Work In Progress – Do Women Score Lower Than Men on Computer Engineering Exams?

Women have long been underrepresented in undergraduate engineering programs. Women may drop out of engineering programs when they become discouraged by low exam scores. In this project, we examine whether women earn lower exam scores than men and whether Dweck’s model of self-theories explains the difference. Dweck proposed two categories for individuals’ beliefs about intelligence: incremental theories and entity theories. Dweck found that women are more likely to be entity theorists than men. In our study, we found that the difference between exam averages between women and men, and between entity and incremental theorists were not statistically significant. Index Terms – Women in engineering, exam performance, self-theories.