Why we persist: An intersectional study to characterize and examine the experiences of women tenure-track faculty in engineering

This project applies an intersectionality framework to identify why tenure-track women of color (WOC) persist as engineering faculty. Project goals will be achieved through the compilation and analysis of longitudinal data of WOC faculty in engineering using an American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) faculty database; the development of a national survey investigating the perspectives of all women engineering faculty at U.S. engineering institutions on issues of race, class, and gender; and the exploration of similarities and differences in horizontal and vertical intersectionality across WOC groups via the collection and analyses of narratives of approximately 65 engineering WOC tenure-track faculty. Our overarching research question explores the following: How do women engineering faculty's representation and experiences differ in academic engineering as a function of race/ethnicity, class, and faculty rank? Informed from Patricia Hill Collins' framework of intersectionality, 1 this research applies a mixed methods approach across three interrelated and parallel research phases. The specific research questions related to each phase, their preliminary findings, and future work are described in the following sections.