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Female Friendly?” (Rosser, 2001). In the following we discuss in more detail those
features of the program that led us to expect it to be female-friendly.
Teamwork Emphasis
Teamwork is a central part of the core course required of every engineering major
each semester of the four-year program. The teams are multi-disciplinary, representing
multiple engineering specialties. In these teams, students learn in their first and second
years of the program to effectively solve open-ended problems as a team and to develop
and deliver reports on these projects; in their junior and senior years, the teams work on
projects, many of which have corporate sponsors, and to deliver reports on their end
products to the wider engineering community and corporate sponsors. Faculty
emphasized in their interviews that other schools may have teamwork, but not usually on
a continuous basis throughout the program: they pointed out that many schools have
senior design projects that are team-based, and some have incorporated teaming into first-
year programs, but Rowan’s incorporation of teamwork into every year of the program
prepares students for the team environment they will encounter in the contemporary
engineering environment. At the end of each semester, both participants and faculty
evaluate the team experience, and grades on the teamwork are given after many factors
are taken into account.
Cognizant of research indicating possible damaging effects of having women or
ethnic minorities being alone on a team of white males, most faculty try to set up teams,
at least in the first year, which do not have only one female or one minority student.
There is no overall policy regarding this, and the practice has varied from instructor to
instructor and year to year. Some faculty have extended this gender- and minority-
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