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Sense of belonging improves educational outcomes for students, especially for minoritized students, like lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) students, and sense of belonging is experienced through students’ relationships with people on whom they rely for academic support. This study examined the relationship between sense of belonging, gender and sexual identities, and the role that key providers of academic support played for students in college. Students reported a high sense of belonging in their majors, and this experience did not vary much by LGBTQ status or role of academic support provider. LGBTQ students do rely on different people for support, however, which holds implications for how students should cultivate relationships to support their academic success. 

This theoretical paper proposes a framework to understand LGBTQ participation in STEM that reveals how heterosexism and cissexism operate in engineering. We propose a framework that connects the low representation of LGBTQ students in engineering to experiences of inauthenticity that threatens their participation in engineering and motivation to persist in their studies. LGBTQ students’ social networks in engineering are composed predominantly of people of different sexual and gender identities than them, whereas cisgender, heterosexual students have access to networks composed of peers who nearly entirely share these identities with them. A concept from social network theory, homophily describes how much one's social network is composed of people who are like oneself. Homophilous networks validate personal experiences and identities in ways that we anticipate foster a greater sense of authenticity within those environments. Schmader and Sedikides posit within their State Authenticity as Fit to Environment model that authenticity is an essential human need induced in environments that are congruent with one’s sense of identity. Experiencing state authenticity increases motivation and engagement within that environment; experiencing inauthenticity does the opposite. Heterosexual, cisgender students experience authenticity within engineering with little question, whereas LGBTQ students are more likely to experience inauthenticity which interferes with their participation in engineering fields. Attention to state in/authenticity as a critical aspect of engineering learning environments may help shift these demotivating and disengaging environments for minoritized students like LGBTQ students who wish to pursue these fields of study. To better understand LGBTQ participation in engineering social network analysis could help unpack the relationship between the composition of engineering students’ social networks, their experiences of in/authenticity, and different educational and vocational outcomes in engineering. This may also offer insight into how students organize their networks into environments where they are more likely to experience state authenticity. Implications for practice include helping LGBTQ students find community in engineering and other STEM fields through organizations like Out to Innovate and oSTEM. 

The purpose of this NSF CAREER project is to explore the participation of LGBTQ students in STEM fields. LGBTQ students leave engineering and other STEM majors and careers at higher rates than their heterosexual, cisgender peers, and the climate within these fields is a contributing factor to this difference in attrition. In order to develop a diverse engineering workforce and adequately prepare the next generation of engineers and other STEM professionals, engineering educators and departments must address inequities such as these to ensure broad participation. This purpose of this poster is to highlight progress toward meeting the first research aim of the overall project, to examine the social networks and related STEM outcomes of LGBTQ students. The project comprises three primary research aims, which also include future work comparing STEM degree completion rates between LGBTQ students and their cisgender, heterosexual peers, and exploring the intersection of STEM discipline-based identity (e.g., engineering identity, science identity) with sexual and gender identity. This project stands to improve our understanding of how to broaden participation in engineering and other STEM fields by pursuing robust research efforts that illuminate the ways sexual and gender identity shape trajectories into, through, and out of STEM. Over the past year of the project, we have accomplished developing and administering a survey to college students nationally. We administered the survey at two universities in Spring 2022 followed by a third in Fall 2022, and administration will conclude at two more in Spring 2023.The survey itself uses an egocentric social network analysis approach to gather data on the characteristics of a subset of students’ social networks, measures of several affective outcomes known to lead to academic persistence, and data on students’ college experiences and personal demographics. For this poster, we present our work testing how well the outcome measures performed in the survey instrument. Overall, our dataset as collected to date includes 404 students who completed the survey. Of these students, over half were women (58.2%), about a quarter were men (28.1%), and 8.9% were nonbinary, genderqueer, or gender nonconforming. In terms of sexual identity, 38.8% of were heterosexual, 30.1% were bisexual or pansexual, 14.4% were gay or lesbian, and 6.5% were asexual. Our survey measured three affective outcomes: sense of belonging in one’s major, commitment to one’s major, and science and engineering identity. Reliability testing and factor analysis demonstrated that our data performed well in replicating the factor structure of our measures, and content validity testing demonstrated these measures related as expected with other variables in the dataset. 

