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Session Description

This highly interactive session is designed to provide engineering faculty with a space to explore barriers and opportunities to establishing a culture of wellness in engineering education. The goal is for faculty to end the session having identified viable strategies that promote individual resilience in the face of professional shame and a culture of overwork, and having concrete approaches for working toward systemic wellness and productivity.

Professional shame has been defined as a “painful emotional state that occurs when one perceives they have failed to meet socially constructed expectations or standards that are relevant to their identity in a professional domain” (Huff et al., 2021). Professional shame may be felt acutely in contexts in which this question is difficult to answer: When is X sufficient to meet or exceed expectations? (where X = service, research, etc.). A culture of overwork is defined both quantitatively and qualitatively, as weekly work hours of 50 or more (Cha, 2013), as well as a culture that values overwork—measured by high productivity expectations and long hours, with little consideration for human wellness. Such cultures are often a source of occupational segregation, a proximate cause of many forms of (among other forms of inequity) gender inequality (Cha, 2013). Research suggests that such cultures are sustained in STEM disciplines by perceptions of merit that are tied to work devotion, even though such cultures paradoxically perpetuate systemic inequity (Blair-Loy and Cech, 2022).

In this session, we explore the nexus of cultures of overwork and professional shame. We contend that the sociocultural realities of cultures of overwork and the individual experience of professional shame may perniciously build on one another. When we feel inadequate to meet the unending demands connected to social norms of overwork, we may respond to this unpleasant emotion by using overwork as a way to avoid dealing with the experience. In doing so, we may then replicate systemic cultural norms of overwork while struggling through our individual experiences of professional shame.

In this session, facilitators and participants will co-create a deliberate space in which we will, among other actions:
• Discuss and reflect on the dimensions of high-stress cultures and the impact on students and faculty.
• Take time to reflect on our own individual lived experiences, if applicable, of professional shame, with an eye toward identifying future wellness and resilience strategies.
• Inquire into whether professional shame intersects with the culture of overwork—and if so, how.
• Brainstorm individual and systemic strategies to try to address the components of and issues associated with professional shame and/or a culture of overwork, in part by distinguishing between individual considerations and systemic narratives.
• Identify viable strategies that promote resilience and concrete approaches for working toward wellness and productivity.

Informed by cases from multiple studies led by the facilitators, we will guide session participants through exercises to examine cases where faculty have felt professional shame amid cultures of overwork. We will leverage these case-based scenarios to guide participants into recognizing and labeling their own experiences of professional shame, where applicable. Finally, we will collectively identify strategies with session participants on how we can resist cultures of overwork by practicing healthy strategies for living well through professional shame and in cultures of overwork, both as individuals and at more systemic levels.

Moderated by

1. Dr. James L. Huff, Dr. Karin Jensen, and Dr. Jon A. Leydens