My first academic paper: Exploring the variation in gender balance on undergraduate engineering courses in UK universities.
I started my research journey by trying to find the percentage of undergraduate engineers who are female at each UK university. The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) collects data which I was able to access (albeit rounded to the nearest 5 to protect anonymity) and discovered there was substantial variation between different institutions. I also discovered that, given the very small numbers of women on some of these courses, rounding counts to the nearest 5 could quickly distort any calculations further down the line. Another proviso was the use of ‘full person equivalent’ so this was not as straightforward as a headcount on a BEng programme but could include students taking a few modules of ‘engineering’ on another course which are added in as an appropriate proportion of a ‘person’.
But surely the data still had secrets to impart. What trends could I find? Were there clear correlations, or even some influencing factors?
- We already knew that, at a national level, the gender balance was better for some engineering disciplines than others, with my own (electronic engineering) being one of the worst, but did that carry through at an institutional level?
- How about the influence of international students – perhaps women from countries where it is more common to find female engineers were impacting the figures?
- And what about the requirement for physics A level? We know far fewer girls take physics post-16 than boys – would the requirement for physics be discouraging girls from applying to certain courses / universities? (And how many still state physics as a ‘requirement’ anyway).
- Or are the academic grade requirements – the entry tariff – an influencing factor?
- Or the type of university? (I spent weeks trying to cluster universities into relevant groupings before realising that this was a complete field of study in itself and managed to pull myself back out of that rabbit hole.)
I chose to analyse the data using Tableau as this satisfied my urge to ‘see’ what was going on. And what conclusions did I draw? That it’s pretty complicated! Taking on board Borrego et al’s (2009, p57) warning that “statistical analysis can bury the voices of underrepresented groups”, I started to think about the lived experience of individual students and the potential impact of individual university departments or courses. The HESA data had given insights and suggested ‘interesting’ universities for further investigation, but I felt it was time to move from a quantitative to a qualitative mode of investigation.
The culmination of this first part of my research was presenting a paper at SEFI (European Society for Engineering Education) Annual Conference in 2023, co-authored by my doctoral supervisors – Exploring the Variation in Gender Balance on Undergraduate Engineering Courses in UK Universities.
Borrego, M., Douglas, E. P., & Amelink, C. T. (2009). Quantitative, qualitative, and mixed research methods in engineering education. Journal of Engineering Education, 98(1), 53–66. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2168-9830.2009.tb01005.x
