Research Progress Report #1 | Beverley Kwang

This quarter I am working with Dr. Lehr and Dr. Finger, the director of the Women’s Engineering Program, to do a research study to ultimately help out with recruitment and retention of female undergraduate engineers at Cal Poly. I have always been interested in this topic and am looking to do my senior project on this subject, specifically of the experiences of female engineers and their view of the lack of women in engineering fields. I also particularly want to focus on women of color in engineering who are said to lead a “double minority status” (Farro) in their major. But for this quarter, with Dr. Finger’s research, I am primarily focusing on trying to figure out how to aim for a higher recruitment and high retention rates of female undergraduate engineers.

So far, the goal is to create a survey to ask first year female students (I think we are still debating if we should ask males or non-first years) specific questions as to what go them interested in engineering and so forth. We have done a literature review, in a sense, to see what has been already done and see what questions other researchers have asked. There were some very interesting finds that I thought would be interesting to include in our survey as well. One that I thought was very interesting was that most female students at the University of Oklahoma’s Industrial Engineering Department, which is actually fifty percent female in their undergraduate program and forty percent female in their faculty, relied on their mothers in regards to their undergraduate education (Harris 190). In another study, the researcher found out the significance that female teachers had on their female students in regards to their interest in engineering (Parviainen).

Based on these articles, many female undergraduates in engineering seem to have been influenced by and relied on other females in their life for support and help. That is one question I would like to ask in our survey. So for our draft survey, I included questions such as: how did you get interested in engineering and whether or not their parents are engineers or not. We are also interested in knowing their ethnicity and socioeconomic status. It is also interesting to see if they have been in any clubs before college that has driven their interest in engineering and exactly how they got interested in studying engineering. There are deeper questions regarding their role in classrooms, whether they have been discouraged by others because of their gender, and points of deflection or overcoming of a negative situation. It is also interesting to see the stereotypes or preconceived notions that these female undergraduates had before entering cal Poly. Like in Parviainen’s study, female undergraduates saw stereotypes of computer scientists as white males who are antisocial, and they went deeper as to how these stereotypes affected and shaped them. Also, I included in our draft survey when comparing to other female undergraduate engineers how they feel, and when comparing to male undergraduate engineers how they feel. I just followed the same questions that Goodman et al. asked when self evaluating themselves to other female or males do they: spend more time and efforts in your class, understand engineering concepts better, better at solving engineering problems, more committed to engineering, work better with other people, have more confidence in your engineering abilities (50).

We are still in the producing and editing the survey and will go over it on Thursday.

Works Cited

Farro, S.A. (2010). Achievements and challenges of undergraduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields in the Ronald E. McNair Program. Dissertation Abstracts International: Section B: The Sciences and Engineering, 70(11-B), 7266-7275.

Goodman, I.F., Cunningham, C.M., Lachapelle, C., Thompson, M., Bittinger, K. Brennan, R.T., Delci, M. (April 2002). A Comprehensive Evaluation of Women in Engineering Programs. Goodman Research Group, Inc., 1-286.

Harris, B.J., Rhoads, T.R., Walden, S.E., Murphy, T.J., Meissler, R., Reynolds, A. (Spring 2004). Gender Equity in Industrial Engineering: A Pilot Study. NWSA Journal, 16(1), 186-193.

Parviainen, M.L. (Fall 2008). The experiences of women in computer science: the importance of awareness and communication. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, 6(4), 87-94.

Progress Report 1- Mariel Emanuel - Diversity and Creativity in Engineering

I chose to focus on gender and racial diversity in American engineering and why it crucial to increase diversity within the field. White males are becoming a minority; however, the field of engineering does not represent this. American engineering has diverged from ideals of apprenticeship and creativity to a profitable industry that comes with status, money and power. My point is, not only is engineering lacking diversity but it is also lacking aspects of creativity as well.

The lack of diversity and creativity within the field of engineering is affecting the quality of engineers and the products they produce because we are in need of various/diverse perspectives in order to create the most fair and ethically/environmentally responsible products.

Wikipedia defines engineering as,

“Engineering is the discipline, art, and profession of acquiring and applying scientific, mathematical, economic, social, and practical knowledge to design and build structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes that safely realize solutions to the needs of society.”

However, are Cal Poly engineers really utilizing the artistic and social knowledge that could be applied to engineering? Or are Cal Poly engineers solely using the science and math in their engineering? Could increasing diversity in the field help this? Does creativity come along with diversity?

Now these are all valid questions I plan on diving into more through interviews with Cal Poly engineers; however, my prediction would be that at California POLYTECHNIC State University engineering would be generally geared towards math and science and emphasis on social science perspective or art would be neglected. 

I could be very wrong with my hypothesis but I plan on interviewing a handful of Cal Poly engineers about their personal knowledge of the field to find out. I want to pay special attention their experience with art/social science and diversity within the engineering field. I would really like to explore how the engineers feel themselves and if they think that an increase in diversity/creativity might help the field.

WM. A. WULF talks a lot about stereo-types of American engineers as being nerdy and dull. I really want to ask the engineers themselves how they confront these stereotypes and if they think there is truth behind it. My guess is there may be some truth behind it because engineering has become so profit based that many want to join the field in order to gain wealth instead of genuine interest in the subject. Through interviewing students and continuing my research I hope to confront some of the stereotypes of engineers and obstacles to achieving equality within the field.

Research Progress Report #1 - Joseph White: Gender & Racial Differences in Malta

I will be researching the areas of gender and race differences in Malta. This will focus on positions of these demographics in both professional and households fields as well as in, specifically, science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. One note: in the household environment, I have found that domestic violence is exceedingly prevalent. It seems that this fact may give a sign as to where the rest of these topics currently lie. These topics will also include historical as well as contemporary patterns of these statuses.

I am currently focused on various papers which include topics such as slavery (historical) and SAIL, a multicultural engineering project initiative (contemporary) to name just a couple. Other papers I have found do not focus directly on these topics, but I hope to find useful information within them such as specific breakdowns by year of things including population, or gender and age of political offices. This data is given for many consecutive years; therefore, I hope to see some kind of pattern or maybe see a drastic change in women’s or other civil rights as time progresses, possibly even correlating with times of other civil rights movements around the world. Interestingly, Malta did not grant women suffrage until the late 1940’s (compare this to the 1921 granting of women’s suffrage in the US). Women also did not have equal right in family law until the 1990s. It will be interesting to see how these comparatively late movements for women play into their current place in the professional fields. In regards to this, I have found that at the very least, women are extremely under-represented in management positions.

It is a bit difficult to find data due to a small amount of research done on these topics in Malta. Another challenge is looking specifically for STEM areas of interest when they concern women or people of color. This is due to the fact that most papers or sources of information simply talk about the field and the research done, rather than who is performing the research: making it difficult to identify how significant a role women and people of color played in these fields.

Concepts and themes I am focusing on include whether or not there is a significant segregation in the workforce based upon gender or ethnicity (especially in STEM fields). The approach I have found (and believe will be) most successful is not to look for articles relating to STEM and see if they touch on the subjects I am focused on: this is unrealistic. But rather look for articles focusing on women and people of color in Malta, and STEM fields will be a bonus.

I have also found a prevalence of contemporary articles as opposed to historical articles. This, I believe is for 2 reasons. One, research from Malta is somewhat rare and most research has occurred in the recent past. Second, there is more of a focus now than ever on STEM fields which promotes further publications of such topics.

I hope to narrow down my searching and specify what I should be concentrating on based on knowledge I gain from some of the articles I have. A lot of the (somewhat) historical data has given me a better idea of what to look for in regards to these topics.