2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Examining Professional Engineering Societies’ Systemic Inclusion of Transgender, Nonbinary, and Sexual Minoritized Undergraduates

Presented at Equity, Culture & Social Justice in Education Division (EQUITY) Technical Session 13

Purpose
Engineering and STEM climates are often less welcoming for gender minoritized (GM; e.g., transgender, nonbinary) students, and particularly harrowing for sexual minoritized (SM; e.g., lesbian, gay) students (Stout and Wright, 2016; Mattheis et al., 2019; Miller et al., 2020; Voigt and Reinholz, 2020; Cech and Waidzunas, 2021; Haverkamp, 2021; Palmer et al., 2021). Identity-focused professional engineering and STEM societies, such as SWE, SHPE, NSBE, and oSTEM, have been shown to help students manage their identities in engineering and STEM. We explore how GM students (some of whom have a SM identity in this study) and gender majoritized students (all of whom have an SM identity in this study) are impacted by their participation in a range of society-types (i.e., identity-focused vs. non-identity focused). We nest our study within the concept of social capital—advice and resources gained from other people that are influential in STEM and engineering degree program persistence. Too often sexual and gender minoritized students are lumped together in analyses, a flaw given the often overlapping but certainly different experiences of SM and GM students—one our work does not have.

Methods
We developed a codebook and used reflexive thematic analysis to descriptively organize data on how societies include respondents. The data came from a first-of-its-kind survey with 477 SGM STEM students (n=364 engineering majors). The item analyzed was “Please describe how your participation in ___________ has contributed to your progress as you pursue your STEM degree.” The blank was filled in based on the societies that the respondent had indicated participating in on an earlier item. Sixty-six respondents indicated a gender other than man, woman, and/or cisgender (e.g., agender, multigender, gender non-conforming/genderqueer, and transgender)—these participants may also hold SM identities. We compare their answers to the remaining sample pool with gender majority identities, all of whom held SM identities (n=411).

Conclusions
We find differences in how societies provided a sense of community to GM students—this trend was seen across oSTEM, NSBE, SWE, and industry/discipline societies, with only SHPE and science chapters not offering reduced sense of community to GM members. GM students had less access to social networking (oSTEM; SWE), professional resources (NSBE; SHPE), and academic resources (industry/discipline societies). This connects to lower rates of society usefulness to GM students’ degree progress (in oSTEM, SWE, and industry/discipline societies). Also, for GM students, oSTEM more frequently reduced isolation related to unspecified identities (likely those related to gender minoritized identities but not explicitly mentioned in the responses), and SHPE more often reduced racial/ethnic isolation.
In sum, only oSTEM helped reduce isolation related to GM identities, leaving room in other societies’ programming to promote inclusion in this regard. This work has implications for societies when enacting policies to cultivate more inclusive community environments, and buttressing potentially unequal access to social networking as well as professional and academic resources. Program changes based on this evidence could help improve the social capital and resource access of GM students, which in turn could increase persistence in engineering and STEM.

Authors

Dr. Rebecca Campbell-Montalvo http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2671-8056 University of Connecticut [biography]

Dr. Rebecca Campbell-Montalvo is a cultural anthropologist who focuses on understanding how a range of people (including women, historically excluded racial/ethnic groups, and LGBTQIA+ students) are served in undergraduate STEM contexts, with an emphasis on engineering and biology. She is a postdoctoral research associate in the Neag School of Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Connecticut. In addition, Campbell-Montalvo is Co-PI on a $500,000 NSF grant that seeks to improve inclusion in biology education and biology education research through the Inclusive Environments and Metrics in Biology Education and Research network. Prior to her current role, Dr. Campbell-Montalvo was the Program Assistant for the National Institute of Health’s Maximizing Access to Research Careers Undergraduate Student Training in Academic Research program in the Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering at the University of South Florida.
Mrs. Hannah Cooke University of Connecticut [biography]

Hannah Cooke is a doctoral student in Curriculum and Instruction with a focus on Science Education at the University of Connecticut. Her research interests include critical, antiracist science teaching that works to dismantle systems of oppression. Currently, she is a research assistant on the DRK12 project COVID Connects Us: Nurturing Novice Teachers’ Justice Science Teaching Identities, which uses design-based research to develop justice-centered ambitious science teaching practices with in-service science teachers. She also works on NSF projects that aim to improve equity in undergraduate STEM education, especially for students with LGBTQ+ identities. In addition, she is working in the Education Leadership department exploring student activism around issues of racial equity. Her former role as a high school science teacher and facilitator of the school’s Green Team led her to grapple with the role science educators play in advancing environmental justice. She holds a MA in Curriculum and Instruction and a BS in Biological Sciences from the University of Connecticut.
Dr. Chrystal Smith http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7816-058X National Science Foundation [biography]

Chrystal A. S. Smith, Ph.D., is a cultural anthropologist with expertise in diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM education. Her research uses social science theoretical frameworks to examine how implicit factors such as culture and social capital influence the persistence of students belonging to groups historically underrepresented in STEM education. Currently, she is a Program Officer in the Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM, Directorate for STEM Education, National Science Foundation.
Dr. Ellen Puccia Beta Research Associates, Inc. [biography]

Ellen Puccia, Ph.D., is an applied anthropologist with expertise in mixed methods data collection and analysis. In addition to her work in healthcare access, she also focuses on diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM education. Specifically, she looks at the influence of social capital on the persistence of underrepresented groups in STEM. Currently, she is the owner and Executive Director of Beta Research Associates, Inc.
Dr. Michelle Hughes Miller University of South Florida [biography]

Michelle Hughes Miller is Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies. As a feminist criminologist with a PhD in Sociology, Dr. Hughes Miller works to improve diversity in STEM, analyzes the problem of gendered violence, and deconstructs policy representations of bad mothers. She has published three co-edited books: Addressing Violence Against Women on College Campuses (Temple, 2017), Bad Mothers: Representations, Regulations and Resistance (Demeter, 2017), and Alliances for Advancing Academic Women: Guidelines for Collaborating in STEM (Sense, 2014). Her current collaborative project is to learn more about the development of STEM students’ ethical identities (NSF, PI=Centeno and Reeves).
John Skvoretz University of South Florida [biography]

John Skvoretz is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Sociology & Interdisciplinary Social Sciences and, by courtesy, Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Florida. A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a recipient of the James Coleman Distinguished Career Award from the Mathematical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association, his current research projects analyze social network data from various sources.
Hesborn Wao [biography]

Hesborn Wao, Ph.D., uses mixed methods research to investigate the implicit factors associated with the underrepresentation of women and minorities in STEM education. He strives to improve K-20 STEM learning experiences and degree attainment. He received his Ph.D. in Measurement & Evaluation and M.Ed. in Curriculum & Instruction both from the University of South Florida, and his B. Ed in Mathematics from the University of Nairobi, Kenya.

Download paper (831 KB)

Are you a researcher? Would you like to cite this paper? Visit the ASEE document repository at peer.asee.org for more tools and easy citations.

» Download paper

« View session

For those interested in:

Advocacy and Policy
Broadening Participation in Engineering and Engineering Technology
engineering
gender
LGBTQIA+
professional
undergraduate