DOCTORAL DEGREES AWARDED TO WOMEN BY DISCIPLINE, 2007–2018

By Angela Erdiaw-Kwasie

The number of engineering doctoral degrees awarded to women increased by 147.4 percent from 2007 to 2018. The period included the Great Recession, which lasted from December, 2007 to June, 2009*, as well as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which increased government research funding. Research grants generally enable faculty members to hire graduate researchers. Women received 1,171 engineering doctorates in 2007 and 2897 in 2018, an increase of 1726.

Table 1 shows the number of total doctoral degrees awarded to women in 2007 and 2018 as well as the percentage of each discipline of the total degrees awarded.

The 5 engineering disciplines with the highest percentages in 2007 were: Electrical/Computer Engineering (12.6 percent), Chemical Engineering (12.5 percent), Biomedical Engineering (12.1 percent), Civil Engineering (10.4 percent) and Metallurgical and Materials Engineering (9.9 percent).

By 2018, the total number of degrees awarded in each discipline increased. However, those disciplines mostly had a lower proportion of the total in 2018. The exception was Biomedical Engineering, which increased from 12.1 percent of the total in 2007 to 14.0 percent in 2018.

It is also important to note that engineering disciplines such as Engineering Management, Engineering (General), and Mining Engineering awarded no doctoral degrees to women in the year 2007 but experienced some growth by 2018.

*National Bureau of Economic Research

Table 1: Doctoral Degrees Awarded to Women by Discipline, 2007–2018

Figure 1: Distribution of Engineering Disciplines of Doctoral Degrees Awarded to Women, 2007–2018

II. ENGINEERING EDUCATION TRENDS

TOPˆ

CALL IT BY ITS NAME

Addressing racism and sexism directly is a necessary first step toward equitable participation in engineering by women and people of color.

By Denise R. Simmons and Susan M. Lord

Supporting diverse students is a critical unsolved issue facing engineering education. As a profession, engineering has not necessarily embraced the value of inclusion. Many challenges for students arise from systemic problems in engineering education that are difficult to identify and even more difficult to address since they require changing the system. Students also continue to experience structural barriers—specifically racism and sexism—which helps explain the persistently low representation of white women and people of color in engineering.

To prepare 21^st century engineers, universities must creatively design programs with depth in engineering disciplines while broadening the curriculum to address other professional skills and values such as diversity and inclusion, communication across cultures, management, inventiveness, ethical decision-making, and teamwork. Addressing this challenge requires examining the experiences of our students and considering who has access and successfully navigates engineering pathways.

Among the most important influences on engineering students’?persistence are university policies; the sequencing and scheduling of classes; credit hours; pedagogy; faculty diversity; the classroom climate; and a sense of belonging. Within each of these, we have found examples of racism and sexism that prevent equitable participation by women and people of color. In our experience, engineering educators are reluctant to deal with these issues directly, fearful of even accessing the literature and discussing them to improve their own understanding. Yet by not naming the problem, the engineering community allows these prejudices to persist.

Besides a direct approach, data-driven research is crucial to elucidate pathway impediments in engineering, inform the community, and move forward. We need to rethink our mindsets, our metrics, and the data we collect. We need to expand the categories of data collected, including generation-in-college status, veteran status, disability, neurodiversity, and LGBTQA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, and ally or asexual). We support increasing the use of intersectional and asset-based approaches. As we expand, we should remain mindful that we still have work to do in removing structural barriers encountered by African Americans and Latinx.

One hopeful sign is that “creating a collaborative and inclusive environment” is one of the 2019–2020 ABET student outcomes. Faculty play an important role in shaping the culture of engineering education including whether students feel they belong and can be successful. We encourage all engineering instructors to use more effective pedagogies to enhance student learning and sense of belonging, including becoming informed about and mitigating stereotype threat. Promoting equity is not just the work of women or people of color. White men can explore and reflect on their own privilege within engineering education and become allies.

Since engineering is entwined with innovation, diverse perspectives are critical for success in teaching, research, and engineering practice. We encourage all involved in faculty hiring to adopt best practices and examine their own mindsets and implicit biases avoiding the false dichotomy of excellence versus equity. Moving beyond guilt to strategies that result in empowering allies is critical to removing structural barriers to hiring faculty of color. More engineering educators should also serve as allies in the retention of underrepresented groups in faculty positions.

