2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Pathways to Engineering Graduate Studies for Women: Challenges and Opportunities Revealed through Mining Students’ Application, Admission, and Enrollment Data

Presented at Women in Engineering Division (WIED) Technical Session 2

While outreach, support, and mentorship for women in the engineering profession is vital, these efforts have been mostly focused on growing the number of women in undergraduate engineering and/or support women in engineering professions. There have been limited outreach and retention efforts recorded for women in graduate studies across Canada, despite the underrepresentation of women in postgraduate studies.
we investigated a) the unique behaviors of engineering departments in attracting and recruiting applicants in graduate degrees, and b) the factors contributing to offering an admission to graduate schools. This article presents findings from the first phase of a multiphase mixed-method research project that aims at exploring the challenges that women face to pursue graduate degrees in engineering and the alternatives to address those barriers, in a major research-based Canadian university.
Using students’ application, admission, and enrollment data from 2006 to 2021, we applied statistical analysis and multilevel logistic model to examine engineering graduate school application and admission patterns. We found that, in most, but not all, engineering departments domestic legal status, grade-based academic performance, and undergraduate degree from the same university are significant positive predictors of receiving admission from an engineering graduate program, while gender is not a significant contributing factor in the admission process. Our analysis also shows that share of women from admissions to graduate degrees in some of the most populated engineering departments has not been keeping up with the increases in the share of women from applicants to graduate degrees in those departments, in the last 10 years.
Understanding these patterns in the existing students’ data contributes to identifying potential spaces to strive for gender parity and equity in graduate studies in the faculty of engineering. Moreover, this understanding informs the next phases of the research project by providing contextualized information about the patterns of applications and admissions in graduate degrees in each engineering department. Such contextualized knowledge can facilitate building more effective pathways for women into graduate degrees in engineering.

Authors

Dr. Najme Kishani Farahani University of Toronto, Canada [biography]

Najme Kishani Farahani (najme.kishanifarahani@utoronto.ca) is a research associate at the University of Toronto to advance gender analysis and women's equity in engineering. Najme did her PhD at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. Her research interests involves the role of education in enhancing young people's hope, motivation, and capability to transform the social conflicts and building peace and democracy. In her careers in international development at UNICEF and Education Development Center, in the Middle East and East Africa, Najme had been working to strengthen institutional capacity to promote equity and justice for minoritized populations and women. Before switching into education, Najme was a civil engineer for eight years. Her passion for education and development made her to quit engineering and switch to social sciences. Her current role, as the research associate, bridges her engineering background to her passion and endeavors for social justice and gender equity.
Prof. Aimy Bazylak University of Toronto, Canada [biography]

Prof. Aimy Bazylak is a Professor in Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. She is the Tier II Canada Research Chair in Thermofluidics for Clean Energy. In 2008, she received the inaugural Bullitt Environmental Fellowship for leadership in the environmental field. She was awarded the I.W. Smith Award for Outstanding achievement in creative mechanical engineering within 10 years of graduation (2011) and the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation Early Researcher Award (2012). She is the Director of the Thermofluids for Energy and Advanced Materials (TEAM) Laboratory working in fuel cells, electrolyzers, and subsurface geology. In 2014 she became a Fellow of the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering and was most recently awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers.
Prof. Jason Bazylak University of Toronto, Canada [biography]

Professor Bazylak's teaching focus is on engineering design education and runs a large first year design course series. His research is into the obstacles facing women and Indigenous people in engineering education programs.

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