Spotlighting: Emergent Gender Bias in Undergraduate Engineering Education

“Spotlighting” is the singling out of women by gender in ways that make them uncomfortable. It has three forms: Type I is singling out with the intention to harm (overt sexism); Type II is doing so with neutral intentions (tacit sexism); and Type III, a new type of gender bias, is singling out women with the intention to help them. In a longitudinal, qualitative study including three types of schools, undergraduate women engineers named Type III spotlighting due to women in engineering (WIE) programs as the direct or indirect cause of their primary gender-bias difficulties. Two changes to WIE programs are suggested to reduce Type III spotlighting: (1) offer their benefits either to all students or based on academic, not demographic, criteria, and (2) expand WIE programs to “conduct in engineering” programs that would emphasize pre-emption of non-professional behavior, and would be more inclusive of other biases.