literature review on the importance of engineering to the society

Engineering as a Social Enterprise (1991)

Chapter: the social function of engineering: a current assessment, the social function of engineering: a current assessment.

GEORGE BUGLIARELLO

Engineering affects virtually every aspect of our society and engages a substantial set of the population in carrying out engineers' plans and designs. But what is the nature of that activity? What is the role of engineering in responding to society's needs as well as in shaping them? How well does engineering carry out that role?

These questions are being asked with increasing urgency by a society that has benefited from great advances in technology, and at the same time, seen dislocations and experienced fears associated with technology—a society that has become increasingly dependent on technology, but also increasingly ambivalent about it. Often the questions about technology are confused with questions about engineering in the mind of the public despite a growing literature on the relation of technology to the rest of society. 1 , 2 In recent years several symposia by the National Academy of Engineering and other engineering organizations, as well as various reports and articles have addressed aspects of this relationship (Chalk, 1988; Christensen, 1987; Corcoran, 1982; National Academy of Engineering, 1970, 1974, 1980, 1988; National Research Council, 1985). In general, however, the voice of engineers in the discussion of engineering 's social role has been weak, episodical, and often self-centered. The assessment of engineering's impact on society has been largely left to other disciplines. Social scientists and philosophers who have studied the technological process have achieved a considerable level of sophistication. However, because of a lack of dialogue with engineers, they too have tended to offer an idealized view of the technological process (Bijker et al., 1989; Mumford, 1934). For a

nonengineering perspective on the technological process see Durbin (1978—), and Kranzberg and Davenport (1972).

The situation is quite different in the sciences. Scientists have written prolifically and in depth about the social role and impact of their activities. Nothing written by engineers is analogous to J. D. Bernal's highly ideological opus The Social Function of Science (1939).

SOCIAL IMPACTS OF ENGINEERING

Many engineering developments of this century with immense impacts on our lives have not been accompanied by realistic engineering views of those impacts on the social fabric or the environment. Would the societal consequences have been different if engineers had been more involved in a systematic study of engineering's complex role in society, had a working dialogue with social scientists, and had better communication with the public? For instance, could we have anticipated that the automobile would turn out to be a severe source of pollution as well as a powerful instrument of urban change, that radios in every household would catalyze the political emancipation of women, or that television would influence our values and contribute to functional illiteracy? Could we have anticipated that a broader base of affluence brought about by technology in the nations of the West would be accompanied by the rise of anomie and a drug culture among not only the poor and the disenfranchised, but also the more affluent who have in many material ways benefited the most from technology? Could we have anticipated that abundant energy for industries and homes or the invention of plastic materials would have such serious environmental consequences, and that “cleaner” technologies, such as computers, would damage the earth 's ozone layer because of the use of chlorofluorocarbons in the fabrication of microchips?

The list of impacts and side effects of technology is long and growing and has contributed to society's ambivalence about technology. While it would be wrong to blame the engineer for the apparent lack of interest by large portions of society in understanding the technological process with its constraints and possibilities, engineers can do much to reduce society's ambivalence if they could overcome their own parochialism. For example, a gap that exists sometime between the perceptions of the engineers and those of the rest of society can be seen in educational technology. Engineers have tended to focus on the development of new technologies rather than the social setting —municipal bureaucracies, school systems, and homes—in which that technology is to become acceptable if it is to be successful (NAE, 1974).

Part of the difficulty engineers encounter in dealing with social issues has to do with too many definitions of engineering and the lack of agreed upon and shared tenets. The famous 1828 definition of engineering by the British Institution of Engineering—as the modification of nature (Encyclopaedia

Britannica, 1910)—was on the right track but is both too general (as other human activities also modify nature) and too specific in its subsequent detailing of those activities. The kind of definitions that later and to this day seem to have become accepted by many engineers center on the application of science to human welfare. Definitions of this kind fall wide of the mark by remaining too vague about the definition of human welfare and the role of engineering in it. They overlook the essential nature of engineering as a human activity to modify nature (a clear distinction between science and engineering). Furthermore, such definitions are not accompanied by a widely shared set of principles that parallel in power and simplicity the verifiable truth of the scientist, although there have been recent efforts to explore key concepts common to all engineering disciplines (see, among others, Bugliarello, 1989b).

An important point in looking at the social function of engineering is how society makes engineering possible. A complex feedback situation emerges. The artifacts extend the power and reach of society and the individual. Society, in turn, through its organizations and demands, makes possible the development of complex artifacts and stimulates their constant technical evolution and diffusion. Today, to talk about the impact of engineering on society is meaningless without also talking about the impact of society on engineering, and how it shapes the role of engineering. The complexity of the interactions between society and engineering is at the root of unrealistic expectations about engineering, as social entities are often inadequately organized to develop and use engineering effectively. It is also at the root of the frustration of engineers unable to bring their capabilities to bear on the solution of social problems or the effective organization of the engineering enterprise.

SOCIOLOGY AND EDUCATION OF ENGINEERS

To understand how engineering responds to the needs of society, we must examine its social structure and its function. Most people who study engineering in the United States have higher mathematics skills than verbal and social ones. This limits their involvement in politics and their success in communicating with the rest of society. Society, in turn, often views the engineer as a narrow, conservative, numbers-driven person, insensitive to subtle societal issues.

The systematic study of sociotechnical problems is rarely included in the engineering curricula as an important sphere of engineering activity. The curriculum focuses on man-made artifacts to the exclusion, except for specialized cases, of biological systems and organisms. This narrow focus has kept engineering away from not only a rich source of inspiration for specific technical feats and lessons offered by systems of great subtlety and complexity, but also a deeper understanding of environmental change.

Most high school students today do not view an engineering education as a path to success and prestige worthy of the sacrifices of a rigorous curriculum.

It is rarely chosen by the offspring of the well-to-do and the socially prominent. Even bright young engineering students, upon graduation, switch to careers in business management, law, and medicine. On the other hand, engineering continues to be a powerful instrument for social mobility and advancement for immigrants and the poor. This situation accentuates the perceived social gap between engineers and other professions in society. It is further reinforced by massive layoffs in defense industries and practices in the construction business that treat engineers more as commodities than as professionals (Jacobs, 1989).

In different societies engineering provides most of the same artifacts: shelter, energy and communications, manufacturing, water supply, extraction and use of resources, and disposal of waste. There are societies where engineers carry out broader functions by virtue of the position they hold. In several European and developing countries, they head state organizations and major industry conglomerates, participate in government, and enjoy high social prestige. By contrast, engineers in the United States are absent from major positions of societal leadership, and only a handful serve in Congress, as governors, or at the cabinet level.

In the United States the number of engineers per capita is roughly half that of Japan. Coupled with layoffs, this is an indicator of how seriously “underengineered” the United States is. The situation needs to be addressed not only in terms of supply and demand of engineers, but also in terms of the basic structure and direction of the country. In so doing, we must be mindful of historical precedents of decline—like Rome of the third and fourth centuries or the Ottoman Empire of the seventeenth century—which some historians believe started with a decline of interest in technology (de Camp, 1975; Kinross, 1977).

The profession is, in a sense, handicapped in terms of serving society in a broader way by a “pecking order” that prizes activities connected with the design of tangible artifacts above the challenges of manufacturing, operations, and maintenance. We need more national and transnational studies of the engineer's origins, careers, institutions, rewards, means of communicating, and so forth to gain a broader understanding of the engineer's role and effectiveness in society. Some of these factors are now receiving attention in the literature out of a concern about engineering ethics (Layton, 1986; Unger, 1982).

Social Responsibility

The burning question for engineering in extending the outreach of society is: What is responsible outreach? The answer is perhaps best given in evolutionary terms. Man-made artifacts, albeit extensions of our body, have not evolved through the gradual process that has shaped man and other biological species. Thus, we constantly face the question of whether the technology we develop enhances the long-range survival of our species. Because assessing how well engineering carries out its social function lacks the ultimate test of the crucible

of evolution, we need to define what we mean by the “social responsibility” of engineering. In the following paragraphs, I offer five guiding principles, some of which are already deeply embedded in the conscience of engineers.

Uphold the dignity of man. The dignity of man is an imponderable in terms of a clear evolutionary meaning. However, it is a fundamental value of our society that never should be violated by an engineering design. This happens when the design or operation of a technological product (a building, a machine, a procedure) fails to recognize the importance of individuality, privacy, diversity, and aesthetics and is based on a stereotyped view of a human being.

Avoid dangerous or uncontrolled side effects and by-products. The challenge to engineering is how to fulfill its social purpose in ways that either control side effects and by-products or make them more easily foreseeable. This demands a rigorous preliminary examination of how to solve a problem and achieve a given social purpose. The problem is complicated beyond measure by the multitude of pressures leading to the development of a design or a technology —be they political, economic, popular, or intrinsically technological. These pressures can lead to unwise outcomes beyond the ability of engineering to solve, for example, the deferral of municipal maintenance due to constrained budgets or the abandonment of nuclear power plants in some Western countries.

Make provisions for consequence when technology fails. The importance of making provisions for the consequences of failure is self-evident, especially in those systems that are complex, pervasive, and place us at great risk if they fail. A simple example is the failure of an air-conditioning system in a closed ventilation system, as occurred tragically in 1990 at Mecca, with the loss of over a thousand lives ( Newsweek, 1990). A more complex example is the space shuttle. Because it is the sole vehicle for a multitude of space tasks, any of its failures sets back our position in space.

Avoid buttressing social systems that perform poorly and should be re placed. This runs much against the grain of most engineers. Thanks to a multitude of technological and engineering fixes (Weinberg, 1966), our society often avoids rethinking fundamental social issues and organization. However, short-run technological fixes can put us at much greater risk in the long term. In the case of energy, for instance, technological or commercial fixes cannot mask the need to rethink globally the impact of consumerism and the interrelationship of energy, environment, and economic development.

Participate in formulating the “why” of technology. At present the engineering profession is poorly equipped to do so both in this country and elsewhere. Few engineers, for instance, have been involved in developing a philosophy of technology—as distinct from that of science—and in teaching the subject in engineering schools. 3 Yet, John Dewey saw the problems of philosophy and those of technology as inseparable at the beginning of this century (Hickman, 1990). This separation of engineering and philosophy affects our entire society. Engineers, in shaping our future, need to be guided by a clearer

sense of the meaning and evolutionary role of technology. The great social challenges we face require a rethinking of the human-artifact-society interrelationship and the options it offers us to carry out a growing number of social functions using quasi-intelligent artifacts to instruct, manufacture, inspect, control, and so on. We also need to think through the implications of a shift from energy to information (for example, for issues relating to urban planning and the environment), and the possibilities of “hyperintelligence”—the enhancement of the social intelligence of our species through the interaction of humans and global computer networks (Bugliarello, 1984a, 1988, 1989a).

Social Purpose

How well does engineering fulfill it social purpose? This apparently simple question presents several problems.

Which social group are engineers trying to satisfy? Is it a family, a tribe, a company, a municipality, a nation, or a supernational global entity? It is clear that different groups have different technological needs and expectations, and that if engineering satisfies some groups, it may not satisfy others.

What about the needs of the engineers themselves as a social group? A technology that does not respond to the interests of other social groups but serves exclusively its own purposes evinces concerns about autonomous or runaway technology (Winner, 1977). While it is possible to envision such an occurrence for a technological system, the likelihood of runaway engineering is generally remote, if only because engineers, as a cog in the technological system, are unable to be autonomous and “run away” with their designs (Florman, 1987; Veblen, 1921) and are most often subservient to contingent pressures of a social group.

The term satisfaction lacks a rigorous definition necessary to describe an engineering response to a particular social need. The dimensions of a social group are a particularly important factor. In the case of small social groups resources are generally too limited to develop anything but the simplest technologies. Even the wealthiest of families today could not, even if they wished it, mount a manned exploration of space. Hence, small social groups, as well as large, unorganized populations, can only use today's technologies, not create them. With this comes the associated danger of alienation from technology or of resentment spurred by limited participation and ignorance. At a national and global scale, there is a similar lack of powerful supranational organizations to mobilize and control technological resources. Hence, the danger of global environmental damage continues. Today, intermediate-size organizations—corporations and governmental bodies—are most effective in mobilizing technology in response to their needs.

An important determinant of how well engineering satisfies its social

purpose is the breadth of engineering. Engineering today continues overwhelmingly to focus on inanimate artifacts or machines, just as engineering school curricula worldwide continue to bypass sociotechnological integrations like the biomachine—the ever-growing interaction and interpenetration of biological and machine systems. 4 This lopsided orientation grew out of obvious historical origins that have had major consequences for society. The factory environment so single-mindedly rationalized by the engineer F. W. Taylor overlooked the effective integration of the worker—the biological unit—and the machine in the production process. This is so almost everywhere in the world, with the notable exception of Japan, where a different social ethos has produced a more effective integration. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the anomie of the worker in Eastern Europe.

Social Needs

The various needs of social groups that engineering and technology may be expected to satisfy are educational (mentioned earlier), economic, environmented, health, public service, spiritual, and defense. It is important to underscore that, in seeking to satisfy these needs, engineering cannot be shackled to short-range and narrow technical applications. It must be allowed to explore new extensions of our biological capability.

The recurrent conflict between advocates of independent and targeted research is an example and an inevitable result of the tension between short-and long-range needs. If pushed to the extreme, however, such conflicts may cross the boundary between what is socially useful and what is out of control.

At the intellectual core of the sluggish and somewhat myopic response of U.S. engineering to environmental needs is the lack of basic environmental principles embedded by education in the consciousness of all engineers. A key principle, for instance, is recognition that any artifact— any alteration of nature— inevitably has an effect on the environment, and particularly on the humans and other living organisms in it. Another key principle is the requirement, as an essential component of the design process, to address those impacts to the satisfaction not only of the engineer and the engineer's employer but also of the general public.

The health care system has absorbed an ever-greater portion of our gross national product, regardless of the state of our economic prosperity. At the same time, it has priced itself outside the financial reach of almost 40 million Americans. Technology has abetted the situation, not only by favoring the higher-cost, high-repair segment of the system, but also by not addressing the structure of the system (Bugliarello, 1984b). Similarly the problem of hunger remains endemic in many parts of the globe despite advances in agricultural technology. Even when production is high, in many countries grain supplies rot for lack of effective storage and distribution systems.

The pattern of technology repeats itself in the way we address problems of infrastructure, education, and poverty, or the problems of the metropolitan areas that now are home to more than 75 percent of our population. For instance, the problem of housing for the poor and homeless in many developing countries as well as in the United States persists despite our knowledge of building techniques and materials. We need to organize a system of production, distribution, self-help, and education to put that knowledge to work for the dispossessed.

Technology and science working in concert have demythologized many social and cultural beliefs and left a spiritual no-man's-land. Paradoxically, the very success envisioned by eighteenth-century encyclopedists —man's conquest of nature—has confused our society, sweeping away the certainties of the past and leaving society in need of guidance and new orthodoxies. Cars, airplanes, telecommunications, fast foods, and contraceptives have brought about a drastic restructuring of social customs and processes and a jadedness about technological advances. It may be argued that engineers need to question their cultural responsibility to society as they contribute to its change. This effort must begin in the universities. The task is particularly daunting for the United States, with its thin line of 20,000 engineering teachers of growing disparity in cultural backgrounds.

The social role of engineering cannot overlook military engineering — the activity from which modern engineering is derived—as one of the most controversial facets of that role (Mitcham and Siekevitz, 1989). Although military engineering is not viewed by everyone as fulfilling a useful social role, it is crucial for the survival and success of a society. The importance of that social role to the long-term future of a society can be a matter of judgment —and hence open to controversy in the context of a hoped for reduction of military confrontations.

The specialist's role of the engineer seems to prevail today—a retreat from the situation in the last century and earlier in this century, when engineers like Herbert Spencer or Vilfredo Pareto took broader views of society and developed new economic, social or political ideas. The dominance, particularly in our country, of the purely technical over the broader role of engineering can be attributed primarily to the sociological characteristics of engineering and to the inadequacy of engineering education in preparing students for broad social leadership. This is so in spite of the fact that the earliest U.S. technological universities hark back conceptually to the model of the French “Ecole Polytechnique,” with its purpose of producing technically prepared leaders. Indeed, it may be argued that the rigorous professionalization of engineering has been achieved in our country at the expense of preparation for broader leadership roles.

To reiterate, any attempt to rate the current performance of engineering in the satisfaction of social needs must take into account at least three factors: (1)

the fundamental difficulty that engineers encounter in addressing major social problems given a lack of an adequate sociotechnological preparation, (2) the propensity of engineers to find technological fixes for existing social systems rather than to develop and use technological innovations to accomplish needed social change, and (3) the ensuing limited or simplistic views of the social role of engineering.

LESSONS LEARNED

A current assessment of the purposes, roles, and aspirations for engineering and society suggest some pathways to more effective partnerships:

When social systems and technology have been able to complement each other, engineering has been immensely effective in improving human life by augmenting agricultural production, building infrastructure, producing jobs, improving public health, etc.

Engineering can best carry out its social purpose when it is involved in the formulation of the response to a social need, rather than just being called to provide a quick technological fix. Often, a technological fix is in the long run counterproductive. The Sahel economy was devastated, at least in part, when local populations were persuaded to abandon animal power for motor-driven vehicles and pumps—only to find them immobilized when the OPEC cartel made fuel inaccessibly expensive.

Society and technology—and hence engineering—fail, often spectacularly, when the social system is hostile or unwilling to modify itself to allow technology to operate under the best conditions for producing beneficial results. Nowhere is this more obvious than in societal failures to alleviate problems of hunger, illiteracy, and health care.

Engineering can respond to a societal purpose in the measure that such a purpose is well articulated. However, even if well articulated, the social purpose may be detrimental to society and to humankind in general. Engineering, as a force of society, can and should intervene in correcting a social purpose it perceives as detrimental. Historically, this has been very difficult to do. Engineering has tended to respond to the social system in which it is embedded: in market economies it has made unbridled consumerism possible, and in authoritarian regimes it has provided the technological means that reinforce the regimes' power.

Whether, even within the framework of existing socioeconomic systems, engineering has served well the social purpose of those systems is a complex question. Engineering, to the extent it has influence on the process, may have failed in this more limited context if a market economy produces consumer goods that do not stand up well to competition or pollute dangerously, or if a nonmarket economy produces artifacts that are shoddy, such as much of public housing in Eastern Europe.

WHAT IS PAST IS PROLOGUE:

The american experience.

In the past 25 years, several major trends have emerged that magnify the social impact of engineering and the challenge to engineering to address pivotal social issues. These trends are too well known and documented to be further underscored here: the sharpening of engineering prowess in the creation of artifacts; the broadening of the social needs that engineering is called to address; geopolitical and economic shifts that are placing new demands on engineering; the coming to the fore of a series of issues of wide societal impact —such as the environment—that stem at least in part from engineering and technology themselves and demand urgent attention.

To focus more specifically on the situation today in the United States, it is clear that engineering continues to perform effectively the task of generating new technological ideas. However, with broad exceptions —such as aerospace, the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, biotechnology, computers, and telecommunications—U.S. technology has not been very successful in maintaining a strong position against capable and aggressive commercial competitors from abroad (NAE, 1988). This failing brings substantial job losses in manufacturing and raises the fear that the United States, despite its prowess in military technology, is becoming a second-class technological power. It also weakens the nation's ability to respond to the cries for help and to the hopes of the poor and the disenfranchised throughout the world.

Engineering has contributed to this situation by its failure to emphasize manufacturing and production in formal engineering education and in the system of professional recognition. That emphasis is being developed, laboriously, only now. U.S. engineering has been slow also in responding to the immense challenges of globalization, and of the environment. The globally spreading networks of designers, factories, research laboratories, data banks, and sales and marketing operations require a new conception of how the engineering enterprise is organized and of how engineers are trained and certified. For instance, the likely development of international teams working around the clock on the same design from different locations will lead to the creation of new engineering specialties. Globalization also means extreme competitiveness, with greater potential instabilities for engineering enterprises and the employment of engineers. But the greatest challenge that globalization presents engineers and engineering education is how to increase throughout the world the rate of technological, economic, and social progress through the creation of new and more adaptable technologies and better sociotechnical integration.

Furthermore, U.S. engineering has not participated to any major extent in the development of strategies for the reform of the health care and education systems as two key service activities that together absorb well over 15 percent of our GNP. In the case of health care, engineering has produced a host of

innovative technologies, which, applied within the framework of an obsolete system, have added greatly to cost, without correspondingly improving national mortality statistics and access to health care (Bugliarello, 1984b). Similarly, although engineering provides education with powerful tools, it has little impact on an education system that remains largely an artisan enterprise, incapable of reorganizing itself to take full advantage of the great potential offered by systems, information, and telecommunications technology.

Engineering also has been absent from the attack on some of the most vexing problems of urban areas. Poverty, drugs, and alienation are all interconnected sociotechnological problems of our cities, with their deteriorating infrastructure and the loss of easily accessible jobs in manufacturing.

A further example of engineering acquiescence in the subordination of technological possibilities and common sense is the anarchical situation in the United States concerning telecommunications. The current absence of a plan for the transition to fiber optics may deny the United States, to the advantage of its competitors abroad, the possibility of developing integrated new technologies for the largest telecommunications system and the biggest computer market in the world (Keyworth and Abell, 1990).

Contributing to the difficulty of U.S. engineering in addressing major social problems is the limited participation of women and African-American, Hispanic, and Native American minorities in the engineering enterprise. These groups are more squarely in the middle of most of those problems, and bring to engineering an enhanced sensitivity and urgency, as well as broader societal support. Much is being done today to attract women and underrepresented minorities to engineering, but it must be remembered that, as late as the early 1970s, there was a fairly strong opposition among engineers themselves to the recruitment of women (Bugliarello et al., 1972). The recruitment of minorities at that time was also limited, as it continues to be today despite major efforts over the intervening 20 years.

It has been said that this is the first generation in the history of the United States that has lost the hope of being better off than the previous generation. That view is too sweeping. Consider, for example, the immigrants and the great progress made on improving the economic conditions of minorities. However, to the extent that there is a perception of loss, much of it is undoubtedly associated with the weakening of our industrial competitiveness and with the sense that American technology, once believed to be the foundation of our success as a society, is not necessarily the harbinger of an ever-better future for Americans. Hence, regaining industrial competitiveness in manufacturing and addressing crucial social problems are challenges that American engineering must address if it is to help instill in our society a greater sense of optimism about the future.

ENGINEERING AT A CROSSROADS

Operating at the core of the technological process, engineering has succeeded in extending by orders of magnitude several of our biological capabilities. Many achievements of the modern world, from megacities to factories to artificial organs to the human presence in space, bear witness to the enormous technical prowess and social impact of engineering. Yet, engineering has exerted little purposeful influence in shaping the social systems that have been fostered and enriched by it.

Today engineering has an unprecedented opportunity to exercise leadership in showing how technology can offer the means for creating a better world out of the ashes of collapsing or obsolete political and economic systems. The involvement of the engineer as a committed, scientifically knowledgeable problem solver and modifier of nature is our best hope for solving the problems of poverty and hunger, for eliminating the atavistic recourse to war and violence, and for addressing the environmental problem. It is also our best hope for addressing a myriad of other challenges, from natural disasters to drugs, and from water supply to a better space policy.

There is no chance, however, for these hopes to become a reality unless the technical means created by engineering are integrated toward a common global purpose. If our society is to mount an intelligent all-out attack on some of its most enduring and elusive problems, stronger engineering and technological influence and a better sense of technological possibilities are needed in the planning and execution of social interventions worldwide, both public and private.