Writing as an African-American woman and a white woman who have been in industry and academia for several decades, we urge everyone in engineering education to explore the role of power and privilege in their own experience and how they can dismantle these structures. How can you be an ally for all students in teaching, research, and policy? As an instructor, are you implementing inclusive teaching strategies? As a researcher, are you adopting a mindset that allows for inclusivity? As a policy maker, are you considering the experiences of a diverse group of students in developing policies? Thoughtful consideration of these questions can help make an inclusive environment a reality for future students in engineering education.

Denise R. Simmons is an associate professor of civil and coastal engineering at the University of Florida. Susan M. Lord is professor and chair of integrated engineering at the University of San Diego. This article is adapted from “Removing Invisible Barriers and Changing Mindsets to Improve and Diversify Pathways in Engineering,” in the Spring 2019 issue of Advances in Engineering Education.

THE TEXTBOOK TRANSFORMED

New interactive approaches dispense with the written lecture and let students ‘do’ as they read.

By Chris Rogers

I have been very excited to see how the textbook—still a powerful learning device—is changing. In digital versions, it is slowly morphing from pure text to interactive multimedia pages that you can edit. Even more interesting is the transformation of the table of contents. If you look at old textbooks—say, fluid mechanics—they start out with a broad overview of the subject. Next comes a chapter of definitions, then a bunch of simple problems with sample recipes for you to follow. It is often not until the end of the book that you actually get to have an opinion, think for yourself, or really adopt a fluid mechanics mind-set. Through most of the chapters, you are following someone else’s footprints. In this way, the classical textbooks are not unlike our education system: 16 years of memorizing the knowledge of others with limited opportunity to invent, discover, and develop your own ideas. Graduate school is the place where your opinion matters, and learning becomes exciting.

As schools bring in constructivist and constructionist learning ideas, suddenly the 8-year-old’s opinion does matter and students start to learn ways of thinking (mind sets) as they acquire knowledge. So what happens to the textbook? Is it still something that takes 12 chapters of hand-holding to get to the interesting stuff? Why not start with the interesting stuff and use that to motivate the hand-holding as needed? How does one get students to “do” while reading instead of just passively taking in information? A slew of interesting new approaches are emerging, starting with flipping the book—placing the overview after the reader has worked on some exercises. Providing recipe examples as hyperlinks challenges students to think first about potential ways of solving a problem before seeing how the instructor/author did it.

A textbook can begin with something fun and tangible. That could be programming a blob/sprite to move around in a virtual space/stage (Apple’s Swift learning book, or MIT’s Scratch coding), making a robot drive to the edge of a table (Lego, Vex Robotics, etc.), getting an LED on pin 13 to blink (Arduino), or writing your first html web page (on W3Schools). In each case, you start with a goal and a gallery of examples. You can start with a “blank page” and start typing or dragging, or you can start from someone else’s story and modify it (remix in Scratch language). Most software now starts with very short “getting started” multimedia efforts—from animated GIFs to sample templates. The same is happening with online books. Mathematica and Matlab have done this very well for quite some time, and there are some new ones, like trinket.io, that extend the idea more.

Imagine that someday you will “open up” a fluids textbook and see a cool video of blood flow on Page 1. You can click in and discover velocity profiles and pressure distributions before really knowing what those parameters are (just as you blink the LED before you really know how LEDs work or how to connect them up). You will be able to modify the shape (or wall friction) of the aorta, change the pumping rate of the heart, or maybe simulate an aneurism. This will spark your curiosity, and you will start to look at the effect of diameter on the flow-rate and realize there is a correlation. You might even develop your own mathematical model before delving into the section on conservation of mass. If you have questions, you might post them on the forum (StackExchange, etc.), or find that someone else has already asked that question and received a clear answer.

Textbooks, I think, will move from a telling model to a conversation model. We can use the analogy of a faculty cocktail party, in which people believing themselves to be experts try to persuade others to their point of view. While someone might walk up to you and launch into a lecture, such an approach is seldom convincing, and most people avoid those conversations. Instead, people use a variety of social tools, including entertaining anecdotes, listening, questioning, and responding. Likewise, our standard textbooks rarely convince simply by telling. With the power of the computer, the textbook can use all the techniques of listening, responding, and probing, while making students feel like part of a group or community and giving them the opportunity to “do” rather than “talk.”

Chris Rogers is a professor of mechanical engineering at Tufts University.

V. JOBS, JOBS, JOBS

TOPˆ

VII. SOUND OFF