Educating Engineering Students to Address Bias and Discrimination Within Their Project Teams

What training should engineering students receive to enable them to contribute to reducing bias, discrimination and the persistent lack of diversity in engineering? Collaboration is central to professional engineering work and, consequently, teamwork and group projects are increasingly present in engineering curricula. However, the influence of unconscious bias on interactions within teams can negatively affect women and underrepresented groups and is now recognised as an important engineering ethics issue. This paper describes a workshop designed to enable engineering students to work equitably in diverse teams. Key features of the workshop include (1) the emotionally safe, empowering and warm environment created, (2) the creation of opportunities for students to discuss and apply the issues raised to their own engineering projects, and (3) the opportunities to practice the use of both proactive and reactive strategies to address bias and discrimination in teams. The evaluation of the workshop suggests that engineering students regarded both onsite and online formats as providing useful skills that they intended to apply in practice. Follow-up evaluations suggest that the workshop leads to behavioural change, especially the use of proactive teamwork strategies intended to reduce the impact of unconscious bias.

University Title IX Requirements have Chilling Effect on Gender Discrimination Research: A Call for a More Nuanced Approach

The full extent of gender discrimination in university settings remains uncertain. More research is needed to understand the scope of gender discrimination experiences in universities and to develop effective prevention approaches. However, Title IX and Institutional Review Board policies may hinder researchers' abilities to study gender discrimination in university settings. In this paper, we describe our experience working with the Institutional Review Board and Title IX offices to obtain approval for researching gender discrimination in university settings. We provide recommendations for how universities can enable gender discrimination research and follow Title IX policies.

“No Girls on the Software Team”: Internship Experiences of Women in Computer Science

Despite computer science (CS) students’ widespread participation in internships, few studies have examined how internship experiences impact career decision-making. Because women are severely underrepresented within CS, understanding how internship experiences impact career decision-making can provide critical insight into women’s career development processes and longevity in the field. Using the concept of career self-management within social cognitive career theory as a theoretical framework and standpoint feminism as a critical lens, we conducted interviews with 13 women CS majors to learn how internship experiences influenced their career decisions. Findings reveal three major career development process themes, including questioning technical competence, navigating gendered “microclimates,” and reflecting on careers in CS. While internships largely affirmed women’s career interests in CS, participants also navigated challenging gendered dynamics and often made career decisions directly influenced by these experiences. Findings inform how CS educators, career development practitioners, and employers may better develop inclusive internship cultures in computing.

Engineering Students’ Industrial Internship Experience Perception and Satisfaction: Work Experience Scale Validation

An essential aspect of higher education institutions’ academic curricula for engineering courses is the students’ industrial internship programs. In the literature, it is well accepted that such programs provide valuable learning outcomes and increase the graduates’ employment prospects. Thus, it is paramount to evaluate the internship programs’ quality to identify opportunities to improve their design and implementation. However, that evaluation typically depends on self-designed academic assessment surveys of questionable validity. The purpose of this paper is to assess engineering students’ perceptions of their internship experiences. For that purpose, the validation of a recently adapted version of the Work Experience Questionnaire (WEQ) was carried out on a sample of 447 engineering students that participated in industrial internship programs offered by Portuguese public universities and polytechnic schools. A confirmatory factor analysis was performed to confirm the suitability of the model proposed by the WEQ’s authors on this study’s sample. The psychometric qualities were evaluated through convergent and discriminant validity. The results showed that the model fit the sample well, and convergent and discriminant validity was established. The general competencies subscale was the most important for the participants—specifically, the competency of solving problems. Differences concerning the WEQ and gender, company size, and compensation were found and discussed. This study provides researchers in the field with a new tool validated explicitly for engineering students.

Who Is Writing About Women in STEM in Higher Education in the United States? A Citation Analysis of Gendered Authorship

The purpose of this study was to identify trends in the representation of female authorship regarding the topic of the status of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in higher education in the United States from 2007 to 2018 in prominent interdisciplinary journals. We conducted a comprehensive search for articles and collected the genders of the first and senior authors from 647 citations. We assessed the number of male versus female authors, the percentages of female first authors and senior authors, and the percentage of female corresponding authors for each year. Additionally, we also analyzed the citations to determine the journals and publishers who produced the most literature in this area. Women constituted 59% overall authorship and 34% first authorship. The top publishers in this area include Sage Publications, Springer/Nature, and Elsevier. Women constituted 60% of the first authors in STEM literature on the status of women and 38% of senior authors. Although there was growth over time in first authorship in STEM literature written by women, they continue to remain a minority in senior authorship. We suggest it is women that are leading this discussion, highlighting the additional lift that women in STEM in higher education must make; researching and publishing on their own experiences as part of their self-advocacy.

Difficulty Orientations, Gender, and Race/Ethnicity: An Intersectional Analysis of Pathways to STEM Degrees

Is there a relationship between mathematics ability beliefs and STEM degrees? Fields such as physics, engineering, mathematics, and computer science (PEMC) are thought to require talent or brilliance. However, the potential effects of difficulty perceptions on students’ participation in STEM have yet to be examined using a gender and race/ethnicity intersectional lens. Using nationally representative U.S. longitudinal data, we measure gender and racial/ethnic variation in secondary students’ orientation towards mathematics difficulty. We observed nuanced relationships between mathematics difficulty orientation, gender, race/ethnicity, and PEMC major and degree outcomes. In secondary school, the gap between boys’ and girls’ mathematics difficulty orientations were wider than gaps between White and non-White students. Mathematics difficulty orientation was positively associated with both declaring majors and earning degrees in PEMC. This relationship varied more strongly based on gender than race/ethnicity. Notably, Black women show higher gains in predicted probability to declare a mathematics-intensive major as compared to all other women, given their mathematics difficulty orientations. This study’s findings show that both gender and racial/ethnic identities may influence the relationship between mathematics difficulty orientation and postsecondary STEM outcomes.

Gender Diversity in STEM Disciplines: A Multiple Factor Problem

Lack of diversity, and specifically, gender diversity, is one of the key problems that both technological companies and academia are facing these days. Moreover, recent studies show that the number of female students enrolled in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) related disciplines have been decreasing in the last twenty years, while the number of women resigning from technological job positions remains unacceptably high. As members of a higher education institution, we foresee that working towards increasing and retaining the number of female students enrolled in STEM disciplines can help to alleviate part of the challenges faced by women in STEM fields. In this paper, we first review the main barriers and challenges that women encounter in their professional STEM careers through different age stages. Next, we focus on the special case of the information theory field, discussing the potential of gendered innovation, and whether it can be applied in the Information Theory case. The working program developed by the School of Engineering at the University of Valencia (ETSE-UV), Spain, which aims at decreasing the gender diversity gap, is then presented and recommendations for practice are given. This program started in 2011 and it encompasses Bachelor, Master and PhD levels. Four main actions are implemented: Providing institutional encouragement and support, increasing the professional support network, promoting and supporting the leadership, and increasing the visibility of female role models. To assess the impact of these actions, a chi-square test of independence is included to evaluate whether there is a significant effect on the percentage of enrolled female students. The percentage of graduated female students in the information and Communications Technology Field is also positioned with respect to other universities and the Spanish reference value. This analysis establishes that, in part, this program has helped to achieve higher female graduation rates, especially among Bachelor students, as well as increasing the number of top-decision positions held by faculty women.