2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board # 26 : Why We Persist: An Intersectional Study to Characterize and Examine the Experiences of Women Tenure-Track Faculty in Engineering

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session

This project applies an intersectionality framework to identify why tenure-track women of color (WOC) across academic ranks, disciplines, and diverse institution types persist as engineering faculty. Project goals will be achieved through the compilation and analysis of longitudinal data of faculty WOC in engineering using the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) database; the development of a national survey investigating the perspectives of all women engineering faculty at U.S. engineering institutions on issues of race, class, and gender; and the exploration of similarities and differences in horizontal and vertical intersectionality across WOC groups via the collection and analyses of narratives of approximately engineering WOC tenure-track faculty.

To date, database and institutional analyses and scale development have occurred. ASEE, National Science Foundation, and university data have been analyzed and cleaned to develop a national database of engineering faculty and institutional leaders (e.g., president, provost, diversity officers) across ABET-accredited universities. ABET data reports that 619 institutions are ABET accredited with 3,245 programs. All of these programs will be included in the analysis. For the scale development, the team generated initial question item pools exploring how intersectionality relates to women engineering faculty’s persistence and resilience from individual, symbolic, and institutional perspectives.

Initial findings note that the concentration of WOC differs across institution types. Predominately White Institutions (PWIs), in general, report lower proportions of WOC than non-PWI’s (e.g., minority-serving institutions). Asian American female faculty constituted the biggest proportion of WOC among all different groups of institutions. African Americans constituted 45% of the female engineering faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), compared to about 3% of the female engineering faculty at PWIs. However, when compared to the total engineering faculty African American female faculty represent only 6.7% and 0.4% in each of these groups of institutions, respectively. Latina faculty were outnumbered by Asian American female faculty at Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs).

Authors

Dr. Monica Farmer Cox Ohio State University [biography]

Monica F. Cox, Ph.D., is Professor and Chair in the Department of Engineering Education at The Ohio State University. Prior to this appointment, she was a Associate Professor in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University, the Inaugural Director of the College of Engineering's Leadership Minor, and the Director of the International Institute of Engineering Education Assessment (i2e2a). In 2013, she became founder and owner of STEMinent LLC, a company focused on STEM education assessment and professional development for stakeholders in K-12 education, higher education, and Corporate America. Her research is focused upon the use of mixed methodologies to explore significant research questions in undergraduate, graduate, and professional engineering education, to integrate concepts from higher education and learning science into engineering education, and to develop and disseminate reliable and valid assessment tools for use across the engineering education continuum.
Dr. Joyce B. Main http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3984-533X Purdue University, West Lafayette (College of Engineering) [biography]

Joyce B. Main is Associate Professor of Engineering Education at Purdue University. She received an Ed.M. in Administration, Planning, and Social Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a Ph.D. degree in Learning, Teaching, and Social Policy from Cornell University. Dr. Main examines student academic pathways and transitions to the workforce in science and engineering. She was a recipient of the 2014 American Society for Engineering Education Educational Research and Methods Division Apprentice Faculty Award, the 2015 Frontiers in Education Faculty Fellow Award, and the 2019 Betty Vetter Award for Research from WEPAN. In 2017, Dr. Main received a National Science Foundation CAREER award to examine the longitudinal career pathways of engineering PhDs.
Dr. Ebony Omotola McGee Vanderbilt University [biography]

Ebony McGee, associate professor of diversity and STEM education at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, investigates what it means to be racially marginalized in the context of learning and achieving in STEM higher education and industry. In particular, she studies the racialized experiences and racial stereotypes affecting the education and career trajectories of underrepresented groups of color by exploring the costs of academic achievement and problematizing traditional forms of success in higher education, with an unapologetic focus on Black folx in these places and spaces. McGee’s NSF CAREER grant investigates how marginalization undercuts success in STEM through psychological stress, interrupted STEM career trajectories, impostor phenomenon, and other debilitating race-related trauma for Black, Indigenous, and Latinx doctoral students.
Education is McGee’s second career; she left a career in electrical engineering to earn a PhD in mathematics education from the University of Illinois at Chicago. With funding from six National Science Foundation (NSF) grants, McGee co-founded the Explorations in Diversifying Engineering Faculty Initiative (EDEFI; pronounced “edify”). Visit EDEFI’s website at blackengineeringphd.org.
Matilde Luz Sanchez-Pena Purdue University, West Lafayette (College of Engineering) [biography]

Matilde Sanchez-Pena is a first year PhD student in the Engineering Education program at Purdue University. Her research interests are diversity in engineering, education policy making and the effective teaching of statistics in engineering.
Dr. Nikitha Sambamurthy zyBooks, A Wiley Brand [biography]

Nikitha Sambamurthy completed her Ph.D. in engineering education at Purdue University in 2017. Nikitha is the engineering content lead at zyBooks, a startup that develops interactive, web-native textbooks for college courses in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) disciplines.
Jung Sook Kim Ohio State University [biography]

Ph.D. in Department of Teaching & Learning, College of Education & Human Ecology, at the Ohio State University

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