Laurent Heyberger
Like Father, Like Daughter… Or Like Mother, Like Daughter? Parental Models of Women Students at France’s Fourth Largest Engineering College (UTBM) in 1985–2016
ICON: Journal of the International Committee for the History of Technology 28, no. 2 (2023): 41–62.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.11590/icon.2023.2.02
Abstract
This article analyses the feminisation of the student population of the University of Technology of Belfort-Montbéliard (UTBM) from its foundation to 2016. It positions the case of UTBM in the French landscape of engineering schools, but also in the academic discussions of the causes of the over-selection of girls (paternal or maternal transmission, other explanatory model).
Thanks to the large number of files used (N = 14,243), a comparison of French, Chinese, and Moroccan students of UTBM makes it possible to identify national models of choice and transmission between parents and their children. For French students, paternal model is more influential, nevertheless the maternal model seems to determine with greater influence the choice of girls, in spite of the small number of mothers who are engineers.