Gender in engineering is a long-standing source of inquiry, research, outreach, and discussion as inequity in demographics and negative experiences persist in the field. Women consist of just approximately 20% of our engineering undergraduate programs nationally, and roughly 14% of our national professional workforce. Absent from these numbers and research into gender minority experiences are students who lay further on the margins of discussion, awareness, inclusion, and acknowledgement of existence - students who identify as nonbinary or other genders aside from man or woman. This paper presents background literature on gender, gender minority experiences in higher education, nonbinary gender identity, and aims to present points of discussion to facilitate further engagement with a more nuanced understanding of gender in engineering.
Gender as a social system is defined by multiplicity and fluidity and does not fit within two unitary and discrete categories. The majority of current gender in engineering scholarship utilizes a conceptualization of gender which does not acknowledge or incorporate more than two gender options, and is rooted in increasingly rejected notions of biological essentialism. Nonbinary and gender nonconforming students, some of which also identify within the transgender population, exist in liminal spaces throughout society and higher education, and continuation of this scholarship tacitly denies their existence by framing gender as intrinsically linked to two biological categories. Engineering professionals, faculty, and students who identify as neither men nor women must be included and our conversation be expanded for academically rigorous investigation into gender dynamics and create inclusive engineering spaces.
Conversations around gender neutral bathrooms are just the beginnings of widespread cultural change to support gender expansive engineers. The discipline must re-think our approaches towards gender equity in engineering and the theoretical conceptualization of gender to not only frame its inequity through the sharp underrepresentation of women, but its gender dynamics as experienced by nonbinary and gender nonconforming students. We must continue to make space for marginalized gender identities and gendered experiences. Through reviewing existing literature and integrating my own intimate experiences I seek to discuss preliminary efforts towards nonbinary inclusion in our teaching, professionalization, and language. This paper represents a point of entry for discussing nonbinary inclusion as part of the discipline's continued commitment to cultural change surrounding gender.
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Transformational Resistance and Identity Development: A Case Study of an Asexual Woman Engineer
DEI programming in recent years has focused significant efforts on fostering inclusion of visible identities, such as race/ethnicity, certain dominant gender identities, and certain dominant forms of sexual orientation. However, there is a lack of understanding of how DEI programs can target people with multiple, possibly invisible, marginalized identities, such as asexuality. Furthermore, while DEI programs tend to provide valuable and necessary support spaces for students from marginalized backgrounds, they may not consider how marginalized students create their own resistance practices. In this paper, we explore the liminal space of invisible identity and its intersections with other identities through a case study of an asexual cis-gender woman undergraduate engineering student through the lens of transformational resistance and identity development. Through her narrative, we see how transformational resistance can occur at any part of the identity development process, though certain identities during these parts may not be salient or significant to the individual. This paper addresses the complexity in creating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) spaces for invisible marginalized identities and offers the experiences of the participant to question the bounds of inclusivity in these spaces.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2051502
- PAR ID:
- 10329791
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The Collaborative Network for Engineering and Computing Diversity (CoNECD)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Gender in engineering is a long-standing source of inquiry, research, outreach, and discussion as inequity in demographics and negative experiences persist in the field. Women consist of just approximately 20% of our engineering undergraduate programs nationally, and roughly 14% of our national professional workforce. Absent from these numbers and research into gender minority experiences are students who lay further on the margins of discussion, awareness, inclusion, and acknowledgement of existence - students who identify as nonbinary or other genders aside from man or woman. This paper presents background literature on gender, gender minority experiences in higher education, nonbinary gender identity, and aims to present points of discussion to facilitate further engagement with a more nuanced understanding of gender in engineering. Gender as a social system is defined by multiplicity and fluidity and does not fit within two unitary and discrete categories. The majority of current gender in engineering scholarship utilizes a conceptualization of gender which does not acknowledge or incorporate more than two gender options, and is rooted in increasingly rejected notions of biological essentialism. Nonbinary and gender nonconforming students, some of which also identify within the transgender population, exist in liminal spaces throughout society and higher education, and continuation of this scholarship tacitly denies their existence by framing gender as intrinsically linked to two biological categories. Engineering professionals, faculty, and students who identify as neither men nor women must be included and our conversation be expanded for academically rigorous investigation into gender dynamics and create inclusive engineering spaces. Conversations around gender neutral bathrooms are just the beginnings of widespread cultural change to support gender expansive engineers. The discipline must re-think our approaches towards gender equity in engineering and the theoretical conceptualization of gender to not only frame its inequity through the sharp underrepresentation of women, but its gender dynamics as experienced by nonbinary and gender nonconforming students. We must continue to make space for marginalized gender identities and gendered experiences. Through reviewing existing literature and integrating my own intimate experiences I seek to discuss preliminary efforts towards nonbinary inclusion in our teaching, professionalization, and language. This paper represents a point of entry for discussing nonbinary inclusion as part of the discipline's continued commitment to cultural change surrounding gender.more » « less
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Abstract Background A better understanding of departmental climate and its relationship to engineering identity is needed to diversify engineering and improve marginalized students' experiences.
