Development of a national survey focusing on the relationships between race, class, and gender on the persistence of women engineering faculty

Our study investigates the persistence of women engineering faculty in U.S. institutions with respect to the intersectionality of race, class, and gender. This investigation will be achieved through a national survey of engineering women faculty. The present paper focuses on the development of the survey. Informed by the theory of intersectionality, in this survey, race, class, and gender are explored from institutional, symbolic, and individual dimensions of oppression. This paper presents the initial process of the creation of scale items and the methodological challenges in using the concept of intersectionality for a scale/survey instrument. The survey is being systematically developed through a step-by-step process involving planning, construction, and qualitative evaluation. An extensive literature review on the persistence of women faculty has been conducted to identify concepts and constructs related to each area of interest. Future work will include additional content validation and pilot testing to confirm the validity and reliability of the instrument. Introduction This work in progress is part of a multi-year research project that investigates the persistence of women of color (WOC) faculty in engineering. This paper presents the initial process of creating scale items for a national persistence survey along with the methodological challenges applying an intersectionality framework to survey development. Via the development of this survey, this study will investigate the perspectives of women engineering faculty in U.S. institutions about ways that race, class, and gender impact their persistence as engineering faculty despite documented barriers facing women faculty in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) academic fields. We anticipate that findings from our work will inform institutional and national policies and practices promoting the diversification of academic communities. Much of existing research on women faculty in engineering has problematized the experiences of women in engineering by focusing on male dominance in the field. Among the challenges women faculty face include gender disparities and unfavorable environments that push them out of the engineering profession. Discrimination against women, however, may not be fully accounted for by gender alone, particularly for WOC who face the “double bind” of experiencing challenges as women and as people of color. Despite the acknowledgement of unique challenges facing WOC in engineering, there is a dearth of empirical research of WOC faculty in engineering. New research should explore the complex experiences of WOC across various institutional and social contexts. With growing interests in the perspectives of WOC in academic and nonacademic (e.g., Margo Lee Shetterly’s bestselling Hidden Figures book about the role of black women mathematicians at NASA) settings, this work offers a timely snapshot of the persistence of WOC, many of whom are the first or only in their professional environments. Literature Review An extensive literature review has been conducted to illuminate key issues and concerns in studying the persistence of the WOC faculty in engineering. The applicable literature reveals