2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In today’s global workforce, employees must work effectively together in diverse teams. This diversity of demographics on an engineering team results in the essential diversity of abilities and experiences required to develop original and innovative designed solutions to the problems posed to the industry[i],[ii],[iii],[iv],[v]However, to ensure the team can work together effectively, each team member must feel safe, included, and valued by the team[vi]It is this “psychological safety” as discussed by Edmondson, and the pursuit to mentor students on its importance and how they might contribute to it that served as motivation for the intervention of this study. The intention of the authors was to increase student awareness regarding gender harassment, inequity and the bystanders that watch it happen, through discussions centered on compassion for those who experience harassment or inequities. This was attempted through facilitating classroom discussions focused on clips from the documentary film Picture a Scientist[vii]. In this documentary, first-hand examples of gender harassment, inequity and bystanders are recounted by the female scientists who experienced them. Several impactful clips were selected from each topic (harassment, inequity, and bystanders) and grouped together to create three separate videos which were assigned to students to view and on which to reflect. Students’ reflections were guided by several prompts, to which their responses were submitted as an assignment prior to the in-class discussion. The clips were then discussed over two class sessions. A final reflection was also assigned with prompts focused on why these topics were discussed in an Introduction to Engineering course and how it might have impacted the students’ perceptions of these topics. Responses to all reflection prompts were qualitatively analyzed for emergent themes and to identify any themes resulting in the largest impact on shifting students’ perspectives. A 16-question survey was developed by the authors and modeled after the Balanced Emotional and Empathy Scale (BEES)[viii]The survey was given both prior to and after the intervention, providing a quantitative measure of the intervention’s impact on students’ perceptions of what constitutes gender harassment, inequities, and bystanders. Reliability analysis on the survey shows a high Cronbach’s alpha score of 0.84 based on two factors. Initial results show that students’ perceptions/understanding of 1) what constitutes professional treatment of their colleagues and 2) the current level of gender equity in the STEM industry can be positively impacted by the proposed intervention. The impacts were greater in the male population.

References
[i] Díaz-García, Cristina, Angela González-Moreno, and Francisco Jose Sáez-Martínez. "Gender diversity within R&D teams: Its impact on radicalness of innovation." Innovation 15, no. 2 (2013): 149-160.
[ii] Bear, Julia B., and Anita Williams Woolley. "The role of gender in team collaboration and performance." Interdisciplinary science reviews 36, no. 2 (2011): 146-153.
[iii] Ellison, Sara Fisher, and Wallace P. Mullin. "Diversity, social goods provision, and performance in the firm." Journal of Economics & Management Strategy 23, no. 2 (2014): 465-481.
[iv] Niebuhr, Annekatrin. "Migration and innovation: Does cultural diversity matter for regional R&D activity?." Papers in Regional Science 89, no. 3 (2010): 563-585.
[v] Trax, Michaela, Stephan Brunow, and Jens Suedekum. "Cultural diversity and plant-level productivity." Regional Science and Urban Economics 53 (2015): 85-96.
[vi] Edmondson, Amy. "Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams." Administrative science quarterly 44, no. 2 (1999): 350-383.
[vii] Cheney, Ian, Natasha Bedu, Nina Griffin, and Jess Potter, eds. Picture a scientist. Uprising Productions, 2020.
[viii] Mehrabian, Albert. "Manual for the balanced emotional empathy scale (BEES)." Available from Albert Mehrabian 1130 (1996).