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This literature review was conducted as a preliminary assessment of the available research literature produced by the engineering education community on climate affecting the retention of engineering doctoral students from diverse backgrounds. We seek to understand this specific student group’s retention in context of organizational science--specifically as an organizational climate issue--- and use an intersectional approach to consider the meaning and relevance of students’ belonging, simultaneously, to multiple social categories such as gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic background, race/ethnicity, and disability status. We review the literature on engineering doctoral students produced by the engineering education community as a first step to building a climate survey instrument. The objective of this literature review is to explore how the concept of ‘climate’ is being used in context of doctoral engineering student retention to degree completion, and we gather a body of evidence of climate factors. To do this, we conducted a targeted literature review and used organizational climate and intersectionality as our approach to interpreting the literature, as we aim to understand how climate affects the retention of engineering doctoral students from diverse backgrounds. In this paper, we first briefly present our understanding of climate as grounded in organizational science and intersectional theory. We then explain our methodology and finally discuss our analysis of the doctoral engineering student literature in engineering.