PERCEPTION OF FEMALE SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS TOWARD MECHANICAL ENGINEERING DEGREE
MAR GUTIÉRREZ-COLON PLANA *
Department of English and German Studies, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain
PALOMA PALEO CAGEAO
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain
FRANCESC FERRANDO PIERA
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Escola Tècnica Superior d'Enginyeria Química, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
The actual presence of women in technological degrees such as Mechanical Engineering (ME) is extremely scarce in Catalonia. We believe that the low enrolment demand of this degree by secondary school female students is due to a lack of information of the career, as well as of the content and methodologies of this degree. We believe that ME should experiment a redefinition in order to make it more appealing to female students. In order to do this, we should first pinpoint which are the problematic aspects.
The present work is divided into two phases: a first stage in which the image that the ME degree has been analysed from the answers of 17 semi-guided interviews of three different groups of women: First year students of ME, students of ME who have studied a previous degree, and finally, women who have finished MEand who are working in this field. In a second stage a test was administered to 496 high school students of 10 different schools. But before that, we also conducted an initial pilot study with an initial sample of 133 participants to evaluate the questionnaire. The general conclusion is that
a careful, accurate and catching informative task should be carried out by the institutions (e.g. universities), because it has been demonstrated that information is the key word in this field.
Keywords: Women engineers, mechanical engineering, engineering