A Cloak of Invisibility: Women Engineers' Experience With Virtual Instruction

Women in engineering often encounter classroom environments that feel "chilly" and unwelcoming, yet the processes that create these dynamics remain poorly understood. This constructivist grounded theory (CGT) study advances scholarship in this area, using a longitudinal, qualitative data set with interviews of 17 women from a selective research institution in the Mid-Atlantic during the COVID-19 pandemic to understand the experiences of women engineering students in virtual instruction and how they compared this to their past experiences with in-person instruction. We discovered that virtual classrooms served as a cloak for women's salient social identities, allowing participants to imagine engaging in and then participating in the engineering community in their classrooms in new ways that were not possible in traditional classroom spaces. We present the results of our interactively rich CGT to demonstrate the processes and their outcomes within our data and its analysis and discuss ways to address environments in traditional in-person classroom spaces that marginalize women.