An Imperative for Diversity and Inclusion Training for Asian-American Faculty to Increase the Number of Women Engineering Graduates

Quantitative analysis is lacking on why little progress has been made on increasing the percentage of women earning bachelor's degrees in engineering. This paper, based on the American Society for Engineering Education's 2019 "Engineering by the Numbers," uses data from the 115 universities with 400 or more bachelor's graduates in engineering in the United States. It describes a simple linear regression to predict the percentage of women engineering graduates based on the percentage of Asian-American tenured/tenure track faculty. For each percentage point increase in Asian-American faculty at a university, the percentage of women graduates goes down by .236 percent. Using data from the top 20 engineering disciplines ranked by total number of graduates, for each percentage point increase in Asian American faculty in an engineering discipline, the percentage of women graduates goes down by .76 percent. The author believes that this analysis points to the need for additional professional development around diversity and inclusion among engineering faculty and to ensure Asian-American faculty, in particular, are engaged. Increased research is being done on inherent bias among engineering faculty. This paper suggests a need to include a separate category for Asian-American faculty to be included in the research.