2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The supply disparity of talented workers in the U.S. civil engineering industry has been identified as a consistent issue. The civil engineering industry is dominated by old, White professionals, and there is a need for the recruitment of populations with diverse backgrounds. Yet, the number of civil engineering students decreased by 3000 between 2010 and 2020. The reduction of full-time student enrollment in the field is exacerbated by the fact that not all engineering graduates choose to work in the same field after graduation. While it is important to recruit students across all populations, little is known about the experiences of underrepresented minority students, such as Asian American women. Asian American women can exhibit transformational leadership through collaboration, compassion, and empathy. These leadership-coupled skills are identified as important by working professionals in civil engineering and can contribute to improving team performance and organizational productivity. Despite their talents, Asian women are understudied, and their racialized and gendered experiences are only partly represented in the studies of women of color in civil engineering research. Because they are overrepresented by race and underrepresented by gender, their experiences should be studied while considering gender, racial, and environmental factors. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to raise the voice of Asian American women in civil engineering by identifying people they indicate as influential in their development of career intentions. To better understand the experiences of Asian American civil engineering students, this paper seeks to identify the influential people, or, in this study, alters, that Asian American women identify as influential for their career choice in civil engineering. This study explored the experiences of 10 Asian American women in civil engineering who were in their third or greater year of their undergraduate program. An inductive approach was utilized to examine the alters of Asian American women by collecting data from a name generator. The researcher analyzed the data by developing codes and categories based on alters’ demographic and occupational backgrounds. This study identified professional, academic, and non-civil engineering alters as influential for Asian American women’s formation of career intention. The findings of this study contribute to the growing body of research on intersectionality studies and the career development of Asian women in civil engineering. The findings of this paper can be used as a guideline for engineering scholars to identify and compare the alters of Asian American women in other similar fields. This paper also informs educators and career counselors to offer more opportunities for Asian American women in civil engineering to interact with alters identified as influential and important for their formation of career intention. This study could also help employers improve support systems that help Asian women make professional connections and move into civil engineering jobs by giving them more chances to network.