Women in Engineering:Paper Excerpt

Diversity: Not a New Idea

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Professions, businesses, and educational institutions increasingly promote the cause of diversity and commit resources to enhancing the success of members of different social groups. This is certainly true of the engineering profession in general and of colleges, departments, and programs throughout the US that train and educate engineers. At the same time, there remains a great deal of misunderstanding within engineering about "diversity"--what it is, why institutions should be concerned with it, and how to achieve it.

Although concern with diversity has deep historical and philosophical roots, diversity is usually identified with contemporary feminism and, thus, for many in male-dominated professions, with a host of negative associations of radicalism and misandry. Indeed, such are the negative associations with "feminism" among many Americans that it is not surprising that initiatives identified with feminism are objects of suspicion. Critics of diversity also may assume that it is anti-individualist, respecting group membership more than individuality and individual achievement. For feminist advocates of diversity, there is no inconsistency between respecting individual achievement and carefully nurturing the conditions for wide participation--conditions in which many kinds of points of view can come into existence.

There is some support for this feminist perspective within the engineering profession. Speaking on diversity in the engineering workforce, the president of the National Association of Engineering, William A. Wulf, explicitly relates the concern with diversity of thought to the diverse contexts and experiences that are legacies of group identity in most cultures. Wulf notes that


As Wulf suggests, organizations diversified by race, ethnicity, religion, class, and gender are the best hope for problem-solving and creativity.

However, a quick look at current demographics shows that engineering--as a profession and as an educational enterprise--continues to be relatively homogeneous. In the early 1970's, women comprised a mere 1% of engineering undergraduate enrollments. Following the enactment of Title IX, the enrollment of women grew, and presently women represent approximately 19-20% of engineering undergraduates. Over the past 10 years, however, the rate of increase has slowed, and indeed the percentage of women undergraduates has been essentially static for the last 5 years. The percentage of engineering African American or Native American undergraduates has remained virtually unchanged over the past 10 years, at 6-7% and less than 1%, respectively. The percentage of undergraduates identified as Hispanic has increased slightly over the same time period, from about 6% to 8%.

In computer science, the situation is even more distressing, as the percentage of women has actually declined since the mid-1980's, when women made up nearly 40% of undergraduates, to approximately 28% today. The percentages of African Americans and Hispanics have increased by about 1%, to 10% and 5% respectively, while that of Native Americans has remained unchanged. In computer engineering as well, the percentages of women and African Americans have declined, and the percentages of Hispanics and Native Americans have not changed. Overall, women make up only 9% of employed engineers. Just 6.5% of engineering faculty are women; among full professors, only 1.4% are women.

This astonishing lack of improvement and, in some cases, actual deterioration in the participation of women and minorities in engineering, has occurred during the same time period when women have flocked to medicine, law, business, and veterinary medicine; when corporate America has touted the benefits of diversity and articulated its need for a diverse workforce; and when women in engineering and minorities in engineering programs have been established and maintained at universities across the country. One cannot escape certain questions. What is it about engineering that renders it so resistant to diversity in its students, educators, and practitioners? How can feminists and others who work to implement the increasing diversification of engineering understand and respond to resistance to diversity?

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Resistance to Diversification

Observers often take for granted that organizational efforts toward greater diversity trigger resistance in those who are already present--and whose racial, ethnic, gender, and other identities are already represented--in these diversifying organizations. However, our understanding of the causes and meanings of this resistance is often sparse and vague, and responses to resistance either hortatory or punitive. For those who value diversity, it is difficult to concede that resistances to it might be predictable, even understandable, and that not all resistance is merely a function of deliberate bias against out-groups.

Group life has both conscious and unconscious dimensions. The conscious public agenda of most groups is not difficult to specify. For engineers, this agenda might be described in analogy to medicine: engineers "doctor" to the needs of society. Engineers are problem-solvers, who diagnose situations and apply their training, experience, and common sense to design solutions and produce creative innovations in the service of improving life for all people. Groups also have unconscious emotional processes and agendas, and although this emotional agenda may differ from group to group, many patterns emerge that apply across groups.

Certain shared emotional operations are commonly observed in groups, and as many observers have noted, these operations become more entrenched and more difficult to ameliorate in circumstances in which a shared sense of threat bonds group members to each other and to their group identity. Orientation toward us-them thinking, defense of group boundaries, and the tendency to idealize the group characterize many social groups, although these processes may emerge in a wide variety of ways, both in intra-group relations and in relations between a group and outsiders. There are many circumstances in which these tendencies of groups are functional for certain purposes, as when identifications with sports teams reinforce "team spirit" and boost team-related sales. It is also common in some venues for leaders to deliberately exaggerate these emotional operations and create, for example, the group dynamics of military life. However, it is also common for the ordinary group dynamics of professional, religious, and social groups to become socially dysfunctional and to create patterns of thought and behavior that individual group members can neither explain nor justify.

