Balancing on the Tightrope: Maintaining Gender Parity in a Successful Undergraduate Engineering Program

This paper focuses on the surprising attainment of gender parity among Industrial Engineering (IE) majors at the University of Oklahoma (OU). In the past five years, the percentage of female majors has varied between 40 % and 58% in the absence of a formal gender equity program. 40% of the faculty are female. We think that general strategies employed to increase retention of students have had a substantial role to play in the department's unplanned success in obtaining gender parity. We seek to identify the most important strategies and to determine the reasons for their success. In 2003, some University of Oklahoma project members began interviewing Industrial Engineering students, both female and male, about their experiences at OU under the auspices of a National Science Foundation Gender Equity grant (Award NSF-GDSE #0225228). Seymour and Hewitt's Talking about Leaving: Why Undergraduates Leave the Sciences (1997) suggests that females in the sciences are often victims of weeding out processes in their sophomore or junior year. In IE at the University of Oklahoma, it appears that undergraduates form close bonds with faculty mentors, work on research projects, and actively participate in technical organizations. They also see faculty outside of classroom and laboratory settings at numerous social events. Coded data from interview transcripts will be analyzed to identify aspects of the departmental culture that are conducive to female students remaining in IE until graduation. The role of internships and career fairs will be considered with regard to employment options available after graduation with data from annual