Strong Black Woman: The Impacts of Engineering Culture on the Mental Well-Being of Black Women Engineers

• In Event: Calling in Well-Being: Critical Examinations of Black and Brown STEM Students

Abstract

The historical formation of engineering consisted of raced and gendered structures that still reside in the present-day customs and traditions of the field. This raced and gendered culture found in engineering causes Black women engineers working in engineering industry to face a myriad of challenges including the compounding effects of racism and sexism. Using Critical Race Feminism and narrative inquiry, this study examines the racism and sexism faced by ten Black women engineers in the professional workforce, the impact of those experiences on their mental well-being, and how their undergraduate engineering program prepared them to address mental health issues triggered by engineering culture and the engineering environment.
Ten Black women engineers, who self-identified as Woman and Black or African American, participated in individual interviews. Five of those participants were graduates of various predominantly white institutions and the other five graduated from various historically Black colleges and universities. Through storytelling, the participants shared the challenges they faced as professional engineers working in industry, they described how those challenges impacted their mental well-being, shared coping mechanisms that they used to persist, and indicated how their undergraduate engineering program equipped them to address mental health challenges brought on by the engineering workplace.
All the study participants encountered challenges that were the product of raced and gendered environments. These challenges caused the mental well-being of some participants to be negatively impacted. For example, some participants developed anxiety. A variety of coping mechanisms were described; some women participated in therapy, some relied on their religion or faith, and others removed themselves from the environment. There were some women who did nothing or did not know how to address the negative influences on their mental health. All the women indicated that their undergraduate degree programs did not prepare them to navigate the challenges associated with the raced and gendered engineering workplace. It was through other means that they learned to leverage their coping skills.
This study will (1) inform the engineering education and STEM education community at large of how engineering culture, specifically the racism and sexism that manifests in engineering environments, impacts the mental well-being of Black women engineers; (2) demonstrate the need for a holistic undergraduate engineering education that considers the social and emotional well-being of individuals and groups or communities of students; and (3) demonstrate the need for more equitable and inclusive engineering learning and working environments for Black women and other minoritized engineering students in STEM contexts.

Author

• Paige Brown
  Presenting Author