How interests in science and technology have taken women to an engineering career

Participants

Karlstad University
This study was performed in the county of Varmland, which is situated in the south-west part of Sweden. Karlstad is the biggest town in the region and received university status in 1999 when Karlstad University was established. The students mostly come from the region and often have a background in non-academic traditions. The engineering faculty at the university is small compared to engineering faculties at bigger Swedish universities. The university and its students could thus be described as what is quite typical of a university in a rural area.

Engineering programs chosen
Graduated women were invited from two out of 16 available engineering programs at Karlstad University, the Mechanical and Computer Engineering programs, respectively, both comprising 180 ECTS credits. During the period 2002 to 2010 only 10% and 14%, respectively, of those graduated from the programs were women. These two programs had the lowest share of women of all engineering programs at the university.

Principle of selection of women
All 35 women with a degree, or with only a few requirements left, from 2002 to 2010 were invited to participate in the study. A prerequisite was that they still were living in the county of Varmland, and this reduced the number to 26 women. Six women declined and we were not able to come into contact with seven. To increase the sample size five women from a computer company in Karlstad were added to the group. These five women were all engineers with a degree from a Computer Engineering program, but only two from Karlstad University. Taking all these figures together, twenty women participated in the study. The youngest was 19 and the oldest 38 years old when they started the program.

Information about the study
The women were contacted via telephone and informed about the project. If they agreed to participate they shortly afterwards got a letter with more information about the project, e.g. who were responsible for the project. The letter also contained ethical guidelines from the Swedish Research Council, guidelines that were carefully followed throughout the project. The women were informed that it was of their own free will to participate. Thus the participants could refuse to answer a question or could withdraw from the study whenever they wanted without any explanations.

Research design

As the aim of this study was to investigate women's choice of studying subjects within the S&T-field, women's experiences and feelings from childhood and adolescence were best caught with the qualitative method and therefore the research interview method was chosen.

Interview procedure
Interviews were carried out at Karlstad University or, if it was more convenient for the woman, at her work place. In one case, when the woman was on parental leave, the interview was performed in her home. The interview rooms were chosen with great care, as to have a peaceful and silent setting. One and a half hour was reserved for each interview, so there would be enough time for all questions. These prerequisites were the same whether the interviews were carried out at the university or in any other place. The participants were informed that it was needed to make tape-recordings in order to catch all information from the interviews. The women were also informed that the interviews would be de-identified later. The interviews took different times to carry out, as some women would like to tell us a lot, while others just shortly answered the questions. As the interviews were part of the big gender project EqualGrowth at Karlstad University, they have been used as data material for other publications as well, e.g. in Holth & Mellström (2011).

Interview guide
The use of an interview guide created structure and made it easier to process and compare the answers (Krag Jacobsen, 1993). The questions were open and directed which made it possible for the interviewers to follow interesting tracks which emerged during the interviews (Lantz, 2007). The interviews were transcribed verbatim and de-identified.

The interview guide was disposed with regard to the women's experiences and feelings from childhood and adolescence. It contained questions about family relationships including fathers' and mothers' professions, siblings and, if the siblings were grown up, their professions today. It also contained questions about hobbies during upbringing, playmates and the atmosphere concerning testing technical advices at home and at homes of relatives. There were questions about teachers and other persons in school who had been important for their interests in S&T. The women were told to try to give accounts of memories from childhood and adolescence, which had been important for their interests in S&T. They were also asked who had been the most important person for their awakening interests in S&T during childhood and adolescence.

Data analyses

Analysis was performed gradually and involved a systematic processing of material using Strauss and Corbins' theory (1998), where keywords and phenomenon were connected to theoretical conceptions. Thus, there has been an interaction between theory and empirical data. The establishment of conceptions and categories has been done through repeated feedback to the material. The specific in the analysis was to look for special and everyday events during the women's childhood and adolescence, events which the women pointed out as important for their choice of S&T later on.