The experiences and career choices of female engineering undergraduate students at Chinese universities: an intersectional study of gender and social economic status

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The experiences and career choices of female engineering undergraduate students at Chinese universities: an intersectional study of gender and social economic status

Liu, Zeyi; (2025) The experiences and career choices of female engineering undergraduate students at Chinese universities: an intersectional study of gender and social economic status. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London). Green open access

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Abstract

Engineering is one of the STEM fields with the largest gender gap in women’s representation. Existing research in this domain largely concerns Western contexts and takes predominantly psychological, quantitative approaches. The issue remains under-researched especially in Global South contexts and from interdisciplinary perspectives. This thesis explores how female engineering undergraduates in Shandong Province, China make post-graduation career choices; and how the choice-making is informed by their educational experiences before and during university study. It focuses on the intersectionality of gender and social economic status (SES) that situates these students’ experiences and choices in Chinese society. The research is primarily underpinned by a poststructuralist conceptual framework that theorises gender, SES, intersectionality, and agency as social constructions. This is complemented by a psychological perspective that explains the internal process of how individuals exercise agency. This study adopts an explanatory sequential mixed-methods research design, starting with a quantitative survey of both male and female Chinese engineering undergraduates (N=607) to understand the statistical landscape of their gendered and classed experiences. It is followed by qualitative semi-structured interviews with newly-graduated Chinese female engineering students (N=24), focusing on socially-situated knowledge of how those students exercise their agency against gender and SES structures in negotiating participation (or not) in engineering careers. The findings suggest that the prevailing Confucian gender norms and the gender monoglossic atmosphere and pedagogy at Chinese universities significantly constrain the experiences and engineering-related career choices of the participating Chinese female engineering undergraduate students. Meanwhile, participating students agentically engaged with available engineering capital embedded in both pre-university and university stages, empowering them to resist culturally normative gender structures and choose a career within engineering. I reconceptualise ‘engineering capital’ in the context of Chinese engineering higher education, arguing for developing support for enhanced accumulation of ‘university-based engineering capital’ for female students and low-SES students.

Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Qualification:	Ph.D
Title:	The experiences and career choices of female engineering undergraduate students at Chinese universities: an intersectional study of gender and social economic status
Open access status:	An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
Language:	English
Additional information:	Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request.
UCL classification:	UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment
URI:	https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10204770