![Sample our Engineering & Technology journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5933/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Engineering-Tech.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Prior research has demonstrated that early career socialization experiences play an important role in career outcomes, including learning, performance, satisfaction, and retention. What is not yet well understood, however, is how the organizational socialization experiences of different groups of early career engineers vary and how such variation leads to different career outcomes. By examining the experiences of first year engineers, this article contributes new insights into factors affecting socialization experiences and draws attention to privilege as an important factor shaping engineering socialization experiences. The stories of negative interpersonal interactions experienced by first year women civil engineers are presented and used to glean forms of privilege that affect newcomer socialization. The primary forms of intersectional privilege identified stem from gender and race, with religion and nationality also shaping newcomer experiences. The stories are used to inform proposed additions to a model of engineering socialization.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my participants for sharing their time and stories with me to make this work possible. I am also grateful to Drs Corey Schimpf, Russell Korte, and Aditya Johri for providing feedback on drafts of this article, and to the anonymous reviewers and Dr Cyrus Mody who helped improve the article further. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant EEC #1929727. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Bauer and Erdogan, “Organizational Socialization Outcomes,” 97.
2 Ibid.
3 Korte, Brunhaver, and Sheppard, “(Mis)Interpretations of Organizational Socialization,” 188.
4 Ibid.; Korte and Lin, “Getting On Board”; Korte, “How Newcomers Learn,” “First Get to Know Them.”
5 A detailed review of prior organizational socialization models and features of engineering socialization that they miss can be found in Korte, “How Newcomers Learn.”
6 Korte and Lin, “Getting On Board,” 408.
7 Ibid., 422–3.
8 E.g. Chao et al., “Organizational Socialization”; Korte, “How Newcomers Learn.”
9 Clark and Corcoran, “Perspectives on the Professional Socialization”; Leggon and Barabino, “Socializing African American Female Engineers”; Sallee, “Performing Masculinity”; Tierney and Bensimon, Promotion and Tenure.
10 Hurst, Kammeyer-Mueller, and Livingston, “The Odd One Out”; Sacco and Schmitt, “A Dynamic Multilevel Model”; Tsui, Egan, and O’Reilly, “Being Different.”
11 Fouad et al., “Stemming the Tide”; Glass et al., “What’s so Special About STEM?”
12 Glass et al., “What’s so Special About STEM?”
13 VanAntwerp and Wilson, “Difference Between Engineering Men and Women,” 3.
14 Beddoes and Borrego, “Feminist Theory.” See also Ettinger, Conroy, and Barr, “The Voices of Late-Career and Retired Women Engineers” for a recent treatment of gender as interaction.
15 Lorber, Gender Inequality; Minnich, Transforming Knowledge; Zalewski, Feminism After Postmodernism.
16 Beddoes and Borrego, “Feminist Theory”; Ettinger, Conroy, and Barr, “The Voices of Late-Career and Retired Women Engineers.”
17 Fenstermaker, West, and Zimmerman, “Gender Inequality”; Lloyd, Judith Butler; Lorber, Gender Inequality; West and Fenstermaker, “Doing Difference.”
18 Acker, “Gendered Organizations and Intersectionality,” 216.
19 Beddoes and Borrego, “Feminist Theory”; Lorber, Gender Inequality; Slaton and Pawley, “The Power and Politics of Engineering Education Research Design.” The term intersectionality was first coined and conceptualized by Crenshaw in 1989 to explain how Black women’s experiences are marginalized compared to both Black men and white women.
20 Alfrey and Twine, “Gender Fluid Geek Girls”; Cech, “LGBTQ Professionals’ Workplace Experiences”; Cech and Waidzunas, “Engineers Who Happen to Be Gay,” “Navigating the Heteronormativity of Engineering”; Riley, Engineering and Social Justice; SWE, A Compendium of the SWE Annual Literature Reviews; Tao and Hanson, Engineering the Future.
21 Studying down refers to the tendency in some social science fields to predominantly problematize groups and individuals in positions of lower social status and power, while studying up means taking as a subject of inquiry those with greater social, economic, academic, or political capital, or powerful institutions more broadly. (Beddoes, “Institutional Influences that Promote Studying Down,” 91.) See also: Beddoes, “Selling Policy Short?,” “Agnotology, Gender and Engineering,” “Men and Masculinities in Engineering”; Beddoes and Panther, “Gender and Teamwork.”
22 McIntosh, White Privilege and Male Privilege, 1.
23 Middleton, Anderson, and Banning, “The Journey to Understanding Privilege,” 295.
24 Johnson, “Privilege as Paradox,” 117.
25 Ferber et al., Examining the Dynamics of Oppression and Privilege; Flood and Pease, “Undoing Men’s Privilege”; Anderson and Banning, “The Journey to Understanding Privilege,” 295; Mcintosh, White Privilege and Male Privilege, “White Privilege.”
26 Flood and Pease, “Undoing Men’s Privilege,” 4.
27 McIntosh, “Reflections and Future Directions,” 204; Wildman, Privilege Revealed.
28 Case, Hensley, and Anderson, “Reflecting on Heterosexual and Male Privilege,” 723.
29 Iverson, “Camouflaging Power and Privilege,” 607.
30 Sefa Dei et al., Playing the Race Card, xii.
31 Case, Hensley, and Anderson, “Reflecting on Heterosexual and Male Privilege,” 725.
32 Mcintosh, White Privilege and Male Privilege, 4–7. A longer list of White privileges can be found here as well.
33 Franzway et al., “Engineering Ignorance”; Douglas, “Engineering as a Space of White Privilege.”
34 Case, Hensley, and Anderson, “Reflecting on Heterosexual and Male Privilege,” 732–3; Schacht, “Teaching about Being an Oppressor.”
