An official website of the United States government
Despite increased calls for the need for more diverse engineers and significant efforts to “move the needle,” the composition of students, especially women, earning bachelor’s degrees in engineering has not significantly changed over the past three decades. Prior research by Klotz and colleagues (2014) showed that sustainability as a topic in engineering education is a potentially positive way to increase women’s interest in STEM at the transition from high school to college. Additionally, sustainability has increasingly become a more prevalent topic in engineering as the need for global solutions that address the environmental, social, and economic aspects of sustainability have become more pressing. However, few studies have examined students’ sustainability related career for upper-level engineering students. This time point is a critical one as students are transitioning from college to industry or other careers where they may be positioned to solve some of these pressing problems. In this work, we answer the question, “What differences exist between men and women’s attitudes about sustainability in upper-level engineering courses?” in order to better understand how sustainability topics may promote women’s interest in and desire to address these needs in their future careers. We used pilot data from the CLIMATE survey given to 228 junior and senior civil, environmental, and mechanical engineering students at a large East Coast research institution. This survey included questions about students’ career goals, college experiences, beliefs about engineering, and demographic information. The students surveyed included 62 third-year students, 96 fourth-year students, 29 fifth-year students, and one sixth-year student. In order to compare our results of upper-level students’ attitudes about sustainability, we asked the same questions as the previous study focused on first-year engineering students, “Which of these topics, if any, do you hope to directly address in your career?” The list of topics included energy (supply or demand), climate change, environmental degradation, water supply, terrorism and war, opportunities for future generations, food availability, disease, poverty and distribution of resources, and opportunities for women and/or minorities. As the answer to this question was binary, either “Yes,” or “No,” Pearson’s Chi-squared test with Yates’ continuity correction was performed on each topic for this question, comparing men and women’s answers. We found that women are significantly more likely to want to address water supply, food availability, and opportunities for woman and/or minorities in their careers than their male peers. Conversely, men were significantly more likely to want to address energy and terrorism and war in their careers than their female peers. Our results begin to help us understand the particular differences that men and women, even far along in their undergraduate engineering careers, may have in their desire to address certain sustainability outcomes in their careers. This work begins to let us understand certain topics and pathways that may support women in engineering as well as provides comparisons to prior work on early career undergraduate students. Our future work will include looking at particular student experiences in and out of the classroom to understand how these sustainability outcome expectations develop.
more »
« less
This content will become publicly available on May 1, 2026
Caught in a Double Bind: Toward an Understanding of Undergraduate Women Engineers Early Experiences
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
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10634793
- Publisher / Repository:
- John Hopkins University Press
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The Review of Higher Education
- ISSN:
- 1090-7009
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Although the effects of COVID-19 were felt by all students, the pandemic exacerbated the barriers to belonging for women in engineering. Little work to date has investigated women’s experiences during the pandemic in disciplines that are hallmarked by masculinity. What scholarship has been completed on pandemic-necessitated virtual instruction has not examined how women’s experiences and sense of belonging differed by the college year in which this disruption in their learning environment occurred. Utilizing data from seven focus groups conducted in March 2022 with 22 students, this study investigates how pandemic-induced virtual instruction is related to sense of belonging for women within their engineering majors. We found not only that the disruption caused by the pandemic had differential outcomes for students, but that these differences were mainly related to the year in which pandemic-induced virtual instruction occurred. This study highlights the importance of focusing on belonging and related issues as women transition into their major. We offer implications and recommendations for practice and research based on the differential outcomes found.more » « less
-
Sustainability has increasingly become a more prevalent topic in engineering as the need for global solutions that address the environmental, social, and economic aspects of sustainability have become more pressing. However, few studies have examined students’ sustainability related career outcome expectations for upper-level engineering students, and, in particular, how these interests can be used to broaden participation in engineering. This time point is a critical one as students will be transitioning from college to industry or other careers where they may be positioned to solve pressing problems facing the environment, society, and the economy. To fill this gap, in this paper we answer the question, “What differences exist between men and women’s attitudes about sustainability in upper-level engineering courses?” in order to better understand how sustainability topics may promote women’s interest in and desire to address these needs in their future careers. We used data from a pilot of the CLIMATE survey given to 228 junior and senior civil, environmental, and mechanical engineering students at a large East Cost research institution. We asked the same questions as the previous study focused on first-year engineering students, “Which of these topics, if any, do you hope to directly address in your career?” with a list of ten sustainability outcome expectations. We used Pearson’s Chi-squared test with Yates’ continuity correction to compare men and women’s answers. We found significant gender differences in students’ desire to address energy, terrorism and war, water supply, food availability, and opportunities for woman and/or minorities in their careers. Some of these differences persist from first-year through upper-level classes, as compared to the results from a previous study in first-year students, while others develop during students’ undergraduate education. Our results begin to help us understand the particular differences that men and women, even far along in their undergraduate engineering careers, may have in their desire to address certain sustainability outcomes in their careers.more » « less
-
The purpose of this qualitative research study is to examine the doctoral experiences of successful Black women enrolled in U.S. engineering and computing programs. Specifically, this manuscript analyzes Black women’s perceived expectations regarding what they believed their doctoral programs would be like prior to their enrollment in graduate school versus their actual experiences as doctoral students (n = 37). Find- ings conclude that Black women expected their coursework would either be academically rigorous or not very difficult at all, and that their faculty advisors would provide them with tailored academic and social support. In addition, some of the Black women also expected that they would not have to deal with racism and sexism under the assumption that their respective departments were inclusive and equitable. Black women’s actual experiences consisted of unsupportive faculty, surprising levels of racism and sexism, and an obligation to code-switch. This article also discusses the implications of the findings, and strategies for helping Black women succeed in engineering and computing doctoral programs are also discussed.more » « less
-
Our research assesses a pivotal generation of pioneering American women engineers who graduated from college in the 1970s. In that decade, young women, encouraged in part by the women’s movement and changing social expectations, flocked into higher education and, to a much lesser extent, engineering. These female students, although not the very first women to enter engineering, were the beneficiaries of new affirmative action laws, and unlike their predecessors, they were part of a small but growing cohort of women engineers. The percentage of women earning undergraduate degrees in engineering grew at a rapid rate from less than 1 percent in 1970 to 9 percent in 1979. Understanding the career trajectories of these women may help institutions to develop better means of supporting female engineers. (Article published In the annual research issue on the state of women in engineering.)more » « less
