Advantage And Disadvantage Of Science And Technology (Exploring the gender gap in engineering: A re-specification and test of the hypothesis of cumulative advantages and disadvantages) 1. INTRODUCTION If this standard framing of the hypothesis of cumulative advantages and disadvantages is correct, then gender differences in factors that promote participation at every stage of the education pipeline should favor men. However, the results of more recent studies are mixed, with some continuing to report advantages for men, while others find no gender differences or gender differences that favor women.14-18 These results suggest that the gender distribution of advantages and disadvantages must be treated as an empirical question. We begin by asking whether male and female engineering undergraduates differ across factors that promote choice of an engineering major, persistence in engineering and progress in engineering. Finding that they do, we then ask two interrelated, yet distinct, questions. (1) Do advantages and disadvantages accumulate as men and women move through the education pipeline? (2) Does the gendered distribution of advantages and disadvantages for engineering undergraduates provide evidence for the standard framing of the hypothesis of cumulative advantages and disadvantages (i.e., micro-inequities favoring men) or do different factors advantage (and, therefore, disadvantage) men and women as our re-specification suggests? In our conclusion, we discuss the implications of our answers to these questions for ongoing research on the gender gap in engineering.
II. GENDER AND THE ACCUMULATION OF ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES Tests of the hypothesis of cumulative advantages and disadvantages have concentrated on the late stages of the education pipeline (e.g., on post-doctoral fellows, professors). In this paper, we shift the focus to undergraduates and compare men and women in engineering across 43 factors that have been shown to affect enrollment, persistence, and progress in science and engineering. Including factors affecting the choice of an engineering major (i.e., family background and participation in mathematics and science) allows us to tap advantages and disadvantages that begin to accumulate in high school or before. By including factors that have been shown to affect progress at later stages of the education pipeline (i.e., engineering self-efficacy, sex-based discrimination and integration), we can understand better the temporal dimension of the gendered distribution of advantages and disadvantages. For each factor, a significant gender difference identifies an advantage for one gender and a corresponding disadvantage for the other. Higher values indicate advantages for all factors except sex-based discrimination.
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