Women and U.S. racial/ethnic minority students are underrepresented in engineering graduate education and engineering practice. Demographic homogeneity in engineering research teams can negatively affect individuals, innovation, and research outcomes. Thus, it is important to explore factors that influence student intentions to complete…

Purpose: The underrepresentation of women in engineering has important consequences for meeting the need for a larger, talented scientific and technological labor force. Increasing the proportion of women faculty in engineering will help increase the persistence probabilities of women undergraduate and graduate students in engineering, as well as…

A synergetic approach to combine service learning at the university level with a high school outreach program is described. A holistic view is presented by discussing the importance of outreach and service learning, survey results, and outcomes. Overall, it was found that the unique program increased the self-efficacy (belief about one's…

Over the last decade the Bay Area region has witnessed a lack of diversity in Silicon Valley technology professions, a subject of current political and popular discourse. The California State University (CSU) system provides accessible higher education; the CSU system approach to accessible higher education affirms the distinctness of regions,…

Unmet or thwarted belonging needs have been implicated in multiple studies of women in engineering in college and in the engineering workforce. A wide range of other challenges that women face in engineering are tightly linked to deficits in belonging. Furthermore, many women face intersectional factors across race and ethnicity that make it even…

Physics outreach programs provide a critical context for informal experiences that promote the transition from new student to contributing physicist. Prior studies have suggested a positive link between participation in informal physics outreach programs and the development of a student's physics identity. In this study, we adopt a student-focused…

It is proposed to examine the argument that females cannot perform better in engineering and science fields because of their poor mathematical or logical reasoning. The major reason for the reduced number of females in the above fields in India is the socio-cultural aversion towards females choosing the field and restriction in providing higher…

This chapter discusses a mixed-methods study of personal and programmatic factors that affected persistence of Latina graduate engineering students at a Hispanic-serving institution (HSI). The study's findings enabled us to share recommendations that may be useful to HSIs and other colleges and universities.

In the study of science and engineering graduate education in the U.S., two themes that have received extensive attention individually are the persisting underrepresentation of women and the significant growth in enrollment among foreign nationals. Using data from a census of U.S. science and engineering graduate programs, this paper examines a…

The purpose of this systematic literature review was to appraise and synthesize the current scholarship pertaining to engineering identity development within the higher education context and create recommendations for future scholarship within engineering education. A review of the literature concluded that research on engineering identity…

International students enrolled in American institutions of higher education have been increasing during the past decades. The current study addresses the experiences of international female graduate students in the United States, in terms of difficulties as students at a southern American university and temporal residents of the United States.…

Strong interpersonal communication skills (ICS) are critical for educational and career success, but effective and widely accessible training systems are not available. This paper describes a 2 × 2 × 2 experimental study of an online, educational simulation for practice with the ICS of active listening. The simulation was customized for women…

Background: Research regarding international female engineering graduate students tends to be aggregated with that about the experiences of international students in the United States or as the struggles of female engineers in engineering disciplines. Therefore, this study was conducted to understand the unique experiences of international female…

Interpersonal problem solving skills allow engineers to prevent interpersonal difficulties more effectively and to manage conflict, both of which are critical to successful participation on teams. This research provides evidence that the "Career"WISE online learning environment can improve those skills among women in engineering graduate…

In this chapter, we argue that intersectionality is a theoretical and methodological framework by which education researchers can critically examine why and how students in STEM fields who are members of intersecting marginalized groups have distinctive experiences related to their social identities, other psychological processes, and educational…