2025 Collaborative Network for Engineering & Computing Diversity (CoNECD)

Broadening participation in engineering has been a key focus in education research for decades. Women have consistently been underrepresented in engineering fields and are often made to feel, either directly or through subtle negative signals, that they do not belong. This harmful messaging creates a significant barrier to increasing women's participation in engineering. Conversely, when women feel a sense of belonging, they are more likely to pursue and stay in engineering careers.

In this presentation, I will discuss a study that examines women's experiences of belonging at two different organizational levels within their undergraduate institutions - their engineering program/college (engineering level), and the broader institution outside of engineering (institution level). The study explores four distinct components of belonging at both the engineering and institution levels: perceptions of belonging, competencies for belonging, motivations to belong, and opportunities for belonging, and examines the influence of each on women’s intentions to persist in engineering.

This study employed a mixed methods approach to: 1) compare the relative of each level of belonging; 2) analyze how the four components of belonging interrelate; 3) examine the correlations between belonging components at different organizational levels and students’ involvement on campus; and 4) assess how various aspects of belonging influence persistence in college and in engineering fields. Data were collected via a survey that included both Likert scale and short-answer questions. The sample consisted of 298 undergraduate women in engineering from two institutions that differ significantly in size, student demographics, religious affiliation, institutional culture, and academic focus.

The results reveal that women experience higher levels of belonging outside of their engineering programs than within them. However, belonging within engineering programs is significantly related to students’ intentions to persist in their engineering degrees, whereas belonging outside of engineering is not. The findings also indicate that different activities (such as participating in a sorority or living in a learning community) affect women's sense of belonging in engineering differently than their overall institutional belonging.

These findings suggest that educators should be intentional about where and how they foster a sense of belonging for students. Supporting women's sense of belonging within their engineering programs could significantly influence their persistence in these programs in ways that belonging initiatives outside of engineering might not.