For instance, our cities offer vast opportunities for engineering in restoring housing stocks and municipal services, and in forming new urban job-creating technologies and enterprises (Bugliarello, 1991; Mayor's Commission, 1989). However, those opportunities cannot be realized as long as engineers continue to occupy subordinate positions in municipal hierarchies and are not prepared to take the lead in drawing bold plans to address these issues—city by city, town by town. Engineers must fight major battles with bureaucracies, unions, and obsolete political jurisdictions (such as in the functionally inseparable tristate area of metropolitan New York) to make the possible real.

Thus, the great challenge to engineering, worldwide, is whether it can demonstrate the promise of an enlightened technology by placing society's more immediate needs in a broader context. Our choice, as engineers, is clear: Are we willing to ensure that the new technologies are placed in a context that affords the maximum utility to society? Or are we satisfied with confining our task to the creation of technologies that make change possible? Will we broaden our social role and take the lead in developing more integrated sociotechnological approaches to society's problems? Or will we continue to

play a specialist's role without participating in the broader decisions about technology in the future of our society?

If engineers are to play a more decisive and enlightened social role, the engineering community must be willing to act on a number of issues:

Work more closely with leaders of business and government to develop a sense of engineering and technology as one of the essential components of their preparation.

Engage more actively in the political dialogue and in the definition of sociotechnological problems.

Increase attention to complex sociotechnological problems, such as poverty or education, and propose new institutions, such as “technological magistratures” with combined technical and legislative power, to address complex sociotechnological problems.

Reshape engineering education to serve society as well as the engineering community.

Foster the involvement of engineers in cultivating the philosophy of technology, the rational and moral underpinnings of the modification of nature and the creation of artifacts.

At the outset of this paper, I raised several questions about engineering: its nature as a social activity, its role in responding to societal needs and shaping them, and its effectiveness in doing so, particularly in the United States. To conclude, engineering has performed extraordinarily well in responding to technical challenges but has shied away from the vigorous pursuit of complex sociotechnological issues. This is surely the Achilles heel of U.S. engineering. If unaddressed, this weakness will do a disservice to society by confining engineers to a mainly technical role in the engine compartments of society. Until engineering is prepared to assume greater leadership, it will remain a most honorable and skillful profession, but it will renounce its legitimate role as a splendid manifestation of humankind's will to control its destiny.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to gratefully acknowledge Professor Walter Rosenblith of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Hedy Sladovich of the National Academy of Engineering for their painstaking review and editing of this paper; Professor Steven Goldman of Lehigh University, for having kindly rushed to me the manuscript of his forthcoming entry on Engineering Education in the Encyclopedia of Higher Education; Professor Carl Mitcham of Pennsylvania State University for his bibliographical guidance; Dr. Joseph Jacobs of Jacobs Engineering for his views on the issue of engineering services tending to be treated as a commodity; Professor George Schillinger of Polytechnic University

for his penetrating comments; and the Library of Polytechnic University and Rose Emma of my staff for their generous help.

Engineering is the core activity of technology performed by a social group—the engineers—within the technological enterprise; it involves the design, construction, and operation of artifacts (as defined below). The term engineering is used to denote the complex of activities in which engineers engage, and of knowledge and institutions that form, organize, guide, and support engineers. The methodology of engineering is a general problem-solving one that resorts heavily to the sciences and mathematics and can have uses beyond engineering. The modifications of nature by engineers take many forms in response to social needs.

Technology is a social activity. It responds to the needs of a social group to modify nature for the group's purposes. Technology is carried out by a subset (which includes engineers) of that social group; its products and by-products (artifacts) affect that social group, and society in general.

Artifacts— at least the wanted ones—are designed to enhance extracorporeally the capabilities of biological organisms, and in so doing enhance society. It is useful to formally define an artifact as any man-made, or, more generally, any biologically made modification of nature. Roads, buildings, mechanical machines, microchips, are obvious artifacts, as they modify nature and are not a product of a natural ecological process. A computer program and a musical score are also artifacts. Today's changing atmosphere can be viewed as an artifact to the extent that it is affected by emissions from factories, automobiles, agriculture, and other human artifacts and activities. Medical intervention in the course of a natural process we call disease is also an artifact, making it akin to engineering in its science-influenced endeavor to modify nature.

Art, like engineering, enhances society through the creation of artifacts that at times come close to engineering, as in architecture and a number of contemporary artwork involving electronics, optics (e.g., motion pictures), new materials (e.g., acrylic painting), and new system concepts (e.g., feedback art) (Bugliarello, 1984c).

See journals such as Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society (1980—), Technology in Society (1978—).

For examples of joint attempts by engineers, philosophers, and historians to address issues of the philosophy and history of technology, see Bugliarello and Doner, eds. (1979); a recent, albeit controversial, study of the philosophy of technology by Agassi (1985); and a comprehensive year-by-year bibliographical review of the philosophy of technology by C. Mitcham in Durbin (1978—).

Exceptions to this are the specialized fields of bioengineering and biochemical engineering and certain aspects of chemical engineering.

Agassi, J. 1985 Technology—Philosophical and Social Aspects Dordrecht : Reidel

Bernal, J. D. 1939 The Social Function of Science New York : Macmillan

Bijker, W. T. Hughes and T. Pinch eds. 1989 The Social Construction of Technological Systems Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press

Bugliarelio, G. V. Cardwell D. Salembier and W. White eds. 1972 Women in Engineering Chicago : University of Illinois at Chicago Circle

Bugliarello, G. 1984a Hyperintelligence The Futurist (December) : 6–11

Bugliarello, G. 1984b Health care costs: Technology to the rescue? IEEE Spectrum : 97–100

Bugliarello, G. 1984c Tecnologia Enciclopedia del Novecento Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana VII : 382–414 Translated and edited as The Intelligent Layman's Guide to Technology. 1987 Brooklyn, N.Y. : Polytechnic Press

Bugliarello, G. 1988 Toward hyperintelligence Knowledge: Creation, Diffusion, Utilization 10(1) : 67–89

Bugliarello, G. 1989a Technology and the environment Pp. 383–402 in Changing the Global Environment Botkin Caswell Estes and Orio eds. San Diego, Calif. : Academic Press

Bugliarello, G. 1991 Technology and the city Paper presented at Conference on Megacities United Nations University Tokyo

Bugliarello, G. 1989b Physical and Information Sciences and Engineering Report of the Project 2061 Phase 1, Physical and Information Sciences and Engineering Panel Washington, D.C. : American Association for the Advancement of Science

Bugliarello, G. and D. Doner eds. 1979 The History and philosophy of technology Urbana, Ill : University of Illinois Press

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Engineering: The Literature Review Process

How to Use This Guide

What is a literature review and why is it important?

Research and trends in STEM education: a systematic review of journal publications

Yeping Li 1 ,
Ke Wang 2 ,
Yu Xiao 1 &
Jeffrey E. Froyd 3

International Journal of STEM Education volume 7 , Article number: 11 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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With the rapid increase in the number of scholarly publications on STEM education in recent years, reviews of the status and trends in STEM education research internationally support the development of the field. For this review, we conducted a systematic analysis of 798 articles in STEM education published between 2000 and the end of 2018 in 36 journals to get an overview about developments in STEM education scholarship. We examined those selected journal publications both quantitatively and qualitatively, including the number of articles published, journals in which the articles were published, authorship nationality, and research topic and methods over the years. The results show that research in STEM education is increasing in importance internationally and that the identity of STEM education journals is becoming clearer over time.

Introduction

A recent review of 144 publications in the International Journal of STEM Education ( IJ - STEM ) showed how scholarship in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education developed between August 2014 and the end of 2018 through the lens of one journal (Li, Froyd, & Wang, 2019 ). The review of articles published in only one journal over a short period of time prompted the need to review the status and trends in STEM education research internationally by analyzing articles published in a wider range of journals over a longer period of time.

With global recognition of the growing importance of STEM education, we have witnessed the urgent need to support research and scholarship in STEM education (Li, 2014 , 2018a ). Researchers and educators have responded to this on-going call and published their scholarly work through many different publication outlets including journals, books, and conference proceedings. A simple Google search with the term “STEM,” “STEM education,” or “STEM education research” all returned more than 450,000,000 items. Such voluminous information shows the rapidly evolving and vibrant field of STEM education and sheds light on the volume of STEM education research. In any field, it is important to know and understand the status and trends in scholarship for the field to develop and be appropriately supported. This applies to STEM education.

Conducting systematic reviews to explore the status and trends in specific disciplines is common in educational research. For example, researchers surveyed the historical development of research in mathematics education (Kilpatrick, 1992 ) and studied patterns in technology usage in mathematics education (Bray & Tangney, 2017 ; Sokolowski, Li, & Willson, 2015 ). In science education, Tsai and his colleagues have conducted a sequence of reviews of journal articles to synthesize research trends in every 5 years since 1998 (i.e., 1998–2002, 2003–2007, 2008–2012, and 2013–2017), based on publications in three main science education journals including, Science Education , the International Journal of Science Education , and the Journal of Research in Science Teaching (e.g., Lin, Lin, Potvin, & Tsai, 2019 ; Tsai & Wen, 2005 ). Erduran, Ozdem, and Park ( 2015 ) reviewed argumentation in science education research from 1998 to 2014 and Minner, Levy, and Century ( 2010 ) reviewed inquiry-based science instruction between 1984 and 2002. There are also many literature reviews and syntheses in engineering and technology education (e.g., Borrego, Foster, & Froyd, 2015 ; Xu, Williams, Gu, & Zhang, 2019 ). All of these reviews have been well received in different fields of traditional disciplinary education as they critically appraise and summarize the state-of-art of relevant research in a field in general or with a specific focus. Both types of reviews have been conducted with different methods for identifying, collecting, and analyzing relevant publications, and they differ in terms of review aim and topic scope, time period, and ways of literature selection. In this review, we systematically analyze journal publications in STEM education research to overview STEM education scholarship development broadly and globally.

The complexity and ambiguity of examining the status and trends in STEM education research

A review of research development in a field is relatively straight forward, when the field is mature and its scope can be well defined. Unlike discipline-based education research (DBER, National Research Council, 2012 ), STEM education is not a well-defined field. Conducting a comprehensive literature review of STEM education research require careful thought and clearly specified scope to tackle the complexity naturally associated with STEM education. In the following sub-sections, we provide some further discussion.

Diverse perspectives about STEM and STEM education

STEM education as explicated by the term does not have a long history. The interest in helping students learn across STEM fields can be traced back to the 1990s when the US National Science Foundation (NSF) formally included engineering and technology with science and mathematics in undergraduate and K-12 school education (e.g., National Science Foundation, 1998 ). It coined the acronym SMET (science, mathematics, engineering, and technology) that was subsequently used by other agencies including the US Congress (e.g., United States Congress House Committee on Science, 1998 ). NSF also coined the acronym STEM to replace SMET (e.g., Christenson, 2011 ; Chute, 2009 ) and it has become the acronym of choice. However, a consensus has not been reached on the disciplines included within STEM.

To clarify its intent, NSF published a list of approved fields it considered under the umbrella of STEM (see http://bit.ly/2Bk1Yp5 ). The list not only includes disciplines widely considered under the STEM tent (called “core” disciplines, such as physics, chemistry, and materials research), but also includes disciplines in psychology and social sciences (e.g., political science, economics). However, NSF’s list of STEM fields is inconsistent with other federal agencies. Gonzalez and Kuenzi ( 2012 ) noted that at least two US agencies, the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, use a narrower definition that excludes social sciences. Researchers also view integration across different disciplines of STEM differently using various terms such as, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary (Vasquez, Sneider, & Comer, 2013 ). These are only two examples of the ambiguity and complexity in describing and specifying what constitutes STEM.

Multiple perspectives about the meaning of STEM education adds further complexity to determining the extent to which scholarly activity can be categorized as STEM education. For example, STEM education can be viewed with a broad and inclusive perspective to include education in the individual disciplines of STEM, i.e., science education, technology education, engineering education, and mathematics education, as well as interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary combinations of the individual STEM disciplines (English, 2016 ; Li, 2014 ). On the other hand, STEM education can be viewed by others as referring only to interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary combinations of the individual STEM disciplines (Honey, Pearson, & Schweingruber, 2014 ; Johnson, Peters-Burton, & Moore, 2015 ; Kelley & Knowles, 2016 ; Li, 2018a ). These multiple perspectives allow scholars to publish articles in a vast array and diverse journals, as long as journals are willing to take the position as connected with STEM education. At the same time, however, the situation presents considerable challenges for researchers intending to locate, identify, and classify publications as STEM education research. To tackle such challenges, we tried to find out what we can learn from prior reviews related to STEM education.

Guidance from prior reviews related to STEM education

A search for reviews of STEM education research found multiple reviews that could suggest approaches for identifying publications (e.g., Brown, 2012 ; Henderson, Beach, & Finkelstein, 2011 ; Kim, Sinatra, & Seyranian, 2018 ; Margot & Kettler, 2019 ; Minichiello, Hood, & Harkness, 2018 ; Mizell & Brown, 2016 ; Thibaut et al., 2018 ; Wu & Rau, 2019 ). The review conducted by Brown ( 2012 ) examined the research base of STEM education. He addressed the complexity and ambiguity by confining the review with publications in eight journals, two in each individual discipline, one academic research journal (e.g., the Journal of Research in Science Teaching ) and one practitioner journal (e.g., Science Teacher ). Journals were selected based on suggestions from some faculty members and K-12 teachers. Out of 1100 articles published in these eight journals from January 1, 2007, to October 1, 2010, Brown located 60 articles that authors self-identified as connected to STEM education. He found that the vast majority of these 60 articles focused on issues beyond an individual discipline and there was a research base forming for STEM education. In a follow-up study, Mizell and Brown ( 2016 ) reviewed articles published from January 2013 to October 2015 in the same eight journals plus two additional journals. Mizell and Brown used the same criteria to identify and include articles that authors self-identified as connected to STEM education, i.e., if the authors included STEM in the title or author-supplied keywords. In comparison to Brown’s findings, they found that many more STEM articles were published in a shorter time period and by scholars from many more different academic institutions. Taking together, both Brown ( 2012 ) and Mizell and Brown ( 2016 ) tended to suggest that STEM education mainly consists of interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary combinations of the individual STEM disciplines, but their approach consisted of selecting a limited number of individual discipline-based journals and then selecting articles that authors self-identified as connected to STEM education.

In contrast to reviews on STEM education, in general, other reviews focused on specific issues in STEM education (e.g., Henderson et al., 2011 ; Kim et al., 2018 ; Margot & Kettler, 2019 ; Minichiello et al., 2018 ; Schreffler, Vasquez III, Chini, & James, 2019 ; Thibaut et al., 2018 ; Wu & Rau, 2019 ). For example, the review by Henderson et al. ( 2011 ) focused on instructional change in undergraduate STEM courses based on 191 conceptual and empirical journal articles published between 1995 and 2008. Margot and Kettler ( 2019 ) focused on what is known about teachers’ values, beliefs, perceived barriers, and needed support related to STEM education based on 25 empirical journal articles published between 2000 and 2016. The focus of these reviews allowed the researchers to limit the number of articles considered, and they typically used keyword searches of selected databases to identify articles on STEM education. Some researchers used this approach to identify publications from journals only (e.g., Henderson et al., 2011 ; Margot & Kettler, 2019 ; Schreffler et al., 2019 ), and others selected and reviewed publications beyond journals (e.g., Minichiello et al., 2018 ; Thibaut et al., 2018 ; Wu & Rau, 2019 ).

The discussion in this section suggests possible reasons contributing to the absence of a general literature review of STEM education research and development: (1) diverse perspectives in existence about STEM and STEM education that contribute to the difficulty of specifying a scope of literature review, (2) its short but rapid development history in comparison to other discipline-based education (e.g., science education), and (3) difficulties in deciding how to establish the scope of the literature review. With respect to the third reason, prior reviews have used one of two approaches to identify and select articles: (a) identifying specific journals first and then searching and selecting specific articles from these journals (e.g., Brown, 2012 ; Erduran et al., 2015 ; Mizell & Brown, 2016 ) and (b) conducting selected database searches with keywords based on a specific focus (e.g., Margot & Kettler, 2019 ; Thibaut et al., 2018 ). However, neither the first approach of selecting a limited number of individual discipline-based journals nor the second approach of selecting a specific focus for the review leads to an approach that provides a general overview of STEM education scholarship development based on existing journal publications.

Current review

Two issues were identified in setting the scope for this review.

What time period should be considered?

What publications will be selected for review?

Time period

We start with the easy one first. As discussed above, the acronym STEM did exist until the early 2000s. Although the existence of the acronym does not generate scholarship on student learning in STEM disciplines, it is symbolic and helps focus attention to efforts in STEM education. Since we want to examine the status and trends in STEM education, it is reasonable to start with the year 2000. Then, we can use the acronym of STEM as an identifier in locating specific research articles in a way as done by others (e.g., Brown, 2012 ; Mizell & Brown, 2016 ). We chose the end of 2018 as the end of the time period for our review that began during 2019.

Focusing on publications beyond individual discipline-based journals

As mentioned before, scholars responded to the call for scholarship development in STEM education with publications that appeared in various outlets and diverse languages, including journals, books, and conference proceedings. However, journal publications are typically credited and valued as one of the most important outlets for research exchange (e.g., Erduran et al., 2015 ; Henderson et al., 2011 ; Lin et al., 2019 ; Xu et al., 2019 ). Thus, in this review, we will also focus on articles published in journals in English.

The discourse above on the complexity and ambiguity regarding STEM education suggests that scholars may publish their research in a wide range of journals beyond individual discipline-based journals. To search and select articles from a wide range of journals, we thought about the approach of searching selected databases with keywords as other scholars used in reviewing STEM education with a specific focus. However, existing journals in STEM education do not have a long history. In fact, IJ-STEM is the first journal in STEM education that has just been accepted into the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) (Li, 2019a ). Publications in many STEM education journals are practically not available in several important and popular databases, such as the Web of Science and Scopus. Moreover, some journals in STEM education were not normalized due to a journal’s name change or irregular publication schedule. For example, the Journal of STEM Education was named as Journal of SMET Education when it started in 2000 in a print format, and the journal’s name was not changed until 2003, Vol 4 (3 and 4), and also went fully on-line starting 2004 (Raju & Sankar, 2003 ). A simple Google Scholar search with keywords will not be able to provide accurate information, unless you visit the journal’s website to check all publications over the years. Those added complexities prevented us from taking the database search as a viable approach. Thus, we decided to identify journals first and then search and select articles from these journals. Further details about the approach are provided in the “ Method ” section.

Research questions

Given a broader range of journals and a longer period of time to be covered in this review, we can examine some of the same questions as the IJ-STEM review (Li, Froyd, & Wang, 2019 ), but we do not have access to data on readership, articles accessed, or articles cited for the other journals selected for this review. Specifically, we are interested in addressing the following six research questions:

What were the status and trends in STEM education research from 2000 to the end of 2018 based on journal publications?

What were the patterns of publications in STEM education research across different journals?

Which countries or regions, based on the countries or regions in which authors were located, contributed to journal publications in STEM education?

What were the patterns of single-author and multiple-author publications in STEM education?

What main topics had emerged in STEM education research based on the journal publications?

What research methods did authors tend to use in conducting STEM education research?

Based on the above discussion, we developed the methods for this literature review to follow careful sequential steps to identify journals first and then identify and select STEM education research articles published in these journals from January 2000 to the end of 2018. The methods should allow us to obtain a comprehensive overview about the status and trends of STEM education research based on a systematic analysis of related publications from a broad range of journals and over a longer period of time.

Identifying journals

We used the following three steps to search and identify journals for inclusion:

We assumed articles on research in STEM education have been published in journals that involve more than one traditional discipline. Thus, we used Google to search and identify all education journals with their titles containing either two, three, or all four disciplines of STEM. For example, we did Google search of all the different combinations of three areas of science, mathematics, technology Footnote 1 , and engineering as contained in a journal’s title. In addition, we also searched possible journals containing the word STEAM in the title.

Since STEM education may be viewed as encompassing discipline-based education research, articles on STEM education research may have been published in traditional discipline-based education journals, such as the Journal of Research in Science Teaching . However, there are too many such journals. Yale’s Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning has listed 16 journals that publish articles spanning across undergraduate STEM education disciplines (see https://poorvucenter.yale.edu/FacultyResources/STEMjournals ). Thus, we selected from the list some individual discipline-based education research journals, and also added a few more common ones such as the Journal of Engineering Education .

Since articles on research in STEM education have appeared in some general education research journals, especially those well-established ones. Thus, we identified and selected a few of those journals that we noticed some publications in STEM education research.

Following the above three steps, we identified 45 journals (see Table 1 ).

Identifying articles

In this review, we will not discuss or define the meaning of STEM education. We used the acronym STEM (or STEAM, or written as the phrase of “science, technology, engineering, and mathematics”) as a term in our search of publication titles and/or abstracts. To identify and select articles for review, we searched all items published in those 45 journals and selected only those articles that author(s) self-identified with the acronym STEM (or STEAM, or written as the phrase of “science, technology, engineering, and mathematics”) in the title and/or abstract. We excluded publications in the sections of practices, letters to editors, corrections, and (guest) editorials. Our search found 798 publications that authors self-identified as in STEM education, identified from 36 journals. The remaining 9 journals either did not have publications that met our search terms or published in another language other than English (see the two separate lists in Table 1 ).

Data analysis

To address research question 3, we analyzed authorship to examine which countries/regions contributed to STEM education research over the years. Because each publication may have either one or multiple authors, we used two different methods to analyze authorship nationality that have been recognized as valuable from our review of IJ-STEM publications (Li, Froyd, & Wang, 2019 ). The first method considers only the corresponding author’s (or the first author, if no specific indication is given about the corresponding author) nationality and his/her first institution affiliation, if multiple institution affiliations are listed. Method 2 considers every author of a publication, using the following formula (Howard, Cole, & Maxwell, 1987 ) to quantitatively assign and estimate each author’s contribution to a publication (and thus associated institution’s productivity), when multiple authors are included in a publication. As an example, each publication is given one credit point. For the publication co-authored by two, the first author would be given 0.6 and the second author 0.4 credit point. For an article contributed jointly by three authors, the three authors would be credited with scores of 0.47, 0.32, and 0.21, respectively.

After calculating all the scores for each author of each paper, we added all the credit scores together in terms of each author’s country/region. For brevity, we present only the top 10 countries/regions in terms of their total credit scores calculated using these two different methods, respectively.

To address research question 5, we used the same seven topic categories identified and used in our review of IJ-STEM publications (Li, Froyd, & Wang, 2019 ). We tested coding 100 articles first to ensure the feasibility. Through test-coding and discussions, we found seven topic categories could be used to examine and classify all 798 items.

K-12 teaching, teacher, and teacher education in STEM (including both pre-service and in-service teacher education)

Post-secondary teacher and teaching in STEM (including faculty development, etc.)

K-12 STEM learner, learning, and learning environment

Post-secondary STEM learner, learning, and learning environments (excluding pre-service teacher education)

Policy, curriculum, evaluation, and assessment in STEM (including literature review about a field in general)

Culture and social and gender issues in STEM education

History, epistemology, and perspectives about STEM and STEM education

To address research question 6, we coded all 798 publications in terms of (1) qualitative methods, (2) quantitative methods, (3) mixed methods, and (4) non-empirical studies (including theoretical or conceptual papers, and literature reviews). We assigned each publication to only one research topic and one method, following the process used in the IJ-STEM review (Li, Froyd, & Wang, 2019 ). When there was more than one topic or method that could have been used for a publication, a decision was made in choosing and assigning a topic or a method. The agreement between two coders for all 798 publications was 89.5%. When topic and method coding discrepancies occurred, a final decision was reached after discussion.

