The Factors Affecting the Career Choice of Male and Female Civil Engineering Students in the Uk

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INTRODUCTION

It was a common phenomenon that male and female own different career outlooks. However, the choice was usually influenced by a variety of factors, such as salary, stability, prospect and so forth. The author examined the factors affecting the career choice of male and female civil engineering students in the UK. Through the whole former survey data, Suzanne Wilkinson (1996) found that the factors had some difference between male and female, but these factors were not credible. So he made a research to solve two question to explain current recruitment patterns construction industry in UK; to identify how construction industry should be changed in UK Suzanne Wilkinson (1996, P45).

BACKGROUND

The research mainly talked about factors including differences and similarities about how factors affected the career choice of male and female civil engineering students. The data showed that more female than male chose other than civil engineering jobs. Why author carried out this research was that a few institutions chose civil engineering as a single target. Researchers mistakenly thought that civil engineering had no differences with other majors in terms of employment. Another reason was that researchers did not compared male and female partly. So the author’s research was meaningful. Through the former research, researchers drew a conclusion female prefer to do interesting work and professional advancement; in addition, they paid more emphasis on quality of the company and family factors, while males placed more emphasis on salary and promotion. Suzanne Wilkinson (1996)”. Although former report had already confirmed that some results were correct, some might be exaggerated.

Research methodology

The data came from a national survey about 165 males and 166 females civil engineering students. The method could increase the accuracy of the data owing to equal division. “The survey responses represented 53 per cent of the female graduates in this subject for 1993. Matched pair sampling techniques were used for the male civil engineering students” Wilkinson (1996).

But this method had some limitations, because if those who were surveyed were just selected randomly, to the effect that they were not selected from different universities in different regions, the result could not express the fact correctly. For this sake, the author derived from “a literature review and an extensive series of interviews of male and female civil engineers in the United Kingdom and three pilot studies on the developing questionnaire” Wilkinson (1996).

Result

As female’s first employment, it was concluded that not only the the location of the companies was very important, but also, females usually put more emphasis on family, as Wilkinson suggested, child care policies and programs were important considerations in choosing first employment (1996). Another factor influencing females’ choice was friends factor which was important factor to influence choosing jobs. As for the males, they paid more attention on salary and employment prospect. There were some factors similar with the former conclusions and one was that female pay more attention on family and male might like salary better, while there also existed some differences; for example, previous research thought female prefer interesting work, but Wilkinson claimed that both genders showed little concern on this aspect. According to author’s survey, although different factors affected the choice by sex differently, top five rankings were similar so that it was easy to understand why there was coincident between male and female in finding a job in civil engineering.

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