2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper discusses the creation of the Society for Women in Mechanical Engineering (SWME) at a large midwestern university, including preliminary findings from its first year of operation. This paper responds to a longstanding need to recruit and retain more women in engineering and focuses on an engineering discipline with one of the lowest representations of women – mechanical engineering. In 2022, ASEE by the Numbers reported that only 17.6% of Mechanical Engineering Bachelor’s Degrees were earned by women. At the university where SWME was launched, the percentage of Mechanical Engineering Bachelor’s Degrees earned by women is even lower at just 12%. The author team, which includes both undergraduate students and faculty in Mechanical Engineering, found through our prior research and through our own experiences at the university of interest that students in this university’s mechanical engineering department lacked a strong sense of community and peer support networks. In response to both the underrepresentation of women in the department and the lack of community, the author team created and launched the Society for Women in Mechanical Engineering. SWME is a student-driven and faculty-supported organization that aims to create community and foster peer mentoring. This paper argues for the need for SWME, anchoring in existing literature and detailing how the mission of SWME differs from the mission of the Society for Women Engineers. Moreover, this paper discusses how SWME is organized, including the executive council roles, events, and ethos behind the structure. Lastly, this paper presents data from the first year of SWME, including both quantitative attendance and retention counts and qualitative focus group data. The authors intend for this paper to enable others at different universities to create their own chapters of SWME and to spark conversation about the need for discipline-specific organizations to support women in engineering within universities.