Results and discussion

In the following sections, we report findings as corresponding to each of the six research questions.

The status and trends of journal publications in STEM education research from 2000 to 2018

Figure 1 shows the number of publications per year. As Fig. 1 shows, the number of publications increased each year beginning in 2010. There are noticeable jumps from 2015 to 2016 and from 2017 to 2018. The result shows that research in STEM education had grown significantly since 2010, and the most recent large number of STEM education publications also suggests that STEM education research gained its own recognition by many different journals for publication as a hot and important topic area.

The distribution of STEM education publications over the years

Among the 798 articles, there were 549 articles with the word “STEM” (or STEAM, or written with the phrase of “science, technology, engineering, and mathematics”) included in the article’s title or both title and abstract and 249 articles without such identifiers included in the title but abstract only. The results suggest that many scholars tended to include STEM in the publications’ titles to highlight their research in or about STEM education. Figure 2 shows the number of publications per year where publications are distinguished depending on whether they used the term STEM in the title or only in the abstract. The number of publications in both categories had significant increases since 2010. Use of the acronym STEM in the title was growing at a faster rate than using the acronym only in the abstract.

The trends of STEM education publications with vs. without STEM included in the title

Not all the publications that used the acronym STEM in the title and/or abstract reported on a study involving all four STEM areas. For each publication, we further examined the number of the four areas involved in the reported study.

Figure 3 presents the number of publications categorized by the number of the four areas involved in the study, breaking down the distribution of these 798 publications in terms of the content scope being focused on. Studies involving all four STEM areas are the most numerous with 488 (61.2%) publications, followed by involving one area (141, 17.7%), then studies involving both STEM and non-STEM (84, 10.5%), and finally studies involving two or three areas of STEM (72, 9%; 13, 1.6%; respectively). Publications that used the acronym STEAM in either the title or abstract were classified as involving both STEM and non-STEM. For example, both of the following publications were included in this category.

Dika and D’Amico ( 2016 ). “Early experiences and integration in the persistence of first-generation college students in STEM and non-STEM majors.” Journal of Research in Science Teaching , 53 (3), 368–383. (Note: this article focused on early experience in both STEM and Non-STEM majors.)

Sochacka, Guyotte, and Walther ( 2016 ). “Learning together: A collaborative autoethnographic exploration of STEAM (STEM+ the Arts) education.” Journal of Engineering Education , 105 (1), 15–42. (Note: this article focused on STEAM (both STEM and Arts).)

Publication distribution in terms of content scope being focused on. (Note: 1=single subject of STEM, 2=two subjects of STEM, 3=three subjects of STEM, 4=four subjects of STEM, 5=topics related to both STEM and non-STEM)

Figure 4 presents the number of publications per year in each of the five categories described earlier (category 1, one area of STEM; category 2, two areas of STEM; category 3, three areas of STEM; category 4, four areas of STEM; category 5, STEM and non-STEM). The category that had grown most rapidly since 2010 is the one involving all four areas. Recent growth in the number of publications in category 1 likely reflected growing interest of traditional individual disciplinary based educators in developing and sharing multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary scholarship in STEM education, as what was noted recently by Li and Schoenfeld ( 2019 ) with publications in IJ-STEM.

Publication distribution in terms of content scope being focused on over the years

Patterns of publications across different journals

Among the 36 journals that published STEM education articles, two are general education research journals (referred to as “subject-0”), 12 with their titles containing one discipline of STEM (“subject-1”), eight with journal’s titles covering two disciplines of STEM (“subject-2”), six covering three disciplines of STEM (“subject-3”), seven containing the word STEM (“subject-4”), and one in STEAM education (“subject-5”).

Table 2 shows that both subject-0 and subject-1 journals were usually mature journals with a long history, and they were all traditional subscription-based journals, except the Journal of Pre - College Engineering Education Research , a subject-1 journal established in 2011 that provided open access (OA). In comparison to subject-0 and subject-1 journals, subject-2 and subject-3 journals were relatively newer but still had quite many years of history on average. There are also some more journals in these two categories that provided OA. Subject-4 and subject-5 journals had a short history, and most provided OA. The results show that well-established journals had tended to focus on individual disciplines or education research in general. Multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary education journals were started some years later, followed by the recent establishment of several STEM or STEAM journals.

Table 2 also shows that subject-1, subject-2, and subject-4 journals published approximately a quarter each of the publications. The number of publications in subject-1 journals is interested, because we selected a relatively limited number of journals in this category. There are many other journals in the subject-1 category (as well as subject-0 journals) that we did not select, and thus it is very likely that we did not include some STEM education articles published in subject-0 or subject-1 journals that we did not include in our study.

Figure 5 shows the number of publications per year in each of the five categories described earlier (subject-0 through subject-5). The number of publications per year in subject-5 and subject-0 journals did not change much over the time period of the study. On the other hand, the number of publications per year in subject-4 (all 4 areas), subject-1 (single area), and subject-2 journals were all over 40 by the end of the study period. The number of publications per year in subject-3 journals increased but remained less than 30. At first sight, it may be a bit surprising that the number of publications in STEM education per year in subject-1 journals increased much faster than those in subject-2 journals over the past few years. However, as Table 2 indicates these journals had long been established with great reputations, and scholars would like to publish their research in such journals. In contrast to the trend in subject-1 journals, the trend in subject-4 journals suggests that STEM education journals collectively started to gain its own identity for publishing and sharing STEM education research.

STEM education publication distribution across different journal categories over the years. (Note: 0=subject-0; 1=subject-1; 2=subject-2; 3=subject-3; 4=subject-4; 5=subject-5)

Figure 6 shows the number of STEM education publications in each journal where the bars are color-coded (yellow, subject-0; light blue, subject-1; green, subject-2; purple, subject-3; dark blue, subject-4; and black, subject-5). There is no clear pattern shown in terms of the overall number of STEM education publications across categories or journals, but very much individual journal-based performance. The result indicates that the number of STEM education publications might heavily rely on the individual journal’s willingness and capability of attracting STEM education research work and thus suggests the potential value of examining individual journal’s performance.

Publication distribution across all 36 individual journals across different categories with the same color-coded for journals in the same subject category

The top five journals in terms of the number of STEM education publications are Journal of Science Education and Technology (80 publications, journal number 25 in Fig. 6 ), Journal of STEM Education (65 publications, journal number 26), International Journal of STEM Education (64 publications, journal number 17), International Journal of Engineering Education (54 publications, journal number 12), and School Science and Mathematics (41 publications, journal number 31). Among these five journals, two journals are specifically on STEM education (J26, J17), two on two subjects of STEM (J25, J31), and one on one subject of STEM (J12).

Figure 7 shows the number of STEM education publications per year in each of these top five journals. As expected, based on earlier trends, the number of publications per year increased over the study period. The largest increase was in the International Journal of STEM Education (J17) that was established in 2014. As the other four journals were all established in or before 2000, J17’s short history further suggests its outstanding performance in attracting and publishing STEM education articles since 2014 (Li, 2018b ; Li, Froyd, & Wang, 2019 ). The increase was consistent with the journal’s recognition as the first STEM education journal for inclusion in SSCI starting in 2019 (Li, 2019a ).

Publication distribution of selected five journals over the years. (Note: J12: International Journal of Engineering Education; J17: International Journal of STEM Education; J25: Journal of Science Education and Technology; J26: Journal of STEM Education; J31: School Science and Mathematics)

Top 10 countries/regions where scholars contributed journal publications in STEM education

Table 3 shows top countries/regions in terms of the number of publications, where the country/region was established by the authorship using the two different methods presented above. About 75% (depending on the method) of contributions were made by authors from the USA, followed by Australia, Canada, Taiwan, and UK. Only Africa as a continent was not represented among the top 10 countries/regions. The results are relatively consistent with patterns reported in the IJ-STEM study (Li, Froyd, & Wang, 2019 )

Further examination of Table 3 reveals that the two methods provide not only fairly consistent results but also yield some differences. For example, Israel and Germany had more publication credit if only the corresponding author was considered, but South Korea and Turkey had more publication credit when co-authors were considered. The results in Table 3 show that each method has value when analyzing and comparing publications by country/region or institution based on authorship.

Recognizing that, as shown in Fig. 1 , the number of publications per year increased rapidly since 2010, Table 4 shows the number of publications by country/region over a 10-year period (2009–2018) and Table 5 shows the number of publications by country/region over a 5-year period (2014–2018). The ranks in Tables 3 , 4 , and 5 are fairly consistent, but that would be expected since the larger numbers of publications in STEM education had occurred in recent years. At the same time, it is interesting to note in Table 5 some changes over the recent several years with Malaysia, but not Israel, entering the top 10 list when either method was used to calculate author's credit.

Patterns of single-author and multiple-author publications in STEM education

Since STEM education differs from traditional individual disciplinary education, we are interested in determining how common joint co-authorship with collaborations was in STEM education articles. Figure 8 shows that joint co-authorship was very common among these 798 STEM education publications, with 83.7% publications with two or more co-authors. Publications with two, three, or at least five co-authors were highest, with 204, 181, and 157 publications, respectively.

Number of publications with single or different joint authorship. (Note: 1=single author; 2=two co-authors; 3=three co-authors; 4=four co-authors; 5=five or more co-authors)

Figure 9 shows the number of publications per year using the joint authorship categories in Fig. 8 . Each category shows an increase consistent with the increase shown in Fig. 1 for all 798 publications. By the end of the time period, the number of publications with two, three, or at least five co-authors was the largest, which might suggest an increase in collaborations in STEM education research.

Publication distribution with single or different joint authorship over the years. (Note: 1=single author; 2=two co-authors; 3=three co-authors; 4=four co-authors; 5=five or more co-authors)

Co-authors can be from the same or different countries/regions. Figure 10 shows the number of publications per year by single authors (no collaboration), co-authors from the same country (collaboration in a country/region), and co-authors from different countries (collaboration across countries/regions). Each year the largest number of publications was by co-authors from the same country, and the number increased dramatically during the period of the study. Although the number of publications in the other two categories increased, the numbers of publications were noticeably fewer than the number of publications by co-authors from the same country.

Publication distribution in authorship across different categories in terms of collaboration over the years

Published articles by research topics

Figure 11 shows the number of publications in each of the seven topic categories. The topic category of goals, policy, curriculum, evaluation, and assessment had almost half of publications (375, 47%). Literature reviews were included in this topic category, as providing an overview assessment of education and research development in a topic area or a field. Sample publications included in this category are listed as follows:

DeCoito ( 2016 ). “STEM education in Canada: A knowledge synthesis.” Canadian Journal of Science , Mathematics and Technology Education , 16 (2), 114–128. (Note: this article provides a national overview of STEM initiatives and programs, including success, criteria for effective programs and current research in STEM education.)

Ring-Whalen, Dare, Roehrig, Titu, and Crotty ( 2018 ). “From conception to curricula: The role of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in integrated STEM units.” International Journal of Education in Mathematics Science and Technology , 6 (4), 343–362. (Note: this article investigates the conceptions of integrated STEM education held by in-service science teachers through the use of photo-elicitation interviews and examines how those conceptions were reflected in teacher-created integrated STEM curricula.)

Schwab et al. ( 2018 ). “A summer STEM outreach program run by graduate students: Successes, challenges, and recommendations for implementation.” Journal of Research in STEM Education , 4 (2), 117–129. (Note: the article details the organization and scope of the Foundation in Science and Mathematics Program and evaluates this program.)

Frequencies of publications’ research topic distributions. (Note: 1=K-12 teaching, teacher and teacher education; 2=Post-secondary teacher and teaching; 3=K-12 STEM learner, learning, and learning environment; 4=Post-secondary STEM learner, learning, and learning environments; 5=Goals and policy, curriculum, evaluation, and assessment (including literature review); 6=Culture, social, and gender issues; 7=History, philosophy, Epistemology, and nature of STEM and STEM education)

The topic with the second most publications was “K-12 teaching, teacher and teacher education” (103, 12.9%), followed closely by “K-12 learner, learning, and learning environment” (97, 12.2%). The results likely suggest the research community had a broad interest in both teaching and learning in K-12 STEM education. The top three topics were the same in the IJ-STEM review (Li, Froyd, & Wang, 2019 ).

Figure 11 also shows there was a virtual tie between two topics with the fourth most cumulative publications, “post-secondary STEM learner & learning” (76, 9.5%) and “culture, social, and gender issues in STEM” (78, 9.8%), such as STEM identity, students’ career choices in STEM, and inclusion. This result is different from the IJ-STEM review (Li, Froyd, & Wang, 2019 ), where “post-secondary STEM teacher & teaching” and “post-secondary STEM learner & learning” were tied as the fourth most common topics. This difference is likely due to the scope of journals and the length of the time period being reviewed.

Figure 12 shows the number of publications per year in each topic category. As expected from the results in Fig. 11 the number of publications in topic category 5 (goals, policy, curriculum, evaluation, and assessment) was the largest each year. The numbers of publications in topic category 3 (K-12 learner, learning, and learning environment), 1 (K-12 teaching, teacher, and teacher education), 6 (culture, social, and gender issues in STEM), and 4 (post-secondary STEM learner and learning) were also increasing. Although Fig. 11 shows the number of publications in topic category 1 was slightly more than the number of publications in topic category 3 (see Fig. 11 ), the number of publications in topic category 3 was increasing more rapidly in recent years than its counterpart in topic category 1. This may suggest a more rapidly growing interest in K-12 STEM learner, learning, and learning environment. The numbers of publications in topic categories 2 and 7 were not increasing, but the number of publications in IJ-STEM in topic category 2 was notable (Li, Froyd, & Wang, 2019 ). It will be interesting to follow trends in the seven topic categories in the future.

Publication distributions in terms of research topics over the years

Published articles by research methods

Figure 13 shows the number of publications per year by research methods in empirical studies. Publications with non-empirical studies are shown in a separate category. Although the number of publications in each of the four categories increased during the study period, there were many more publications presenting empirical studies than those without. For those with empirical studies, the number of publications using quantitative methods increased most rapidly in recent years, followed by qualitative and then mixed methods. Although there were quite many publications with non-empirical studies (e.g., theoretical or conceptual papers, literature reviews) during the study period, the increase of the number of publications in this category was noticeably less than empirical studies.

Publication distributions in terms of research methods over the years. (Note: 1=qualitative, 2=quantitative, 3=mixed, 4=Non-empirical)

Concluding remarks

The systematic analysis of publications that were considered to be in STEM education in 36 selected journals shows tremendous growth in scholarship in this field from 2000 to 2018, especially over the past 10 years. Our analysis indicates that STEM education research has been increasingly recognized as an important topic area and studies were being published across many different journals. Scholars still hold diverse perspectives about how research is designated as STEM education; however, authors have been increasingly distinguishing their articles with STEM, STEAM, or related words in the titles, abstracts, and lists of keywords during the past 10 years. Moreover, our systematic analysis shows a dramatic increase in the number of publications in STEM education journals in recent years, which indicates that these journals have been collectively developing their own professional identity. In addition, the International Journal of STEM Education has become the first STEM education journal to be accepted in SSCI in 2019 (Li, 2019a ). The achievement may mark an important milestone as STEM education journals develop their own identity for publishing and sharing STEM education research.

Consistent with our previous reviews (Li, Froyd, & Wang, 2019 ; Li, Wang, & Xiao, 2019 ), the vast majority of publications in STEM education research were contributed by authors from the USA, where STEM and STEAM education originated, followed by Australia, Canada, and Taiwan. At the same time, authors in some countries/regions in Asia were becoming very active in the field over the past several years. This trend is consistent with findings from the IJ-STEM review (Li, Froyd, & Wang, 2019 ). We certainly hope that STEM education scholarship continues its development across all five continents to support educational initiatives and programs in STEM worldwide.

Our analysis has shown that collaboration, as indicated by publications with multiple authors, has been very common among STEM education scholars, as that is often how STEM education distinguishes itself from the traditional individual disciplinary based education. Currently, most collaborations occurred among authors from the same country/region, although collaborations across cross-countries/regions were slowly increasing.

With the rapid changes in STEM education internationally (Li, 2019b ), it is often difficult for researchers to get an overall sense about possible hot topics in STEM education especially when STEM education publications appeared in a vast array of journals across different fields. Our systematic analysis of publications has shown that studies in the topic category of goals, policy, curriculum, evaluation, and assessment have been the most prevalent, by far. Our analysis also suggests that the research community had a broad interest in both teaching and learning in K-12 STEM education. These top three topic categories are the same as in the IJ-STEM review (Li, Froyd, & Wang, 2019 ). Work in STEM education will continue to evolve and it will be interesting to review the trends in another 5 years.

Encouraged by our recent IJ-STEM review, we began this review with an ambitious goal to provide an overview of the status and trends of STEM education research. In a way, this systematic review allowed us to achieve our initial goal with a larger scope of journal selection over a much longer period of publication time. At the same time, there are still limitations, such as the decision to limit the number of journals from which we would identify publications for analysis. We understand that there are many publications on STEM education research that were not included in our review. Also, we only identified publications in journals. Although this is one of the most important outlets for scholars to share their research work, future reviews could examine publications on STEM education research in other venues such as books, conference proceedings, and grant proposals.

Availability of data and materials

The data and materials used and analyzed for the report are publicly available at the various journal websites.

Journals containing the word "computers" or "ICT" appeared automatically when searching with the word "technology". Thus, the word of "computers" or "ICT" was taken as equivalent to "technology" if appeared in a journal's name.

Abbreviations

Information and Communications Technology

International Journal of STEM Education

Kindergarten–Grade 12

Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology

Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics

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A Multi-level Review of Engineering Ethics Education: Towards a Socio-technical Orientation of Engineering Education for Ethics

Diana adela martin.

1 Philosophy and Ethics, Department IE&IS, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

2 College of Engineering and Built Environment, Technological University Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

Eddie Conlon

3 Academic Affairs – City Campus, Technological University Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

This paper aims to review the empirical and theoretical research on engineering ethics education, by focusing on the challenges reported in the literature. The analysis is conducted at four levels of the engineering education system. First, the individual level is dedicated to findings about teaching practices reported by instructors. Second, the institutional level brings together findings about the implementation and presence of ethics within engineering programmes. Third, the level of policy situates findings about engineering ethics education in the context of accreditation. Finally, there is the level of the culture of engineering education. The multi-level analysis allows us to address some of the limitations of higher education research which tends to focus on individual actors such as instructors or remains focused on the levels of policy and practice without examining the deeper levels of paradigm and purpose guiding them. Our approach links some of the challenges of engineering ethics education with wider debates about its guiding paradigms. The main contribution of the paper is to situate the analysis of the theoretical and empirical findings reported in the literature on engineering ethics education in the context of broader discussions about the purpose of engineering education and the aims of reform programmes. We conclude by putting forward a series of recommendations for a socio-technical oriented reform of engineering education for ethics.

Introduction

Ethical concerns are a contemporary addition in engineering education. The establishment of ethics as an academic subject in the engineering curriculum began in the 1970s, when research on engineering ethics started to feature in academic journals and dedicated textbooks were published (Mitcham, 2009 ; Weil, 1984 ). Traditionally, disciplines of exact sciences such as engineering were regarded as morally neutral (Roeser, 2012 ) or even as morally good, 1 and hence did not require ethical instruction (Ehrlich, 2010 ). Consequently, the development of engineering ethics education has been slow (Mitcham, 2009 ; Reed et al., 2004 ).

The article aims to analyse the education of engineering ethics in terms of the challenges and dissatisfaction reported in the literature and link these with debates about the paradigms guiding engineering education and the purpose of reform programmes. The literature review draws inspiration from the Critical Realist focus on different levels of the engineering education system, which locates individual agents in the socio-cultural and institutional contexts in which they operate (Conlon, 2015 ). The failure to integrate these different levels into programs for change has been identified as a gap in engineering education research, with different research communities having focused separately on different levels (Froyd et al., 2008 ; Seymour, 2002 ). As Godfrey ( 2014 , p. 438) points out, it is important to focus the analysis of engineering education not only on the characteristics of behaviours and practices, but also on the values, beliefs, and assumptions that underpin how these came to be, as to enable the development of reform strategies. As such, higher education research should be mindful of contextual aspects, given that reform programmes focused strictly on ‘improving’ individuals run the risk of failure when neglecting the broader context that individuals operate in (Trowler, 2008 , p. 151). This can explain why engineering education reform has a relatively long but slow history (Heywood, 2005 ).

During the past decades, numerous challenges and an overall dissatisfaction with the state and status of engineering ethics education have been highlighted. The challenges revealed by empirical and conceptual research are preponderantly of an individual manner, pertaining to the instructors’ struggle to make sense of the variety of theoretical frameworks, learning goals, teaching activities and assessment methods, as to ensure their alignment (Keefer et al., 2014 ). This challenge is compounded by the engineering instructors’ low familiarity with ethics and their access to institutional support, CPD programmes or teaching resources. Several challenges of an institutional nature have also been reported. These are related to the unsystematic implementation of ethics (Colby & Sullivan, 2008 ; Barry & Ohland, 2012 ; Flynn & Barry, 2010 ; Polmear et al., 2018 ), as well as the low weight given to ethics (Barry & Ohland, 2012 ; Colby & Sullivan, 2008 ; Monteiro et al., 2016 ). There are also challenges related to the cultural milieu of engineering education that was formative for the current generation of engineering academics (Jamison et al., 2014 ), and which in turn impacts the instructors and students’ engagement with ethics (Barry & Herkert, 2014 ; Besterfield-Sacre et al., 2000 ; Cech, 2014 ; Sheppard et al., 2009 ). These challenges point to the complexity behind the implementation and teaching of engineering ethics, which warrants further research and supportive strategies of a structural manner.

Theoretical Approach

Our analysis of engineering ethics education is inspired by Critical Realism, a theoretical approach that strives to develop deeper levels of explanation and understanding (Mc Evoy & Richards, 2006 ).

An example relevant to engineering ethics refers to accident causation. Pearce and Tombs ( 1998 ) draw explicitly on Critical Realism to argue that the analysis of accident causation tends to concentrate on first-order causes, such as immediate production pressures, poor communication or lack of training, and less on the second-order underlying mechanisms that generate them. Explanations about accidents should place their occurrence within “prevailing systems of economic, social and political organisation, dominant value systems and beliefs, and the differential distribution of power” (Tombs, 2007 , p. 29), before exploring their causes, which often are social, political or historical (Dien et al., 2004 , 2012 ). According to Tombs ( 2007 ), such analysis should consider factors present at distinct levels, ranging from individual agents to the contexts in which they operate, such as the workplace culture or the political environment in which a company is based.

By drawing inspiration from Critical Realism, our approach responds to arguments for analysing education as a complex and multi-layered system (Bybee, 2003 ; Godfrey, 2009 ; Lattuca & Stark, 2009 ; Sterling, 2004 ). Sterling ( 2004 ) uses an iceberg metaphor to point to the structures of paradigm and purpose guiding policy and practice in higher education, which are mostly hidden from view and consequently from debate. Godfrey ( 2009 ) also highlights the need for situating findings related to individual beliefs and practices manifest in engineering education within deeper structures. A similar claim in favour of deploying a depth analysis is made by Lattuca and Stark ( 2009 , p. 303), who argue that the higher education curriculum reflects its socio-cultural context. Nevertheless, higher education research has largely neglected the socio-cultural context that shapes the activities of individuals (Ashwin, 2009 ; Scott, 2005 , 2010 ; Trowler, 2005 , 2008 ).

