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1. Nevertheless, she persisted:” Women thrive when they experience the joy of doing engineering in a climate for inclusion

   Evans R., Liang J. (December 2021, Research in Engineering Education Symposium & Australian Association for)

   CONTEXT For the last 40 years, the aggregate number of women receiving bachelor’s degrees in engineering in the US has remained stuck at approximately 20%. Research into this “disappointing state of affairs” has established that “the [educational] institutions in which women sought inclusion are themselves gendered, raced and classed” (Borrego, 2011; Riley et al., 2015; Tonso, 2007). PURPOSE Our focus is women students who thrive in undergraduate engineering student project teams. We need to learn more about how they describe becoming an engineer, about how women come to think of themselves as engineers and about how they perform their engineering selves, and how others come to identify them as engineers (Tonso, 2006). METHODS We are guided by a feminist, activist, and interpretive lens. Our multi-case study method, i.e., three semi-structured interviews and photovoice, offers two advantages: 1) the knowledge generated by case studies is concrete and context dependent (Case and Light, 2011); 2) case studies are useful in the heuristic identification of new variables and potential hypotheses (George and Bennett, 2005). ACTUAL OUTCOMES Our preliminary results suggest these women find joy in their experience of developing and applying engineering expertise to real, tangible, and challenging problems. They find knowing-about and knowing-how exciting, self-rewarding and self-defining. Further, these women work to transform the culture or ways of participating in project teams. This transforming not only facilitates knowing-about and knowing-how; but also it creates an environment in which women can claim their expertise, their identity as engineers, and have those expertise and identities affirmed by others. CONCLUSIONS If we aim to transform our gendered, raced, classed institutions, we need to learn more about women who thrive within those institutions. We need to learn more about the joy of doing engineering that these women experience. We also need to learn more about how they create an “integration-and-learning perspective” for themselves (Ely and Thomas, 2001) and a “climate for inclusion” within those project teams (Nishii, 2012), a perspective and climate that fosters the joy of doing engineering. 

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2. Women Thriving in Engineering: Listening to and learning from women who flourish in undergraduate engineering project teams

   https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE49875.2021.9637468  

   Evans R., Liang J.G. (December 2021, 2021 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE))

   Our work-in-progress research offers a distinctive focus and methodology. We focus is on women who are thriving in undergraduate engineering student project teams. Our methodology adopts a feminist, activist, interpretivist perspective using a multi-case study, critical sampling approach that attends to small numbers in order to learn from small numbers. Our early results suggest that these women are thriving because they experience joy in developing and applying engineering expertise, in knowing what and knowing how in response to real, tangible and challenging problems. They report that the experience is exciting, self-rewarding and self-defining. Such research can potentially change the negative discourse regarding women and engineering education with a discourse that is more welcoming and inclusive. 

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3. New Engineers' First Three Months: A Study of the Transition from Capstone Design Courses to Workplaces

   Gewirtz, Chris; Kotys-Schwartz, Daria; Knight, Daniel; Paretti, Marie; Arunkumar, Sidharth; Ford, Julie Dyke; Howe, Susannah; Rosenbauer, Laura Mae; Alvarez, Nicholas Emory; Deters, Jessica; et al (June 2018, 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exhibition)

   In preparing engineering students for the workplace, capstone classes provide unique opportunities for students to develop their professional identities and learn critical skills such as engineering design, teamwork, and self-directed learning (Lutz & Paretti). But while existing research explores what and how students learn within these courses, we know much less about how capstone courses affect students’ transitions into the workplace. To address this gap, we are following 62 new graduates across 4 institutions during the participants’ first 12 weeks of work. Participants were drawn from 3 mechanical engineering programs and one general engineering program. Women were intentionally oversampled in the study, with 29 participants identifying as female. Weekly surveys were used to collect quantitative data on what types of workplace activities participants engaged in (e.g., team meetings, project budgeting, CAD modeling, engineering calculations) and qualitative data on what challenges they experience in their early work experience. In this paper, we present a descriptive analysis of the data to identify patterns across participants. Preliminary analysis of the quantitative data suggests that the most common activities for our participants were team meetings and project planning (mentioned by >70% of participants) compared to formal presentations and project budgeting (mentioned by <30% of participants). Preliminary analysis of the qualitative data suggests that participants’ most challenging experiences clustered into two dominant groups: 1) self-directed learning, and 2) teamwork and communication. The results are intended to inform both capstone faculty and industry to identify areas of strength within current practices and areas for improvement in course design and structure and/or in industry onboarding practices. 

