Intersectionality as a Framework for Understanding Diverse Young Women’s Interest in Engineering

Recruitment of females (and U.S. born non-White males) to engineering continues to plague broadening participation and workforce development efforts nationwide. While early intervention programming, mentoring, and pedagogical reforms, show promise, this paper describes a more refined understanding of the sociocultural underpinnings of adolescent influences on post-secondary considerations and college choices. Intersectionality, or the notion that lived experiences and social categories of gender vary by race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, age and other interconnected dimensions of difference and inequality, has recently been established as a major theoretical framework in feminist gender studies and other related fields. However, few scholars have used intersectionality explicitly or implicitly as a framework to study gender and its interconnections with various categories of difference in engineering and other STEM fields. The program we developed and implemented to increase high school, mostly underrepresented minority girls’ interest in engineering, Female Recruits Explore Engineering (FREE), brought intersectionality to the fore. FREE was designed (1) to deliver an engineering focused after-school program to a diverse sample of girls in three states; and (2) to study how the girls responded to the program, how the program and its content fit into the context of the girls’ lives, and the extent to which the girls pursued engineering subsequently. Our paper unravels the interconnections between gender, race, ethnicity and class and their combined effects on young women’s interest and intentions to pursue engineering and other STEM fields for possible careers. Our findings suggest potentially significant differences within and across groups with pronounced differences surfacing at decision-making stages. Informed by the scholarship of Pierre Bourdieu and Tara Yosso, these differences are attributed to the social capital – social, cultural, and economic – one may or may not possess. Social capital is attributed to family backgrounds, previous experiences, regional [geographic] differences, competence with technology, school settings and culture, and the social networks the young women had in high school. Given the diversity of the participants, intersectional analysis provided a means to identify perspectives and influences and to understand nuanced data. The exploration of these intersecting categories provides rich explanations of women’s continued underrepresentation in engineering and other STEM fields. The findings underscore the belief that young women, especially those from under-served groups, have the capacity to choose non-traditional STEM career fields, but that ongoing, long term relationships and support are crucial. __________________ This paper uses intersectionality theory to provide an understanding of how interest in engineering and intentions to pursue a career in STEM were affected by the interconnections between gender, race, ethnicity and class for a diverse group of young women who were exposed to an exploration of engineering program.