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One Issue to Watch Out For: Language Use

• An emphasis on language is an important feature of social movements that is consistently underestimated and often ridiculed by critics. It is worth noting that one of the concerns about criticisms of language use in the context of diversity is that such criticisms are wielded by "thought police" who seek to undermine personal freedoms in the cause of a political crusade. Indeed, because speech is often idiosyncratic and bodily at the same time that it is shared and profoundly social, criticisms of language use are particularly likely to be construed as attacks on personal identity. However, such reactions are misleading. They personalize critiques of collective phenomena and deflect attention away from the consequences of language use for marginalized or underrepresented group members. What are always at issue in social movement critiques of in-group language are uses of language that, far from being idiosyncratic, are strikingly consistent and widely shared by in-group members at the same time that they are defended as merely expressions of personal belief or individual thought. It is this consistent, shared--indeed, deeply unconscious--quality of group language use that so stubbornly resists examination and reform.
  
  
• It is important to pay attention to both content and language when group members express the terms of their shared identity because language carries with it unconscious meanings that influence the thinking of group members and, in turn, convey their group dynamics.
  
  
• Calling typical uses of language into question interrupts the mutually-constituting relationship between language and perceptions, and creates conceptual space for re-thinking language that underpins in-group attitudes and values.
  
  
• Language that bolsters unconscious images of the group member is particularly pernicious if it is true, as William Wulf suggests, that in some cases members of different social groups may actually conceptualize problems, or seek to solve them, in different ways.
  
  
• It is very difficult for an in-group to draw its boundaries, reinforce them unconsciously through language, images, and stereotypes, and then be able to transcend them through rational evaluation. This means we should not count on diversity training alone to influence the ways in which group members create their shared culture and regard those seeking admission to the group.

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Diversity as Threat. . .and Not Only as Benefit

Diversity initiatives and programs must respond to the kinds of questions that are constantly being posed within insular groups: "Why is it necessary to permit entry to these "others"? If they belonged here with us wouldn't they be here already?" These questions suggest that diversity is not only experienced as an opportunity to group members, but is also--and perhaps in many circumstances primarily--experienced as a threat. In terms of group psychology, the mandate to diversify a group may easily be experienced as a threat to the integrity of the group. This is particularly true because the diversity mandate is, tacitly or explicitly, a kind of criticism undertaken by outsiders and imposed upon an in-group. Regardless of the actual make-up of the in-group, such a criticism is likely to evoke an emotional reaction that is akin to "circling the wagons." When this reaction occurs, what we see enacted is an amalgam of us-them thinking, defense of group boundaries, and the tendency to idealize the group as it is, not as it might be at some point in the future.

From a group psychodynamic perspective, the mixed message presented by the call for diversity in a culture that holds the superiority myth reinforces durable unconscious convictions about the unfitness of underrepresented group members rather than challenging them. With idealizing convictions reinforced in this manner, hortatory messages about the goods to be derived from diversity are unconvincing. Diversity is likely to be dismissed by those who have received the "real" underlying message: group members must be on the alert to defend the boundaries of their empire of worth against the unworthy interlopers. Once mixed messages of superiority and the mandate toward diversity are broadcast, in-group members can hardly be blamed for believing that their leaders are not serious about diversity. Trusted leaders will not betray and damage the group by insisting on admitting the unqualified, or so the group will believe. And we should not be surprised when group members act in accordance with this belief in a variety of ways that include ridicule, sabotage, scapegoating, and racial or sexual harassment. These strategies are common tools in the arsenal of group conflict. These particular tools have a long history in American social, political, and economic life as ways of marginalizing and controlling disempowered groups such as men and women of color and white women. But the tools may be wielded effectively whenever there are in-groups and out-groups, regardless of the particular identities of those involved. It is actual or perceived power, insider status and /or a sense of threat, and not whiteness, maleness, or any other particular identity formation, that situates groups to employ such strategies effectively.

In order to construct a full account of resistance to diversity in engineering, it is not sufficient to employ a psychodynamic group analysis that ignores the particular social and relational context of the group under study. However, without a psychodynamic analysis, it is difficult for those who teach the benefits of diversity to acknowledge and understand the resistance of in-group members, including leaders, to diversification. This is particularly true when feminists, diversity experts, and other interested parties accurately represent that the interests of engineering are better served by diversity than by continued group homogeneity and resistance. Like individuals, groups are both rational and irrational, but even the irrationality of groups may be predictable and transparent to analysis.

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*The authors acknowledge research support from the Coca Cola Fund for Women's Studies Scholars.

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