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GENDER DIFFERENCES IN THE IMPACT OF BACKGROUND
CHARACTERISTICS ON ENGINEERING SELF-CONFIDENCE
We suspected that background characteristics might have a different relationship
with the engineering self-confidence of men and women, as suggested in the literature
and because of the interaction of gender with the high school background factors shown
above. Therefore we performed regression analyses for males and females separately,
which we will discuss below (Table IIB-4).
Background characteristics are more related to females’ engineering self-
confidence than to males’. Only about 15% of the variance in male engineering self-
confidence is related to background characteristics, while over 27% of the female
engineering self-confidence is. For each of the background characteristics we measure,
the relationship to engineering self-confidence is stronger for females than for males
(comparing the unstandardized regression coefficients for each variable shows that the
coefficients for females are larger than for males). For both males and females, the most
important of these family characteristics are the positive opinions of family and
significant others about the student’s pursuit of engineering; however, the importance of
this support is nearly double for female students than for males (the unstandardized
regression coefficient, B, is .105 for males and .184 for females). In fact, this is the only
family characteristic that has statistical significance for the female students.
IIB-88