Illustrating Meritocracy: (How) Do Canadian Engineers See Social Structure?

Saskia van Beers; Cindy Rottmann; Emily Moore

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Conference: 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Publication Date: June 22, 2025
Start Date: June 22, 2025
End Date: August 15, 2025
Conference Session: Liberal Education/Engineering & Society Division (LEES) Technical Session 10: Institutions and Structures
Tagged Division: Liberal Education/Engineering & Society Division (LEES)
Tagged Topic: Diversity
Page Count: 20
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/56731

Paper Authors

biography

Saskia van Beers University of Toronto

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Saskia van Beers (she/her) is a current MASc. student studying engineering education under the supervision of Dr. Cindy Rottmann. Her research interests include engineering culture, cultural reproduction and transformation, and structural inequity within engineering.

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Cindy Rottmann University of Toronto orcid.org/0000-0003-3291-095X

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Cindy Rottmann is an Assistant Professor of Engineering Leadership Education at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include engineering leadership, ethics, and equity in the context of engineers' professional practice.

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Emily Moore P.Eng. University of Toronto

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Emily Moore is the Director of the Troost Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering (Troost ILead) at the University of Toronto. Emily spent 20 years as a professional engineer, first as an R&D engineer in a Fortune 500 company, and then leading

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Abstract

Despite roughly four decades of equity, diversity, and inclusivity (EDI) work, stark racial and gender inequities continue to plague the engineering profession [1],[2]. Within Canada in 2022, for example, women made up only 14.4% of professional licensed engineers [3]. Further, literature on engineering career paths has illustrated the hostile and chilly climate for gender and racial minorities within engineering culture [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9]. One possible reason for the persistence of this documented inequity is the limited attention to social structure in a profession that socializes its members to view themselves in an agentic manner [2], [10]. Our paper examines this possibility by analyzing the prevalence of agentic and structural explanations present in the responses of 952 Canadian engineers in response to two questions on a national career path survey: Q52: Do you think your gender/race/sexuality/immigrant status/social class/etc. has influenced your career so far? and Q53: Please explain your response above. Additionally, we draw on classification and demographic information of the respondents to deepen understanding of how engineers’ perceptions of structural inequity differ across dimensions of privilege. We use participant responses to these questions to investigate the following research question: “How do Canadian engineering graduates explain the impact of their social location on their career mobility”.

Preliminary findings for Q52 (n=952) indicate that 26.3% of white men, 49.3% of racialized men, 71.6% of white women, and 75.6% of racialized women believe that their social location has impacted their careers. These findings suggest that those individuals who are relatively underrepresented in the engineering profession are more inclined to view their social location as a non-neutral feature of their career mobility. Our proposed paper uses both inductive and deductive analytic methods to illustrate the types of impact participants have noticed, disaggregating both quantitative (n=952) and qualitative (n=608) responses by intersectional gender and race variables, career paths, licensing status, and location of undergraduate education [11], [12], [13]. A further contribution from our paper will be our novel conceptual framework used for deductive coding, which draws on concepts from Bourdieu’s cultural capital theory and Cech’s dominant ideologies in engineering [2], [14].

By better understanding the distinct ways in which demographically disaggregated groups of Canadian engineers attribute their own professional success or failure to personal or structural factors, engineering education researchers committed to equity will have Canadian data, not only on the prevalence of meritocracy within the profession as a whole, but also on the stories engineers tell themselves about their own progress. This baseline narrative data can be used in our classrooms to help engineering students see and navigate structural inequities over the course of their careers. Over time, this process of constructing engineering career progression as not exclusively meritorious will help us address root causes of inequity in the profession.

Citation
Format

van Beers, S., & Rottmann, C., & Moore, E. (2025, June), Illustrating Meritocracy: (How) Do Canadian Engineers See Social Structure? Paper presented at 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Montreal, Quebec, Canada . https://peer.asee.org/56731

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - Despite roughly four decades of equity, diversity, and inclusivity (EDI) work, stark racial and gender inequities continue to plague the engineering profession [1],[2]. Within Canada in 2022, for example, women made up only 14.4% of professional licensed engineers [3]. Further, literature on engineering career paths has illustrated the hostile and chilly climate for gender and racial minorities within engineering culture [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9]. One possible reason for the persistence of this documented inequity is the limited attention to social structure in a profession that socializes its members to view themselves in an agentic manner [2], [10]. Our paper examines this possibility by analyzing the prevalence of agentic and structural explanations present in the responses of 952 Canadian engineers in response to two questions on a national career path survey: Q52: Do you think your gender/race/sexuality/immigrant status/social class/etc. has influenced your career so far? and Q53: Please explain your response above. Additionally, we draw on classification and demographic information of the respondents to deepen understanding of how engineers’ perceptions of structural inequity differ across dimensions of privilege. We use participant responses to these questions to investigate the following research question: “How do Canadian engineering graduates explain the impact of their social location on their career mobility”. 

Preliminary findings for Q52 (n=952) indicate that 26.3% of white men, 49.3% of racialized men, 71.6% of white women, and 75.6% of racialized women believe that their social location has impacted their careers. These findings suggest that those individuals who are relatively underrepresented in the engineering profession are more inclined to view their social location as a non-neutral feature of their career mobility. Our proposed paper uses both inductive and deductive analytic methods to illustrate the types of impact participants have noticed, disaggregating both quantitative (n=952) and qualitative (n=608) responses by intersectional gender and race variables, career paths, licensing status, and location of undergraduate education [11], [12], [13]. A further contribution from our paper will be our novel conceptual framework used for deductive coding, which draws on concepts from Bourdieu’s cultural capital theory and Cech’s dominant ideologies in engineering [2], [14]. 

By better understanding the distinct ways in which demographically disaggregated groups of Canadian engineers attribute their own professional success or failure to personal or structural factors, engineering education researchers committed to equity will have Canadian data, not only on the prevalence of meritocracy within the profession as a whole, but also on the stories engineers tell themselves about their own progress. This baseline narrative data can be used in our classrooms to help engineering students see and navigate structural inequities over the course of their careers. Over time, this process of constructing engineering career progression as not exclusively meritorious will help us address root causes of inequity in the profession.  
AU  - Saskia van Beers
AU  - Cindy Rottmann
AU  - Emily Moore P.Eng.
CY  - Montreal, Quebec, Canada 
DA  - 2025/06/22
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Illustrating Meritocracy: (How) Do Canadian Engineers See Social Structure?
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/56731
ER  -