Gender Stereotypes and the Choice of an Engineering Undergraduate Program br

In Russia, as well as in the globe, there is a substantial imbalance in proportionsof men and women who choose engineering undergraduate programs. As pre-vious research demonstrated, this phenomenon can be explained by the gen-der stereotypes about better natural abilities of men to understand mathemat-ical and engineering subjects. The paper is aimed to define the prevalence of gender stereotypes and gender differences in the choice of engineering majors,and explore associations between gender bias and the reasons for major choice.The survey data about undergraduate engineering students collected in one re-gional Russian university with strong focus on technical science was utilized(N = 1791). According to our results, the most widespread gender stereotypesamong engineering students are that men better understand physical phenome-na and patterns and have more developed technical and logical reasonings, whilewomen are more neat and diligent. Reasons for engineering program choice do not significantly differ for men and women students. However, men students af-fected by gender stereotypes more often reported their wish to get a good job af-ter graduation as a reason for major choice. While, women students, affected by gender stereotypes about better natural math abilities of men, more often report-ed that their major choice was made by the influence of family. Moreover, wom-en are less satisfied with their choice of university and undergraduate program