Our literature survey comprises four levels of analysis (Table (Table1), 1 ), whose main features and interrelations are explored. These four levels are (i) the individual level represented by instructors and students, (ii) the institutional level represented by higher education units such as engineering programmes, departments or colleges, (iii) the policy level represented by national accrediting bodies, and (iv) the wider cultural milieu in which engineering education takes place. A multi-level approach allows us to address some of the limitations of research in higher education, which tends to either include only individual agents such as instructors or students (Ashwin, 2008 , 2009 ; Trowler, 2005 , 2008 ), or to focus on the levels of policy and practice without examining the deeper levels of paradigm and purpose guiding them (Sterling, 2004 ). By adopting an approach focused on distinct analytical levels, our contribution aims to place individuals in their socio-cultural, institutional and policy context and to link some of the findings in engineering ethics education with wider debates about the dominant paradigm for engineering education (Jamison et al., 2014 ). A key issue that emerges is the need for clarity about the purpose of engineering education and the mission of reform programmes. The ultimate aim is to develop ground for reflection on the structural strategies needed for effecting change in engineering ethics education and to foster a socio-technical orientation of the engineering curriculum for ethics.

Levels of a critical realist inspired literature review of engineering ethics education

a As mentioned in the limitations of the review, we are not focusing on funding agencies in this article

The literature review (Wilson & Anagnostopoulos, 2021 ) relied on the core collection of the Web of Science for identifying research about undergraduate engineering ethics education. To retrieve sources that address issues representing the four analytical levels described in Table Table1, 1 , the following combination of key terms was used to search in the titles and abstract of publications during the period 2000–2020: “ethic*” AND “engineering” AND “education*” OR “course” OR “curricul*” OR “instruct*” OR “teach*” OR “assess*” OR “implement*” OR “challeng*” OR “accredit*” OR “cultur*”.

To ensure a more comprehensive analysis, the process of retrieving sources based on keywords search was followed by an overview of the references mentioned by the most cited publications, for identifying additional publications relevant to the objectives of the analysis that do not have this combination of key terms in their title or abstract. An additional search was then undertaken in the engineering education journals and conference proceedings that featured the highest number of publications during the first search process. More specifically, the first author searched the databases of the Journal of Engineering Education, the European Journal of Engineering Education and Science and Engineering Ethics, as well as the conference websites for the American Society for Engineering Education and the European Society for Engineering Education to retrieve additional publications featuring the word “ethics” in their title, abstract or keywords.

A limitation that emerged during the source retrieval process relates to the extensive research published in English and the overemphasis on research undertaken in the US, UK, Australian and Western European context, to the exclusion of potential relevant studies set in other national and cultural contexts. A second limitation is linked with how accurately the published research on engineering ethics education that guides our analysis reflects the reality of teaching and institutional attitudes and practices. While it is not possible to ensure that the totality of teaching and institutional attitudes and practices is represented by existing research, the studies published can be considered a reliable indicator of the challenges and states of affairs in engineering ethics education. A final limitation is due to narrowing the analysis of policy actors to accrediting bodies, thus omitting other influential actors such as funding agencies or state ministries. We are referring here only to accrediting bodies, being modest about the breadth we can ensure in a journal publication and at the same time mindful of the role played by this policy body in engineering education worldwide. We consider that accreditation is a force shaping engineering education in many and various national contexts, in ways that resonate across geographical borders, while the role of other policy actors might be confined to specific geographical contexts.

Multi-level Analysis of the Challenges of Engineering Ethics Education

In what follows, we present the empirical and theoretical findings about the challenges and dissatisfaction with engineering ethics education reported in the literature, manifest at each analytical level.

Individual Level

The main challenges experienced by instructors teaching ethics can be subsumed under seven main themes, related to (i) the lack of clarity about the appropriate pedagogical approaches for supporting the various goals set for engineering ethics education, (ii) ensuring a broad coverage of topics, (iii) conducting assessment, (iv) the limited empirical research guiding the design and use of teaching materials, (v) the lack of familiarity with the subject, (vi) the lack of support, and (vii) students’ resistance to ethics.

Diversity and Lack of Clarity for Goals Set in Engineering Ethics Education

The limited research on the effectiveness of the various strategies and goals set for engineering ethics education is a major challenge revealed in the literature. According to Hess and Fore ( 2018 ), there are multiple ethics related learning goals, and no consensus on which strategies are the most effective towards these goals, nor goals should be prioritised. The instructors surveyed by Romkey ( 2015 , p. 25) were found to employ a “very diverse” set of overall teaching goals, but “the goals and practices did not always align”. As stressed by Keefer et al., ( 2014 , p. 250), “variability in instructional goals within the same content areas raises the spectre of significant problems with curricular alignment”. A coherent strategy implies that the goals set for engineering ethics education inform decisions about assessment (Borrego & Cutler, 2010 , p. 366), and are congruent with the delivery and pedagogical methods employed (Li & Fu, 2012 , p. 343). The lack of clarity and alignment might lead to missed educational opportunities (Li & Fu, 2012 ).

The goals proposed for engineering ethics education can be grouped under 12 major categories, as seen in Table Table2. 2 . Inspired by the goals described by Van de Poel and Royakkers, ( 2011 ), six of these categories relate to the development of moral sensibility, analysis, creativity, judgement, decision-making and argumentation. Additionally, we identified goals that fall under categories such as moral knowledge, design and agency, situatedness, emotional and character and virtue development.

Goals posited for engineering ethics education

*Category borrowed from Vande Poel and Royakkers ( 2011 )

There is limited research exploring the prevalence of each learning goal in engineering ethics instruction or on the teaching methods and content to achieve them, which raises questions on how to ensure curricular alignment. Furthermore, there is little known on how specific learning goals might convey to students an understanding of the societal mission of engineering, as captured by the broader theoretical frameworks used to conceptualise engineering ethics education.

Considering the more popular theoretical frameworks developed in the last decades, learning goals can be further subsumed under microethics, macroethics, virtue ethics, value sensitive design and feminist ethics of technologies.

The microethical model is characterised by a strong emphasis on the individual responsibility of engineers (Herkert, 2005 ). Basart and Serra ( 2013 , p. 179) capture the spirit of microethics by noting that it “is usually focused on engineers’ ethics, engineers acting as individuals.” It strives to expose students to ethical dilemmas, with goals focused on enhancing students’ professional responsibility through knowledge of professional codes and refining their moral judgement. This is the theoretical approach considered to prevail in engineering ethics education (Bielefeldt et al., 2016 ; Colby & Sullivan, 2008 ; Herkert, 2000 ; Hess & Fore, 2018 ).

The macroethics model moves beyond an understanding of engineering actions and responsibilities in individual terms towards engaging the engineering profession as a whole and reflecting on the profession’s responsibility in technological development (Vanderburg, 1989 ; Herkert, 2005 ). The focus is on the collective responsibilities of engineers and societal decision-making about technology (Herkert, 2005 , p. 373). Goals address the context of engineering practice in order to enable an engineer’s agency to act ethically (Zandvoort et al . , 2008 ; Conlon, 2011 ; Chance et al., 2021 ). Macroethical goals also target the development of technologies that are congruent with egalitarian and democratic structures and institutions (Vanderburg, 1989 ), or foster the active involvement in public policy to formulate rules and regulations promoting socially just practices (Martin & Schinzinger, 2013 , p. 29; Conlon & Zandvoort, 2011 ).

Representative of virtue ethics approaches are goals that emphasise the importance of context sensitivity and the acquisition of moral virtues and practical judgment ( phronesis ) for dealing with concrete situations (Nair & Bulleit, 2020 ). The focus of virtue ethics lies not on the rightness of engineering decisions, actions or outcomes, but on developing the moral attitudes or virtues of the deciding agents that would incline an engineer’s actions (Hillerbrand & Roeser, 2016 ; Schmidt, 2014 ; Vallor, 2016 ). According to virtue ethics, pedagogical approaches that focus on moral action and its consequences need to be complemented by training the future engineer to develop certain character traits or virtues. Virtue ethics has been posited as a more appropriate frame to convey aspects of engineering professionalism, such as sensitivity to risk, awareness of the social context of technology, respect for nature and commitment to the public good (Harris, 2008 ). Virtue-based pedagogical approaches are also considered to improve engineering students' ethical competence, contributing to learning goals purporting to an enhanced ethical sensitivity, awareness, analysis and judgement (Frigo et al, 2021 ). This theoretical approach lies at the basis of Bowen’s ( 2009 ) understanding of the mission of engineering as enhancing the quality of human life, the well-being of the community or the vitality of the eco-system. Fostering a virtue based approach in engineering education can contribute to the development of students’ professional identity as “virtuous engineers”, who can

assert their responsibility for engaging in a combined human performance that involves the exercise of practical judgment to enhance the material well-being of all people by achieving safety, sustainability and efficiency while exhibiting objectivity, care and honesty in assessing, managing and communicating risk. (Schmidt, 2014 , p. 1007)

An alternative theoretical approach which aims to integrate micro and macro ethical aspects in engineering education is Value Sensitive Design. 2 Introduced by Friedman ( 1996 ) and later popularised in the Netherlands, VSD draws on the philosophy of technology and Science and Technology Studies to connect the moral analysis of the influence exercised by technological artefacts on their environment with moral decision-making during the design process (van de Poel & Verbeek, 2006 ; Verbeek, 2008 , 2011). A major goal of this approach is to make students aware of how the effects of a technological artefact transcend its functionality. When technologies fulfil their functions, they also shape the experiences and actions of their users (Verbeek, 2006 ). VSD thus proposes a broadening of the scope of engineering ethics education as to encompass goals fostering the professional responsibility of engineers from the design stage of an artefact, by considering the prospective mediating role of technology development and instilling it with moral values (Verbeek, 2008 , 2011). The values prioritised by this approach target the societal good over instrumental values aimed at enhancing economic profit (Friedman et al., 2013 ). Important values promoted by VSD relate to safety, sustainability and inequality (Mok & Hyysalo, 2018 ; Mouter et al., 2018 ; van Gorp, 2005 ). The focus is on encouraging students to design value driven artefacts and solutions that contribute to societal welfare or diminish the negative societal effects of existing technologies (Gorman, 2000 , 2001 ; van Gorp & van de Poel, 2001; Verbeek, 2008 , 2011).

A feminist philosophy of technology is an inclusive and value-laden approach that employs a critical discourse on modern technological development (Loh, 2019 ). In the articulation of feminist philosophy of technology, the concern lies with the development of tools and knowledge for enhancing women’s “ability to develop, expand, and express their capacities” (Layne, 2010 , p. 3). The goals of this approach range from addressing the status of women to restructuring social arrangements in ways that adjust the power relations between genders (Layne, 2010 ). These goals are aligned with the precepts of VSD (Pantazidou & Nair, 1999 ; Whitbeck, 1998 ), by reflecting on the gendered assumptions inherent in technological design and promoting the development of technological artefacts that do not discriminate against the female gender (Michefelder et al . , 2017 ; Riley, 2013 ). Thus, for feminist philosophy of technology, technological artefacts cannot be divorced from the social, political and economic context of their development and modes of use (Layne, 2010 ; Whitbeck, 1998 ). In this sense, feminist philosophy of technology has a common history and agenda with social justice movements, through the focus on ending “different kinds of oppression, to create economic equality, to uphold human rights and dignity, and to restore right relationships among all people” (Riley, 2008 , p. 5; Riley et al., 2009 ).

Mindful of the varied theoretical frameworks for organizing the goals of engineering ethics education, we suggest that curricular alignment should consider not only the teaching and assessment methods or the thematic content of instruction, but also the view of the mission of engineering put forward by different conceptualisations. The prevailing goals reported in the literature have an overriding focus on the moral agency of engineers and less on the context in which they may have to make ethical decisions or on the values embedded at the design stage (Hess & Fore, 2018 ). This means that students might be exposed to a singular and narrow dimension of engineering ethics (Canney et al., 2017 ). To counteract this risk, microethical approaches can be complemented by other theoretical approaches, as to ensure the attainment of a broader spectrum of ethics learning goals and a nuanced view of engineers’ role in society, reflective also of the institution’s educational vision and graduate attributes.

Furthermore, there are also concerns that ethics education might lead to indoctrination. Some instructors argue against the presence of ethics in the engineering curriculum, considering it a subjective and personal issue falling under the responsibility of the students’ families (Romkey, 2015 ; Vesilind, 1991 ; Walczak et al., 2010 ). This stance highlights the need for open discussions and clarifications on the object of engineering ethics, as to explore and challenge common intuitions and how the personal understanding of the subject is reflected in the aspirational goals set for ethics.

Content of Engineering Ethics Education

Engineering ethics is taught using diverse content areas. The major content areas identified include responsibility, sustainability, health and safety, legislation, professional ethics, community engagement and humanitarian engineering, societal context, value sensitive design, academic and research integrity, ethical theories, business studies and military applications (Bielefeldt et al., 2019a , 2019b ; Haws, 2001 ; Kline, 2001 ; Lynch, 1997 ; Martin et al., 2020 , p. 2). At the core of engineering ethics lies the concept of "professional responsibility” (Herkert, 2002 ), understood by Whitbeck ( 1998 ) as the “exercise of judgment and care to achieve or maintain a desirable state of affairs”.

However, not all content areas are of “equal value” for the goal of helping engineers connect their work to the broader community and exercise their societal responsibility (Haws, 2001 , p. 227). More so, there is an uneven coverage of key ethical issues (Colby & Sullivan, 2008 ; Polmear et al, 2019 ), which is consistent with the difference in how instructors and students perceive the coverage of ethics. Even though faculty describe their instruction as including not only codes, but also a nuanced treatment of complex issues, students report hearing “simplistic, black-and-white messages about ethics” (Holsapple et al., 2012 , p. 101). This might be due to the instructors’ lack of familiarity and training in teaching ethics, such that simplistic teaching might lead to simplistic messages. 3

Reflecting on the uneven coverage of engineering ethics education, Bielefeldt et al. ( 2016 ) note that there is a limited understanding of the extent to which macroethical topics are being addressed. While the focus is on professional codes, safety and plagiarism (Atesh et al., 2017 ; Colby & Sullivan, 2008 , pp. 329–330; Hess & Fore, 2018 , p. 551; Mitcham, 2017 , p. 4; Polmear et al., 2018 , p. 14), there are concerns that macro topics have lesser prominence. Under-emphasized topics include equity, the critical histories of ideas about engineering, the broader mission and implications of the profession, as well as the respect for life, law and public good (Atesh et al., 2017 ; Colby & Sullivan, 2008 ; Mitcham, 2009 ; Rottman & Reeve, 2020 ). According to Mitcham ( 2009 ), discussions about public safety, health and welfare should be complemented by reflection on their historical and social character.

Conducting Assessment

As Goldin et al., ( 2015 , p. 790) point out, the instructors’ teaching approach affects assessment, and “given the variations in teaching applied ethics, one must be clear about the goals of teaching, and the real opportunities for assessment.” Keefer et al., ( 2014 , p. 259) also highlight the importance of aligning goals with teaching methods as to ensure they are “appropriately assessed”, noting that alignment is “still a weakness in the present state of ethics education.” The assessment of ethics raises several challenges, pertaining to the unfamiliarity with evaluating and grading the ethical components of engineering courses, as well as to the limited guidance about what assessment methods are suitable for nontechnical subjects (Goldin et al., 2006 ; Romkey, 2015 ; Sinha et al., 2007 ).

Engineering ethics instructors typically use between 0 and 4 assessment methods, with an average of two assessment methods per course (Bielefeldt et al., 2016 , p. 12). Popular assessment methods include reflective essays and individual assignments graded with a rubric (Bielefeldt et al., 2016 , p. 12), as well as presentations, group projects and portfolios (Sunderland et al., 2013 ). Nevertheless, it is more common for ethical components either to remain unassessed or be subjected to a binary assessment as pass/fail (Keefer et al., 2014 , p. 251), with several instructors indicating they “made no effort to assess student’s understanding of ethics” (Freyne & Hale, 2009, p. 8).

According to Newberry ( 2004 , pp. 349–350), the use of varied assessment methods is linked to a personal understanding of engineering ethics by instructors unfamiliar with this subject. Davis and Feinerman ( 2012 ) also highlight the difficulty in grading students on ethical abilities and character. Many of the faculty with a technical background consider ethics to be a personal and subjective subject, ignoring how Humanities faculty assess students’ work and provide feedback (Davis & Feinerman, 2012 ). The assessment of case study assignments can also be challenging due to the ill-structured nature of the problems they address (Goldin et al., 2015 ).

These challenges led to a call for the development of standardized assessment instruments, scoring rubrics and instruments. There are currently instruments that measure the maturity of students’ reflection on ethical issues (Rest, 1979 ; Rest et al., 1999 ), the influence of formal and informal ethical experiences on students’ behaviour (Finelli et al., 2012 ; Harding et al . , 2013 ), students’ views on social responsibility (Canney & Bielefeldt, 2016 ), their moral sensitivity (Borenstein et al., 2008 ), the ability to address ethical dilemmas, focused on attributes of attainment such as the recognition, argumentation, analysis, perspective taking and resolution (Sindelar et al., 2003 ), moral reasoning (Borenstein et al., 2010 ), moral decision-making in design projects (Zhu et al., 2014 ) or in the context of briefs provided by industry stakeholders (Moskal et al., 2001 ) and real world scenarios (Bagdasarov et al., 2016 ; Mumford et al, 2006 ).

An advantage of assessment instruments is that results can serve as feedback for instructors in the process of curricular improvement, revealing where to allocate future instructional resources (Keefer et al., 2014 , p. 258; Moskal et al., 2001 ; Sindelar et al., 2003 ). A significant drawback is that none of the instructors surveyed by Bielefeldt et al. ( 2016 ) has been using a standardised assessment method, as they are unaware of their existence. This might be linked to a lack of familiarity with ethics and training in ethics instruction. Further drawbacks refer to the lengthy time duration of standardised assessment tests or their lack of relevance across different student cohorts (Davis & Feinerman, 2012 ). As Davis and Feinerman ( 2012 , p. 357) note, standardized assessment offers “no middle ground for a test both general enough to produce comparable results across a wide range of courses and specific enough to measure what was actually learned in a particular course”.

More so, the quantitative treatment of ethical matters put forward by standardised tests can be interpreted as an attempt to bring the positivist approach characteristic of the technical culture into a nontechnical subject. Also notable is the Western centric nature of existing standardized tests. The aforementioned tests have been developed in the US and might exclude the cultural traditions of other geographical regions or the individual characteristics of respondents that are shaped by their gender, ethnicity, cultural background or social class (Zhu et al., 2014 , p. 10). Goals associated with the feminist and value-based design approaches are also missing from the scope of existing standardized tests.

Lack of Expertise

As Barry and Herkert ( 2014 , p. 824) note, the preparation of faculty to “comfortably engage” with the subject remains one of the biggest challenges facing engineering ethics education. Other major challenges encountered by instructors relate to formulating ethical learning goals and understanding the expectations of accrediting bodies as to how these can be achieved (Besterfield-Sacre et al., 2000 ; Colby & Sullivan, 2008 ; Herkert, 2002 ; Sheppard et al., 2009 ). At the root of these challenges, we find the instructors’ lesser familiarity with ethics, which makes difficult finding appropriate pedagogical content and linking ethical concerns with technical subjects (Barry & Herkert, 2014 ). Furthermore, engineering instructors highlight the lack of guidance and training on how to teach ethics (Harding et al., 2009 ; Monteiro, 2016 ; Polmear et al., 2018 ; Romkey, 2015 ; Sinha et al., 2007 ; Vesilind, 1991 ; Walczak et al., 2010 ). Also notable is the time commitment required for becoming acquainted with an unfamiliar subject, which is an impediment given the busy schedule of faculty members (Walczak et al., 2010 ).

Co-teaching activities involving engineering and philosophy or social sciences instructors can address the problem of expertise and convey to students a message about the importance of this subject. Nevertheless, it is an expensive, time and labour-intensive approach, which requires long-term contact and research efforts (Bombaerts et al., 2021 ). Moreover, this approach is considered “second-rate academic work” (Taebi & Kastenberg, 2019 , p. 1768), and is not properly acknowledged in promotion and hiring schemes (National Academy of Engineering, 2017 , p. 12).

Empirical Research Guiding the Design and Use of Teaching Materials

Existing studies report the use of various teaching methods (Harding et al., 2013 ; Keefer et al., 2014 ). These include case studies, lectures and presentations, role-playing activities, in-class or online discussion, debates, voting, games, online courses, films and videos, creative fiction, science fiction, community service, field trips and visits (Loui, 2009 ; Alpay, 2011 ; Atwood & Read-Daily, 2015 ; Berne & Schummer, 2005 ; Bielefeldt et al . , 2016 ; Burton et al., 2018 ; Finelli et al., 2012 ; Génova & González, 2015 ; Itani, 2013 ; Kang & Lundeberg, 2010 ; Lloyd & van de Poel, 2008 ; Loui, 2000 ; Lumgair, 2018 ; Pritchard, 2000 ; Rabb et al., 2015 ; Voss, 2013 ). One of the most popular methods for teaching engineering ethics are case studies (Colby & Sullivan, 2008 ; Herkert, 2000 ; Yadav & Barry, 2009 ).

Nevertheless, despite the variety of teaching methods and the prevalence of case studies, there is limited empirical research that could elucidate the effectiveness of each teaching approach towards the attainment of clearly defined goals, as well as their impact on student engagement (Bagdasarov et al., 2013 ; Bombaerts et al., 2021 ; Martin et al., 2021 ; Thiel et al., 2013 , p. 267). There is also little known on how cases are presented in engineering ethics instruction and the kind of cases used (Yadav et al, 2007 ), how they should be taught (Davis & Yadav, 2014 , p. 172), and what approach serves the achievement of which learning goals (Romkey, 2015 ). As such, one cannot point to the approach by which the case method could achieve its “alleged superiority” in engineering ethics instruction (Abaté, 2011 , p. 589).

Lack of Support

Another challenge faced at individual level is the lack of peer and institutional support for instructors teaching ethics (Polmear et al., 2018 ; Romkey, 2015 ; Walczak et al., 2010 ). Engineering ethics instructors report feeling isolated and lacking a peer group within their institution with whom they could discuss their teaching approaches (National Academy of Engineering, 2017 ). Recent initiatives for connecting engineering ethics instructors and researchers include the Engineering Ethics Division of the American Society for Engineering Education, the special interest group on ethics of the European Society of Engineering Education, or the Communities of Practice supported by the Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Science. 4 Instructors also report resistance encountered at the institutional level, related to fewer resources allocated for ethics teaching and promotion systems that do not recognise the value of ethics education (Martin et al., 2021 ; Polmear et al., 2018 , p. 13; Taebi & Kastenberg, 2019 ; Walczak et al., 2010 ).

Student Reception

Students’ skills and reception of ethics is another major challenge of engineering ethics instruction (Harding et al., 2009 ; Romkey, 2015 ). Students tend to show disinterest, resistance, and difficulties when exposed to ethics and societal considerations (Bairaktarova, & Evangelou, 2011 ; Polmear et al., 2018 , p. 9), as well as a lack of emotional engagement with the course content (Balakrishnan & Tarlocha, 2015 ; Newberry, 2004 ). Students also prefer to have ethics as a non-compulsory topic that is not assessed (Sucala, 2019 ), and invest less time preparing for ethics courses (Bombaerts & Nickel, 2017 ; Martin, 2020 ).

