2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Female engineering students have unique insights for improving engineering programs and yet they often do not feel empowered to suggest changes. This paper will describe the creation and execution of a pilot brainstorming workshop titled, “How to make engineering programs worse for women” which was developed as part of a master’s level creativity and innovation class for a research practitioner. The pilot was run with a small cohort of eight female engineering students from the local chapter of the Society for Women Engineers (SWE) during engineering week in March 2022. The 2-hour workshop employed three proven creativity techniques including reverse brainstorming, a four-field matrix for evaluation, and enrichment tools for elaboration. The catchy title attracted an outspoken group of participants that were able to create many negative ideas, a good exercise in divergent thinking. Negative ideas are often easier to come up with than solutions, as our analytical brains limit creative potential. The results of this workshop were two-fold. First, the students that attended were able to vent their current frustrations and they also were able to practice some creative thinking techniques that might be useful in their careers and personal life. Second, the workshop yielded quite a few implementable ideas ranging from short-term to long-term that are being used to improve the campus experience for female engineering students. To date, the researcher has been able to implement two more ideas generated by the workshop participants including new mid-term course survey, women’s-led makerspace programming and registration support for parents. Additional ideas such as priority registration for women and gender pairing of academic advisors are in longer-term planning talks. This paper will detail the workshop format and supplementing documents, as well as the results generated from the pilot workshop. The research practitioner hopes this brainstorming workshop may be able to be used by other program managers to meaningfully engage with female engineering students, implement rapid change, and improve the learning environment for this underrepresented cohort of students.