Filtered Gender Diversity Pathways for Domestic and International Doctoral Graduates of United States Electrical Engineering (EE), Computer Engineering (CompE) and Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Programs

Doctoral degree attainment on pathways to a tenured faculty position proceeds through levels wherein persistence differs by gender and race at every level. Using the ASEE database and other sources, this paper describes transitions along the engineering faculty pathway wherein domestic female and male electrical and computer engineering (ECE) undergraduate degree recipients have been producing the surprising result that domestic women are completing ECE doctorates at a higher rate than are domestic men. This suggests that we may have a limited understanding of the motivations and successes in doctoral study for domestic students and that we need to more broadly assess the impacts of our diversity efforts. Introduction Slowing or even retreating, progress in gender diversity at the BS level (ASEE, 2013, Bowman 2011, 2014) shows signs of extending to the level of graduate education through to engineering academia. As gender diversity progress at the Bachelor’s degree (BS) level has slowed or even declined, the role of professional societies is clearly of high importance (Robinson 2013; Holm 2013; Johnson 2013; Goldsmith 2013). In spring 2013 the IEEE Computer Society dedicated their monthly magazine Computer to the issue of gender diversity (Prey & Weaver, 2013). A changed context has been sought that: “. . . you can make a decision to be part of bringing about change by talking with your daughters, nieces, neighbors, and their school counselors about the wonders of computing and how the next generations of computing professionals will have an even more exciting opportunity to change the world.”(Prey & Weaver, 2013) Navigating from the BS level and on to PhD degrees involves a continuously narrowing pathway (Hoag, 2009; Ehrenberg & Kuh, 2009). Although often characterized as a “pipeline,” Bowman (2014) has described it as having characteristics more in line with filtration. Differences in departmental cultures and differences in engineering disciplines are likely amplified by strong disciplinary and sub-disciplinary differences (Fox, 2000; Sonnert et al., 2007). For ECE, separate designations for electrical engineering (EE), computer engineering (CompE) and electrical and computer engineering (ECE) as well as overlap and distinctions from computer science (CS) offer a very challenging context for generalizations as well as data reporting and tracking. Throughout the remainder of this paper the designation ECE will be used for the combined data reported under electrical engineering, computer engineering and electrical and computer engineering headings by ASEE (2013). Consider the differential outcomes shown in Figure 1 and Table 1 (see also Bowman, 2014). There was approximately one new domestic engineering assistant professor in 2012 for every five thousand graduating high school seniors in 2000, a year in which there were about three million high school graduates. Broken down by gender, this ratio is approximately 1 to 10,000 for females and 1 to 3,000 for males. For ECE, which comprises about twenty-three percent of tenure and tenure-track engineering faculty and may have a slightly lower fraction of US born faculty due to a historically high fraction of foreign doctorates, about one hundred-twenty domestic engineering assistant professors are hired every year with about twenty-five per year being female. The electrical engineering devices most similar in scaling to this pathway to an engineering academic career are probably filters and not pipelines. This paper is focused on the connection between BS and PhD degree production in the context of gender equity and domestic versus international students with emphasis on recent demographic data reported for ECE compared to engineering overall. Data used here does not include computer science due to year-to-year variability in reporting by a number of institutions and variable situations in administrative locations, including in separate science or applied science colleges. ECE was chosen for comparison here based on the large numbers of degrees granted and the relatively low fraction of domestic women completing BS degrees. Figure 1 Data for US individuals entering each stage of the pathways towards becoming an engineering assistant professor in 2012 with blue and pink indicating the fractions of male and female, respectively. The scale of the figure changes going from left to right with the outer diameter of each ring showing the relative numbers at each level. Engineering BS is the smallest ring on the left side and the largest ring on the right. Table 1 Gender Fractions for each Stage shown in Figure 1 High School Graduate Enter College BS Degree Eng BS Degree Eng MS Degree Eng PhD Degree New Asst Professor Female 51% 54% 57% 19% 23% 22% 23% Male 49% 46% 43% 81% 77% 78% 77% Data from NCES (2012) and ASEE (2013). BS#Degree#