This may contribute to a trend identified in several research studies showing that students’ engagement with public welfare and their moral reasoning decreases throughout their engineering studies (Bielefeldt & Canney, 2016 ; Cech, 2014 ; Rulifson & Bielefeldt, 2018 ), even upon receiving ethics training (Tormey et al., 2015 ). Cech ( 2014 ) found that students from engineering programmes which emphasise the development of technical skills to the detriment of ethics and social engagement tend to have declining beliefs about the importance of public welfare from their first to last year of studies, and their engagement with public welfare issues does not rebound upon entering the workplace. Engineering students tend to develop strong and rigid views about the lower value of academic subjects oriented towards people and society (Adams et al . , 2018 ). They also express less commitment to social activism and concern for society than students from other disciplines (Sax, 2000 ), and consider unrealistic to expect engineers to have an ethical behaviour (Stappenbelt, 2013 ).

Institutional Level

Barry and Herkert ( 2014 , p. 420) highlight that the key aspects in the implementation of ethics at programme level refer to where and how ethics is integrated in the programme and the weight given to ethics. These questions touch on issues considered challenging at the institutional level, such as what constitutes an effective design and implementation of ethics in the engineering curricula, as well as ensuring the balance between technical and ethical content (Sheppard et al., 2009 ; Wicklein, 1997 ).

Low Emphasis on Ethics

As Wicklein ( 1997 , p. 74) remarks, it is important to enquire to what degree should the engineering curriculum be devoted to technical skill training, given that historically there has been “an exorbitant amount of instructional time to this area, while slighting many of the other facets of the curriculum”. According to Wicklein ( 1997 , p. 74), the key to a healthy engineering curriculum is finding the “appropriate balance of tool skills with other curricular areas”.

Empirical research paints an educational landscape where ethics has marginal presence in the engineering curriculum, even in educational systems where ethics features among the accreditation criteria (Barry & Ohland, 2012 ; Colby & Sullivan, 2008 ; Ocone, 2013 ). The self-assessment conducted by engineering programmes for the purpose of accreditation in Ireland reveals that ethics is the accreditation outcome with the lowest weight in the engineering curriculum, compared with both technical and nontechnical outcomes (Martin, 2020 ). In countries where ethics education is not mandatory for accreditation, ethics is mostly absent (Monteiro et al., 2016 , 2017 ). As Mitcham ( 2014 ) points out, humanities and social science requirements are often limited to “little more than a semester’s worth, spread over a degree program crammed with science and engineering”. The marginal role of ethics in a technically dominant curriculum is revealed also by the few number of exams and assignments addressing ethical considerations (Fabregat, 2013 ; Miñano et al., 2017 ; Stonyer, 1998 ).

There is a disparity between the perceived importance of ethical and societal related practices and their presence in the curriculum (Romkey, 2015 , p. 14). The main risk associated with a weak presence of ethics in engineering education is that of conveying to students the message that ethics is not as important for their education and future profession as the development of technical abilities (McGinn, 2003 , p. 525). Given that university education is the propitious period when engineering students start developing their identities as future professionals (Loui, 2005 ), the curricular weight given to ethics is of crucial importance for sending students the message that ethics is not peripheral to engineering, but a substantial aspect of their profession (Li & Fu, 2012 ; Trevelyan, 2010 , 2014 ).

Lack of a Systematic Approach Driving the Implementation of Ethics

For implementing ethics in a systematic manner, a cohesive and purposeful strategy needs to be designed at institutional level. To ensure a cohesive curriculum, devising an implementation strategy should take precedence over the introduction of ethics learning activities (Li & Fu, 2012 ). Such strategy should be considerate of quality assurance mechanisms, accreditation requirements, and strive to adapt the implementation of ethics as to fit the vision and graduate attributes set by the institution as well as the specific characteristics of the institution’s ecosystem.

A systematic implementation of ethics requires a wide scale transformation undertaken at institutional level (LeBlanc, 2002 ). The challenges of such an endeavour are rooted in budgetary pressures, limited institutional resources for bringing external instructors with an expertise in this area, insufficient space in the curriculum and lack of guidance (Romkey, 2015 ; Sheppard et al., 2009 ; Walczak et al., 2010 ).

Besterfield-Sacre et al., ( 2000 , p. 100) note that when a dedicated ethics criterion was introduced in the US, there was “much concern as to how to best operationalise each outcome for use within one’s own institution.” A similar deficit about the operationalising the accreditation outcome dedicated to ethics in the engineering curriculum is encountered in the context of engineering education in Ireland, where Murphy et al., ( 2019 , p. 381) found no evidence that any institution implemented ethics “to set itself apart […] as different and unique” and there are “no clear themes reflecting an institute-wide focus” with respect to ethics.

According to Herkert ( 2002 ), the vagueness of the accreditation criterion “makes it difficult to implement a standard model for teaching engineering ethics.” A significant challenge is thus linked to understanding the formulation of accreditation requirements purporting to ethics and the expectations of the accreditation body about the implementation of ethics (Colby & Sullivan, 2008 ; Sheppard et al., 2009 ). Furthermore, engineering programmes report the lack of “consistent, accurate, and reliable methods of teaching ethics and measuring its outcome” (Bairaktarova & Woodcock, 2015 ), pointing to issues related to quality assurance. This is reflected in the disparity of approaches for teaching and assessing ethics (Bielefeldt, 2016 ; Harding et al., 2013 ), and the call for a constructive alignment between programme outcomes targeting ethics, assessment methods and the design of learning environments (Bombaerts et al., 2019 ; Borrego & Cutler, 2010 ).

The unconstructive feedback following accreditation events and the lack of guidance from the accrediting body on how to operationalise the outcome has been highlighted as a significant barrier in the systematic implementation of ethics at institutional level (Barry & Ohland, 2012 ; Bielefeldt et al., 2016 ; Herkert, 2002 ; Murphy et al., 2019 , pp. 381–382). According to Barry and Ohland ( 2012 , p. 389), the feedback on ethics received from the accrediting body is “either significantly lacking or not constructively useful to the evaluated programmes,” which might impede the dimension of the accreditation process associated with quality assurance and improvement (Kumar et al., 2020 ; Quiles-Ramos et al., 2017 ). Barry and Ohland ( 2012 , p. 389) further stress that the lack of feedback following the accreditation review has left “most programs uncertain of their chosen quantity of curricular content". Reflecting on the South African context, Gwynne-Evans et al., ( 2021 , p. 10) note that the description of the graduate attributes set by the Engineering Council of South Africa provides “very little conceptual detail” as to their meaning, which results in “insufficient signposts to guide educators in the implementation and assessment of ethics within the engineering programme”.

The vagueness and limited scope of the ethics accreditation criterion risks leading to a narrow treatment of the subject (Gwynne-Evans et al., 2021 ; Riley, 2021 ). Bielefeldt et al. ( 2016 ) are especially concerned that in the US, ABET’s self-study documents do not distinguish between micro and macro ethical issues, while the common use of the Fundamentals of Engineering exam implies a focus on microethical issues.

There also appears to be a less thorough evaluation of how engineering programmes meet the accreditation criterion dedicated to ethics, compounded by minimal recommendations on the implementation of this outcome, and a granting of accreditation irrespective of the lacuna identified in the evidence purporting to ethics. Such absence can lead to minimal interventions undertaken at programme level targeting ethics. Examining the Irish context, Murphy et al., ( 2019 , p. 381) found “no evidence of systemic attention to a broadening agenda within the accreditation reports”, and that “often, the same (few) courses” within a programme are mentioned as bearing the responsibility to provide all the evidence for meeting the requirement purporting to ethics. Ethics thus ends up being regarded as an “add-on” implanted artificially in an engineering programme, rather than implemented following a programme wide strategic process (Flynn & Barry, 2010 ; Martin, 2020 ; Murphy et al., 2019 ; Newberry, 2004 ; Polmear et al., 2018 ; Sunderland, 2019 ).

A survey of 100 programmes offered by 40 engineering schools in the US, found that few schools managed to institute “systematic programmes to educate for a broad sense of professional responsibility” (Colby & Sullivan, 2008 , p. 330). In Ireland, a similar ad-hoc implementation of ethics has been reported, contrasted with the carefully designed strategy driving the implementation of technical topics. According to an evaluator for the accrediting body,

“if you take technical subjects, like structures or signal processing, the academics will make sure that the design of the programme incorporates these, and in a logical and coherent way. But they do not take the same approach about the ethical material” (Martin, 2020 ).

The challenges of implementing ethics are compounded by questions of how to make room for new content in a crowded curriculum. Technical and scientific subjects are given priority in the engineering curriculum, making it difficult for programmes to decide which technical components should be reduced to introduce new ethical components (Harding et al., 2009 ; Polmear et al., 2018 ; Romkey, 2015 ; Walczak et al., 2010 ).

Policy Level

At policy level, the impact of national accrediting bodies on the engineering curriculum was highlighted as a potential force for an enhanced role given to ethics. Since the adoption of the Washington Accord, signatory countries are required to align to a similar set of graduate attributes, including ethics, and their accrediting bodies ensure that these are being met. As such, the introduction of an accreditation criterion dedicated to ethics in the Washington Accord signatory countries has led to an increase in the number of courses addressing ethical issues (Barry & Ohland, 2012 ; Lattuca et al., 2006 ; Martin, 2020 ; Ocone, 2013 ; Skinner et al., 2007 ; Volkwein, et al., 2004 ).

Despite the positive influence of accrediting bodies on enhancing the presence of ethics in the engineering curriculum through the formulation of required outcomes, there are doubts that the pressure from accreditation criteria can inform deeper curricular change (Little, 2019 ; Sunderland, 2013 ).

Role of a Dedicated Accreditation Criterion

Having an accreditation criterion dedicated to ethics can contribute to its increased presence in the engineering curriculum. In the US, the formulation of the accreditation criteria known as EC2000 constituted a step forward towards the inclusion of more societal and environmental topics, as well as of considerations regarding the professional and ethical responsibilities of engineers (Herkert, 2001 ; Johnston & Eager, 2001 ). Prior to the adoption of EC2000, the engineering academic landscape in the US was described as neglecting the ethical dimension of the profession (Herkert, 2002 , 2005 ). A survey of US course catalogues conducted by Stephan ( 1999 , pp. 460–461) showed that in 1998, less than 27% of colleges had a mandatory course addressing ethics. Later studies have indeed confirmed an increase in the number of mandatory ethical courses, provided either by engineering programmes or by humanities programmes within the same institution (Barry & Ohland, 2012 ; Volkwein et al., 2004 ). Furthermore, a study commissioned by ABET noted an “increased emphasis on nearly all of the professional skills and knowledge sets” associated with the accreditation criterion dedicated to ethics (Lattuca et al., 2006 , p. 3). Surveys covering the period prior to the introduction of the EC2000 showed that undergraduate engineering students did not perceive the importance of learning about the engineer’s role in society (Peters, 1998 , p. 874), considering that their courses prepared them “only a little bit or not at all” to face ethical issues in the workplace (McGinn, 2003 ). In contrast to their counterparts who graduated prior to the introduction of EC2000, 2004 graduates reported higher ability levels on outcomes related to the awareness of the impact of engineering decision-making and ethics (Lattuca et al., 2006 , p. 9).

While empirical research on the reception and impact of an accreditation criterion dedicated to ethics is predominantly US based, research conducted in Australia and the UK reveals similar findings about the increased curricular presence of ethics following the introduction of such requirements. In Australia, the accreditation criteria were redesigned in 1997 to include the “understanding of the social, cultural, global and environmental responsibilities of the professional engineer, and the need for sustainable development” and an “understanding of the principles of sustainable design and development” (Institution of Engineers, Australia, 1997 ). A survey of Australian engineering institutions prior to the introduction of a dedicated ethics criterion showed that “apart from a few mentions of sustainability and professionalism, there was no indication of any scholarly interest in these areas” (Johnston et al., 2000 , p. 317). Afterwards, the accreditation of engineering programmes required an “integrated exposure to professional engineering practice, including management and professional ethics in not less than 10% of courses, up to a coverage of 20%” (Skinner et al., 2007 , p. 136). In the UK, a survey supported by the Royal Academy of Engineering revealed that engineering ethics instruction was “rather patchy” prior to the introduction of ethical specifications in accreditation (Ocone, 2013 , p. 263). In Ireland, instructors also perceive an increase in the content dedicated to ethics following the introduction of a dedicated accreditation criterion, from “virtually nothing” (Martin, 2020 ).

At the same time, the lack of a firm stance of the accrediting body on ethics was found to negatively affect the presence of ethics in the engineering curriculum, as in the case of Portugal (Monteiro & Leite, 2021 ; Monteiro et al., 2016 , 2017 , 2019 ). Monteiro ( 2016 , p. 2) explains the low emphasis given to ethics as the outcome of the strong influence of instructors on shaping curriculum development, based on their own views of education and knowledge. Such views have a cultural root, purporting to the technically oriented education that engineering instructors received (Monteiro, 2016 ).

Surface Level Change

Accreditation requirements can offer the impetus for curricular redesign (Graham, 2012 ; Lattuca & Stark, 2009 ; Lewis, 2016 ). Nevertheless, institutional change driven solely by the demands set by accrediting bodies leads to a culture of compliance rather than of transformative change (Little, 2019 ). The pressure originating in the interplay between the external influence of accrediting bodies and administrative leadership is considered to marginalise the role of individual instructors (Suskie, 2015 ), giving rise to a “transactional environment” (Little, 2019 , p. 33). As such, the implementation of accreditation recommendations is not considered to necessarily translate into quality curricular change (Bolden, 2007 ; Haviland, 2014 ; Kuh et al., 2015 ).

More so, older universities with a long legacy of alumni are also more resistant to changing their curricula for the purpose of accreditation. Klassen ( 2018 ) found that institutional prestige can be used to resist a perceived misinterpretation of criteria by accreditors, in ways that would not be possible in lower status institutions. Elite universities can thus maintain their position with “less need to change their discourse or organisation to maintain their power and position” (Bernstein, 2000 , p. 69).

Although policy agents have the role of initiating change through the formulation of mandatory graduate learning outcomes, this effort can nevertheless fall short of achieving a deeper change in the ethos of engineering programmes and of prompting reflection on the purpose of engineering education. Even in national systems of engineering education that have mandated ethics, “one can take a ‘tick box’ approach to the teaching of ethical issues” (Flynn & Barry, 2010 , p. 2). As Sunderland ( 2013 , p. 1771) points out, while ethics is meant to be a central component of the contemporary engineering curriculum, it is often perceived as “a marginal requirement to be fulfilled.”

Cultural Level

Having examined the practices and beliefs manifest at the individual, institutional and policy levels of engineering education, the attention is now moved to the structural forces related to the culture of engineering and engineering education affecting them. First, we establish the legitimacy of the concept of engineering culture, before exploring how the culture of engineering education is understood and its implications for identity development.

Engineering Disciplinary Culture

We are guided in the use of the concept of “culture” by the definition provided by Schein ( 1992 , p. 12) and popularised in engineering education research by Godfrey and Parker ( 2010 ), according to which culture is understood as

a pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid, and therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.

As Godfrey ( 2009 , p. 3) points out, this definition focuses on “the deepest, unconscious level of basic beliefs and assumptions, which underpins the more visible cultural manifestations”.

The characteristics of the scientific culture were first cast by Snow ( 1959 ) in opposition to the literary culture. Snow argues that scientists and literary intellectuals exist as distinct “cultures in the anthropological sense […], linked by common habits, common assumptions, and a common way of life”. The distinction made by Snow ( 1959 ) between the two cultures overlaps with a 200-year-old hierarchisation of sciences, according to which natural sciences are placed at the top of the hierarchy, and social sciences are found at the bottom (Budd, 1989 ; Cole, 1983 ). Despite the diffusion of different hierarchies of sciences, they shared the belief that some fields of research, indicated as “harder”, follow a more rigorous research method and are more reliant on data and theories than other fields, described as “softer”, which are ruled by sociological and psychological factors (Fanelli, 2010 ).

The distinction between “hard” and “soft” sciences touches on the duality between engineering and natural sciences, on one hand, and humanities and social sciences, on the other. It alludes to a valorisation of the “hard” over the “soft” (Storer, 1967 ), as well as conveying gendered connotations (Keller, 1985 ). 5 “Hard” sciences are considered superior to “soft” sciences (Becher & Trowler, 2001 , p. 192 6 ; Gardner, 2013 ), which prompted Cassell ( 2002 , p. 179) to remark that in the use of “a barely disguised (tautological) phallic metaphor, ‘hard’ science is more scientific than ‘soft’.” Referring to the “hard” versus “soft” dichotomy, Biglan ( 1973 ) notes that this terminology was meant to capture the level of paradigmatic consensus among the individuals within a specific discipline. According to Biglan ( 1973 , p. 202, 210), there is more consensus in the “hard” disciplines in the adoption of a common framework of content and method, while in “soft” disciplines content and method tend to be idiosyncratic.

This conceptualisation of academic disciplines highlights the isomorphism of the different disciplinary cultures, which transcends fields of specialization, institutional affiliations, or geographical characteristics (Becher, 1981 , p. 109; Becher, 1994 , pp. 153–155; Becher & Trowler, 2001 ). The distinctiveness of the engineering disciplinary culture appears to be rooted in common practices and behaviours (Godfrey & Parker, 2010 , p. 5), while its homogeneity is linked to the role played by professional and regulatory bodies in determining how disciplinary knowledge practices are translated into curriculum material (Ashwin, 2009 ). What emerges is the legitimacy of talking about a scientifically-oriented culture specific to engineering (Meiksins, 2007 , p. 121), which can be “readily recognised from both inside and out” (Herkert, 2001 , p. 410).

Contending Paradigms of Engineering Education

The paradigmatic nature of engineering presupposes a high degree of consensus and a tightly structured subject matter, which is considered to affect the instructors’ teaching beliefs and practices (Braxton & Hargens, 1996 ; Braxton et al., 1998 ; Jones, 2011 ). Reflecting on the sociotechnical divide posited by Snow ( 1959 ) and Petrina ( 2003 , p. 70) considers that the two cultures are reflected in engineering education. Brint et al.’s ( 2008 ) survey confirms the existence of two cultures of undergraduate academic engagement rooted in differences between academic majors. The culture of engagement specific to the humanities and social sciences is characterised by individual assertion and interest in ideas and societal aspects, while in natural sciences and engineering, students engage more in problem-solving courses that target the development of quantitative competencies (Brint et al., 2008 , p. 390; Cech, 2014 ; Godfrey, 2003 ). There seems to also be two cultures of assessment and grading, with differences reported in instructors’ attitudes towards technical versus nontechnical disciplines (Barnes et al., 2001 ).

More recently, Jamison et al ( 2014 ) proposed a tripartite analysis of the different cultures shaping engineering education and their associated views on engineers’ identity. It comprises the academic paradigm of engineering as applied science, which upholds a technical oriented engineering identity, the market-driven paradigm promoting the identity of engineers as innovators and entrepreneurs, and finally, the integrative paradigm of engineering as public service that fosters the identity of students as social reformers and agents of change. Although the latter paradigm represents “a more balanced or comprehensive approach,” it featured less prominently in the history of engineering education or in programs of educational reform (Jamison et al., 2014 , p. 255). As Wicklein ( 1997 , p. 72) remarks, there is little curricular innovation in engineering education, which broadly resembles older vocational models focused on “the technical aspects of selected tools and materials.”

The implications for ethics teaching become apparent. Empirical research on the culture of engineering education (Cech, 2014 ; Godfrey, 2014 ; Godfrey & Parker, 2010 ; Schiff et al., 2021 ) confirms the valorisation of the technical and the marginalisation of the societal dimension of engineering. Tormey et al., ( 2015 , p. 2) notes that students’ declining moral reasoning is the outcome of the culture within their institution, as courses with ethical content are “swimming against the hidden cultural tide of the programme as a whole”. Kim et al ( 2018 ) found a pervasive unreflective disengagement of engineering students rooted in a lack of reflection around the ethical or moral dimensions of a given decision or situation. The culture of disengagement and value neutrality manifest in engineering education is the reflection of a profession-wide phenomenon (Cech, 2014 ; Riley, 2008 ), which deems anything outside the technical “to be of lesser value or outside the scope of engineering” (Niles et al., 2020b , p. 498).

It appears then that the culture of engineering education has been articulated in terms of a dominant discourse focused on science (Meiksins, 2007 ), to the exclusion of alternative discourses of philosophy and ethics, environmental studies, politics or sociology (Johnston et al., 1996 , p. 33; Pawley, 2008 ).

Generative Engineering Identity

The value of Jamison et al.’s ( 2014 ) tripartite analysis of engineering education is that it allows us to link the different paradigms of engineering education to different conceptions of what it means to be an engineer, thus positing a generative view of engineering identity. By engineering identity is understood who counts as an engineer, what does performing the role of an engineer entail and what are the responsibilities of engineers (Murphy et al., 2015 ).

Engineering identity is typically portrayed as singular and homogenous, rather than as “many types or manifestations” (Rodriguez et al., 2018 , p. 259). As such, engineering identity appears to be largely determined by one’s disciplinary culture (Ashwin, 2009 ; Becher & Trowler, 2001 ; Biglan, 1973 ; Toma, 1997 ; Umbach, 2007 ). Engineering education enculturates students into a well-established system of practices, meanings and beliefs, while they learn what it means to be an engineer and what is valued by the discipline (Brint et al., 2008 , p. 394). In a similar manner, Meijknecht and van Drongelen ( 2004 , p. 448) compare the monolithic identity of engineers rooted in education to that of professions such as medicine, considering that “university is a place of initiation for the tribe of engineers”. As Stonyer ( 2002 , p. 397) points out, academic enculturation leads to a specific dominant socio-historical engineering identity, as “nuts and bolts” technicists (Faulkner, 2007 ).

Although distinct concepts, the articulation of the features of the dominant engineering culture and discourse, engineering education paradigm and engineering identity converge towards a similar valorisation of the technical over the social in engineering education. The cultural identity of engineering reflected in the curriculum is of a more rigorous, difficult and complex discipline, a masculine field, fit for those who excel in mathematics and the physical sciences, devoid of subjectivity, and with a low concern towards societal issues (Carberry & Baker, 2018 ; Cech, 2014 ; Godfrey & Parker, 2010 ; Pawley, 2008 ; Stevens et al., 2007 ; Stonyer, 2002 ; Tonso, 1999 ).

These cultural characteristics of engineering are seen to, on one hand, influence the development of an engineering identity as “nuts and bolts” technicists (Faulkner, 2007 ), according to which engineers are distinguished as an occupational group in light of their technical and scientific expertise (Trevelyan, 2014 ; Meiksins, 2007 , p. 122), and on the other hand, are reflected in the overemphasis of technical and scientific aspects in the engineering curriculum to the exclusion of ethical and societal concerns (Bucciarelli, 2008 ; Jamison et al., 2014 ; Johnston et al., 1996 ; Stevens et al., 2007 ). The culture of engineering education appears to promote the dichotomy between “hard” and “soft” skills (Martin, 2020 ), according to which ethics is a “fuzzy” subject (McGinn, 2003 ), falling outside the scope of “real engineering” (Polmear et al., 2018 ) and considered “not very important” or of an “inferior quality” (Lönngren, 2021 ). Thus, what emerges for the purpose of the present analysis is a collective understanding of what it is to be an engineer and educate an engineer as a key generative mechanism for explaining the state and status of engineering ethics education.

