Gender perspective of professional competences in engineering programs: comparison between Politecnico di Torino, Milano and Bari

The gender gap between men and women is a contentious issue at the current moment. It is a subject sensitive to many people and to which various solutions have been proposed. The issue of gender difference is often addressed from an academic and professional point of view. Specifically the question concerns the reasons why men and women make unequal choices in their studies and work. This inequality could be attributed to a natural predisposition, or the tendencies of society to affect the choices of individuals. This thesis focuses on the academic situation, where italian universities in general have a higher percentage of female students than male, but the participation of women in some courses of study has an opposite trend: only a strong minority of women enroll in STEM faculties (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). Even within purely male contexts, such as the most significant engineering schools in Italy (the Politecnico di Torino, Milano and Bari) there are opposing trends between the different areas of engineering in terms of female enrollment. The objective of this thesis is to investigate this phenomenon and to check the existence of an explanation based on the analysis of form of teaching on offer. In particular, the thesis analyses promotional materials produced by the faculties at the Politecnico di Torino and Milano, on which Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques have been applied. This process was intended to derive a vocabulary of words classifiable as of potential "male or female interest". The words belonging to the created vocabulary were then searched for within the materials of the Politecnico di Bari and were counted separately for each engineering area. The results show that the engineering faculties with a higher percentage of female enrollment have, in their materials, many words of "female interest", as compared to engineering faculties with a higher percentage of male enrollment, having more words of "male interest" in their materials. The thesis offers eventually a potential tool to balance the gender vocabulary in the description of engineering programs.