As faculty members, we are in a unique position to help mold and push our fields’ forward. We help educate and inform the next generation of professionals and scholars, giving them the tools to grow and progress in their careers. In this role, it is also our responsibility to help encourage and grow diversity, equity, and inclusion within our departments and disciplines. It is of no surprise anymore that the field of engineering suffers from a diversity issue. As of 2022, it is estimated that, in the United States, 86.3% of engineers are men and 71.7% of engineers are white [1]. Additionally, engineering suffers from a lack of diversity in other, less tracked groups, such as sexual orientation, neurodiversity, and disability. This lack of representation hurts everyone. Individuals from diverse backgrounds, with various life experiences, ideas, and viewpoints, help enrich the classroom and broaden our way of thinking. In a team setting, it has been proven that diversity helps increase productiveness and creativity when problem solving. This is especially important in the field of engineering, where we are trying to design and create unique solutions for the world’s problems. Lack of diversity has led to certain groups’ issues going unaddressed, such as women’s health issues being vastly understudied, and severe flaws in designed solutions, such as soap dispensers not recognizing darker skin tones. Promoting DEI in engineering departments will, therefore, not only led to a more enriching and inclusive learning environment for our students but also has the potential to make our society and technology more equitable as a whole. It is therefore imperative that, as faculty, we continue to educate ourselves about DEI initiatives and best practices, implement them in the classroom, and work towards a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive classroom, campus, and society.
Promoting DEI initiatives is not a passive undertaking but, instead, requires conscious thought and action taken by the faculty. In order to prepare myself for this active endeavor, I took multiple steps during my undergraduate and graduate education to try and inform myself on the experiences of individuals from underrepresented groups. This education came in several forms, with some less structured learning coming in the form of documentaries, such as the 2020 film Picture a Scientist, and books, such as Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race. On top of that, during my graduate education, and as part of my time in the Certificate of College Teaching program at Duke University, I enrolled in GS 767: College Teaching, Diverse Learners, and Contentious Issues. In this course we discussed the importance of having diverse learners in the classroom and the need to identify your own preparedness to teach a diverse group. This course gave me the space to reflect and determine in what areas I need to continue to grow in order to serve and mentor students from underrepresented minorities better. Moreover, the course content reviewed best practices for creating inclusive classrooms and emphasized the importance of universal design and culturally-responsive curriculum. These practices, such as providing lecture slides to students prior to the class meeting or designing assignments that invite students’ cultures into the classroom, can help underrepresented students feel seen, reduce stress, and combat against negative feelings such as stereotype threat. The lessons learned in GS 767 will help guide my course design and teaching methods.
On top of trying to educate myself, I aimed to become an active participant in promoting DEI initiatives at both my undergraduate and graduate institutions. During my undergraduate career, I served as president of Loyola University Maryland’s Society of Women Engineers (SWE) chapter. In this position I organized monthly chapter meetings to help support connections between fellow students and faculty mentors. My enthusiasm towards promoting gender diversity in the sciences continued during my graduate education, where I stepped into the role of co-President for Duke University’s Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE) affinity group. This group is open to all female-identifying graduate students and post-docs in STEM disciplines and helps connect individuals from many different departments. Through my role as co-President, I helped organize and oversaw various social, career development, and outreach events the organization put on. These events included social happy hours with other affinity groups at Duke, annual career panels featuring Duke alumnae, and outreach events promoting STEM initiatives in the local Durham K-12 community. My time spent in these leadership roles illustrated to me the importance and power a sense of community can have on a student’s mental and emotional well-being and their academic success.
During my time at Duke University, I also helped organize and run an Implicit Bias training for all PhD students in the Biomedical Engineering department. This training was performed prior to, and as a participation requirement for, new student recruitment each Spring. During this training event, PhD students were educated on what implicit bias is and how to identify our own implicit biases. Additionally, the seminar reviewed the impact that implicit bias can play in admission decisions. Through my efforts in organizing and my participation in this seminar, I was further reminded of the importance of continued training in DEI initiatives and a continuous reflection on the areas in which we can improve ourselves.
As I move into my next role as a teaching faculty, I am looking forward to using these experiences to help enrich the DEI landscape at X University. As a member of the faculty, I would like to introduce and serve as faculty mentor for a Women in Science and Engineering group, that spans the STEM disciplines. I have found that these organizations help promote a sense of community and belonging, that is so important for retention of female students in STEM fields. The expansion of affinity groups to all STEM disciplines also helps broaden the sea of mentors and role models for female students. Additionally, during my undergraduate and graduate school experiences, I came to recognize the importance of DEI education. For this reason, I hope to design a new course for the engineering department: Engineering Ethics and the Importance of Diversity. This course would highlight the importance of ethical practices in engineering and technology, with a specific emphasis on the importance of diverse teams in such pursuits. It would highlight past cases where engineering design solutions have failed to be equitable for all members of society due to a lack of representation. The curriculum would also include evidence of unethical practices that have historically taken place within the engineering disciplines. I believe such a course would instill in our student’s an understanding of the importance of DEI initiatives and would help move the future of the field forward. However, as I have mentioned, these goals will be naught without continued work by myself and other colleagues to promote an inclusive and equitable environment in each classroom setting and department. As a faculty member, I will continue to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion as core values throughout my teaching, mentorship, and research.
References
[1] https://www.zippia.com/engineer-jobs/demographics/