Nevertheless, as Tonso ( 1996 , p. 218) points out, culture is an everchanging system of meaning, which holds the promise for improving engineering education towards more inclusive ways or a broader understanding of the engineer’s societal role. We already witness efforts in this direction, represented by non-mainstream currents in engineering that engage the social and ethical dimensions, evidenced by research in engineering studies and practices like community engagement (Lucena et al, 2010 ; Schneider et al., 2008 ), humanitarian engineering (Lucena et al., 2003 ; Mazzurco & Daniel, 2020 ), decolonial movements (Cordeiro Cruz, 2021 ; Kutay et al., 2018 ) or social justice (Baillie, 2020 ; Karwat, 2020 ; Karwat et al., 2015 ; Larsen & Gärdebo, 2017 ; Nieusma, 2013 ; Niles et al., 2020a ; Riley, 2008 ). 7

Conclusion and Recommendations

The aim of our analysis was to develop deeper levels for understanding engineering ethics education (Mc Evoy & Richards, 2006 , p. 69). We regarded this analysis of the current state and status of engineering ethics education as a prerequisite for suggesting strategies for change towards a socio-technical paradigm of engineering education that could lead to a curricular orientation for ethics. Following Wynne ( 2014 , p. 1479), we understand by “orientation” the acceptance of an attitude, of a way of doing things and of operationalising core values.

We argued that engineering ethics education is a complex system, constitutive of various beliefs and practices, which are manifest at different levels. The different levels of engineering ethics education rendered in Table Table1 1 are connected. The analysis showed how the beliefs and practices of individual instructors are impacted by institutional measures and policies set by accrediting bodies, as well as by the cultural milieu in which they were educated or currently teach, while also playing a role in shaping the engineering curriculum. Instructors justify their curricular choices according to their vision of what engineering practice is (Monteiro, 2016 ; Quinlan, 2002 ) and their understanding of engineers’ responsibilities (Downey et al., 2007 ). This has implications for generating change in engineering education, as the instructors’ belief systems influence the diffusion of innovations in engineering education (Boland, 2014 ; Carew & Mitchell, 2002 ; Froyd et al., 2008 ; Quinlan, 2002 ; Seymour, 2002 ; Sonnert, 2007 ; Spalter-Roth & Meiksins, 2008 ). Thus, change in teaching practices often requires forming new collective identities about what is valued in engineering education (Carberry & Baker, 2018 ; Godfrey, 2014 ; Quinlan, 2002 ).

At the same time, issues related to the purpose of engineering education and the perception of ethics in the engineering curriculum arise at each level. Recalling Snow ( 1959 ), the findings of the analysis reveal the existence of two distinct cultures reflected at the surface level of the engineering curriculum, pointing to ethics’ lesser status. As such, ethics has been articulated as a “soft” and “non-essential” feature of engineering education, a curricular “add-on” implemented in a non-systematic manner and surrounded by a degree of confusion as to its conceptualization and application. The development of technical acumen, on the other hand, is regarded as an essential part of engineering education, and is at the centre of curricular design (Goold, 2015 ; Martin, 2020 ).

To dismantle the two cultures existing in engineering education, it is imperative to move from a non-essential status given to ethics towards a socio-technical orientation of the engineering curriculum for ethics. Engineering education for ethics is a transformative process, which aims to challenge existing core assumptions and values promoted in engineering education (Cranton, 2006 ; Mezirow, 1978 , 1991 ; Sheppard et al., 2009 ). Although many studies focused on the transformation of higher education, and specifically on higher education for sustainability (Filho et al., 2018 ; Holmberg et al., 2012 ; Trowler et al., 2013 ), the question of the integration of the ideal of engineering education for ethics has been largely ignored, highlighting a potential area for further research.

Furthermore, it has been remarked that change strategies need to link different levels for generating a long-lasting transformation (Graham, 2012 ; Hannah & Lester, 2009 ). When aiming to effect change, it is important to take a systemic rather than a linear approach (Sterling, 2004 ), which implies thinking “vertically, about interdependencies at higher and lower levels” (Trowler, 2008 , pp. 155–157). Our undertaking to identify the different types of agents and forces shaping engineering education is a necessary first step. As Rover ( 2008 , p. 389) notes, the key to change is first understanding “what we are”, and then taking steps towards “what we are capable of becoming”. Building on this, it is imperative to examine the role of each in the socio-technical orientation of engineering education for ethics, towards a “hybrid” and “comprehensive” paradigm that integrates the scientific, technical, social, political and environmental dimensions of engineering, as envisioned by Jamison et al ( 2014 ) and van den Hoven ( 2019 ).

At cultural level, there is a need for determining the different professional identities actively promoted by engineering programmes, as well as the meanings imparted through the ethos fostered in institutions and the structure of the engineering curricula. Patrick and Borrego ( 2016 , p. 4) point out that studies of identity development tend to use a narrow definition and do not give credence to the socio-cultural and environmental factors that shape “becoming” in the process of “doing” engineering. While discussing the factors affecting engineering identity development, Morelock ( 2017 , p. 1250) recalls only one study (Paretti & Mc Nair, 2012 ) which points to the discourse that challenges or reinforces extant engineering identities as a directional factor shaping the type of engineering identity that students might develop. Following Morelock ( 2017 , p. 1256), we stress the importance for researching engineering identity development to “examine how frameworks that define individual engineering identity harmonise with how societal conditions have shaped collective engineering identity in participants’ national contexts”. A further aspect to be considered is researching the effects of different methods of implementing and teaching ethics on the development of a socio-technical identity of engineering students, resonating with efforts conducted by Johnson et al. ( 2016 ), Leidens et al. ( 2018 ) and Jesiek et al. ( 2019 ). More so, as Nieusma and Cieminski ( 2018 ) note, engineering education reformers committed to centering ethics discourse should take a curriculum wide approach focused on the cohesiveness of the diverse components making up students’ educational cultures and not just individualized student knowledge about ethics or capacities for moral reasoning. Achieving this would require bringing to the forefront examples of best practices in centring ethics within the institutional culture, similar to the examples of curricular redesign presented by Riley et al. ( 2004 ) and Mitcham and Englehardt ( 2019 ).

At policy level, research has revealed the impact of national accrediting bodies on increasing the weight given to ethics in the engineering curriculum (Barry & Ohland, 2012 ; Lattuca et al., 2006 ; Skinner et al., 2007 ). Yet, little is still known on how to maximise the evaluation of ethics in accreditation as to assist programmes in a more systematic implementation (Barry & Ohland, 2012 ; Bielefeldt et al., 2016 ; Herkert, 2002 ; LeBlanc, 2002 ). Further research is needed for exploring what counts as effective feedback provided by accrediting bodies and how to prepare members of accreditation panels to offer constructive feedback and recommendations targeting the ethical criterion for accreditation.

At the institutional level, upon highlighting the need for a systematic implementation of ethics (Flynn & Barry, 2010 ; Lambrechts et al., 2013 ; Murphy et al., 2019 ; Newberry, 2004 ; Polmear et al., 2018 ), it is crucial to research strategies for curriculum redesign and identify examples of best practices in the development of a holistic and comprehensive educational model. Recent years saw growing debates and research on education for sustainability (Filho et al., 2018 ; Holmberg et al., 2012 ; Trowler et al., 2013 ) and similar attention should be given to engineering education for ethics. Given the limited research available on curricular alignment and quality insurance in engineering ethics education (Bombaerts et al., 2019 ; Hess & Fore, 2018 ; Keefer et al., 2014 ; Li & Fu, 2012 ; Romkey, 2015 ), we highlight the need for further research to explore the effectiveness and coherence between the implementation, teaching, assessment methods, the goals and theoretical frameworks envisioned for engineering ethics education. More specifically, research should illuminate ways to ensure curricular alignment between theoretical frameworks, the institutional vision, learning goals, content themes, teaching and assessment methods.

At individual level, we recommend additional research exploring instructors’ understanding of what falls under the scope of engineering ethics education and the goals employed, to illuminate whether ethics instructors adopt any of the various theoretical conceptualisations of ethics developed or whether a common-sense understanding of ethics prevails. In terms of the former, further research could help determine which ethics learning goals are favoured by instructors. This should be complemented by researching the attainment of these goals, given that “ethical awareness has not been demonstrated to translate reliably into ethical behaviour” (Bairaktarova & Woodcock, 2017 , p. 1130). As pointed out by Martin et al. ( 2021 ) and Bombaerts et al. ( 2021 ), metrics of evaluating the effectiveness of different teaching approaches are still underdeveloped.

Given the need for more guidance in engineering ethics instruction, a recommended avenue for further research is to provide an in-depth exploration of the challenges experienced by instructors when teaching and assessing ethics. It is equally important to examine the impact of different strategies in countering these challenges, as well as the role of funding streams dedicated to engineering ethics education research, of independent support initiatives, of repositories such as the Online Ethics Center, or working groups on ethics affiliated with international societies of engineering education such as SEFI or ASEE. The extensive literature that is the object of this review is based in the US, with several empirical studies coming from projects which received the financial support of the National Science Foundation. This seems to point to the importance of a dedicated funding stream for engineering education research with cascading effects on the education of engineering ethics, to be replicated as a policy strategy in other geographical contexts.

Following Kim et al.’s ( 2018 ) and Niles et al.’s ( 2020b ) suggestion, further research is also needed to understand why engineering students are disengaged from the societal and public welfare role of engineering, and which strategies can reverse this trend. It is also important to examine the effectiveness of various teaching approaches for enhancing students’ reception of the subject, given that it was identified as a challenge for engineering ethics instructors (Harding et al., 2009 ; Polmear et al., 2018 ; Romkey, 2015 ). Additionally, this might require research targeted at developing curriculum materials, guidelines and textbooks (Reed et al., 2004 ), consistent with empirical findings on the effectiveness of different teaching methods. A particular focus should be given to empirical research on the design and application of different typology of case studies (Martin et al., 2021 ), given the popularity of this teaching method (Bagdasarov et al., 2013 ; Lundeberg, 2008; Abaté, 2011 ; Romkey, 2015 ; Thiel et al., 2013 ; Yadav & Barry, 2009 ).

An agenda for a socio-technical orientation of engineering education for ethics would thus call to:

(i) clarify the underlying paradigm driving the development of engineering education initiatives and programmes,
(ii) reconceptualise what it means to be an engineer and to educate an engineer, for developing a socio-technical professional identity,
(iii) enhance the role of humanities, social sciences, science and technology studies or liberal arts studies in engineering education,
(iv) prepare students to engage with public policy, as to enable an engineering practice committed to human welfare, sustainability and social justice,
(v) generate commitment to larger systematic change to established practices over time, rather than suggest heroic responses to management wrongdoing,
(vi) foster reflection on how the practices of engineers impact and are impacted by their socio-cultural environment and how they can be changed,
(vii) ask how engineering education and society can change together in a mutually affirming way, towards more sustainable patterns for both (Sterling, 2004 , p. 67),
(viii) address the organisational, political and socio-economic factors that impinge on engineering practices and provide a theoretical lens for understanding them.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the editor and the seven reviewers of the manuscript. Their generosity, time and constructive feedback were crucial for strengthening the manuscript and bringing it to its current form. This publication is based on the first author’s doctoral research study, and she extends her gratitude to her former institution and her colleagues.

1 We want to thank Carl Mitcham for the suggestion that engineering might have been considered as morally good.

2 Henceforth, abbreviated as VSD.

3 The authors want to thank the anonymous reviewer #7 for this interpretation.

4 Thank you to Reviewer #7 for suggesting the inclusion of peer support networks.

5 Referring to the cultural dichotomies between natural and social sciences, (Keller, 1985 ) observes an assumption present in scientific practice between objectivity, reason, and mind, which are cast as male features, and subjectivity, feeling, and nature, which are perceived as female features.

6 Becher & Trowler ( 2001 , p.192) remarked that soft disciplines are “seen internally as politically weak and externally as lacking in good intellectual standing”, which “has rendered the social sciences especially vulnerable to attack from unsympathetic external forces”.

7 We to thank the anonymous reviewer #5 for highlighting the role of current non-mainstream movements in effecting change.

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Women in Engineering: Analyzing 20 Years of Social Science Literature

For the past two decades, SWE has conducted an annual review of the social science research addressing the underrepresentation of women in engineering. This retrospective examines what has been learned in that time, what questions remain unanswered, what has changed, what has not, and the policy implications stemming from these realities.

By Peter Meiksins, Ph.D., Cleveland State University and Peggy Layne, P.E., F.SWE, Virginia Tech

In 2001, SWE initiated its annual review of the research literature on women in engineering with a view to making women engineers in industry, the public sector, and the academy more aware of the findings of social science research on the experiences of women engineers and the reasons for the relatively small numbers of women entering the profession. For the past 20 years, the review has appeared in the pages of SWE Magazine , reporting on the growing body of research published each year. Since 2021 marks 20 years of literature reviews, it seems appropriate to look back over previous reviews to try to determine what has been learned and what questions remain unanswered. This retrospective review will also provide an opportunity to assess to what extent and how the situation of women in engineering has changed. Such an assessment will help shed light on whether the many policy changes and innovative programs described in previous years’ research have borne fruit and whether changes “on the ground” have led researchers to shift their focus in response to new realities.

We begin our retrospective look at research on women in engineering with a review of the empirical situation. Has there been progress in increasing the numbers of women in engineering and, if so, how much and in what areas? We then review the main themes on which research has focused over the past two decades, indicating both shifts in research emphasis and ongoing themes that have been central all along. Throughout that review, we will summarize research published in 2021 that made significant contributions to what we know. Finally, we conclude with comments on what a retrospective look at the research literature teaches us about what would be needed to accelerate progress toward gender equity in engineering.

A Review of the Numbers — How Much Change Has There Been?

Reviewing the situation in the early 2020s, one feels a mixture of encouragement that women have become a much more significant presence in engineering in the past few decades and disappointment that the field has not become fully gender-balanced, despite decades of research examining the reasons for gender imbalances, numerous programs designed to attract more girls to engineering, well-funded national programs such as NSF-ADVANCE, and the efforts of important national organizations, including the American Association of University Women and SWE. As the statistical data presented here show, while there has been progress, it has been slow in the 21st century, and women still represent a minority of both engineering students, faculty, and employed engineers more broadly.

One must be careful in interpreting data on the share of the profession occupied by men and women. As previous literature review author Lisa Frehill long ago pointed out, the increase in the percentage of engineering students who were women in the last few decades of the 20th century was as much a function of the decline in male enrollment as anything else — women were not more likely to enroll in engineering programs in 2001 than they had been 15 years earlier. i As engineering enrollments have grown in the last decade or two, there has been increasing interest in engineering among male students, meaning that women’s enrollment would have had to grow even faster for their share of engineering degrees to increase.

That said, the data presented here document real change. First, it is obvious that there has been a significant increase in the share of engineering degrees at all levels going to women. For example, women earned less than 1% of engineering B.S. degrees in 1954; that share had increased to 23% in 2020. Similarly impressive increases occurred for master’s and doctoral degrees in the same period. A bit less encouragingly, however, the most significant increases occurred in the 1970s and 1980s; since 1990, women’s share of engineering degrees has grown, but much more slowly. If trends continue, it will take decades for anything close to gender parity in degree attainment to be achieved.

The percentage of engineering degrees going to women varies by discipline; in 2020, women earned fully half of bachelor’s degrees in biomedical engineering, but only 16.5% of bachelor’s degrees in mechanical engineering. Notably, women’s share of bachelor’s degrees by discipline has been quite stable over the past 20 years. For example, women earned 37% of bachelor’s degrees in chemical engineering in 2002 and 37.7% in 2020; in mechanical engineering, the percentages were 14% in 2002 and 16.5% in 2020.

The share of engineering degrees earned by women varies by race and ethnicity, although not enormously. Among African Americans and Asian Americans, women’s share of bachelor’s degrees in engineering was somewhat higher (closer to 30%), while it was lower for other groups. It should be added that the number of engineering degrees earned by African Americans of either sex was quite small, so one should not exaggerate the significance of the higher percentage earned by African American women.

Data on faculty reveal a pattern similar to that for students. Overall, the share of faculty positions in engineering held by women doubled between 2002 and 2021, from 9.25% to 18.5%. This is an impressive increase, although women still represent a distinct minority of engineering faculty. The pattern of doubling is apparent for most disciplines within engineering, although it remains the case that certain disciplines are less “female” than others — e.g., mechanical and electrical engineering have smaller percentages of female faculty (in the 15% range), while chemical, civil, and biomedical engineering are higher (over 20%). The percentage of faculty who are female decreases with rank: In 2020, only 13.6% of full professors of engineering were women, compared with 25.4% of assistant professors. In one sense, this represents a perpetuation of the situation that prevailed 20 years earlier — in 2002, 4.7% of engineering full professors were women, compared with 17% of assistant professors. It is worth noting, however, that the rate of increase is highest for full professors, so women’s access to senior, tenured positions appears to be improving.

Finally, the percentage of employed engineers who are women also has increased steadily over the past 25 years. In 1993, women represented less than 10% of employed engineers; that percentage had risen above 10% by 2001, when the SWE Literature Review was first published. In the subsequent 20 years, women’s share of engineering employment has continued to grow, rising to about 14% in 2019. It should be emphasized, however, that the rate of growth is very slow, and that women’s share of engineering employment is substantially lower than women’s share of engineering degrees.

Looking Back at 20 Years of SWE Literature Reviews — What We’ve Learned

Our “meta-analysis” of two decades of literature reviews reveals that much research on women in engineering specifically, and STEM more broadly, has been focused on a finite set of questions. In what follows, we attempt to summarize what has been learned about those questions. We are encouraged to note that, over the years, researchers have learned a great deal about the reasons for women’s underrepresentation in engineering and about the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of programs designed to promote change. Although we do not know everything we need to know, and important questions remain unresolved, one can point to a number of significant insights that are now well-established.

It’s Not Just About Math It was long thought that a primary obstacle to women’s entry into engineering was math achievement. Until the last few decades, girls’ average math achievement trailed boys’ and advanced math classes in high schools (e.g., calculus) were disproportionately male. Since it remains the case that taking advanced math classes in high school is a strong predictor of majoring in engineering, the male/female math achievement “gap” was an obvious explanation for the small numbers of female engineering majors. This appeared so difficult an obstacle to overcome that researchers such as Sally Hacker raised questions about whether calculus was more of a gender barrier than an occupational requirement for practicing engineers. ii

The 2001 literature review still mentioned research showing that achievement gaps in math and science were a factor inhibiting women’s entry into engineering. And, in 2005, the review discussed Lawrence Summers’ infamous comments to the effect that women were less likely to have the aptitudes required to succeed in engineering; in his view, women’s brains were “wired” differently, meaning many lacked the innate ability to succeed in science and engineering. iii In the intervening years, however, research has shown that the gender gap has narrowed, at least in some respects. Although boys continue to outscore girls on standardized math tests of various kinds, advanced math classes such as calculus are no longer dominated by boys (if anything, the reverse may be true), and girls consistently earn higher grades than their male counterparts. Of course, the SWE Literature Review has summarized research emphasizing that there remains a gender gap at the “right tail” of the distribution — that is, boys are more likely than girls to score in the extremely high range of assessments of math ability and achievement. iv Some have argued that this remains a reason for the low numbers of women in engineering because they believe it is high achievers who are most likely to select engineering majors. However, other researchers have shown that boys with mediocre math scores are more likely to enter engineering than girls with very high math scores. v So, it may be that the composition of the “right tail” of the distribution is not the central issue. And, other research finds that girls who are high achievers in math are significantly less likely to choose an engineering major than boys with similar levels of math achievement. vi One possible reason is that high-achieving girls, in contrast to many high-achieving boys, are high achievers in other fields besides math, meaning that they have broader options in choosing a major and career. vii Overall, changes in the nature of the gender achievement gap in math have led to a decreased emphasis in the research literature on the role of math achievement in limiting the numbers of women in engineering.

There is, however, another way in which researchers continue to find a relationship between girls’ math experiences and their interest in majoring in engineering. The SWE Literature Review has discussed a large body of research that had begun to develop as early as 2001 focused on whether girls are less confident in math than their male counterparts. With a high level of consistency, research on this question finds that, when compared with boys with similar levels of achievement in math, girls tend to evaluate themselves lower. viii

Whether there is a causal link between this lower self-evaluation and deciding not to major in engineering is somewhat less clear. It seems reasonable to suppose that it may affect girls’ confidence in being successful in engineering and that it may contribute to their feeling that engineering is not for them (a theme we discuss below). However, research published in 2021 found that even girls who hold the counter-stereotypical view that girls are better at math than boys are not more likely to major in physical sciences and engineering, although they are more likely to major in biology. ix

In sum, while substantial research effort has been and continues to be expended on examining whether math and/or confidence in math affect girls’ interest in majoring in engineering, the relationship among math achievement, math confidence, and interest in engineering appears to be, at best, complex. It is perhaps time to agree with a study by Isaacs, summarized in the very first SWE Literature Review, that argued that “recruiting efforts directed toward encouraging girls to study math and science are focused on the wrong problem.” (4) x

Not All Women Are the Same Research on women in engineering has introduced the term intersectionality to capture the reality that talking about “women in engineering” as if all women shared the same experiences is a serious mistake. The SWE Literature Review has discussed a growing body of research that details the ways in which a woman’s race or ethnicity can affect her experience in engineering, the ways in which sexual orientation can matter and, most recently, the different experiences of female engineers with disabilities. There has been far too much research to summarize it all adequately here. A few examples of the kinds of insights attention to intersectionality has yielded will have to suffice.

Research published in 2021 illustrates well the value of attending to the different experiences of female engineers of different races and ethnicities. Cross et al. (2021) describe the fact that female students of color face a “double bind” in which they are continually required to dispel negative stereotypes based on their group association (i.e., both their race/ethnicity and their gender) and to defend their presence within the engineering culture. xi True-Funk et al. (2021) conducted a set of interviews with a diverse group of engineering undergraduates, documenting their experience of microaggressions and finding a variety of intersectional effects — the consequences for African American women differed somewhat from those for African American men, differed again from the effects on Latina or Latino students, and so on. xii Interestingly, True-Funk et al.’s research, like a small-scale interview study (Ross, Huff, and Godwin 2021) of nine successful, senior engineers of color (all had been in the field for at least 10 years), found that African American women, despite the “double bind” they faced, were able to make their racial identity into a strength and to find ways to make it congruent with their identity as engineers. xiii

Earlier research described in the literature review emphasized the need to tailor recruitment efforts to the different experiences and situations of students of color. For example, efforts to increase the number of female students of color need to address those students’ desire to help their communities and take advantage of the peer support groups students themselves form and on which they rely. Efforts to recruit them also need to recognize that they are likely to attend schools that don’t support the students’ language and culture (thus weakening their resilience) and are less likely to provide them with the math and science instruction they need to succeed in engineering. Recruitment efforts also need to recognize that many students of color begin their educations in two-year institutions and make an effort to build pipelines from those schools to four-year engineering programs. xiv Sexual orientation has been identified as another axis of intersectionality affecting women in engineering. Yang et al. (2021) report on a focus group study of nine LGBTQ+ engineering students at a large public university in the Southeast. Their respondents report feelings of isolation (even if there were other women in their classes), the need to respond continually to homophobic comments and behaviors, and how they deliberately sought out institutional roles (such as being a TA) that would enable them to help other LGBTQ+ students find the resources they needed. xv Finally, an interesting study reviewed in 2017 noted the ways in which gender, sexual orientation, and race all intersected to produce a range of different experiences for female engineers. The 18 tech workers in the Bay Area all reported struggling to fit into the male “geek culture” that shaped their workplaces. However, their identities affected their ability to succeed. White women whose self-presentation was “gender fluid” and who identified as LGBTQ were better able than others to manage their status on male-dominated teams. Race mattered, however, as black LGBTQ women were not as successful. xvi

These are merely a few examples of the many interesting insights produced by a focus on intersectionality. What this research illustrates is that a “one-size-fits-all” approach to promoting gender equity in engineering is unlikely to be successful. Happily, a retrospective look at the SWE Literature Review demonstrates that researchers and advocates for gender equity in engineering have become increasingly aware of the need to understand and take into account the differences among the many kinds of women in engineering.

