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.
Renee Desing is a postdoctoral scholar at the Ohio State University in the Department of Engineering Education. Dr. Desing recently graduated from Ohio State with her Ph.D. in Engineering Education. Her research interests include motivation & identity in engineering and diversity & inclusion in the workplace. Dr. Desing also 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.
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. She is the faculty lead for the Research on Identity and Motivation in Engineering (RIME) Collaborative.
Are you a researcher? Would you like to cite this paper? Visit the ASEE document repository at peer.asee.org for more tools and easy citations.