35 Case, Hensley, and Anderson, “Reflecting on Heterosexual and Male Privilege”; Ferber, “The Culture of Privilege”; Gutiérrez y Muhs et al., Presumed Incompetent.
36 Ferber, “The Culture of Privilege.”
37 I chose civil engineering as the discipline of focus for this study because of my familiarity with the field, access to resources therein, and the relatively wide range of work that civil engineers perform, which allows for context comparisons (e.g. roadway design versus wastewater treatment), while also limiting the number of variables that would have come from including multiple disciplines in the study.
38 Singleton and Straits, Approaches to Social Research.
39 Beddoes, “First Year Practicing Civil Engineers’ Challenges.”
40 Charmaz, Constructing Grounded Theory.
41 Clandinin and Connelly, Experience and Story in Qualitative Research; Maynes, Pierce, and Laslett, Telling Stories.
42 Beddoes, “First Year Practicing Civil Engineers’ Challenges.”
43 The term ‘intern’ here is used for someone who as graduated college and is working as an ‘intern engineer’.
44 Beddoes, “First Year Practicing Civil Engineers’ Challenges.”
45 Eagly and Karau, “Role Congruity Theory,” 574.
46 Babcock and Laschever, Women Don’t Ask; Biernat and Fuegen, “Shifting Standards”; Carli, “Gender and Social Influence”; Heilman, “Description and Prescription.”
47 Biernat and Fuegen, “Shifting Standards”; Eagly et al., “Social Role Theory”; Foschi, “Double Standards in the Evaluation of Men and Women,” “Double Standards for Competence”; Ridgeway, “Gender, Status and Leadership.”
48 Babcock and Laschever, Women Don’t Ask; Biernat and Manis, “Shifting Standards”; Heilman, “Description and Prescription”; Ridgeway, “Gender, Status and Leadership.”
49 Biernat and Fuegen, “Shifting Standards”; Ridgeway, “Gender, Status and Leadership.”
50 Gutiérrez y Muhs et al., Presumed Incompetent.
51 Prior scholarship discussing being taken seriously as a knower and the presumption of competence in engineering specifically includes Douglas, “Engineering as a Space of White Privilege,” 40; and Franzway et al., “Engineering Ignorance,” 101.
52 Faulkner, “Doing Gender in Engineering Workplace Cultures. II”; National Academies, Sexual Harassment of Women; Roberts and Ayre, “Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?”; Shaw, Hegewisch and Hess, Sexual Harassment and Assault at Work.
53 Ilies et al., “Reported Incidence Rates”; Shaw, Hegewisch, and Hess, Sexual Harassment and Assault at Work.
54 Ilies et al., “Reported Incidence Rates.”
55 Wilson and Thompson, “Sexual Harassment as an Exercise of Power,” 64; Shaw, Hegewisch, and Hess, Sexual Harassment and Assault at Work.
56 National Academies, Sexual Harassment of Women.
57 Clancy et al., “Double Jeopardy.”
58 Faulkner, “Doing Gender in Engineering Workplace Cultures. II”; Roberts and Ayre, “Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?”; Williams et al., Climate Control.
59 Faulkner, “Doing Gender in Engineering Workplace Cultures. II,” 177–8.
60 Shaw, Hegewisch, and Hess, Sexual Harassment and Assault at Work.
61 Willness, Steel, and Lee, “A Meta-Analysis,” 127.
62 Faulkner, “Doing Gender in Engineering Workplace Cultures. II,” 177–8.
63 Faulkner, “Doing Gender in Engineering Workplace Cultures. I and II”; National Academies, Sexual Harassment of Women; Wilson and Thompson, “Sexual Harassment as an Exercise of Power.”
64 Wilson and Thompson, “Sexual Harassment as an Exercise of Power,” 67.
65 Warm climate and chilly climate are my characterizations; Helen did not use these terms.
66 Mills, Ayre, and Gill, Gender Inclusive Engineering Education.
67 Douglas, “Engineering as a Space of White Privilege,” 41; McIntosh, White Privilege and Male Privilege.
68 Ettinger, Conroy, and Barr, “The Voices of Late-Career and Retired Women Engineers.”
69 Beddoes, “First Year Practicing Civil Engineers’ Challenges.”
70 Korte, “How Newcomers Learn.”
71 Schwalbe and Shay, “Dramaturgy and Dominance,” 161; West and Zimmerman, “Doing Gender.”
72 Wise and Stanley, Georgie Porgie, 71.
73 Wilson and Thompson, “Sexual Harassment as an Exercise of Power,” 61.
74 Bauer et al., “Newcomer Adjustment During Organizational Socialization.”
75 As summarized in Bauer, “Newcomer Adjustment During Organizational Socialization,” six dimensions along which socialization tactics vary have been proposed and studied: Collective vs. individual; formal vs. informal; sequential vs. random; fixed vs. variable progression times; serial vs. disjunctive (with or without the help of insiders and role models); investiture vs. divestiture (whether feedback affirms or disaffirms newcomers’ identities). These dimensions were originally proposed by Van Maanen and Schein in “Toward a Theory of Organizational Socialization.”
76 Bauer et al., “Newcomer Adjustment During Organizational Socialization.”
77 Sefa Dei et al., Playing the Race Card, xii.
78 The notion that power is the creation of subjectivities comes from Foucault, Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Volume I. The term refers to ‘a possibility for lived experience within a larger historical and political context’. It ‘captures the possibility of being a certain kind of person, which, for the theorists who tend to use it, is typically a contingent historical possibility rather than a universal or essential truth about human nature’. (Heyes, “Subjectivity and Power,” 159.)
79 This proposed model is expanded even further based on two additional sets of interviews reported in Beddoes, “Gender as Structure in the Organizational Socialization of Newcomer Civil Engineers.”