2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Currently and historically, women are underrepresented in engineering. One possible explanation for this phenomenon is the masculine engineering culture that rewards the ideas and behaviors of men over women. Researchers have shown that women who display more masculine attributes tend to be more successful in engineering. The culture of engineering could be a major contributing factor to women’s underrepresentation due to these masculine values and norms not only at the social level but also at the deeper epistemological levels of knowledge formation and convention. Our main argument in this paper is that epistemic injustice toward women is a theoretical grounding that helps explain the unwelcoming engineering culture toward women and others outside the middle-class white heterosexual male majority, thereby supporting unearned privilege for some while simultaneously disadvantaging and possibly harming others.
Through the theoretical framework of epistemic injustice, we seek to contrast the philosophical underpinnings of women’s ways of knowing to the accepted ways of knowing within engineering. We posit that this incongruence in epistemology is a structural barrier to women’s engagement in engineering and can negatively impact women’s experiences during their engineering education. The purpose of this paper is to understand how stereotype threat provides evidence of systemic inequity as defined by epistemic injustice theory and illuminates engineering practices that sustain and perpetuate harm to women.
In this conceptual synthesis, we examine literature on epistemic injustice and stereotype threat in educational spaces to provide a foundation to operationalize the two theories. Then, we propose a visual model to illustrate the overlap between the phenomenon of stereotype and the theoretical framework of epistemic injustice. The visualization of stereotype threat as an example of epistemic injustice highlights the deleterious consequences on women’s ways of knowing that affect their experiences and interactions as engineers, which can influence their academic and career choices. Stereotype threat examined through the lens of epistemic injustice offers an extemporaneous perspective on the epistemological interplay between culture and individual to tackle the long-standing problem of women’s underrepresentation in engineering.