2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

A complex systems approach to studying the outcomes of initiatives supporting women engineering faculty.

Presented at Persistence, Outcomes and Barriers for Women in Engineering

The national need to broaden participation in STEM is persistent. Significant resources have been invested into initiatives to expand the successful participation of women and ethnic minorities in STEM, yet the plethora of factors influencing their success and the challenges they face complicate the grasping of their real impact. The use of complex systems methods, informed by theoretical foundations, has the potential to contribute to a better understanding of the aspects that make broadening participation initiatives effective as well as to identify persistent barriers to their successes. This requires exploration of complex systems tools and methods and consideration of the theories explaining the systems where these problems are located.

This full research paper describes the ongoing data collection stage of a larger project evaluating the effectiveness of the NSF-ADVANCE program as an exemplary broadening participation initiative. As the ADVANCE program has now supported more than one-hundred US institution with the goal of expanding women representation in STEM careers, it offers a unique opportunity to explore the intricacies of enacting positive change for gender equity within existing complex systems. Framed theoretically under Acker’s Inequality Regimes that acknowledges a variety of dimensions embedded in organizational inequality, we collect qualitative data that is later transformed into quantitative measures to be modeled through Qualitative Comparative Analysis. In this paper we describe the data collection stage, with the decision making required to transform qualitative data into quantitative measures. We offer a reflection of the challenges faced while collecting high level organizational data from publicly available data for the execution of complex system modeling.

Authors

Matilde Luz Sanchez-Pena http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3511-0694 University at Buffalo, The State University of New York [biography]

Dr. Matilde Sánchez-Peña is an assistant professor of Engineering Education at the University at Buffalo – SUNY where she leads the Diversity Assessment Research in Engineering to Catalyze the Advancement of Respect and Equity (DAREtoCARE) Lab. Her research focuses on developing cultures of care and well-being in engineering education spaces, assessing gains in institutional efforts to advance equity and inclusion, and using data science for training socially responsible engineers.
Dr. Juan M Cruz http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7426-682X Rowan University [biography]

Juan M. Cruz is an assistant professor in the Experiential Engineering Education Department at Rowan University. He has a B.S. in Electronic Engineering and a Masters in Education from Universidad Javeriana in Colombia and a PhD in Engineering Education from Virginia Tech. His research uses a systems perspective to understand the dynamics of the academic system and how it influences faculty motivation to change, undergraduate students’ motivation to learn, and retention and persistence of doctoral students (with special attention to underrepresented minority (URM) students).
Dr. Corey T Schimpf http://orcid.org/https://0000-0003-2706-3282 University at Buffalo, The State University of New York [biography]

Corey Schimpf is an assistant professor in the Department of Engineering Education at University at Buffalo. He is the Past Division Chair for the Design in Engineering Education Division (DEED) for the American Society of Engineering Education. His research interests include engineering and human-centered design, advancing research methods, and technology innovations to support learning in complex domains. He has a PhD from Purdue University in Engineering Education.
Muhammad Ali Sajjad University at Buffalo, The State University of New York [biography]

Second year PhD student in Engineering Education at University at Buffalo.
Melanie Gabriela Valladares University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
Brianna Mateus University at Buffalo, The State University of New York

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025

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