2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

How Engineering Faculty, Staff and Administrators Enact and Experience Diversity Programs.

Presented at Equity, Culture & Social Justice in Education Division (EQUITY) Technical Session 6

Women and men of color and white women remain severely underrepresented in engineering education, despite the myriad of programs and initiatives that have been implemented to increase their participation. While much research has investigated the impacts of diversity programs on minoritized groups in engineering, less has been done to study how engineering faculty, staff and administrators tasked with implementing and enacting diversity policies and programs discuss their roles and efforts in these programs.

Our analysis looks at how policies and practices unfold around diversity work. Using one primarily white flagship university we call ‘Middle University’ as a case study, we use interview data with faculty, staff and administrators. Drawing on literature from scholars that conceptualize diversity work as a dynamic and contested process in higher education, we consider how diversity work is implemented and carried out in this college of engineering. Our results show that interviewees describe the following four themes: (1.) Diversity work lacks resources (2.) Diversity work is not tightly coordinated or organized (3.) Diversity work is not always consistently rewarded by the institution (4.) Diversity outcomes are rarely tracked systematically. In summary, our study sheds light on the ways engineering education institutions may express their commitment to diversity in theory, but face difficulties carrying it out in practice.

This work is funded by NSF Grant # 2042363:Identifying Catalysts for Increasing Student Diversity in Engineering in a Predominantly White Institution

Authors

Dr. Emily Gwen Blosser University of Louisiana, Lafayette [biography]

Emily Blosser is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Louisiana Lafayette. She has expertise in qualitative methods, including grounded theory and narrative analysis. She prioritizes the importance of using sociological theories to shed light on the underrepresentation of women and people of color in engineering. Her work is committed to shifting engineering environments towards diversity, inclusion and equity.
Dr. Arunkumar Pennathur University of Texas, El Paso [biography]

Dr. Arunkumar Pennathur is Associate Professor of Industrial Engineering at the University of Texas at El Paso. Dr. Pennathur is a Co-Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Industrial Engineering, and the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Applications and Practices in Engineering Education. Dr. Pennathur’s research interests are in human factors engineering and engineering education. In particular, he has conducted research on functional limitations in activities of daily living in older adults. The National Institutes of Health, and the Paso del Norte Health Foundation have funded his research on older adults. The US Army Research Laboratory has funded Dr. Pennathur’s research on workload assessment. Dr. Pennathur has also been recently awarded two grants from the National Science Foundation in Engineering Education. In one of the grants, he is modeling how engineering faculty plan for their instruction. In a second grant, he is developing a model for institutional transformation in engineering which balances access and excellence. Dr. Pennathur is the author/co-author of over 100 publications in industrial engineering and human factors engineering. He is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics, among other journals.
Priyadarshini Pennathur
Prof. Nicholas A Bowman http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8899-7383 University of Iowa [biography]

Nicholas A. Bowman is the Mary Louise Petersen Chair in Higher Education, professor of Higher Education and Student Affairs, senior research fellow in the Public Policy Center, and director of the Center for Research on Undergraduate Education at the University of Iowa. His research uses a social psychological lens to explore key issues in higher education, including student success, diversity and equity, admissions, rankings, and quantitative research methodology.

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