The under-representation of women and African Americans in engineering spurred the research documented in this study. This document reports the reults of a study investigating middle school (in a southeastern rural community) children's attitudes toward persistence, life goals and sex-stereotypes, as potential barriers to their pursuit of engineering careers. It was designed to validate previous research on southeastern college freshmen that found no difference between persistence and life goals but large gender differences on sex-stereotyped barriers against women in engineering by men. Race, gender, and race-by-gender effects were studied on 88 middle schoolers between the ages of 13 to 15 (25 black males, 15 white, 25 black females, 23 white). Results indicate that males have higher scores on persistence than females, and black males have higher scores than white males. Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) indicates that race and the sex-by-race interaction effect were not significant at the .05 level of significance. The main effect for gender of sex-stereotypes was significant beyond the .01 level. T-test results indicate that freshmen males harbor more sex-stereotyped opinions against women in engineering than eighth grade males. (Contains 27 references.) (PR)