“She’s More Like a Guy”: The Legacy of Gender Inequity Passed on to Undergraduate Engineering Students

Despite decades of effort to increase the number of female graduates in engineering, women remain vastly underrepresented in the discipline. As millions of dollars in recruitment and retention programs have failed to reverse the underrepresentation problem, we as engineering education researchers need to refocus our efforts. Too often research is framed in student deficits and does not include an examination of the culture in engineering. In light of inertia to change, we must better identify the root cause of sustained gender inequity. Many scholars argue it is time start re-examining the undergraduate engineering culture. This includes the pedagogical practices, long-standing traditions, and socialization of engineers steeped in male norms. In this research, we sought to identify the teaching methods and deeply entrenched beliefs that transmit inherent messages of a hierarchical discourse community; a community that is not friendly to women. To explore the barriers to engineering and the sorting mechanisms that lead to attrition of women from the field, we interviewed men and women engineering professors and students in three university engineering programs. Faculty and students alike identified and rationalized several time-honored engineering education practices that encouraged women to adopt a more masculine role, deeming them as necessary for success in a biased environment. In exploring the beliefs of engineering education insiders, the enculturation of women in engineering was evident in both the female faculty and students, with the female students being much more aware of the process than their faculty “role models.” We found evidence that enculturation of female faculty results in their failure to recognize the role culture plays in maintaining a dearth of women engineering students. Finally, we found that professors’ beliefs are echoed in the accounts of students, which leads to the perpetuation of many practices that alienate women

Assessment Of An Engineering Technology Outreach Program For 4th-7th Grade Girls

This paper describes a workshop led by female Engineering Technology students, with support from female faculty, to provide an introduction to Engineering Technology to 4th – 7th grade girls through a series of interactive laboratory experiments. This outreach program was developed to improve attitudes towards science and engineering in middle school-aged girls by making science tangible and fun. The workshop takes place on a college campus and makes use of four different Engineering Technology laboratories. Each lab activity includes a hands-on experiment, beginning with an overview of the engineering technology discipline and a brief description of the theories related to the experiment. The day culminates with a panel session between the participants and the college students. An ancillary outcome of the program is that it serves as a community building event for female Engineering Technology college students. Connections are developed between the students and between students and faculty in the college. The college students gain the satisfaction of influencing the attitudes of participants and develop critical communication skills. An attitude survey given to participants before and after the workshop shows that participation in these workshops results in a more positive attitude towards science and technology. College student volunteers were also surveyed after the workshop to determine the impact of their participation. A full workshop description is given in this paper as well as analysis of the assessment results for the participants and the college students.

Where Are All the Women Engineers? An Insider's View of Socialization and Power in Engineering Education

Despite more than thirty years of the underrepresentation of women in engineering being a persistent concern, research on the cause of the problem has not been successful in reversing the trend. A plethora of theories as to why females are not entering engineering exist, yet they only address issues on the surface and do not attend to a deep-rooted culture in the field; a climate that has been traditionally male-normed and identified as “chilly” for women. My study calls into question traditional representations of the discipline by revealing an established culture of power, privilege and exclusion. In the tradition of ethnography, my study examined the environment of engineering education from the perspective of a 30-year insider, viewing the culture from the outside for the first time. Data were collected from class observations and interviews with engineering students and engineering professors at two state-funded and one private college of engineering. I found teaching methods and deeply entrenched beliefs that transmit inherent messages of a hierarchical discourse community, a community that is not friendly to women. Through my data I depict a hegemonic culture that has changed very little in the last 30 years in light of the many calls to diversify the discipline. Convinced that traditional teaching methods must be effective, since they themselves have been successful, professors I interviewed failed to identify contexts of persistence, challenge and success, socialization and preparation tasks, and engineering communications as contributing to an inequitable learning environment. Through this research journey, not only did I come to realize how the time-honored norms in engineering education have maintained a white, male dominance, I was confronted with my own domestication (Rodríguez, 2006) into the discipline and the regrettable role I have played in upholding inequitable practices in the face of my efforts to recruit and retain more women students