Women Engineers' Attraction to and Persistence in Engineering via Personality and Job Satisfaction

Abstract

This chapter presents individualized and aggregate personality results from 19 working U.S. women engineers using the Ten Item Personality Inventory and a validated bank of 16 Likert items on job satisfaction. Findings relate personality typologies and how they perceive their experiences in the engineering field (via job satisfaction) to illuminate their persistence. Sampled women possessed personalities traits, unlike their male peers, of extroversion and openness to new experiences. Participants reported high job satisfaction, despite experiencing gendered challenges in the engineering workplace like modifying their gender presentation and social performances (both image and demeanor). This study offers details on personalities of women engineers who have persisted vis-à-vis their perceptions of job satisfaction which is underexplored. This study provides academics and engineering outreach professional insight to how the changing nature of engineering may privilege stereotypically feminine personality traits, which can be leveraged to recruit/retain women to/in engineering fields.