2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Across the globe, women continue to experience exclusion from engineering and engineering academia, despite decades of diversity efforts. In Africa, these inequities are compounded, as the women STEM faculty face added constraints, including patriarchal university systems, traditional gender expectations, poor institutional support, limited research infrastructure, and epistemic injustice. This literature review set out to examine the experiences of Nigerian female engineering faculty, yet the search did not identify peer-reviewed studies that explicitly center this group. Existing research largely centers on women in STEM faculty more broadly, women of color in academia, and African women in higher education. These studies highlight enduring barriers: unequal service loads, chilly and unwelcoming climates, discrimination, invisibility, identity taxation, microaggressions, and structural inequities that limit career progression. To situate this absence, the review synthesizes global and African scholarship on women in STEM and higher education through three guiding questions: (1) What barriers and institutional conditions shape
women’s participation and advancement in STEM academia? (2) How have researchers theorized and addressed these barriers across contexts? (3) How might these insights inform a conceptual framework for examining the experiences of Nigerian female engineering faculty? By identifying these gaps, the paper charts a research trajectory toward a qualitative study that centers these women’s voices and narratives, examining how they confront systemic barriers, navigate institutional cultures, and make meaning of their professional identities. Ultimately, this paper seeks to extend the global equity discourse (by rendering visible what remains unseen) and to propose contextually grounded insights for culturally responsive and sustainable interventions that advance engineering education and faculty development across West Africa, promoting the visibility and success of women in engineering education everywhere.