2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Silent Barriers: Gender Bias in STEM Faculty Evaluation and Promotion

Persistent challenges continue to shape faculty evaluation and promotion in higher education, particularly within STEM disciplines where women remain underrepresented in senior academic ranks. This conceptual paper offers a focused synthesis of U.S.-based literature to examine how gender bias persists despite decades of policy reforms and increased attention to equity. Rather than documenting disparities alone, the paper integrates Role Congruity Theory, Stereotype Threat, and research on microaggressions to develop a theoretically grounded framework explaining how bias becomes embedded within formal evaluation and promotion systems, particularly in engineering and closely related STEM fields.
The analysis demonstrates how structural expectations, psychological processes, and everyday institutional interactions operate simultaneously to shape how women faculty are evaluated in teaching, research, and service. Women are frequently held to higher evidentiary standards while carrying disproportionate amounts of undervalued academic labor, patterns that accumulate over time within promotion systems. Special attention is given to Women of Color, whose experiences illustrate how gender bias intersects with race within U.S. STEM evaluation structures.
Beyond identifying persistent barriers, the paper advances actionable, theory-informed recommendations for engineering education stakeholders, including revising promotion criteria to broaden definitions of merit, strengthening leadership accountability through disaggregated data transparency, and embedding bias mitigation within evaluation committee practices. The paper argues that equitable evaluation systems are not only matters of fairness but are essential for sustaining inclusive, innovative, and resilient STEM academic communities.

Authors

Manar Yamany West Virginia University [biography]

Manar Yamany is a Ph.D. student in the School of Education within the College of Applied Human Sciences at West Virginia University. She holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical and communication engineering and brings an interdisciplinary perspective that connects engineering and education. Her research focuses on STEM education, with particular interest in robotics education, early experiences that shape students’ pathways into STEM fields, and factors that influence students’ persistence in engineering. Her work examines how educational environments, preparation, and exposure to STEM opportunities influence students’ decisions to pursue and remain in STEM-related disciplines.
Dr. Jeffrey S. Carver http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9889-7159 West Virginia University [biography]

Dr. Carver’s research interests are in the improvement of teaching and learning of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) at the pK-12 and undergraduate level. His interests developed out of early career teaching experiences in high school and community college chemistry and physics. Dr Carver has been teaching STEM and STEM Education coursework for 33 years and has been exploring various aspects of teacher decision making in the improvement of STEM teaching for over 20 of those.
Erin McHenry-Sorber http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9522-133X West Virginia University
Dr. Robin A.M. Hensel http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1858-6452 West Virginia University [biography]

Robin A. M. Hensel, Ed.D., is a Teaching Professor in the Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources at West Virginia University and an ASEE Fellow Member. As a mathematician and computer systems analyst, she collaborated in engineering teams to support energy research before entering higher education where she taught mathematics, statistics, computer science, and engineering courses, secured over $5.5M to support STEM education research, led program development efforts, and served in several administrative roles. She has been recognized for her teaching, advising, service, and research and as an Exemplary Faculty Member for Excellence in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 21, 2026, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 24, 2026