2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Exploring Career-path Streaming through an Intersectional Lens: Race, Gender, and Engineering in the Canadian Context

Presented at Women in Engineering Division (WIED) Technical Session 5 - Careers and Professional Identity

The continued underrepresentation of women in engineering is a concern that has received research, policy, and industry attention. In Canada, only 15 percent of practising professional engineers are female-identifying, and there is no publicly available data reporting the representation of racialized persons as licensed professional engineers. But disparity is not just in representation by numbers but also in workplace experiences and trajectories of career paths. Building on our previous research that uncovered engineering career path differences across race and gender (Rottmann et al., 2019, 2022), we conducted a cross-Canada survey with 982 engineering graduates to explore, intersectionally, career path streaming and its implications for professional identity and belonging. Through chi-squared tests of associations, we found that proportionately fewer among racialized men and racialized women engineering graduates were licensed professional engineers. We also found a significant overrepresentation of women, especially racialized women, on the 'Non-traditional path', the career path furthest away from the traditional, 'technicist'-centric, notion of an engineering career. Lastly, measures on engineering identity and belonging were significantly associated with career paths, race and gender identities, and licensure status. Connections to the broader literature and implications for advancing equity in engineering education and practice are discussed.

Authors

Dr. Andrea Chan University of Toronto [biography]

Andrea Chan is a Senior Research Associate at Troost Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering (Troost ILead), Institute for Transdisciplinary Engineering Education and Practice (ISTEP), University of Toronto
Dr. Cindy Rottmann http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3291-095X University of Toronto [biography]

Cindy Rottmann is the Associate Director of Research at the Troost Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering and an Assistant Professor of Engineering Education (ISTEP) at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include engineering leadership, social justice, and equity in engineering education and engineers' professional practice.
Dr. Emily Moore P.Eng. University of Toronto [biography]

Emily Moore is the Director of the Troost Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering (Troost ILead) at the University of Toronto. Emily spent 20 years as a professional engineer, first as an R&D engineer in a Fortune 500 company, and then leading
Ms. Dimpho Radebe University of Toronto [biography]

Dimpho Radebe is a PhD student in Engineering Education at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include engineering culture, engineering careers in the public sector, and ethics and equity in STEM. Dimpho has several years of experience in th
Ms. Emily Macdonald-Roach University of Toronto [biography]

Emily Macdonald-Roach is an MASc student in Engineering Education at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include engineering identity formation, engineering culture, and equity, diversity, and inclusion in engineering career paths.

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