Women’s persistent underrepresentation in undergraduate engineering is a well-documented concern. One issue missing from many discussions on the topic, however, is that women are not equally underrepresented in all engineering majors. Furthermore, a significant portion of the research focuses solely on women’s experiences within engineering. We know far less about how key stakeholders, such as faculty, understand gender stratification in engineering education. Faculty are influential figures who have been shown to play a central role in introducing students to the profession and can significantly impact students’ experiences. This article addresses these gaps by examining the reasons engineering professors provide to explain women’s underrepresentation across majors. Using data from 23 in-depth interviews at one university, the findings demonstrate how the majority of faculty mobilize gendered images to position some majors as feminine and others as masculine, and then suggest that this impacts women’s choices of fields. Chemical engineering, however, served as an interesting case in this study because it was described as gender diverse. These findings contribute to discussions about the construction of gendered cultures within engineering and show how engineering faculty play a role in this process.

妇女在本科生工程学中的长期代表性不足是一个有据可查的问题。但是，有关该主题的许多讨论中缺少的一个问题是，在所有工程专业中，女性的代表人数并没有同样减少。此外，研究的很大一部分只专注于女性在工程领域的经验。我们对关键利益相关者（例如教师）如何理解工程教育中的性别分层了解得很少。教师是有影响力的人物，已被证明在向学生介绍专业方面起着核心作用，并且可以显着影响学生的经历。本文通过研究工程学教授解释专业中女性任职人数不足的原因，来解决这些差距。利用在一所大学进行的23次深度访谈获得的数据，研究结果表明，大多数教师如何调动性别形象，以将某些专业定位为女性，而将其他专业定位为男性，然后表明这会影响女性的专业选择。然而，化学工程在本研究中是一个有趣的案例，因为它被描述为性别多样化。这些发现有助于就工程学中的性别文化建设进行讨论，并表明工程学教授如何在这一过程中发挥作用。