IMAGES OF THE FUTURE: GENDER AND PORTRAYALS OF FACULTY AND INDUSTRY MEMBERS IN CANADIAN ENGINEERING SCHOOL RECRUITMENT MATERIALS
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Engineering remains a male-dominated profession, despite efforts toward change. It is possible that the images used in undergraduate recruitment materials could influence how an individual might perceive their “fit” within engineering. We considered both the representation and context of individuals shown in images and videos collected from 18 Canadian English-language engineering schools, using content analysis. In this paper, we focus on individuals coded as either faculty or industry members, as they illustrate the future possibilities of a career in engineering in this material. We found an overrepresentation of women faculty and women industry members compared to their population percentages at the schools (faculty) and in the profession (industry). We also found that women professionals of both types were under-represented among those professionals wearing business attire, and women industry members were over-represented among those industry members whose names and credentials were given, in both the images and videos. We encountered a similar overall over-representation of women among student imagery, and suspect that it is the result of intentionally highlighting women within the schools and the field of engineering. However, we believethat context, as well as presence, matters. The underrepresentation of women in some cases is worth examining for the message it may send about the future prospects of a student considering engineering.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".