Asee peer logo

Women Engineers in Entrepreneurship: An Alternative Pathway

Download Paper |

Conference

2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Columbus, Ohio

Publication Date

June 24, 2017

Start Date

June 24, 2017

End Date

June 28, 2017

Conference Session

Women in Engineering Division Technical Session 7

Tagged Division

Women in Engineering

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

9

DOI

10.18260/1-2--29136

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/29136

Download Count

595

Request a correction

Paper Authors

biography

Lesley Cremeans Texas Tech University

visit author page

PhD student in Higher Education Research and instructor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Texas Tech University.

visit author page

biography

Audra N. Morse P.E. Texas Tech University

visit author page

Dr. Audra Morse, P.E., is a Professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Construction Engineering at Texas Tech University. Her professional experience is focused on water and wastewater treatment, specifically water reclamation systems, membrane filtration and the fate of personal products in treatment systems. However, she has a passion to tackle diversity and inclusion issues for students and faculty in institutions of higher education.

visit author page

Download Paper |

Abstract

Women represent 50.2% of the US resident population and represent 12.9% of the Engineering workforce (NSF, NCSES, 2015). The underrepresentation of women in traditionally male-dominated academic programs and professions urge scholars to investigate strategies to attract, develop, and retain more females for future innovation and discovery (Balakrishnan & Low, 2016). The purpose of the Women Engineers in Entrepreneurship (WE²) program is to create an alternative industry pathway for females in engineering and computer science (CS) academic degree programs through entrepreneurship. The National Science Foundation recognizes the importance of developing entrepreneurial skills and knowledge in the new generation of scientists and engineers, and the skill set required to succeed are different from the skills needed for basic research (NSF, I-Corps, 2012). Entrepreneurship education and mentoring activities will provide scaffolding for the participants in terms of social capital in the field, self-confidence, and entrepreneurship identity formation. Engineering is constructed as masculine, and women must create an identity independent from the gender frames that construct engineering as belonging to men. The paper will explore the literature on identity formation of female students in engineering and summarize external data on the impacts of entrepreneurship education and real-world application on identity formation.

Cremeans, L., & Morse, A. N. (2017, June), Women Engineers in Entrepreneurship: An Alternative Pathway Paper presented at 2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Columbus, Ohio. 10.18260/1-2--29136

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2017 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015