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4. Caught in a Double Bind: Toward an Understanding of Undergraduate Women Engineers Early Experiences

   https://doi.org/10.1353/rhe.0.a960939  

   DeAngelo, Linda; Lewis, Danielle Vegas; Snowadzky, Morgen (May 2025, The Review of Higher Education)

   Women’s experiences in engineering are fraught with issues beyond their underrepresentation. Utilizing the concept of the double bind and intersectionality, this interpretive phenomenological study examined data from interviews with 32 first-year women undergraduate engineering students during their first few weeks of college to understand how women’s early experiences inform the ways they position themselves in engineering. We were concerned with how women’s self-understanding is inherently intertwined with how they make calculated moves based on contradictory messaging about their competence and suitability for engineering both prior to and early on in their college experience. We found that women engineering students of all races and ethnicities begin college already caught in a double bind that forces them to navigate conflicting social expectations, which are intensified and reified during their early college experiences as they face the entrenched gender expectations in engineering. For women of Color, the whiteness of the space uniquely heightened, differentiated, and situated their experiences. We conclude our discussion with implications that center equity in both experiences and outcomes 

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5. Surfacing Deeply Held Beliefs about Gender-and Race-Based Minoritization in Engineering: Emerging Insights After Two Years Focused on Data Collection

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--41977  

   Delpech, Dira; Dringenberg, Emily (August 2022, ASEE Conferences)

   Engineering educators in many contexts are increasingly being called to contribute to equity. The focus of our CAREER project is to investigate the ways in which engineering faculty, staff and administrators think about the cause of gender- and race-based minoritization in engineering. Specifically, we investigate the beliefs they express about why women and people of color remain minoritized in engineering and how they arrive at those beliefs. Long term goals of the work include designing evidence-based professional development that can support faculty at any stage in their development as change agents for equity in engineering. The overarching project design includes a series of four one-on-one interviews with participants. The first two interviews are focused on their beliefs about gender- and race-based minoritization, respectively. The third interview will explore their narrative, and the fourth interview (or some type of interaction) will be designed based on how the project evolves and what we learn. We are currently in the second year of the project. To start, our research team used crowdsourcing as a method of recruiting our participants. We asked students to identify engineering educators that they considered to be inclusive based on their lived experience. We oversampled for students from minoritized groups (non-male, non-white). We also allowed those nominated by students to refer to any peers that they felt were inclusive. This resulted in the following participant pool with at least one majority identity (race or gender): 11 white men, 11 white women, and 5 men of color. After piloting our initial interview protocol, we completed gender beliefs interviews with all 27 participants during the 2020-2021 academic year. We had the interviews transcribed, and members of our research checked them for accuracy and de-identified them. The clean transcripts were then sent back to the participants for review. We began data condensation by generating a summary sheet for each participant, which includes the main concepts captured in each section of their gender beliefs interview. We are currently (2021-2022) conducting race beliefs interviews with those same participants. We published the results of piloting the use of our methodological framework, Thinking as Argument (TaA) in the 2021 ASEE proceedings. In short, we believe the framework shows promise for studying beliefs at a deeper level by inviting participants to work through the types of evidence they draw on to commit to their beliefs about the cause of minoritization in engineering. In this paper, we offer some insights that are emerging at this early stage of the project: Different participants draw on diverse ways of knowing to commit to their beliefs, including lived experience and scholarship. These ways of knowing seem potentially related to their own identities. For example, several participants who identify as men of color leverage their own experiences with racism to explain the cause of sexism. This insight has given us pause on the ways in which our framework, TaA, privileges academic or argumentative ways of knowing. We are gaining awareness of the incredible complexity that exists within trying to characterize or evaluate someone's contributions to equity as they relate to their ways of thinking. This finding has given us a pause about the ways in which we, as researchers, assign value to ways of being or acting. At this current stage, we are exploring further by engaging ourselves in reflection of other ways in which beliefs in this context are formed and we are inviting others to do the same. Future work will include ongoing analysis and sensemaking. With the race beliefs completed, we will be able to use data display techniques to explore any patterns between the participants’ beliefs and positionalities. We look forward to honing our protocol for the narrative interviews and are soliciting feedback in terms of how to use the fourth and final interaction of the project in a more participatory way to encourage and give back to our participants. 

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