The purpose of this research paper is to test the difference in likelihood that LGBTQ students are open about their sexual or gender identities to peers in STEM than other members of their networks. LGBTQ students face pressures in STEM to hide their sexual and gender identities, which threatens their ability to experience state authenticity within STEM, or a congruence between their social identities and the environment. Incongruence would lead LGBTQ students to leave STEM majors at higher rates which undermines efforts to broaden participation in engineering. We used egocentric social network analysis to test differences in the likelihood that LGBTQ students are “out” to different members of their networks. We hypothesized that LGBTQ students are less likely to be out to peers in STEM than other members of their networks because of the culture and climate within STEM. Experiencing continued incongruence between one’s social identity and one’s environment, more common for minoritized individuals than others, can become a barrier to continued participation within that environment. Outness therefore serves as an indicator of how comfortable LGBTQ students are in STEM as an early predictor of whether they will persist in STEM. Results indicate participants were less likely to be out to peers in STEM than other peers. When we took whether the participant was a STEM major into consideration, the picture became less clear. Among STEM majors, participants reported being less likely to be out to their peers in STEM than other network members, but none of these factors were significant in a full-factor, mixed-effects regression model. These results suggest some degree of inauthenticity experienced by LGBTQ people with their peers in STEM, though the situation may be improving. These results implicate the role of climate in STEM through LGBTQ students’ relationships with their peers. If they feel they must be less open about their sexual or gender identities with peers in STEM, LGBTQ students are likely not experiencing a level of state authenticity within STEM that would retain them within these fields. Educators should consider how academic environments are construed to provide a supportive climate that allows LGBTQ students to be open and that sets expectations for all students to respect and welcome the contributions of their LGBTQ peers. 

Research shows that the LGBTQ climate in engineering, and other STEM, undergraduate degree programs is rife with heteronormativity and cissexism, leading LGBTQ students to leave STEM majors and careers at higher rates than their heterosexual, cisgender peers. In order to develop a diverse STEM workforce and adequately prepare the next generation of professionals in STEM, higher education, and especially engineering education, must address inequities such as these to ensure broad participation in STEM fields. This NSF CAREER-funded project helps meet this need by examining the participation of LGBTQ students in STEM fields. The project focuses on three primary research aims to address this purpose: test the relationships between the composition of LGBTQ students’ social networks and non-cognitive STEM outcomes, compare STEM degree completion rates between LGBTQ students and their cisgender, heterosexual peers, and explore the intersection of STEM discipline-based identity (e.g., engineering identity, science identity) with sexual and gender identity. This project stands to improve our understanding of how to broaden participation in STEM by pursuing robust research efforts that illuminate the ways sexual and gender identity shape trajectories into, through, and out of STEM. The purpose of this poster is to present preliminary outcomes from the first research aim of the project, which is to test the relationship between composition of students’ social networks and non-cognitive outcomes, and compare these relationships by sexual and gender identities. We hypothesize that homophily within students’ social networks, especially for heterosexual and cisgender students, will predict greater levels of identification with one’s STEM discipline, sense of belonging in STEM, and commitment to a STEM major. LGBTQ students whose LGBTQ connections are primarily outside STEM are hypothesized to feel more of a pull away from STEM. This poster focuses on the social network analysis phase of the project, including instrument development, data collection procedures, and preliminary analysis of the data. Data collection will commence in the spring 2022 semester. Social network analysis (SNA) is a method that measures and represents the patterns and information of contextually bound structural relationships to explain why the relationships occur and the outcomes of their existence, and SNA is only recently gaining ground in educational research. We developed a survey that incorporates generating an ego-centric social network, or the people an individual relies on most for support, with existing measures for sense of belonging, discipline-based identity, and commitment to field of study, adapted for this study’s purpose. The survey validation procedure included cognitive interviews with undergraduate students and expert reviews by engineering education and institutional research experts. Data collection will occur at five colleges and universities nation-wide, representing a range of institutional types, geographical diversity, and student body diversity. The poster will detail the theory and procedures that constitute SNA research, the survey development process for this phase of the project, and preliminary results from analysis of the data. 

Background: How do Indigenous engineering students describe their engineering leadership development? The field of engineering has made only slow and modest progress at increasing the participation of Indigenous people; an identity-conscious focus on leadership in engineering may help connect the practice of engineering with Indigenous students’ motivations and values. Methods: This study utilized a grounded theory qualitative approach to understand how Indigenous engineering students at a U.S.-based university experience engineering leadership. We explored the experiences of four Indigenous engineering students through one interview and one focus group. Results: Students pointed out how Indigenous peoples had long engaged in engineering work before contact with European settlers, and they saw an opportunity for leadership in applying their engineering knowledge in ways that uplifted their home communities. Conclusion: In addition to ways that engineering programs can better support Indigenous students who aspire to become practicing engineers, our study pointed to new directions engineering programs could take to frame engineering work as providing a toolkit to improve one’s community to leverage a wider set of motivations for entering engineering among many different communities underrepresented in engineering, including Indigenous students.