2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Mental health issues like depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation and self-injury are common for students in college, with 44% of engineering students screening positive for mental health distress in 2021. Within engineering, prior studies have found that cisgender women and gender expansive students are more likely to report symptoms of mental health distress when compared to men. That being said, these studies are often limited to a small number of institutions and often do not account for the confounding impact of other demographic factors such as race/ethnicity, generational status or financial stress on the well-being of these subpopulations. Therefore, this study used survey data from the 2022-2023 Healthy Minds Study, a national study on college student mental health, to investigate the impact of gender identity on students’ self-reported symptoms of depression, anxiety, non-suicidal self-injury and suicidal ideation, as well as prior diagnosis for depression and/or anxiety and therapy or counseling use. The sample used in this study contained approximately 3800 responses from undergraduate students majoring in engineering, with 26% women and 4% gender expansive students. Regression analyses were used to examine the mental health outcome variables across different gender identities (cisgender man, cisgender woman, gender expansive) while controlling for demographic covariates. Cisgender women and gender expansive students were found to be statistically significantly (p < 0.05) more likely than cisgender men to screen positive for depression and anxiety, and gender expansive students were also more likely than cisgender men to report suicidal ideation. Through this study, it was found that compared to cisgender men in engineering, cisgender women and gender expansive engineering students were more likely to be impacted by mental health distress even when controlling for other demographic covariates. With an increase in broadening participation efforts aimed at improving the enrollment of cisgender women and gender expansive students across engineering, this highlights the importance of creating an engineering environment and culture that is supportive of student mental health and well-being.