Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite significant efforts to boost female enrollment levels and retention rates in engineering programs, females continue to make up only a small portion of the Canadian undergraduate engineering student population. However, this traditionally-male field is undergoing a culture change as a result of the recent establishment of a female minority. New initiatives that are encouraging women to enter the field are also challenging assumed gender differences previously used to legitimize women's low participation. \n \nThrough a series of multiple-choice, scenario-based questionnaires, this exploratory study seeks to establish whether or not gender differences observed in the broader population are applicable to the unique engineering undergraduate population at the University of Waterloo. In particular, respondents are quizzed on their preferences for specific job attributes and aspects of life outside of work. In addition, short-answer open-ended questions are used to gauge the level of integration experienced by female students in the faculty. Attention is paid to the general academic and social engineering environment as well as the specific dynamics of mixed-gender groups. \n \nAlthough some gender differences, such as higher preference for earnings on the part of males and work-life balance on the part of females, are in line with previous findings, other differences are found to be either absent or reversed. A surprising side effect of our culturally-diverse sample is the emergence of cultural background as a strong factor which, besides gender, affects work and life attribute preferences, especially preferences for task challenge and earnings. Another interesting outcome of the study is the resulting asymmetry between factors \nthat respondents acknowledge as contributing to their happiness, and factors, which when absent, are found to contribute to the respondents' unhappiness. The study also reveals that female engineering students find themselves in a balancing act between perceived privileges due to their minority, and reduced participation and decision making power due to perceptions of engineering projects as stereotypically in the male domain.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".