Complicating Difference: Exploring and Exploding Three Myths of Gender and Race in Engineering Education

Abstract

This paper examines three myths of gender and race that operate in engineering education, and uses a review of the literature as well as findings from the authors' research to address them. First, we address the tendency to construct studies to look for difference and to interpret findings in ways that reduce results to gender-or race-based traits. Second, we consider the importance of getting beyond considerations of singular identities in isolation and considering the complexities of intersecting identities of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Examining a case study of longitudinal interviews with a queer-identified Latina engineering minor will elucidate the importance of considering intersectionality as part of a holistic analysis. Third, we argue for gender studies in engineering that attends to men and masculinities, not just women's experience.

On Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Computing: Finding Allies in Overrepresented Populations

“…The movement of students away from STEM and into other fields should be seen as a failure of the STEM programs and not as evidence that the students were never suited to STEM in the first place. For instance, Donna Riley and Alice L. Pawley write about a Latinx student who chose engineering as an undergraduate major because she felt it would be a field that honored her commitment to social change and because it is an interdisciplinary field that would have allowed her to pursue a variety of interests [43]. After her first year, though, those same values led her to consider a change in major to cultural studies, hoping to learn more about her Latin American heritage.…”

Allies, Advocates, and Accomplices: A Critical Look at the Relationships Between white and Black women in Engineering Education

“…While there seems to be a dearth of efforts to develop allyship based upon race (as opposed to gender), these foundational assumptions align with our own experiences with allyship across racial lines. As Riley and Pawley have demonstrated, the myths about gender and race reveal the need to articulate an intersectional approach to oppression [10]; yet few white women have (in our experience) been well-prepared to navigate their own positionality and privilege alongside and as an accomplice with Black women. Allies are often well-meaning but ill-equipped for establishing relationships that can endure systems of oppression.…”

I Never Played the 'Girl Card': Experiences and Identity Intersections of Women Student Veterans in Engineering

“…Intersectionality suggests that veterans are not amonolithic group and that their experiences must be considered within a wider prism of difference that accounts for gender, race, social class, sexual orientation, and ability. This theory has been used effectively in modern engineering education research to elucidate stories that would otherwise remain hidden, such as our research on majority measurement bias in studies of persistence [47], Riley and Pawley's [48] work critiquing myths of gender and race in engineering education, and Foor, Walden, and Trytten's [49] ethnography of one female multiminority student which provides "a microphone for the voices of the marginalized to be heard" (p. 113). The powerful lens of intersectionality contributes to the growing field of engineering studies, which considers how social categories (such as age, race/ethnicity, class, gender, ability and sexual identity) are enacted in engineering [50].…”