Allison Godwin

Stories of Black women in engineering industry — Why they leave

The U.S. government has called for more STEM professionals in order to remain competitive as a nation. Increased participation of women and minorities in these fields will capture the rich diversity of their lived experiences and contributions. Many studies examine these issues for women or minorities, but less frequently consider the intersection of gender and race. There have been quantitative studies conducted in recent years that attempt to capture why women leave engineering. However, they lack the rich description at the intersection of race and gender necessary to understand the impetus to leave engineering industry. Identity theory is the theoretical framework utilized for understanding how engineering industry culture fits with how these women see themselves and feel like they belong or do not belong in engineering. Identity theory can illustrate the meanings that Black women attribute to themselves as engineers and how they negotiate their perceived membership in engineering based on interpretations of status differences, legitimacy and stability of those status differences. This paper presents insight in to methods of data collection, analysis process, and preliminary research results.

Visualizing systematic literature reviews to identify new areas of research

This research paper describes the application of linguistic analysis through scaled co-occurrence networks to create visual representations of systematic literature reviews. This approach uses currently available and free tools in this new application. Co-occurrence networks are a method for visualizing relationships between concepts within written material. The results of a co-occurrence analysis are a network that reflects the relationships between words based on meaning similarities among words and text segments. To illustrate this approach, I applied the methodology of a systematic literature review search that resulted in 391 unique journal articles, books, and reports on identity published in the period from 1995 to 2015. The abstracts, titles, and keywords of these journals were analyzed via linguistic analysis to create a word co-occurrence network of these articles related to identity in science and engineering. Clusters within this network were identified based on word frequency. The results of this research illustrate a hole in the current identity literature in understanding diversity beyond traditional definitions of race, class, and gender. This method has the potential to powerfully convey and embed information about large amounts of data in a single image and offers a new way to report findings from a systematic literature review.

An intersectional approach to understanding underrepresented students' sustainability goals

The lack of diversity in engineering is a persistent issue which hinders the development of more sustainable engineering solutions. We hope to help address this problem by investigating the sustainability-related career outcome expectations among engineering students who identify with groups underrepresented in the field. This research examines the intersectionality of students’ race, ethnicity, and gender, which can help us understand how unique individuals pursue sustainability goals through the cultures of engineering. We investigate this sustainability-related beliefs among underrepresented groups using data from a national (U.S.) survey in which we collected responses about these variables of interest from students in introductory college courses. The sample was stratified by institution type and the number of enrolled students. In total we received responses from 6,772 individuals enrolled at 50 institutions. We analyze the data using descriptive statistics and multinomial logistic and linear regression. Our results suggest that showing students the connection between certain sustainability issues and engineering careers could help as we strive to diversify participation in engineering. For example, white females, black females are less likely than other groups to want to address climate change in their careers while their while male counterparts are more likely than other groups to want to address the same issue. These results highlight ways in which some populations may be more excited about engineering careers or less based on topics emphasized. This results may help bring a broader range of engineers would likely bring new ideas and ways of thinking to engineering for sustainability.