CAREER: Valuing the Social in Engineering and Computer Science

Engineering and Computer Science (ECS) shapes our social, political and economic environments, yet struggles to attract and retain a diversity of practitioners. Why does ECS remain stubbornly segregated when it comes to gender parity? The goal of this CAREER project is to use ethnography to compare subfields of ECS in which women have different levels of participation.

It investigates the relationship between cultural values, norms and practices that 1) presume practitioners from dominant groups are more competent than practitioners from underrepresented groups; and 2) privilege the technical dimensions of computing over the social ones. The uneven participation of women across ECS subfields suggests that subfield cultural values and norms vary.

To examine this variation, this project focuses primarily on the experiences of female faculty members because they are a critical population that shape the next generation of ECS practitioners, have a long-standing relationships with their disciplinary subfields, and may have experiences that could lend critical insights into the social/technical divide. The project's findings articulate and forge pathways toward broadening participation in ECS because they inform learning modules and course curricula to educate students, faculty, and leaders in academia about the benefits of diversity and transformations required to foster welcoming environments for women to participate in ECS with equal opportunities, resources and regard.

Due to the prominence and impact of ECS, identifying gender inequities in the field and interrupting them will help welcome and retain more talented women from a range of intersectional identities. Harnessing the power of diversity in this way will positively contribute to all domains on which computing impinges.

This CAREER project is a comparative analysis of the impact of subfield culture on women's representation in ECS. It deconstructs theoretical assumptions undergirding ECS practices to understand how complex, intersectional biases disenfranchise women from the field. To yield new knowledge useful in efforts to broaden participation, this CAREER project systematically conceptualizes how labor segregation may relate to an ideological hierarchy between the social and technical dimensions of computing and influence cultural exclusions along intersecting vectors of gender and race.

Using a theory-driven, interdisciplinary research approach that integrates gender and racial equity research, anthropology and science and technology studies, this CAREER project works to: 1) Develop and refine a theoretical model of change in ECS to combat the covert and overt mechanisms that marginalize women; 2) Describe and analyze epistemic bias emerging from ideologies that consider empirical data superior to qualitative data and trivialize socially applied research in ECS; 3) Identify and assess elements of culture in ECS that reproduce or challenge inequitable power relations; 4) Describe women's differential experiences in ECS subfields along vectors of race, ethnicity, and gender identity; 5) Develop and analyze educational interventions into ECS culture that spring from an original method integrating ethnography and case study methods to both interrupt the reproduction of dominant class rule and to study the beliefs and power relations of computing communities. Not only does this project contribute a novel qualitative theory of cultural change in ECS, it also tests innovative methods to better elucidate who and what counts in the field and why.

Further, it creates highly adaptable and sustainable techniques that provide opportunities for engineers to practice recognizing and responding to bias in social dynamics and articulating means of institutional change in communion with their peers. Finally, this project provides much needed anthropological theory to the problem of women's underrepresentation in ECS to advance inclusive educational practices that support and capitalize on the aptitudes of underrepresented groups.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.