2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Women have historically been underrepresented in STEM. Despite continued efforts to increase diversity among engineers and create more equitable and inclusive environments in engineering places of teaching, learning, and professional practice, women and other minorities continue to remain underrepresented in the field of engineering. Increasing the overall diversity of the field of engineering is beneficial to fostering a more productive and creative engineering environment because a diverse team brings a broader range of perspectives, thus creating more innovative design solutions. Likewise, the team of engineers best served to design solutions to problems in society is one that closely represents the demographics of society to ensure designs are accessible to everyone.

This study aims to analyze the societal perceptions of who an engineer is through the lens of first-year engineering students at a large, public university. Previous research has found that students often share the preconceived stereotypical associations of masculinity with the field of engineering. For this study, data came from the project submissions of about forty different first-year engineering student teams. For this project, students created personas of engineers who they believed to have contributed to the creation of a product or process they selected to break down study. The data were analyzed by quantifying the demographics of the personas created, as well as comparing the demographics of the teams to the demographics of the personas those teams created. Results indicate that the populations underrepresented in engineering in society are also underrepresented by the personas created by students. This study further stresses the importance of increasing efforts to further understand when and how societal perceptions about what engineers look like are formed, as even with the increasing diversity in the field, aspiring engineers continue to visualize engineers in ways that align with stereotypes and majority identities within the field.