Asee peer logo

“What’s getting in the way?” Personal and Professional Barriers to Engineering Leadership

Download Paper |

Conference

2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Minneapolis, MN

Publication Date

August 23, 2022

Start Date

June 26, 2022

End Date

June 29, 2022

Conference Session

EMD Technical Session 2: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Page Count

26

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/41857

Download Count

315

Request a correction

Paper Authors

biography

Cindy Rottmann University of Toronto

visit author page

Cindy Rottmann is the Associate Director, Research at the Troost Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering at the University of Toronto. She conducts research on engineering leadership, engineers' professional practice, and ethics and equity in engineering. She is currently the Program Chair of the ASEE LEAD division.

visit author page

biography

Emily Moore University of Toronto

visit author page

Dr. Emily Moore is the Director of the Troost Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering at the University of Toronto. Before becoming a professor in 2018, Emily spent more than twenty years as a professional engineer in industry, first with the Xerox Research Centre of Canada and then with Hatch Ltd. Emily's teaching and research interests include engineering leadership, systems thinking, and equity in engineering education and practice.

visit author page

biography

Andrea Chan

visit author page

Andrea Chan is a Research Associate at the Troost Institute for Leadership Education in Engineering | University of Toronto

visit author page

biography

Lee Weissling

visit author page

At the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers (OSPE) Lee Weissling, Ph.D., conducts research and generates reports concerning engineering policy, labour market conditions, and other topics related to the profession. He also writes proposals for government grants and oversees management of OSPE’s government funded programs. He co-supervises two Mitacs researchers per year.

He attained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Geography at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, and has been an educator, consultant, and project manager in both the public and private sectors.

visit author page

biography

Dimpho Radebe University of Toronto

visit author page

Dimpho Radebe is a PhD Student in Engineering Education at the University of Toronto, Canada. Her research interests include engineering culture and identity, engineering careers in the public sector, and ethics, equity and social justice in STEM. Dimpho has several years of professional experience in the public and private sectors in process engineering, as well as project management and implementation. She holds a BASc in Industrial Engineering from the University of Toronto and an MSc in Management, specializing in Operations Management, from the University of Bath, UK. Her career vision is to be a driving force for efforts to diversify engineering and to challenge some of the dominant ways of thinking that might restrict diverse engineers with different viewpoints and varying career path interests.

visit author page

Download Paper |

Abstract

Recent attempts to ground leadership theory in engineers’ day-to-day realities suggest that while engineers may accept the managerial and supervisory responsibilities structured into their work, many resist the notion of engineering as a leadership profession. When engineers resist leadership, they give up their authority to frame the problems they are hired to solve. Our paper examines the prevalence of this resistance alongside other personal and professional barriers to leadership, drawing on a large-scale survey and four follow up focus groups with engineers in Ontario, Canada. We found that the majority of survey respondents actually embraced the idea of engineering as a leadership profession, however, many experienced structural barriers to their leadership. When we disaggregated findings by gender, race, age, licensing status, job category, and internationally trained status, we found that racially minoritized men and women, white women, and early career engineers were most likely to report having experienced barriers to their leadership. Compounding the impact of structural barriers was the inequitable distribution of two important supports—professional autonomy, and decision-making authority. This indirect finding highlights the important relationship between leadership access and managerial authority. Our ability to understand the key structural impediments to embracing and enacting leadership among engineering students and professionals will help us as engineering educators facilitate meaningful leadership development opportunities for our students and alumni, ultimately enhancing their capacity for social, professional, and organizational impact.

Rottmann, C., & Moore, E., & Chan, A., & Weissling, L., & Radebe, D. (2022, August), “What’s getting in the way?” Personal and Professional Barriers to Engineering Leadership Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. https://peer.asee.org/41857

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: © 2022 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