Purpose/Hypothesis We investigated whether undergraduate engineering students from 16 social identity groups perceived departmental climate differently from one another and examined psychological and behavioral factors contributing to these perceptions and their relationship to engineering identification.
Design/Method We surveyed 398 undergraduate engineering students about departmental climate and engineering identity, testing structural models across race and gender. Qualitative analysis of open‐ended items complemented quantitative results.
Results Students rated climate for dominant identities (White, male, and/or US‐born) as more welcoming than for 14 nondominant identities, broadening the notion of “nondominant” identities in engineering. In structural models, invariant across race and gender, students' perceptions of bias, safety, and faculty support predicted climate ratings; peer relations and microaggressions predicted engineering identity. There were mean differences in perceptions across intersections of race and gender, but students in all groups perceived a climate gap favoring dominant identities. Open‐ended responses highlighted students' desire for a more diverse, inclusive program and the importance of peer relations.
Conclusions Departmental climate can be less welcoming for engineering students with many different nondominant identities. Attending to both students' own social positioning and their perceptions of climate for other students can open opportunities for change in engineering departments. Results suggest that efforts to improve peer relations in group work could be important in promoting disciplinary identification in historically marginalized groups.
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Undergraduate programs in engineering are demanding, time consuming, and inherently social endeavors for young adults. Strong social support networks and communities which foster success are frequently found to increase student retention and perseverance through their engineering degree programs. Students with marginalized identities in higher education are met with additional workloads – managing their social identity, negotiating stereotypes, and finding belonging. Existing research shows that a student’s experience in in higher education is particularly shaped by gender interactions. This has been shown to be particularly true in engineering, whose gender demographics and professional culture is described as hegemonically masculine. Research on gender in engineering has typically framed gender within a rigid, essentialized cisgender binary. Current literature is lacking detail on the processes used by gender diverse students in the transgender and gender nonconforming (TGNC) community as they navigate the gendered engineering field. We wish to highlight the experiences that undergraduate engineering students have had in relation to their social support and perceptions of gender as it relates to engineering culture within their undergraduate programs. Two students participated in autoethnography as a method of data collection to meet this objective. Collaborative autoethnographic methods position the students as coauthors and coresearchers to ensure the validity of analysis alongside the project’s primary investigators. Using a resiliency framework and critical autoethnographic analysis, the primary focus is on the ways these students have formed support systems and their perception of the social landscape in engineering. Through exploring how students persevere through their programs we may uncover points of intervention to strengthen these support systems.more » « less
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The contemporary understanding of gender continues to highlight the complexity and variety of gender identities beyond a binary dichotomy regarding one’s biological sex assigned at birth. The emergence and popularity of various online social spaces also makes the digital presentation of gender even more sophisticated. In this paper, we use non-cisgender as an umbrella term to describe diverse gender identities that do not match people’s sex assigned at birth, including Transgender, Genderfuid, and Non-binary.We especially explore non-cisgender individuals’ identity practices and their challenges in novel social Virtual Reality (VR) spaces where they can present, express, and experiment their identity in ways that traditional online social spaces cannot provide. We provide one of the first empirical evidence of how social VR platforms may introduce new and novel phenomena and practices of approaching diverse gender identities online. We also contribute to re-conceptualizing technology-supported identity practices by highlighting the role of (re)discovering the physical body online and informing the design of the emerging metaverse for supporting diverse gender identities in the future.more » « less
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