Women in Engineering: Improving Performance and the Environment

In this workshop, learn how research and theorizing on social identity threat was utilized to develop interventions designed to improve women’s performance in engineering. In one intervention we provided women with strategies for coping with social identity threat that led to changes in their friendship networks and improved their performance. Despite the success of this intervention we felt an important piece of improving women’s performance was missing: reducing social identity threat in the environment. The first intervention allowed women to cope with social identity threat, but did not reduce it. In a second intervention we developed ways to change men’s attitudes toward and respect for their female peers. This intervention promises to not only give women strategies for coping with social identity threat, but also actually lowers social identity threat in the environment.

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