2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Illuminating Growth Among Women in Engineering: A Retrospective on ASEE Data

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

Background: There exists a national focus on broadening the participation of women in engineering beyond the commonly reported 20% proportion of degrees awarded. Yet, we do not know the full impact of this focus, especially as the reported aggregated data does not appear to shift over time.
Purpose: The authors wanted to understand the anecdotal musings that the women are choosing “soft” engineering disciplines, like environmental engineering, while avoiding the “hard” engineering disciplines, like mechanical engineering. Additionally, we sought to disaggregate the graduation data over time by biological identities in ways previously unpublished by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) annual reports.
Method: The program Tableau was used to visualize data from ASEE, per their Engineering Data Management System (EDMS). We first cleaned data with a self-generated Jupyter Notebook file and then followed ten rules for making sense of data in creating the disaggregated visualizations at all three levels of engineering academia. We sought trends by disaggregating ASEE records by gender, race, and engineering discipline bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degree levels over a 16-year period, from 2005-2021. Infographics were generated for all twenty-two of the ASEE-reported disciplines at all three engineering degree levels, including discipline-specific versions of all three levels of percentages with each gender highlighted. These infographics are available for future attributed use as supplementary materials:
https://asee2024-public.drkristinlyn.com/
Results: The percentage of bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees is increasing for women, as the total number of all degrees awarded is increasing for all genders in all disciplines. Racial factors remain a concern for both sexes, but these are not evenly distributed across disciplines. Women congregate in biomedical, environmental, and chemical disciplines, which are actually hard-applied-life academic subjects. However, the most women earned bachelor’s degrees in the hard-applied-nonlife mechanical engineering discipline over the study timeframe. Also, degrees awarded to women in the computer science within engineering discipline climbed steadily to the second most in 2021.
Conclusions: While true that the overall proportion of women in engineering hovered at ~20% for the past 20 years, the numbers and distribution of women has shifted in some disciplines. Myriad first- and second-year retention programs, as well as outreach for all levels of PreK-12 education, are likely bringing more women into engineering majors, however, more engineering identity research is needed to determine how to empower women and minority persistence to change the proportions.

Authors

Ms. Kristin L Schaefer P.E. http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5945-1485 University of Houston [biography]

Kristin Luthringer Schaefer is a licensed professional engineer (PE) and a certified secondary teacher (grades 6-12), both in Texas, as well as the owner of her own consulting firm, Schaefer Engineering. She obtained both her bachelor's and master's degrees in Mechanical Engineering (ME) from Texas A&M University (TAMU) and earned a doctorate in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Houston (UH). Her Ph.D. research interests are in STEM education, especially with underrepresented students of all ages, STEM mentors, and their motivations and/or persistence. The first part of her career was spent designing residential split system HVAC equipment and Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) units for Trane in Tyler, TX. Kristin has taught about design, engineering, and manufacturing to students of all ages in various places including to preschoolers via Schaefer Engineering’s STEM outreach, to senior mechanical engineering undergraduates at TAMU, to eighth graders in KatyISD at Beckendorff Junior High, and to freshmen mixed major undergraduates at UH and at TAMU.
Kristin is also the mom of one smart teenage boy whose journey through learning differences and Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) has enabled her to connect with and support students with a broad spectrum of learning preferences.
Dr. Jerrod A Henderson http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-0501-5805 University of Houston [biography]

Dr. Jerrod A. Henderson (“Dr. J”) is an assistant professor in the William A. Brookshire Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Cullen College of Engineering at the University of Houston (UH). He began his pursuits of higher education at Morehouse College and North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University, where he earned degrees in chemistry and chemical engineering as a part of the Atlanta University Center’s Dual Degree in Engineering Program. While in college, he was a Ronald E. McNair Scholar, allowing him to intern at NASA Langley. He also earned distinction as a Phi Beta Kappa member and an American Chemical Society Scholar. Dr. Henderson completed his Ph.D. in Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As a graduate student, he was a NASA Harriet G. Jenkins Graduate Fellow and mentor for the Summer Research Opportunities Program. Dr. Henderson has dedicated his career to increasing the number of students on pathways to pursue STEM careers. He believes that exposing students to STEM early will impact their lives and academic pursuits. He, along with Rick Greer, co-founded the St. Elmo Brady STEM Academy (SEBA). SEBA is an educational intervention that introduces underrepresented and underserved fourth and fifth-grade students and their families to hands-on STEM experiences. Dr. Henderson is the immediate past Director of the Program for Mastery in Engineering Studies (PROMES, pronounced “promise”), a program aimed at increasing engineering student achievement, engagement, and graduation rates. His research group seeks to understand engineering identity trajectories and success mechanisms throughout lifespans using action-based participatory research and novel methodologies such as photovoice, IPA, and draw-an-engineer and the development of research-informed interventions to improve student success. He was most recently recognized by INSIGHT Into Diversity Magazine as an Inspiring STEM Leader, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences (LAS) Outstanding Young Alumni Award, Career Communications Group with a Black Engineer of the Year Award for college-level promotion of engineering education and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2023 to advance his work that centers engineering identities of Black men in engineering.

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Broadening Participation in Engineering and Engineering Technology
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