-: Malcolm Forbes once wrote that
diversity is the art of thinking independently together.
Diversity is also a growing concern
in the melting pot that is the United States
because as we have a growing, evermore diverse population,
we have new issues arising that require
more innovative solutions.
Fortunately for us, researchers
have correlated innovation and diversity
because if you have people with diverse backgrounds
working on the same problem, you're more likely to come up
with an innovative solution.
This is especially important in fields such as engineering
and one form of diversity for engineering is women.
In the 1960s, women had a 1% enrollment rate in engineering
and today that number is up to around 20%
but recent data from the NSF found that in the early 2000s
and into today, the percentage of women enrolling
in engineering has been declining.
In response to this, I formulated a qualitative study
to analyze the motivations and threats
to women enrolling in engineering.
I interviewed nine different women from across
the Bagley College of Engineering and different majors
and I asked them questions such as,
"When did you first hear of engineering?,
"Why did you choose engineering?",
"Why did you choose your field in particular?",
"What's the hardest part of being an engineer?",
"What do you enjoy about being a female engineer?",
"Why do you think other women
"are not going into the field?",
and as well as if there was anything else
that they wanted to tell me or share.
I then took these interviews and transcribed them
and myself and another researcher used
systematic qualitative coding methods to identify
the different motivations and threats
to women enrolling in engineering.
Now, the top four threats I have listed up here.
Each one of them has a quote next to it
so you can kind of see how
the qualitative coding method works.
Now, the first three, a lack of community,
lack of role models, and lower self-efficacy,
where self-efficacy is a woman's belief
in her own ability to accomplish tasks.
So, they have a lower belief in their own ability
to accomplish engineering tasks.
These three things were all attributed
to the lower female enrollment rate itself.
This is because they don't have very many women,
so they have a lack of community.
They don't have very many role models in front of them,
so they have lack of role models.
And because they don't see other women accomplishing
these engineering tasks, they have a lower self-efficacy.
The last one, stereotype threat, came from more of
a societal pressures, where society says that women
aren't just good at math and science
and how that impacted the engineering identity
of the different participants.
In the future, I want to propose a study
that looks further into stereotype threat
and how it impacts minority groups outside of just women
because at the end of the day, it's incredibly important
that we all think independently but that we work together.