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Literature Review of Counterfactual Thinking and Career Motivation Theory for Early Career Women Engineers

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Conference

2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Tampa, Florida

Publication Date

June 15, 2019

Start Date

June 15, 2019

End Date

June 19, 2019

Conference Session

Women in Engineering Division Technical Session 2

Tagged Division

Women in Engineering

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

15

DOI

10.18260/1-2--33068

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/33068

Download Count

505

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Paper Authors

biography

Renee M. Desing Ohio State University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-4052-2423

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Renee Desing is currently a graduate student at the Ohio State University in the Department of Engineering Education. Ms. Desing holds a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a M.S. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from the Pennsylvania State University. Most recently, Ms. Desing worked as a managing consultant for IBM Public Sector Advanced Analytics.

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biography

Rachel Louis Kajfez Ohio State University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0001-9745-1921

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Dr. Rachel Louis Kajfez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering Education at The Ohio State University. She earned her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Civil Engineering from Ohio State and earned her Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Virginia Tech. Her research interests focus on the intersection between motivation and identity of undergraduate and graduate students, first-year engineering programs, mixed methods research, and innovative approaches to teaching.

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Abstract

Navigating the workplace as an early career professional is daunting for anyone, especially women entering a technical field such as engineering. When encountering challenging, gender-based situations, women react in various ways, from ignoring the situation to leaving the engineering field completely. Through a literature review, this paper investigates conceptually aligning counterfactual thinking and career motivation theory for early career women engineers. Counterfactual thinking is the creation of alternative scenarios to events that already occurred and imagining different consequences or benefits. Career motivation theory aims to understand career plans and decisions. From these theories, this review explores the effects of counterfactual thinking on women engineers’ reactions to challenging situations, from work-life balance to discrimination, that they encounter in the workplace during their early careers and how that affects their long-term career motivation. The results of this review provide an initial conceptual alignment for integrating counterfactual thinking and career motivation theory and will lead to future research to understand how early career women engineers process the situations they are experiencing, how they use counterfactual thinking during these situations, and the impact on their career motivation.

Desing, R. M., & Kajfez, R. L. (2019, June), Literature Review of Counterfactual Thinking and Career Motivation Theory for Early Career Women Engineers Paper presented at 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Tampa, Florida. 10.18260/1-2--33068

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