Community engagement efforts have become an important avenue for raising public interest and know-how related to engineering. These efforts draw the young and the diverse into seeing engineering as a worthwhile profession. One such effort at the national level in the U.S. is the “National Engineers Week”. This is a week-long celebration held every February that consists of numerous events and activities organized for the general public with a focus towards students, women, and under-represented groups. In this paper, we examined this effort through the lens of social media and analyzed Twitter data collected for two hashtags used during the National Engineers Week 2017: “#eweek2017” and “#engineersweek”. Our dataset consisted of 6,583 original tweets and 10,885 retweets. To study the impact of the outreach we used three analytical approaches: descriptive analysis, content analysis, and network analysis. We found that the Twitter campaign participation was dominated by engineering companies and individual users followed by a limited participation of educational institutions, professional engineering associations, and non-profits. As opposed to other popular hashtag campaigns, not a single news media organization was identified as a participating user signaling a lower new media-driven propagation of the campaign among the public. From a content perspective, the tweets can be categorized as event promotion, showcasing employees of engineering companies, or encouraging and inspiring public (especially women and children) towards engineering. With the growing popularity of social media, community engagement efforts need to strategically leverage hashtags and other media elements for a broader impact.
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#ILookLikeAnEngineer: Using Social Media Based Hashtag Activism Campaigns as a Lens to Better Understand Engineering Diversity Issues
Each year, significant investment of time and resources is made to improve diversity within engineering across a range of federal and state agencies, private/not-for-profit organizations, and foundations. In spite of decades of investments, efforts have not yielded desired returns - participation by minorities continues to lag at a time when STEM workforce requirements are increasing. In recent years a new stream of data has emerged - online social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram - that act as a key sensor of social behavior and attitudes of the public. Almost 87% of the American population now participates in some form of social media activity. Consequently, social networking sites have become powerful indicators of social action and social media data has shown significant promise for studying many issues including public health communication, political campaign, humanitarian crisis, and, activism. We argue that social media data can likewise be leveraged to better understand and improve engineering diversity. As a case study to illustrate the viability of the approach, we present findings from a campaign, #ILookLikeAnEngineer (using Twitter data – 19,354 original tweets and 29,529 retweets), aimed at increasing gender diversity in the engineering workplace. The campaign provided a continuous momentum to the overall effort to increase diversity and novel ways of connecting with relevant audience. Our analysis demonstrates that diversity initiatives related to STEM attract voices from various entities including individuals, large corporations, media outlets, and community interest groups.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1707837
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10066229
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of ASEE CONECD Conference, Crystal City, VA, USA.
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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