Recruitment Needs to be Combined with Retention The “leaky pipeline” metaphor has been criticized for oversimplifying the process by which women make their way into and progress through engineering careers. However, researchers acknowledge that it is important to examine not just which methods of recruitment promise to increase the numbers of women in engineering, but also what needs to be done to ensure that they remain. If large numbers of women leave the profession at some point during their life course, even the most vigorous recruitment efforts are likely to have little effect on engineering’s gender balance.

One could argue that there is a sense in which girls leave the profession before they even enter it! Research reviewed in 2020 found that both male and female students’ interest in STEM declined during the high school years, but that girls’ interest in science and engineering tends to decline much faster. xvii Since the numbers of girls with engineering intentions are small to begin with, this pattern of decline is an obvious reason for the underrepresentation of women in college engineering programs.

There has been much discussion of the retention of women in college programs. Many studies describe the fact that some female students leave engineering majors, but many of these studies, including some of the most carefully done xviii , don’t include male students in their analysis. Since male students leave engineering majors too, it would be necessary to show that women leave at higher rates than men to argue that the gender gap is the result of female attrition.

Whether women leave college engineering programs at higher rates than men has been much disputed. Lisa Frehill, who led the SWE Literature Review project for most of its first decade, stated clearly in a 2010 publication that they did not xix Subsequent editions of the literature review have discussed a number of research studies of this question, but there continues to be no clear consensus as to how to answer it. In 2016, the review cited a meta-analysis of the research on attrition by Cheryan et al. that asserted strongly that recruitment, not retention, was the reason for the gender gap in engineering.xx Much of the subsequent research reviewed by SWE has been consistent with that conclusion, but occasional studies appear that continue to find evidence of a gender gap in retention. For example, research on major-switching published in 2021 found that women switched majors more frequently than men and were more likely to switch out of STEM majors. xxi A comprehensive national study of this issue may be needed to resolve the debate.

There is a higher level of consensus that women leave engineering after graduating at higher rates than men, especially since the percentage of engineering degrees earned by women is substantially higher, consistently, than the percentage of employed engineers who are women. There is somewhat less certainty as to why this attrition occurs, in part because of the limited amount of research being conducted on the experiences of working engineers. However, a number of possible reasons have been suggested.

Among the leading explanations of women’s leaving engineering careers at higher rates than men involves work/family conflict. At least since the pioneering publication in 2004 of Anne Preston, Leaving Science, xxii researchers have emphasized how women find the time demands of engineering and scientific careers difficult to reconcile with their domestic responsibilities. Major studies by, among others, Fouad and Singh and Cech and Blair-Loy have documented further the effect of work/family conflict on women’s persistence in engineering. xxiii Failing Families, Failing Science, a book on the issue published in 2016, did make the case that growing numbers of men also struggled with the time commitments required by careers in academic STEM, but it still acknowledged that women were more affected by work/family conflict than men. xxiv

Other research questions the centrality of work/family conflict to women’s departure from engineering careers. An important example is SWE’s own study of why women leave engineering, the results of which were published in an issue of SWE Magazine in 2016. xxv This study found that work/family balance was not the primary reason for women’s leaving. Instead, women left because they found themselves working in environments that tolerated persistent obstacles to their organizational and career goals. Fouad and Singh’s research, while emphasizing work/family conflict, also noted that female engineers often left because their career goals were not being met. xxvi

An interesting study published in 2021 points to a possible reason why work/family conflict may not play as central a role as might be thought in causing midcareer women to leave engineering. Thébaud and Taylor (2021) conducted interviews with 57 postdocs and doctoral students in science and engineering, 2/3 of whom were women. Their respondents described a “specter of motherhood” in which motherhood was constructed in opposition to professional legitimacy, as something to fear. Female students and faculty (but not men) felt compelled to conceal motherhood and to choose between motherhood and career. xxvii This analysis suggests that some women may be leaving engineering before they embark on careers or that they find ways either to avoid motherhood or to subordinate it to the careers to which they have committed.

Finally, many have mentioned women’s experience of the masculine culture of engineering as a reason for their departure. The SWE Literature Review has discussed numerous publications describing that culture and some women’s unwillingness to adapt to it (more on the masculine culture of engineering below). While much of that literature takes the form of anecdotal accounts of personal experiences, two well-conceived studies of the early-career experiences of female engineers show how male culture can push women away. Seron et al. (2016) xxviii studied a group of engineering students at four New England universities, finding that their experiences in internships and team projects already involved gender stereotyping that affected their enthusiasm for engineering careers. The 2016 literature review quoted that study as follows:

“The findings reported here suggest that subtle and cumulative encounters with the values and norms of professional culture compromise women’s affiliation with the profession and raise the prospect of departure.” (pp. 30–31)

In 2018, the literature review discussed a fascinating study by Wynn and Correll involving observation of recruiting sessions by technology companies at prominent West coast universities. xxix These recruiting sessions were consciously planned to recruit female candidates, but the study found that the primary presenters were generally male and that the presentations involved frequent (positive) references to the workplaces’ fraternity-like cultures and to aspects of pop culture more likely to be of interest to men. Without intending to, the sessions may have been pushing women away from careers in technology.

In sum, while many questions remain about the timing of and reasons for women’s departure from science and engineering, researchers have demonstrated clearly that retention, not just recruitment, is an important cause of the underrepresentation of women.

Well-Funded, Sustained Programming Works — the Case of NSF-ADVANCE The 2002 SWE Literature Review announced the initiation of NSF-ADVANCE, a federal program designed to support efforts to increase the numbers of female faculty in science and engineering, and noted that the first nine grants had been made. A new cohort of 10 projects was announced in the 2004 review. Since then, the literature review has regularly featured descriptions and assessments of individual NSF-ADVANCE projects as well as a number of overviews and analyses of the program as a whole.

These analyses of NSF-ADVANCE projects have, by and large, been positive, and it is clear that the work done in the various individual projects has gradually accumulated into real collective knowledge about the experiences of female faculty in STEM departments and about what works (and what does not) in supporting efforts to improve the recruitment and retention of women in academic STEM. Early assessments of NSF-ADVANCE projects emphasized the now familiar idea that departmental climate is important to both male and female faculty and that the impact of a toxic climate was greater on women. xxx Research summarized in 2010 identified a number of problems associated with traditional searches and techniques to overcome them, many of which have become standard practices in universities across the country. xxxi In 2012, the review discussed a book by Bilimoria and Liang that assessed the results of the first two ADVANCE cohort projects; that assessment was largely positive and emphasized that the programs’ success was rooted in their having senior administrative support and involvement, the presence of an institutional champion, collaborative leadership, widespread and synergistic participation across campus, and the existence of visible actions and outcomes. Bilimoria and Liang also noted that a network of peer institutions had developed through ADVANCE and that the funding provided by NSF gave the programs legitimacy. xxxii Many more assessments of individual projects echo the conclusion that ADVANCE projects have had a significant impact on the institutions where they were implemented. An article published in 2021 even argued that a concept as important and ubiquitous as “implicit bias” took root in the broader corporate world largely because of pathbreaking work in projects supported by NSF-ADVANCE. xxxiii

The SWE Literature Review has discussed some criticisms of NSF ADVANCE. An assessment by Morimoto and Zajicek reviewed in 2014 noted that ADVANCE programs can be too focused on individuals (through mentoring programs and the like) and that they often rely on women to become the changemakers. xxxiv Zippel and Ferree, while praising ADVANCE in many respects, note that it has been limited in some ways by its need to balance the conflicting priorities of gender equity, organizational priorities, and the norms of scientific publication. xxxv Still, despite these criticisms, a re-reading of the research on NSF-ADVANCE discussed in the SWE Literature Review indicates that it has been a successful program that has had a significant impact on diversity in academic science and engineering. While it would be wrong to conclude that the growing share of academic positions in STEM held by women is entirely the result of NSF-ADVANCE programs, it also is obvious that the knowledge generated by ADVANCE projects has had effects well beyond the institutions at which they were implemented and has helped to spur the gradually increasing diversity of the STEM professoriate. NSF ADVANCE demonstrates that change can be promoted by well-funded national programs that combine good research with strong, internal support for sustained institutional transformation.

An Ongoing Debate

Thus, 20 years of research on women in engineering has resulted in real knowledge and in the exploration of new research questions — our understanding of the situation of women in engineering has definitely advanced. Yet, there is a sense in which the arguments reviewed in 2021 would seem familiar to someone living in 2001. Specifically, researchers continue to be divided on the question of whether efforts to increase the numbers of women in engineering should focus on better preparing women for engineering as it currently exists, or whether gender equity in the field requires that engineering itself change in some way. In 2001, the year in which the first SWE Literature Review was published, Pamela Mack wrote an article titled “What Difference Has Feminism Made to Engineering in the Twentieth Century?” xxxvi She noted the question identified above, and concluded that, for the most part, researchers and program designers were not focused on changing engineering itself:

“Rather than tackle subtle prejudice head on, studies of how to encourage more women to study engineering came to emphasize networking, mentoring and career development programs.” (p. 159)

While the most popular strategies for encouraging women to study engineering have changed somewhat in the past 20 years, Mack’s 2001 assessment could easily be applied to the situation in 2021. As our “meta-analysis” reveals, the relatively slow progress toward gender equity in engineering continues to fuel calls for a focus on structural changes, not just supporting individuals.

Why Aren’t Girls More Interested in Engineering and What Can Be Done About It? A large portion of the research reviewed in SWE’s Literature Review each year focuses on girls and women themselves: What do they think and what do they want? The hope seems to be that, if we can understand the psychological and motivational barriers to girls’ involvement in engineering, we may be able to strengthen them in areas where they may be weak as potential engineers and to persuade them that they can fulfill themselves in the field. Research has shown that girls’ and boys’ interests develop early in life, so the focus has been on girls’ development and experiences prior to their entering university.

Young girls’ lack of knowledge about and experience with engineering is one recurring theme in research on their interest in the field. Researchers find that girls know relatively little about engineers and engineering, and that what they “know” is sometimes incorrect. For example, Salas-Morera et al. (2021) report on research in which they asked a sample of high school students whether engineers perform various tasks — some of the students were wrong, with more girls than boys being misinformed. xxxvii Girls have little contact with the field and are unlikely to have encountered female engineers whom they can emulate or from whom they can learn. Toys designed for girls typically do not encourage the development of the kinds of skills associated with engineering (building, tinkering, electronics, etc.) and parents are less likely to see their daughters as possessing the skills and inclinations that lead toward engineering, so they are less likely to encourage girls than boys in that direction. xxxviii All of this would seem to suggest that exposing girls early to engineering might help. But, as Cheryan et al. have noted, some fields where girls also do not have early exposure are actually female-dominated, so early experience alone may not be the solution. xxxix

Still, engineering continues to be perceived by both children and their parents as “masculine,” as a field dominated by men and to which men are better suited than women. When Americans, both male and female, are asked to describe an engineer, they are much more likely to describe a man, a fact which affects young girls as well. One study reviewed in 2018 found that even incoming female undergraduate engineering majors viewed the “typical” engineer as stereotypically masculine. xl While this did not prevent these women from choosing to major in engineering, it seems likely that this stereotype is a factor steering other women away from the field. And, researchers have found that boys are particularly tenacious in defending gender norms, policing gender “deviants” strictly and aggressively claiming particular kinds of tasks as belonging to boys. xli

Researchers find that the perception that engineering is “male” affects girls’ sense of belonging in the field, meaning they are less likely to aspire to a career in engineering or to persist in pursuing engineering studies should they begin. For example, Veldman’s 2021 study of a sample of Belgian high school students in STEM-focused university tracks found that girls’ concerns about “belonging” were significantly higher in fields (such as engineering) that are heavily male-dominated. xlii

Many Americans also link engineering and masculinity through the perception that being successful in the field involves “brilliance” and that brilliance is a quality that boys are more likely to have than girls. The SWE Literature Review has discussed numerous studies documenting the male-brilliance-engineering association, including one that found it developing very early — among children as young as 6! xliii The 2020 review included a sidebar on Lisa Piccirillo, a mathematician who solved what had been seen as an insoluble math problem and has subsequently spoken out against the perception that innate brilliance is a requirement for success in math-intensive fields.

Researchers also have argued that girls have different interests and career goals than boys and that engineering typically does not present itself as a good field in which to pursue those interests and goals, even though it could easily make that case. In 2015, the literature review reported on Su and Rounds’ meta-analysis of gender differences in interest as an explanation of the underrepresentation of women in STEM; it found that most studies confirmed that women were more interested in people-oriented than object-oriented fields, so disciplines such as engineering were seen as less attractive. xliv

Even studies of engineering majors seem to confirm the argument that young women are attracted by different aspects of a field than men. Erin Cech’s study of undergraduate engineering students at four universities in the Northeast found that women’s self-concepts led them to value social consciousness more and to be less likely to value technological leadership. xlv Similarly, Patrick, Riegle-Crumb, and Borregoxlvi report this year on a study of a sample of engineering students at a large public university in the United States, finding that men identified with engineering more strongly than women and that men identified with different aspects of engineering than women did. However, not all research confirms that differences in interest explain the failure of engineering to attract more female students. In 2019, the review discussed several research studies examining whether male and female students’ interests differed. xlvii A number found that they did — women were found to be more people-oriented, interested in solving social problems, and altruistic. But another study found that it was quite common for both male and female STEM students to major in disciplines that did not align with their stated interests. xlviii

The overall effect of this type of research is to underline the fact that girls need to be recruited to engineering, while boys do not. Simply improving girls’ math and science skills is not enough. Girls (and their parents and peers) need to be persuaded that engineering is for girls as well and that they can pursue their interests and career goals in the field. So, what do researchers and policymakers think might work?

One common suggestion is that having more female role models would help. The hope is that if girls have contact with more female engineers and encounter more women as they proceed through engineering programs, they will be more likely to aspire to engineering careers and persist in engineering programs and less likely to avoid the field because it seems male-dominated. Over the years, the SWE Literature Review has discussed numerous accounts of programs designed to bring young women into contact with female engineering role models, but the results of these programs vary, so the jury is still out on how effective they can be in increasing girls’ interest in engineering.

Mentoring also is often mentioned as a strategy for increasing the numbers of women in engineering — here the emphasis is on retaining interested female students rather than recruiting the reluctant. Early issues of the literature review contained frequent reference to this strategy, including extended discussions in both the 2006 and 2008 reviews xlix . And, studies of the efficacy of mentoring and calls for expanded and improved mentoring for women at all stages of engineering careers continue to appear. There seems to be a consensus that effective mentoring helps women who enter engineering to persist and succeed, although the 2009 review summarized an article in Research in Higher Education that identified expanded mentoring as one of the “least successful” programs for undergraduate women in engineering. l However, researchers continue to examine questions such as whether female or male mentors are preferable, whether formal or informal mentors are more effective, whether women seek the same kind of mentoring as men, and how to avoid the reality that mentoring experiences can also be negative.

Some efforts to combat the perception of science and engineering as male focus on trying to strengthen girls’ science or engineering identity. It seems logical to argue that, since, on average, girls identify less with science and engineering than boys, strengthening that identity would increase the likelihood that girls would enter and persist in engineering and science programs. Research has raised questions about whether a successful effort to do this will actually help. A study reviewed in 2020 found that science identity was more strongly associated with science aspirations for boys than for girls. li The fact that girls with strong science identities were less likely than comparable boys to aspire to science careers challenges the view that targeting girls’ identities alone will increase their desire to pursue careers in science or engineering.

Perhaps the way to counter the cultural association of engineering with masculinity is to present engineering differently. As we have seen, many researchers focus on the idea that girls have different interests and aspirations than boys and that engineering needs to do a better job of appealing to them. Some have suggested that a good way to do this would be to expand programs that already appeal to more women, such as environmental or biomedical engineering. However, research indicates that doing so tends to have the effect of drawing women away from other subdisciplines rather than increasing the numbers of women overall; it may even have the effect of hardening gender stereotypes within engineering, as fields such as mechanical or electrical engineering become even more male-dominated. lii

Researchers also have found varying answers to the question of whether engineering enables women (and men) to satisfy their “agentic” or communal goals. Some find support for the idea that engineering can be presented as a career in which such goals can be met, but others respond that it doesn’t always do so. In either case, it is important to take note of a study discussed in the 2018 review, which criticized what some see as cosmetic innovations in engineering’s self-presentation; women are not likely to be persuaded to enter or to remain in the field if promises of a different approach are not sustained throughout engineering programs and careers. liii

Finally, researchers have shown that there is a need to be cautious in assuming that there is a simple relationship between individuals’ stated goals and interests at a point in time and their career choices. As we saw above, there is evidence that many people in STEM fields have stated interests different from those associated with the careers they chose. And, other research has found that people adapt to the goals and values of the careers they select — women, in particular, may find that emphasizing communal goals is at odds with the prevailing male culture of engineering, so downplaying those goals and assimilating to traditional engineering culture may be viewed as a prudent career choice. liv

Fix the System, Not the Women — What’s Pushing Women Away? Pamela Mack’s 2001 analysis cited earlier argued that efforts to recruit girls and young women to engineering tended to focus on changing women — by educating them about the field, by persuading them that it offers them opportunities to fulfill their goals, and by strengthening their science and engineering identities. Over the succeeding 20 years, as the above review indicates, that emphasis has continued to inform much of the research on gender inequity and programmatic efforts to increase the numbers of women in the field. But, Mack’s analysis noted that there is another way to approach the problem — perhaps it is engineering itself, and not just the women it seeks to attract, that needs to change if it is to become a field to which similar numbers of men and women are drawn. That approach has also continued to inform the work of some researchers and program designers, as the limits of focusing exclusively on women became apparent.

Educated women in the United States have choices about which careers to enter; the evidence is that many of them are choosing more gender-integrated occupations. Pearlman’s (2019) research showed that women are gravitating toward expanding opportunities in areas such as management, rather than trying to enter occupations that have been historically male-dominated, such as engineering. lv While she leaves open the question of whether women have a negative view of fields such as engineering, the reality that they can choose easy-to-enter, growing areas of employment, rather than overcome historical barriers to entry in engineering, tips the balance away from the latter. And, researchers have also found evidence that some young women perceive engineering not just as male-dominated, but as gender-biased. Studies summarized in the 2018 review found experimental evidence that women react negatively to fields in which they perceive bias and survey evidence indicating that college undergraduates, while not averse to STEM majors as a whole, perceived specific STEM fields (including engineering) as biased and were likely to avoid majoring in those fields for that reason. lvi

Other research suggests that this perception is not simply an invention — considerable evidence exists that engineering can be an unwelcoming field to women who seek to enter. Studies of this problem have focused on two questions: a. Do female engineers face bias in hiring and promotion decisions and b. Is there a “chilly climate” for women in engineering workplaces?

Whether there is bias in personnel decisions has become the subject of much controversy. Research conducted by Ceci and Williams (2014) contended that there is little evidence that women face employment discrimination in math-intensive STEM fields in universities. According to this research team, female candidates are at least as likely as males to interview for tenure-track positions; they also found that reviewing for grant funding and manuscript submission are gender-neutral. lvii These findings attracted substantial public attention as a result of an op-ed the authors wrote in The New York Times summarizing their research and a vigorous response in the same newspaper from critics. lviii

Subsequent research continues to be divided on the issue of whether discrimination exists in engineering employment. A 2017 study of actual job interviews suggested that simply examining who gets interviewed is not enough; it found evidence that female job candidates who made it through to the interview stage faced different, and more intense kinds of scrutiny than male candidates for the same positions.lix Research discussed in the 2020 literature review presented conflicting findings. On the one hand, one study found evidence that female doctoral recipients in several fields, including engineering, were more likely than male doctoral recipients to receive no job offer after completing their degree. Experimental research using matched resumés for male and female candidates found evidence of implicit bias in male-dominated physics, but not in more gender-integrated biology (suggesting something similar may be the case in engineering). However, a study of university faculty found that engineering faculty, in particular, when asked to recommend colleagues for various roles, were more likely to recommend female candidates for leadership and research roles. The study’s authors speculated that this may reflect a degree of “bias correction” in a male-dominated field. lx

All of this research focuses on academic employment, but a study published in 2021 suggests that, outside the academy, hiring and promotion decisions may be shaped by the interaction of women’s choices and implicit biases. Campero (2021) analyzed data from a hiring platform to examine the development of gender segregation in software engineering and development. He found that women are more prevalent in lower-paid, lower-status quality assurance positions in the field. This was largely the result of women’s being more likely than men to apply for these positions; but, employer bias also played a role, in the sense that people employed in quality assurance roles were less likely to be considered subsequently for better-paid roles in other areas. lxi

The perception that employed female engineers confront a “chilly climate” in their workplaces has also been the subject of much discussion in recent years. The SWE Literature Review has discussed the growing number of published accounts of what it is like to be a woman employed in a high-tech firm. The picture that emerges is one of a “bro culture” in which sexist behavior is tolerated and in which women are subjected to a variety of indignities, microaggressions, and unequal treatment.

Lacking detailed studies of other engineering workplaces, it is impossible to say whether the conditions in the tech industry are characteristic of other engineering workplaces. However, there are at least some indications that women encounter microaggressions and sexism in a variety of engineering employment settings. We have already discussed Seron’s study of the internship and work team experiences of engineering students. Research on teams in engineering has been reviewed on numerous occasions in the pages of the literature review, consistently finding that women are not treated equally when they find themselves on teams dominated by men. Research reviewed this year leads to similar conclusions. For example, Tomko et al.’s (2021) study of university maker spaces finds that female students encounter obstacles to entry and are treated as “helpless” females by their male counterparts.lxii Beddoes’ (2021) study, based on interviews with a small number of newly hired female civil engineers, finds that they identify a variety of forms of male privilege in their workplaces, notably being taken seriously, not being subject to sexual harassment, and feeling welcomed. lxiii

Developing strategies to address the kinds of institutional and cultural problems these studies investigate is obviously challenging. Complicating the problem is the reality that many people, both men and women, don’t acknowledge that there are structural problems involved.

