2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Background:
Libraries are essential for student success, contributing to both academic achievement and feelings of belonging on campus – key factors in retention and post-graduate outcomes. Despite longstanding efforts to increase diversity in STEM fields, engineering lags behind other STEM disciplines in representation of women. National trends were repeated across our state university system, where only 27.5% of the undergraduate and 29.1% of graduate engineering enrollments were women.

Purpose/Hypothesis:
There is a well documented need for institutional support of underrepresented students in engineering to boost enrollment, increase retention, and facilitate successful degree completion. Across the campuses considered, libraries are well established and serve as a node for students. A coordinated, cross-institutional survey administered by consortial libraries may reveal commonalities facing women-identified engineering students, and inform the potential for scaled interventions.

Method/Design/Scope:
Engineering librarians on nine Californian campuses implemented an anonymous Qualtrics survey open to woman-identified graduate or undergraduate engineering students. The online survey consisted of chiefly multiple choice questions, encompassing fifty-four questions. The survey was deployed in Spring 2024, remaining open for four weeks.

Results:
There were a total of 386 responses across the state, 73% of which were undergraduate students. Three of the nine campuses provided statistically significant results. Respondents shared their involvement with student organizations, access to mentors, and the presence of women-based case studies or event series. Responses considered how students felt about presentations in class, asking questions, and claiming credit – all integral to success in engineering career growth.

The survey also considered how engineering students use library spaces, collecting data about favored campus libraries. Respondents reported consistent use of library spaces, with a majority identifying campus science or engineering libraries as their home library.

Conclusions:
The survey findings provide a foundation for advocating for data-driven, coordinated initiatives across system campuses. Our approach to survey multiple campuses creates an argument that our findings are generalizable beyond an individual campus. Findings reflect the students’ habits and utilization of campus services, including students’ use of the library. This positions STEM libraries as partners to engineering programs in developing initiatives for women students, as students are present and feel comfortable within the libraries.

The insights exposed impactful outreach approaches, including connecting with student organizations to more directly reach underrepresented populations, create programming, and build relationships. Furthermore, a clear information need for more real-life examples of women in the profession was exposed. Possible future work includes strengthening or redesigning services for women studying engineering, piloting library-led interventions across campuses, and conducting further research into the effectiveness of initiatives.