagilhole,

& Dainty, 2009). For instance, drawing on an interview‐based study of Australian women engineers across the range

of disciplines, Gill, Mills, Franzway, and Sharp (2008) argue that engineering as a profession has been constructed as a

“man's world”where the size and scale of projects as well as language and patterns of understanding (e.g., prevalent

metaphors) exclude women (Mills, Mehrtens, Smith, & Adams, 2008). Similarly, in an ethnographic study of oil

engineering, Faulkner (2009) argues that interactions are characterised by fraternal markers of familiarity and bonding.

In her study, she found that when engineers' conversations strayed beyond the immediate task in hand, they often

reflected shared subjectivities around technology and/or typically masculine topics such as football. In such

environments, women remain isolated (Watts, 2010), struggle to secure informal support, and encounter barriers to

social networks (Roth, 2006). Furthermore, as a minority in a heavily masculine profession, women are often stereo-

typed as technically incompetent (Faulkner, 2009; Powell et al., 2009) and kept away from core knowledge clusters

(Greed, 2000).

The gendered nature of engineering is also reflected in a long working hours culture where incumbents are

required to devote long hours and prioritise work above all other concerns (Servon & Vissers, 2011; Watts, 2007).

Moreover, there are regular after‐hours social gatherings in pubs and sports clubs. Watts (2007) found that women

who cannot conform to long‐hours cultures because of parenting responsibilities are made to feel conspicuous and,

here again, as if they do not belong. Indeed, many women engineers eventually choose to leave the profession due

to marginalisation, isolation, perception of a lack of opportunities for advancement (Hewlett et al., 2008), and/or dif-

ficulties in the management of childcare (Bagilhole et al., 2007; Fouad & Singh, 2011). Although much of the existing

literature has sought to uncover barriers to explain women engineers' high turnover rates, a few contributions exam-

ine retention. Some of this work focuses on explicating the personal characteristics that enable women to stay in the

profession, whereas fewer contributions recognise the impact of the organisational context. In what follows, we will

address individual and organisational factors in turn.

480 FERNANDO ET AL.