Date of Conferral

2020

Degree

Ph.D.

School

Management

Advisor

Keri Heitner

Abstract

More women exit the engineering profession than enter, leaving a talent void that incurs lost business value from unrealized business revenues. Without new insights about how to address the continued attrition of women engineers, the profession is unlikely to sustain the human capital needed to achieve competitive advantages through innovation, increased productivity, and improved firm reputation. This qualitative narrative inquiry explored the career attrition phenomenon of six former women engineers in the Northern Tier States region of the United States who left engineering within the past 4 years and were either an engineer-in-training or professional engineer. The conceptual framework for this study was based on Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital, and field to discover a more nuanced meaning about women engineers’ career exit experiences. The research questions focused on understanding the experiences of six former women engineers as told through their narrative stories of consideration for leaving and a final decision to leave the profession. Data were collected in semi-structured interviews; the resulting transcripts were hand coded using initial and pattern coding to ascribe meaning to story segments grouped in cohered themes. Results suggest that women engineers become disillusioned and leave their careers as resilience is surpassed by uncertainty about sustaining professional and life aspirations in response to incongruent hegemonic-male work cultures. These findings can enable engineering stakeholders to develop ways to retain more women. Positive social change could be realized by improving the lives of women engineers and their communities while enhancing the profession’s ability to deliver innovative and creative solutions to the most vexing problems facing humanity.

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