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One intervention thought to foster women’s interest in engineering is introducing girls to STEM or engineering activities. The argument for this is that an increase in interest early in their lives will lead to more women pursuing a career in engineering. The focus of our research is women who are thriving as undergraduate student leaders in engineering project teams. We employ a multi-case study method that involves a sequence of semi-structured interviews. This paper speaks to the findings derived from the life history interview where participants describe their early lives and pre-college education. Our inductive thematic analysis of the data indicates that: (1) The women’s early familial influences allowed non-gender defined ways of being, doing, and aspiring for trying new things. (2) This re/definition of gender in relation to self is reinforced by their success in school and through their accomplishments in other extracurricular activities. Those activities were not confined or even heavily weighted toward STEM. (3) Not all of the women assumed leadership roles throughout their K-12 schooling. Nevertheless, what is common is that through academic and extracurricular engagements they developed confidence, a “can-do” attitude, and a rejection of viewing failures as defining indicators of their ability or potential. Their self-awareness, their confidence, and their persistence in the face of failure are critical because they later function as counter-narratives in the women’s encounters with sexism and other forms of marginalization when in engineering and their project teams. Finally, there is some evidence to suggest that encouraging young girls to involve themselves in STEM and/or engineering may be counterproductive. By unintentionally “pushing” these young girls into engineering, rather than “allowing them to choose for themselves,” we may be encouraging the adoption of masculinist gendered roles associated with engineering. 

An ongoing focus of engineering education research is on increasing the number of women in engineering. Previous studies have primarily focused on examining why the number of women enrolled in engineering colleges remains persistently low. In doing so, while we have gained better understanding of the challenges and barriers that women encountered and factors that contribute to such negative experiences, it also, as some scholars have pointed out, has cast a deficit frame on such matters. In this study, we take on a positive stand where we focus on women undergraduate students who not only “stay” but also succeed in engineering programs (that is, our definition of thriving) as a way to locate the personal and institutional factors that facilitate such positive outcomes. Our initial pilot study involved two female engineering undergraduate students at an R1 university. Each student was interviewed three times. While each of the interviews in the sequence had a slightly different focus, the overall goal was to understand the women’s autobiographic and educational experiences leading to their paths to engineering and participation in the engineering project teams. The inductive thematic analysis revealed several primary findings which subsequently played a major role in developing a codebook for the current study. Building upon what is learned from the pilot study, the current study uses a layered multi-case study design involving three institutions: a public/private Ivy League and statutory land-grand research university in the Northeast, a public land-grant research university in the Midwest, and a public land-grant research university in the Southwest which is also designated as MSI/HSI. In addition to the interview method, data collection also contains documents and artifacts. For this paper, we zone in onto the data collected in the first interviews, known as the “life history” where we mainly learn about the women undergraduate participants’ personal-familial contexts that contribute to their entry to majoring in engineering as identified by the women themselves. Preliminary findings indicate that: (1) our participants tend to have supportive families; (2) while all experienced gender biases, not everyone has formed a critical consciousness of sexism; and (3) being able to actually engage by “doing” something and creating a product is key to the women’s finding joy in engineering and associating themself with the field/profession. It is important to note that the second interviews, which focus on the educational journey of the participants in relation to engineering identity development and project team experiences, are underway. The ultimate goal for the study is to develop a theoretical framework speaking to a multifaceted model of forces (micro as autobiographic, macro as institutional, and in-between or middle-level as team-based) in shaping women’s entry and advance in engineering programs. This framework will recognize the variations in institutional type, resource availability, and structural and cultural characteristics and traditions in teams. It will also use such differences to show possibilities of more versatile ways for diversifying pathways for women and other minoritized groups to thrive in engineering. 

In this presentation/publication, we focus on reporting the notion of joy as revealed in our data. The women undergraduate student participants find joy in their experience of developing and applying engineering expertise, knowing what and knowing how in response to real, tangible and challenging problems. They find knowing what and how exciting, self-rewarding and self-defining. They begin as outsiders, progress through a series of successes; having always to earn and, in some cases, demand respect. They develop an engineer’s systematic approach culminating with them claiming their identity as an engineer. If we hope to transform our gendered, raced, classed institutions, we need to learn more about women who thrive within those institutions, about the joy of doing engineering that these women experience.