Investigating strategies of pre-tenure women engineering faculty to overcome microaggressions in the classroom

Though considerable attention and resources have been dedicated over a few decades to improve the representation of women in engineering fields, the issues of underrepresentation still exist, especially among the tenure track and research faculty. “Chilly” climate models of underrepresentation discuss these and other barriers to women's persistence, including implicit gender bias in the department. For women of color in faculty roles, these biases overlap to become serious barriers to persistence. Microaggressions in the classroom can lead to depreciation of contributions of women faculty, disregarding their accomplishments and limiting their effectiveness within social and educational contexts. One area that is underexplored are the microaggressions that occur intentionally or unintentionally in the engineering classroom when (young) women faculty teach upper-level or graduate courses in traditionally gendered subjects such as internal combustion engines, computer programming, or rocket propulsion. The purpose of this research is to qualitatively investigate experiences and strategies that junior women faculty in engineering disciplines use in the classroom to overcome student bias and microaggressions through content analysis of semi-structured interview data. This Work-in-Progress paper will present preliminary themes and strategies by which women faculty establish credibility with predominantly male students.