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.
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Pink for Princesses, Blue for Superheroes: The Need to Examine Gender Stereotypes in Kid's Products in Search and Recommendations
In this position paper, we argue for the need to investigate if and how gender stereotypes manifest in search and recommender this http URL a starting point, we particularly focus on how these systems may propagate and reinforce gender stereotypes through their results in learning environments, a context where teachers and children in their formative stage regularly interact with these systems. We provide motivating examples supporting our concerns and outline an agenda to support future research addressing the phenomena.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1751278
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10335669
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- KidRec '21: 5th International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children \& Recommender and Information Retrieval Systems (KidRec) Search and Recommendation Technology through the Lens of a Teacher- Co-located with ACM IDC 2021
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2105.09296
