Stemming from Stereotypes: Navigating Competing Expectations among Female Asian-American Engineering Students
Abstract
This research explores race and gender-based inequality in an academic setting. Specifically I focus on both Asian-American men and women students enrolled in an engineering program. While much of the current research examines test-taking and professional environments, special attention here is being paid to students’ long-term, personal experiences with race and gender in a field that is predominantly white and male. The aim of this research is to examine the unique intersectional experience of these students via thorough, individual interviews regarding encounters with and perceptions of microaggressions, harassment, and isolation. Methods include data-gathering from school resources such as university student body databases and demographic data, and in-depth, semi-structured student interviews. I find that while Asian-American students overall had positive evaluations of their majors, many still encountered stereotypes such as the model minority myth. Asian-American men had seemingly internalized this stereotype and felt pressure to live up to its high expectations. Asian-American women reported feeling the need to prove themselves to male peers despite having a supposedly “beneficial” Asian identity, and described being ignored and disregarded by men. This study offers a better understanding of the racial and gendered experiences of these students so that efforts such as mentoring programs, fellowships, and diversity training can be created to lessen such inequalities and prevent the loss of students in these programs. This study seeks to not only reveal important information regarding the degree and frequency to which female Asian engineering students may experience race and gender-based discrimination, but also the nature of those experiences.
Description
Keywords
Race and ethnicity, Gender, Intersectionality, Identity, Microaggressions, Qualitative, Asian-American Studies