Gender Inequity in Engineering Higher Education: A Case Study of an American University in a Middle Eastern Country

Abstract

Research has shown that gender inclusive collaborations have higher quality of science. Therefore, to promote increased gender equity and collaboration across the genders proper efforts and policies should be put in place to provide equitable and mixed gender or heterogenous representation. This study quantifies the importance of gender representation by employing a bibliometric analysis of female and male faculty engagement in research in the scholarly area of engineering and technology. The case study is of the Lebanese American University and respective scholarly publications; due to its unique dichotomy of being an American-charted university, with liberal American policies in a patriarchal Middle Eastern country. Our findings demonstrate that policies protecting against discrimination and ensuring equitable gender representation are insufficient and unable to penetrate the last bastion of masculinity within engineering. Female authors remain at a disadvantage within the field, with basically no single author publications or significant all-female homogenous teams works compared to their prolific male counterparts. This case study finds that mixed gender collaboration provides an equitable and comparable scholarly impact for both genders.