Women Thriving in Engineering: Listening to and learning from women who flourish in undergraduate engineering project teams

Our work-in-progress research offers a distinctive focus and methodology. We focus is on women who are thriving in undergraduate engineering student project teams. Our methodology adopts a feminist, activist, interpretivist perspective using a multi-case study, critical sampling approach that attends to small numbers in order to learn from small numbers. Our early results suggest that these women are thriving because they experience joy in developing and applying engineering expertise, in knowing what and knowing how in response to real, tangible and challenging problems. They report that the experience is exciting, self-rewarding and self-defining. Such research can potentially change the negative discourse regarding women and engineering education with a discourse that is more welcoming and inclusive.