In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

4 Telling Stories about Engineering: Group Dynamics and Resistance to Diversity Cynthia Burack and Suzanne E. Franks Naming Diversity 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 United States 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. In this paper, we apply insights drawn from psychodynamic group theory to engineering and engineering education to investigate some common problems concerning the institutionalization of diversity. In particular, we argue that understanding resistance to diversity is enhanced by a group-psychodynamic perspective and that leaders of in-groups play a key role in conducting group responses—consciously and unconsciously, positively and negatively.1 Although concern with diversity has deep historical and philosophical roots (Mill 1994), diversity in the United States is usually identi¤ed with contemporary feminism and,thus,for many in male-dominated professions,carries a host of negative associations of radicalism and misandry. Critics of diversity also may assume that it is anti-individualist, respecting group membership more than individuality and individual achievement. However, for feminist advocates of diversity, there is no inconsistency between respecting individual achievement and carefully nurturing the conditions for wide participation by members of underrepresented groups. There is some support for this feminist perspective within the engineering profession. Speaking on diversity in the engineering workforce, the president of the National Academy 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 “[a]t a fundamental level, men, women, ethnic minorities, racial minorities, and people with handicaps experience the world differently. Those differences in experience are the ‘gene pool’ from which creativity springs” (1999a, 10). If engineering lacks diversity, he argues, then “[s]ince the products and processes we create are limited by the life experiences of the workforce, the best solution—the elegant solution —may never be considered because of that lack!” (1999b). As Wulf suggests , organizations diversi¤ed 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 . As Beatriz Clewell and Patricia Campbell note in a recent review of the data on women’s progress in science and engineering, “the more things change, the more they stay the same” (2002, 257). In the early 1970s, women constituted a mere 1 percent of engineering undergraduate enrollment. Following the enactment of Title IX, the enrollment of women grew, and presently women represent approximately 19 to 20 percent of engineering undergraduates . During the past ten years, however, the rate of increase has slowed, and indeed the percentage of women undergraduates has been essentially static for the last ¤ve years. The percentage of engineering African American and Native American undergraduates has remained virtually unchanged over the past ten years, at 6 to 7 percent and less than 1 percent, respectively. The percentage of undergraduates identi¤ed as Hispanic has increased slightly over the same period , from about 6 to 8 percent (WEPAN 2002). In computer science, the situation is even more distressing, as the percentage of women has actually declined since the mid-1980s, when women earned nearly 40 percent of the B.S. degrees, compared to approximately 28 percent currently. The percentage of B.S. degrees in computer science awarded to African Americans and Hispanics has increased over the last ten years by about 1 percentage point, to 10 and 5 percent respectively, while that of Native Americans has remained unchanged at less than 1 percent.2 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 ®ocked to medicine, law, business , and veterinary medicine; when corporate America has touted the bene¤ts of diversity and articulated its need for a diverse workforce; and when programs for women and minorities in engineering have been established and maintained at universities across the country. Two questions inescapably come to mind: What is it about engineering that renders it so...

Share