Gender Essentialist Beliefs Among Women Engineers in College: Variation by Race and Social Class and Implications for Inequality

Abstract Gender essentialism refers to commonly held cultural beliefs that men and women are innately different, comprising mutually exclusive gender groups that each have natural interests, preferences, and skills which differentiate them from one another. Utilizing cross-sectional data from an online survey collected from a nationwide sample of women college engineers in the United States ( N = 332), this study finds that gender essentialist beliefs among women who have entered a gender non-normative domain are quite low, yet there is variation by racial identity and social class background. Specifically, Black women with lower levels of parental education report significantly stronger essentialist beliefs than other groups. Further, analyses revealed that gender essentialist beliefs among women college engineers significantly predicted both a) higher levels of endorsement of the notion that their field is highly meritocratic and b) lower levels of awareness of the structural nature of gender inequality in engineering. Overall, the study makes a new contribution by examining how beliefs held among the next generation of women engineers could ultimately serve to reinforce gender inequality.