The role of gender in belonging and sense of community

This paper reports differences in belonging and connection to various levels of community between distinctly different technical fields: electrical engineering, civil & environmental engineering, and computer science. Established (reliable and validated) constructs have been used to assess community strength in these three fields at a major research university. The results emphasize gender differences within fields and between technical fields. Belonging (and sense of community) has been implicated in drop-out rates and lack of engagement in grades K-12; likewise, isolation (lack of belonging) has been cited as a persistent reason that female undergraduates leave engineering early in their programs. Our results show that sense of belonging (and connection to community) is consistently higher for women in engineering fields where women are present in higher numbers. In addition, these important affective constructs are higher overall in fields where women are more highly represented. These results may suggest that greater numbers of women enable a stronger sense of community or alternatively, the inherent nature of the field provides increased opportunity for belonging and developing a strong sense of community. In either case, related technical fields with stronger community can serve as role models for those that demonstrate less robust connection to community in helping these fields to improve their recruitment and retention of women.