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).
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.
Joyce B. Main is Assistant Professor of Engineering Education at Purdue University. She holds a Ph.D. in Learning, Teaching, and Social Policy from Cornell University, and an Ed.M. in Administration, Planning, and Social Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Ebony O. McGee is an Assistant Professor of Diversity and Urban Schooling at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College and a member of Scientific Careers Research and Development Group at Northwestern University. She received her Ph.D. in Mathematics Education from the University of Illinois at Chicago; and she was a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. As a former electrical engineer, she is concerned with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning and participation among historically marginalized students of color. Her research focuses on the role of racialized experiences and biases in STEM educational and career attainment, problematizing traditional notions of academic achievement and what is mean to be successful yet marginalized, and STEM identity and identity development in high-achieving students of color. She is currently the PI on two studies funded by NSF, the first of which investigates the causes behind why African Americans remain one of the most underrepresented racial groups in engineering faculty positions. The second study is working toward the design of a holistic racial and gender attentive mentoring program for engineering PhD students of color.
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.
Nikitha Sambamurthy completed her Ph.D. in engineering education at Purdue University in 2017. Nikitha works with zyBooks, a startup that develops interactive, web-native textbooks for college courses in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) disciplines.
Ph.D. in Department of Teaching & Learning, College of Education & Human Ecology, at the Ohio State University
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