Social Capital From Professional Engineering Organizations and the Persistence of Women and Underrepresented Minority Undergraduates.

Chrystal A S Smith,Hesborn Wao,Rebecca Campbell-Montalvo,Julie P Martin,Reginald Lee,John Skvoretz,Gladis Kersaint,Phyllis Gray-Ray,Ellen Puccia,George Macdonald

doi:10.3389/fsoc.2021.671856

Abstract

Professional engineering organizations (PEOs) have the potential to provide women and underrepresented and minoritized (URM) students with social capital (i.e., resources gained from relationships) that aids their persistence in their engineering undergraduate programs and into the workforce. We hypothesize that women and URM students engineering students who participate in PEOs are more likely to persist in their engineering major and that PEOs contribute to their persistence by providing them access to insider information that supports their persistence. Each year for five years we administered surveys with closed- and open-ended items to examine the association between participating in PEOs and the persistence of a cohort of engineering majors from 11 diverse universities. We used logistic regression and thematic analysis to analyze the data. URM students who participated in PEOs and other engineering related activities were more likely to persist to the second year than URM students who did not (adjusted odds ratio = 2.18, CI: 1.09, 4.37). Students reported that PEOs contributed to their persistence by enabling them to network, reduce gender and race/ethnic isolation, and access professional resources. URM students should be encouraged to participate in PEOs beginning in their first year to increase their integration in their major, which we have found to increase their persistence.

Highlights

The culture of engineering undergraduate degree programs is often unwelcoming and exclusionary for women and underrepresented and minoritized (URM) students, who are often subjected to overt sexism, racism, discrimination, stereotyping, and isolation (May and Chubin, 2003; Brown et al, 2005; McGee and Martin, 2011; Geisinger and Raj Raman, 2013; Seron et al, 2015; McGee, 2016; McGee, 2020)
Our results provide evidence to warrant further investment in race/ ethnicity-focused PEOs such as National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) and Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) to aid URM students and promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in the STEM workforce
We extend this finding by reporting how students benefits from participating in race/ ethnicity-focused PEOs to persistence

Summary

Introduction

The culture of engineering undergraduate degree programs is often unwelcoming and exclusionary for women and underrepresented and minoritized (URM) students, who are often subjected to overt sexism, racism, discrimination, stereotyping, and isolation (May and Chubin, 2003; Brown et al, 2005; McGee and Martin, 2011; Geisinger and Raj Raman, 2013; Seron et al, 2015; McGee, 2016; McGee, 2020). The hostile climate of engineering programs and the feeling of not belonging in these programs are the main reasons that students identify for switching to non-engineering majors (as well as non-STEM majors) before graduation (Seymour and Hewitt, 1997; Tyson et al, 2007; Griffith, 2010; Hill et al, 2010; Ohland et al, 2011; Marra et al, 2012; Meyer and Marx, 2014; Rainey et al, 2018; Fink et al, 2020) This negative academic climate is a threat to efforts to make the STEM workforce more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. For example (Wilson et al, 2014), found that student participation in professional societies and other academic activities was positively associated with “self-efficacy and academic emotional engagement,” but students who participated in women and minority organizations had “lower academic emotional engagement” than their counterparts who did not. Students must be motivated to commit time and become active participants in their academic and social college experiences (Tinto, 1998; Astin, 1999)

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