While the importance of school-to-work transitions is increasingly recognised, little research has examined the roles that gender plays in those transitions. This is a problem because of the higher rates of attrition of newcomer women engineers than newcomer men engineers. To address that gap in research, this article addresses the questions: "What gendered experiences and observations do practicing civil engineers have within their first three years in the workplace?" And "How can those experiences be accounted for in a model of organisational socialisation?" Three sets of interviews were conducted with men and women early career civil engineers in the United States. A model was then created to account for the findings. Men and women had different experiences that point to ways in which gender structures organisational socialisation, and those must be accounted for in studies of organisational socialisation.