Search for: All records

This full paper seeks to characterize how gender and career-related identity may affect a practicing engineer’s description of their expertise. This work is situated within a larger effort to disentangle the construct of intuition from expertise in engineering. Our findings will inform further data collection and analysis by shedding light on gender and career-related identity as potential confounding variables. Numerous models of expertise development note intuition as important or essential, yet intuition as a construct has yet to be defined, particularly within an engineering context. From literature on expertise development and cognition, we have synthesized a proposed definition of engineering intuition as the ability to assess solutions and predict outcomes in a timely manner. Our larger study is focused on developing an emergent characterization of engineering intuition informed by perceptions of practicing engineers, allowing us to disentangle intuition from expertise and identify its characteristics and co-dependent constructs. We also seek to characterize salient differences between demographic groups, and in the work presented here we focus on gender and whether the individual has had a significant role change in their career to date. We define a significant role change specifically as the transition from a technical role to a managerial role. 

This full paper seeks to characterize how gender and career-related identity may affect a practicing engineer’s description of their expertise. This work is situated within a larger effort to disentangle the construct of intuition from expertise in engineering. Our findings will inform further data collection and analysis by shedding light on gender and career-related identity as potential confounding variables. Numerous models of expertise development note intuition as important or essential, yet intuition as a construct has yet to be defined, particularly within an engineering context. From literature on expertise development and cognition, we have synthesized a proposed definition of engineering intuition as the ability to assess solutions and predict outcomes in a timely manner. Our larger study is focused on developing an emergent characterization of engineering intuition informed by perceptions of practicing engineers, allowing us to disentangle intuition from expertise and identify its characteristics and co-dependent constructs. We also seek to characterize salient differences between demographic groups, and in the work presented here we focus on gender and whether the individual has had a significant role change in their career to date. We define a significant role change specifically as the transition from a technical role to a managerial role.