The study, published on 8 October 2026, follows the PRISMA 2020 guidelines for systematic reviews and combines qualitative synthesis with bibliometric mapping, a technique borrowed from information science that treats the research literature itself as data. The authors searched five databases for publications between 2000 and 2025, retrieved records, and after deduplication screened 252 of them. From there, 118 full-text articles were assessed for eligibility, and 19 studies were retained for in-depth qualitative synthesis, while the broader corpus informed the bibliometric analysis. Because the work involved no human participants and relied entirely on previously published, peer-reviewed literature, ethics approval was not required, and the review was conducted under the Committee on Publication Ethics principles.

The bibliometric side of the analysis is where the study becomes genuinely revealing about the shape of the field itself. The authors examined annual production trends, identified core sources using Bradford’s zones, a classical library-science method for distinguishing the small set of journals that publish most of the relevant work from the long tail that publishes the rest, and mapped citation structure and keyword co-occurrence. What emerged was a literature concentrated in engineering education outlets and organised around two distinct intellectual axes: disciplinary engineering education scholarship on one side, and gender-focused psychosocial research on the other. In other words, the people who study how engineers are taught and the people who study how gender shapes motivation have largely been publishing in parallel, with limited integration between the two traditions.

That fragmentation matters, because the review’s qualitative synthesis shows that the mechanisms driving women’s persistence cut across both worlds. The authors identify four interacting mechanisms. The first is belonging, which they describe as relational infrastructure. Decades of research, from Vincent Tinto’s foundational models of student departure to contemporary work on counterspaces for women of colour in STEM, converge on the finding that a student’s sense of being recognised as a legitimate member of the engineering community is not a soft, optional nicety. It is load-bearing. When belonging collapses, persistence tends to collapse with it, and the effect is not uniform: studies show that race and gender interact in how belonging influences decisions to major in STEM fields.

The second mechanism is socially situated self-efficacy and engineering identity. Self-efficacy, the belief that one can successfully execute the tasks required of a domain, has long been a staple of motivation research, but the review emphasises its social situatedness. Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory, extended by Lent, Brown and Hackett into career and academic choice, treats efficacy beliefs as products of environments, not just of individuals. Studies of undergraduate women in engineering show that stereotypes about who belongs in the field erode both efficacy and identification with engineering itself, and that this erosion predicts lower achievement and weaker persistence intentions. Danish survey and registry data published in 2024 add population-level evidence linking gender, self-efficacy and attrition from STEM programmes.

The third mechanism is what the authors call cumulative expectancy-value-cost dynamics, drawing on the situated expectancy-value theory developed by Jacquelynne Eccles and Allan Wigfield. The logic is deceptively simple: students persist when they expect to succeed, when they value the outcome, and when the perceived costs, in effort, time, emotional strain and foregone alternatives, do not overwhelm the expected value. But the review’s synthesis shows that for women in engineering these three quantities are not gender-neutral. Threatening academic environments depress self-esteem and engagement, make-or-break gateway courses create profiles of expectancy, value and cost that predict who abandons a major, and the costs accumulate over semesters rather than arriving all at once. Persistence decisions, in this framing, are the output of a slow-moving ledger that the environment keeps writing in.

The fourth mechanism is programme design and viability conditions, and it is here that the review makes its most distinctive contribution. Rather than treating curriculum structure, pedagogy and institutional support as background variables, the authors advance a relational-structural framework that positions programme design as an active contributor to persistence outcomes. The evidence they synthesise includes studies of linked-course communities, which a 2025 randomised controlled trial found can increase student success, cooperative learning methodologies, and programmes such as the Rocky Mountain Scholars Program, which was shown to affect social and academic support, retention and success for female undergraduate engineers. The design of a programme, in this view, either builds the relational infrastructure that belonging requires or quietly dismantles it.

The broader context gives these findings urgency. UNESCO’s 2024 report on securing STEM futures for women, the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2024, and CEPAL’s analysis of educational transformation in Latin America and the Caribbean all document persistent underrepresentation of women in engineering and technology fields, and consulting analyses such as McKinsey’s 2023 diversity report argue that the costs of that underrepresentation extend well beyond fairness into organisational performance. Against that backdrop, the Chilean study, funded by Chile’s Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo through FONDECYT Regular Grant No. 1241537, is notable for grounding its synthesis in a systematic, reproducible search strategy rather than a selective reading of the literature.

What makes the four-mechanism framework compelling is its insistence on interaction. Belonging, self-efficacy, expectancy-value-cost calculations and programme design do not operate in isolation. A student who doubts her efficacy in a gateway course experiences rising psychological cost precisely because her sense of belonging in the programme is fragile, and a programme that structures competitive, high-stakes weed-out courses amplifies all three at once. Conversely, interventions that build relational infrastructure, such as cohort models, linked courses and counterspaces, can simultaneously raise belonging, strengthen identity, lower perceived cost and improve the expectancy side of the ledger. This is why single-lever interventions so often disappoint in evaluation studies: they address one term of a coupled system while leaving the others untouched.

The review also carries a methodological lesson for the research community. The two-axis structure of the literature, with engineering education scholarship and gender-focused psychosocial research running on separate tracks, suggests that the field’s own organisation may be slowing down the integration of insights that students experience as a single, seamless reality. A woman deciding whether to stay in an engineering programme does not distinguish between a psychosocial mechanism and a structural one; she experiences them together, in the same classroom, in the same week. The relational-structural framework proposed by Beroíza-Valenzuela and Véliz is an attempt to give researchers and programme designers a shared map of that experience, one in which the question is no longer simply how to fix individual students, but how to build programmes that make staying the rational, supported and socially sustainable choice for everyone who wants to engineer.

Subject of Research: Gendered academic persistence in engineering education: bibliometric trends and underlying mechanisms

Article Title: Gendered academic persistence in engineering education: bibliometric trends and underlying mechanisms

Article References: Beroíza-Valenzuela, F., & Véliz, D. (2026). Gendered academic persistence in engineering education: bibliometric trends and underlying mechanisms. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 509. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01793-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01793-y

Keywords: Gendered, academic, persistence, engineering, education, bibliometric, trends, underlying, mechanisms, scientific research