Although, as some critics of NSF ADVANCE have noted, women are often cast in the role of change-maker in programs designed to modify institutional cultures; researchers have found that many female engineers are reluctant to say that sexism and bias are more than an individual matter. One of the first studies along these lines discussed in the literature review was Britton’s (2017) analysis of a set of interviews with about 100 female STEM faculty at public research universities. Her respondents reported incidents of unfair and unequal treatment at work, but they did not describe them as part of a broader “chilly climate.” Instead, perhaps concerned that to do so would draw additional attention to their gender and worsen the situation, they preferred to treat these incidents as isolated cases of individual misbehavior. lxiv

Subsequent research confirms this finding. Seron’s (2018) study of undergraduate students emphasized their resistance to identifying themselves as a “feminist.” While acknowledging their marginalization as women in a male-dominated field, they attributed their success to individual effort and accepted the prevailing meritocratic interpretation of the field. To them, improving women’s situation in engineering was not a matter of structural changes but of strengthening individual women’s skills so that they could more effectively compete in a field they saw as largely gender-blind. lxv A number of studies summarized in the 2019 review painted a similar picture of the attitudes of female engineers and scientists, which one referred to as “STEMinism.” lxvi

Research published in 2021 continued along the same lines. The eight women who held engineering leadership positions in Germany studied by Schmitt (2021) believed that succeeding in the profession required adapting to the male “habitus” of engineering. Although conscious of gender inequality in the profession, all reported trying to stay invisible as women in order to maintain their identity as an engineer. lxvii Somewhat more encouragingly for advocates of institutional transformation, Bird and Rhoton’s (2021) study of a group of faculty involved with NSF ADVANCE found that there was a range of opinions among their respondents about whether STEM disciplines were meritocratic; faculty in departments in which women were in a significant minority (such as engineering) were more likely to see systematic problems. Bird and Rhoton speculate that the fact that these were ADVANCE institutions may have increased faculty members’ awareness of institutionalized inequalities. lxviii

Studies such as these indicate that institutional transformation requires that female engineers be persuaded that it is actually necessary. Researchers also have argued that it is important to persuade men, since it is their attitudes and behaviors, and the structures they have built around them, that need to be transformed. And, male scientists and engineers, like their female colleagues, tend to see their disciplines as gender-blind, as Sattari and Sandefur’s (2019) study of male STEM faculty indicated. lxix Even sympathetic male colleagues may see men playing a relatively limited role in institutional change. The same study found that leaders (largely male) expected men to make largely attitudinal changes (“be more sensitive”) while they expected women to change more fundamentally (be more aggressive, reconsider family commitments). It is worth adding that even the expectation that women should be more aggressive is not really a commitment to institutional change. As a recent study of the concept of implicit bias and its role in NSF ADVANCE has noted, while it is important and useful to press for change in the attitudes of individual members of an organization, doing so does not affect the structures surrounding those individuals and may render the attitudinal changes ineffective. lxx

Last year’s SWE Literature Review highlighted a recent book by David G. Smith and W. Brad Johnson entitled Good Guys: How Men Can Be Better Allies for Women in the Workplace. The book makes a strong case that men need to be part of the solution to the problem of institutional gender bias in the workplace and identifies a number of concrete ways in which they can help. However, as SWE’s summary observed, the likelihood of men’s playing a leading role is limited by the fact, discussed above, that many men (and women) don’t perceive their institutions as sexist and by the reality that many men may see women’s gain as their loss. lxxi

Achieving equity in occupations dominated by one sex is difficult. As the classic analysis of the issue by Barbara Reskin and Patricia Roos demonstrated years ago, it is extremely rare to find an occupation in the United States in which men and women work alongside one another in equal numbers performing the same tasks. lxxii We should, therefore, be impressed that women have made the significant strides in engineering the data presented at the beginning of this review document. At the same time, it is reasonable to ask whether ongoing efforts to integrate the profession further are likely to succeed and what, if anything, could be changed to make those efforts more effective.

The research summarized in the SWE Literature Review explores both the various reasons for the small numbers of women in engineering and the programs designed to increase those numbers. So, a reasonable question to ask is whether those programs are well-matched to what has been learned about the causes of gender inequities in the profession. In some cases, it is probably necessary to answer no. An obvious example is the ongoing emphasis on programs to improve girls’ math skills and self-confidence and to improve the retention of women in engineering at the college level. As discussed earlier, the evidence suggests that there are already more than enough girls with the math skills needed to succeed in an engineering program. And, research has shown that improving girls’ confidence in math alone does not make them as likely as comparable boys to aspire to an engineering career. So, while these programs are unlikely to do any harm, they also are unlikely, by themselves, to have a major impact on the gender composition of engineering.

A similar critique can be made of programs focused on improving the retention of women in college-level engineering programs. Although far from a consensus, there is a significant amount of research that challenges the view that women leave engineering degree programs in larger percentages than men. Thus, programs focused on post-secondary retention, while not harmful, likely will have only a limited impact on the numbers of women in engineering. Instead, emphasis should be placed more on making engineering more attractive to pre-college women (since decisions to enter the field occur early) and on retaining women after they graduate, since there is clear evidence that female engineering graduates leave the profession at higher rates than men.

To pursue this last point somewhat further, we continue to know too little about women’s experiences as working engineers and about why they leave the profession after graduating. It is clearly difficult for researchers to gain access to workplaces outside the academy. The result is that we have only a limited understanding of the role played in women’s departure by the various causes researchers have suggested: work/family conflict, a chilly climate, lack of opportunities for personal development, etc. In an ideal world, a program similar to NSF-ADVANCE, that emphasized research-based, sustained institutional transformation, focused on industry could be created both to improve our understanding of women’s employment experiences and match programming to what is learned.

Many of the programs described and assessed in the literature on women in engineering are relatively small-scale, short-term programs — recruitment workshops, research experiences, summer camps, etc. While these programs are well-intended, and often can show positive outcomes, the SWE Literature Review has asked on more than one occasion whether they are likely to have a lasting impact. A passage from the 2005 literature review describes the problem well:

“Simple one-shot exposure and interest in engineering careers is probably not enough to get more girls involved in engineering programs. If that were true, then we would expect to see young female fans of ‘Star Trek Voyager,’ with its strong female engineering characters, flocking to the field.” (p. 64)

So, perhaps more broadly based, regional or national efforts to attract more women to engineering are needed. And, it is worth adding that those efforts should target not just middle- and high-school students but also include the goal of developing alternative pipelines to engineering. In last year’s review, we summarized interesting research showing that some women develop an interest in engineering once they have already completed their college education, but returning to complete a second degree is often impractical because of the amount of time and money required. Two-year colleges also are a potential recruiting site for students, especially students of color, but the path from a two-year program to a four-year engineering program is often discouragingly complex. lxxiii Finding ways to make it possible for nontraditional students to complete engineering programs would help expand the pool of women from which the profession could recruit. An interesting option that might help solve this problem was described in the 2011 review; the DEEP (Deconstructing Engineering Education Programs) project demonstrated the possibility of simplifying the engineering curriculum by drastically reducing the length of prerequisite strings. lxxiv Of course, achieving this kind of curricular reform is very difficult and likely to require considerable amounts of time.

It is possible to be optimistic that the United States will be a leader in achieving gender equity in engineering and that the kinds of programs that are needed to achieve it will be developed relatively soon. After all, the U.S. has a relatively egalitarian culture in which, in theory at least, ideas about gender equity should thrive. However, researchers have argued that even relatively egalitarian cultures can harbor persistent ideas about gender difference. Charles and Bradley’s seminal analysis of sex segregation in higher education found that “universalistic” norms undermine vertical segregation (i.e., norms about who can participate in various levels of education) much more rapidly than horizonal segregation (which fields of study are appropriate for men or women). lxxv Although there is evidence that, in more egalitarian countries, the gender gap in science career expectations is smaller, lxxvi research also has shown that, in those countries, women who have high science and math scores typically also have high verbal scores — indeed their verbal scores are often their best test results. So, compared with men who have high science and math scores, these women have more options and may choose careers outside engineering or science or careers in science where women are more common, such as health care careers. lxxvii

An interesting article published in 2021 describes one way in which girls who are strong in science and math are sometimes drawn away from careers such as engineering. Pitt, Brockman, and Zhu (2021) lxxviii analyze data on a sample of students who double-majored in college. They found that women were more likely than men to select a non-STEM major as their second major and to express dissatisfaction with their STEM major. Although they had been pushed by parents and others to select a STEM major, these double majors often expressed more “love” for their (non-STEM) second major, a fact that suggests they may be drawn toward non-STEM careers or would be more likely to abandon a STEM career after having begun it.

We are thus led back to the question of making engineering more attractive. If women are choosing other options they see as more inviting, how can engineering be made to seem a better choice? As we’ve seen, this is not just a matter of talking about engineering’s virtues. If the field is perceived as hostile to women, and if women’s experiences in the field bear that out, they are unlikely to select it from the available options or to stay if they begin an engineering career. Thus, the focus needs to be on men, as well as women. In addition to persuading women that engineering is something they can do and will enjoy, men must be persuaded to support their efforts and to change a culture that too often is unwelcoming to its female recruits.

About the authors

Peter Meiksins, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Cleveland State University. He received his B.A. from Columbia University and Ph.D. from York University, Toronto. Major publications include Putting Work in Its Place: A Quiet Revolution, with Peter Whalley, Ph.D. (2002), and Changing Contours of Work: Jobs and Opportunities in the New Economy, 4th edition, with Stephen Sweet, Ph.D. (2020).

Peggy Layne, P.E., F.SWE, is former assistant provost and director of the ADVANCE program at Virginia Tech. She holds degrees in environmental and water resources engineering and science and technology studies. Layne is the editor of Women in Engineering: Pioneers and Trailblazers and Women in Engineering: Professional Life (ASCE Press, 2009). A Fellow of the Society of Women Engineers, Layne served as SWE FY97 president.

i Frehill, L. (2004). The Gendered Construction of the Engineering Profession in the United States, 1893-1920. Men and Masculinities 6(4): 383-403.

ii Hacker, S. (1990) Mathematization of Engineering: Limits on Women and the Field, pp. 139–154 in Dorothy E. Smith and Susan M. Turner (eds) D oing it the Hard Way: Investigations of Gender and Technology . London: Unwin Hyman.

iii See the 2005 SWE Literature Review, pp. 60-61.

iv Ceci, S.J., Williams, W.M., and Barnett, S.M. (2009). Women’s Underrepresentation in Science: Sociocultural and Biological Considerations. Psychological Bulletin 135(2): 218-261.

v Cimpian, J.R., Kim, T.H., and McDermott, Z.T. (2020). Understanding Persistent Gender Gaps in STEM. Science 368(6497): 1317-1319.

vi Kimmel, L.G., Miller, J.D., and Eccles, J.S. (2012). Do the Paths to STEMM Professions Differ by Gender? Peabody Journal of Education (0161956X) 87(1): 92-113.

vii Valla, J.M. and Ceci, S.J. (2014). Breadth-Based Models of Women’s Underrepresentation in STEM Fields: An Integrative Commentary on Schmidt (2011) and Nye et al. (2012). Perspectives on Psychological Science 9(2): 219–224.

viii For an example, see Seo, E., Shen, Y., and Alfaro, E.C. (2019). Adolescents’ Beliefs About Math Ability and Their Relations to STEM Career Attainment: Joint Consideration of Race/Ethnicity and Gender. Journal of Youth & Adolescence 48(2): 306–325.

ix Riegle-Crumb, C. and Peng, M. (2021). Examining High School Students’ Gendered Beliefs about Math: Predictors and Implications for Choice of STEM College Majors. Sociology of Education 94(3): 227-48.

x SWE Magazine Review of the Literature (2001): summary of argument made in Isaacs, B. (2001). Mystery of the Missing Women Engineers: A Solution. Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering Education and Practice 127(2): 85-91.

xi Cross, K.J. et al. (2021). The Pieces of Me: The Double Bind of Race and Gender in Engineering. Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering 27(3): 79-105.

xii True-Funk, A. et al. (2021). Intersectional Engineers: Diversity of Gender and Race Microaggressions and Their Effects in Engineering Education. Journal of Management in Engineering 37(3).

xiii Ross, M., Huff, J.L., and Godwin, A. (2021). Resilient Engineering Identity Development Critical to Prolonged Engagement of Black Women in Engineering. Journal of Engineering Education 110(1): 92-113.

xiv See the 2013 SWE Literature Review, pp. 246-8 for a more detailed review of the findings summarized here.

xv Yang, J.A. et al. (2021). Resistance and Community-building in LGBTQ+ Engineering Students. Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering 27(4): 1-33.

xvi Alfrey, L. and Winddance Twine, F. (2017). Gender- Fluid Geek Girls: Negotiating Inequality Regimes in the Tech Industry. Gender and Society 31(1): 28–50.

xvii Holian, L. and Kelly, E. (2020). STEM Occupational Intentions: Stability and Change Through High School. Stats in Brief. NCES 2020-167. National Center for Education Statistics.

xviii For example, this is the case for a major research project funded by NSF at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. See Fouad, N.A., Singh, R., Cappaert, K., Chang, W., and Wan, M. (2016). Comparison of Women Engineers Who Persist in or Depart from Engineering. Journal of Vocational Behavior 92: 79–93.

xix Frehill, L. (2010). Satisfaction. Mechanical Engineering 132(1): 38-41.

xx Cheryan, S., Ziegler, S., Montoya, A., and Jiang, L. (2016). Why Are Some STEM Fields More Gender Balanced than Others? Psychological Bulletin , October.

xxi Denice, P. (2021). Choosing and Changing Course: Postsecondary Students and the Process of Selecting a Major Field of Study. Sociological Perspectives 64(1): 82-108.

xxii Preston, A. (2004). Leaving Science: Occupational Exit from Scientific Careers Between 1965 and 1995 . NY: Russell Sage Foundation.

xxiii Singh, R., Zhang, Y., Wan, M. (Maggie), and Fouad, N.A. (2018). Why Do Women Engineers Leave the Engineering Profession? The Roles of Work-Family Conflict, Occupational Commitment, and Perceived Organizational Support. Human Resource Management 57(4): 901–914; Cech, E.A. and Blair-Loy, M. (2019). The Changing Career Trajectories of New Parents in STEM. PNAS 116(10): 4182–4187.

xxiv Ecklund, E.H. and Lincoln, A.E. (2016). Failing Families, Failing Science: Work-Family Conflict in Academic Science . New York: New York University Press.

xxv Holmes, M. (2016). Why Women Leave Engineering: The SWE Gender Culture Study. SWE Magazine 62(2): 10-12.

xxvi Fouad, N.A., Singh, R., Cappaert, K., Chang, W., and Wan, M. (2016), op. cit.

xxvii Thébaud, S. and Taylor, C.J. (2021). The Specter of Motherhood: Culture and the Production of Gendered Career Aspirations in Science and Engineering. Gender and Society 35(3): 395-421.

xxviii Seron, C., Silbey, S.S., Cech, E., and Rubineau, B. (2016). Persistence Is Cultural: Professional Socialization and the Reproduction of Sex Segregation. Work and Occupations 43(2): 178–214.

xxix Wynn, A.T. and Correll, S.J. (2018). Puncturing the Pipeline: Do Technology Companies Alienate Women in Recruiting Sessions? Social Studies of Science 48(1): 149–164.

xxx See 2006 SWE Literature Review, pp. 91-93 for a summary of these early assessments.

xxxi Bilimoria, D. and Buch, K.K. (2010). The Search Is On: Engendering Faculty Diversity Through More Effective Search and Recruitment. Change 42(4): 27-32.

xxxii Bilimoria, D. and Liang, X. (2012). Gender Equity in Science and Engineering: Advancing Change in Higher Education . New York: Routledge.

xxxiii Nelson, L. and Zippel, K. (2021). From Theory to Practice and Back: How the Concept of Implicit Bias Was Implemented in Academe and What This Means for Theories of Organizational Change. Gender and Society 35(3): 330-357.

xxxiv Morimoto, S.A. and Zajicek, A. (2014). Dismantling the “Master’s House”: Feminist Reflections on Institutional Transformation. Critical Sociology 40(1): 135-150.

xxxv Zippel, K. and Ferree, M.M. (2019). Organizational Interventions and the Creation of Gendered Knowledge: US Universities and NSF ADVANCE. Gender, Work and Organization 26(6): 805–821.

xxxvi Mack, P.E. (2001). What Difference Has Feminism Made to Engineering in the Twentieth Century? p. 149-68 in Creager, A., Lunbeck, E., and Schiebinger, L. (eds), Feminism in Twentieth Century Science, Technology and Medicine . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

xxxvii Salas-Morera, L. et al. (2021). Understanding Why Women Don’t Choose Engineering Degrees. International Journal of Technology and Design Education 31: 325-338.

xxxviii See, for example, Shi, Y. (2018). The Puzzle of Missing Female Engineers: Academic Preparation, Ability Beliefs, and Preferences. Economics of Education Review 64(C): 129-143.

xxxix Cheryan, S., Ziegler, S., Montoya, A., and Jiang, L. (2016), op. cit.

xl Kelley, M.S. and Bryan, K.K. (2018). Gendered Perceptions of Typical Engineers Across Specialties for Engineering Majors. Gender and Education 30(1): 22–44.

xli McGuire, L., Jefferys, E., and Rutland, A. (2020). Children’s Evaluations of Deviant Peers in the Context of Science and Technology: The Role of Gender Group Norms and Status. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 195.

xlii Veldman, J. et al. (2021). “Where Will I Belong More?”: The Role of Belonging Comparisons Between STEM Fields in High School Girls’ STEM Interests. Social Psychology of Education 24(5): 1363-1387.

xliii Bian, L., Leslie, S.-J., and Cimpian, A. (2017). Gender Stereotypes About Intellectual Ability Emerge Early and Influence Children’s Interests. Science 355(6323): 389–391.

xliv Su, R. and Rounds, J. (2015). All STEM Fields Are Not Created Equal: People and Things Interests Explain Gender Disparities Across STEM Fields. Frontiers in Psychology 6(February): 20.

xlv Cech, E. (2015). Engineers and Engineeresses? Self-Conceptions and the Development of Gendered Professional Identities. Sociological Perspectives 58(1): 56–77.

xlvi Patrick, A., Riegle-Crumb, C., and Borrego, M. (2021). Examining the Gender Gap in Engineering Professional Identification. Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering 27(1): 31-55.

xlvii See the 2019 SWE Literature Review, pp. 413 and 416.

xlviii Ertl, B. and Hartmann, F.G. (2019). The Interest Profiles and Interest Congruence of Male and Female Students in STEM and Non-STEM Fields. Frontiers in Psychology 10: 897.

xlix See the 2006 SWE Literature Review, pp. 81-84 and the 2008 SWE Literature Review, pp. 151-53.

l Fox, M.F., Sonnert, G., and Nikiforova, I. (2009). Successful Programs for Undergraduate Women in Science and Engineering: Adapting versus Adopting the Institutional Environment. Research in Higher Education 50(4): 333-353.

li Bodnar, K. et al. (2020). Science Identity Predicts Science Career Aspiration Across Gender and Race, but Especially for White Boys. International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology 12(1): 33–45.

lii d’Entremont, A.G., Greer, K., and Lyon, K.A. (2020). Does Adding “Helping Disciplines” to Engineering Schools Contribute to Gender Parity? 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access.

liii Diekman, A.B., Steinberg, M., Brown, E.R., Belanger, A.L., and Clark, E.K. (2017). A Goal Congruity Model of Role Entry, Engagement, and Exit: Understanding Communal Goal Processes in STEM Gender Gaps. Personality and Social Psychology Review (Sage Publications Inc.) 21(2): 142–175.

liv Smith-Doerr, L., Vardi, I., and Croissant, J. (2016). Doing Gender and Responsibility: Scientists and Engineers Talk about Their Work. Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering 22(1): 49–68.

lv Pearlman, J. (2019). Occupational Mobility for Whom?: Education, Cohorts, the Life Course and Occupational Gender Composition, 1970–2010. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 59: 81–93.

lvi Moss-Racusin, C.A., Sanzari, C., Caluori, N., and Rabasco, H. (2018). Gender Bias Produces Gender Gaps in STEM Engagement. Sex Roles 79(11-12): 651-670; Ganley, C.M., George, C.E., Cimpian, J.R., and Makowski, M.B. (2018). Gender Equity in College Majors: Looking Beyond the STEM/Non-STEM Dichotomy for Answers Regarding Female Participation. American Educational Research Journal 55(3): 453–487.

lvii Ceci, S., Ginther, D., Kahn, S., and Williams, W. (2014). Women in Academic Science: A Changing Landscape. Psychological Science in the Public Interest 15(3): 75–141.

lviii See the 2014 SWE Literature Review, pp. 266-71 for a summary of the controversy.

lix Blair-Loy, M., Rogers, L.E., Glaser, D., Wong, Y.L. Anne, Abraham, D., and Cosman, P.C. (2017). Gender in Engineering Departments: Are There Gender Differences in Interruptions of Academic Job Talks? Social Sciences 6(1): 29.

lx Kinoshita, T.J., Knight, D.B., Borrego, M., and Wall Bortz, W.E. (2020). Illuminating Systematic Differences in No Job Offers for STEM Doctoral Recipients. PLOS ONE 15(4): 1–23; Eaton, A.A., Saunders, J.F., Jacobson, R.K., and West, K. (2020). How Gender and Race Stereotypes Impact the Advancement of Scholars in STEM: Professors’ Biased Evaluations of Physics and Biology Post-Doctoral Candidates. Sex Roles 82(3/4): 127–141; Judson, E., Ross, L., Krause, S.J., Hjelmstad, K.D., and Mayled, L.H. (2020). How a STEM Faculty Member’s Gender Affects Career Guidance from Others: Comparing Engineering to Biology and Physics. 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access.

lxi Campero, S. (2021). Hiring and Intra-Occupational Gender Segregation in Software Engineering. American Sociological Review . 86(1): 60-92.

lxii Tomko, M. et al. (2021). Participation Pathways for Women into University Makerspaces. Journal of Engineering Education 110:700-17.

lxiii Beddoes, K. (2021). Examining Privilege in Engineering Socialization Through the Stories of Newcomer Engineers. Engineering Studies 13(2):158-179.

lxiv Britton, D.M. (2017). Beyond the Chilly Climate: The Salience of Gender in Women’s Academic Careers. Gender and Society 31(1): 5-27.

lxv Seron, C. Silbey, S., Cech, E., and Rubineau, B. (2018). “I Am Not a Feminist, but. . .”: Hegemony of a Meritocratic Ideology and the Limits of Critique Among Women in Engineering. Work and Occupations 45(2): 131–167.

lxvi See the 2019 SWE Literature Review, p. 437 for a summary of these studies. The term STEMinism comes from Myers, K., C. Gallaher, and S. McCarragher (2019). STEMinism. Journal of Gender Studies 28(6): 648–660.

lxvii Schmitt, M. (2021). Women Engineers on Their Way to Leadership: The Role of Social Support Within Engineering Work Cultures. Engineering Studies 13(1): 30-52.

lxviii Bird, S.R. and Rhoton, L.A. (2021). Seeing Isn’t Always Believing: Gender, Academic STEM, and Women Scientists’ Perceptions of Career Opportunities. Gender and Society 35(3): 422-448.

lxix Sattari, N. and Sandefur, R.L. (2019). Gender in Academic STEM: A Focus on Men Faculty. Gender, Work and Organization 26(2): 158–179.

lxx Nelson, A. and Zippel, K. (2021), op. cit.

lxxi Smith, D.G. and Johnson, W.B. (2020). Good Guys: How Men Can Be Better Allies for Women in the Workplace . Boston: Harvard Business Review Press. See 2020 SWE Literature Review, pp. 458-59 for a review of this book.

lxxii Reskin, B. and P. Roos (1990). Job Queues, Gender Queues: Explaining Women’s Inroads into Male Occupations . Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

lxxiii See the 2020 SWE Literature Review, pp. 478-9 for a more detailed statement of these arguments and references to the relevant literature.

lxxiv Busch-Vishniac, I., Kibler, T., Campbell, P., Patterson, E., Guillaume, D., Jarosz, J., Chassapis, C., Emery, A., Ellis, G., Whitworth, H., Metz, S., Brainard, S., and Ray, P. (2011). Deconstructing Engineering Education Programmes: The DEEP Project to Reform the Mechanical Engineering Curriculum. European Journal of Engineering Education 36(3): 269-283.

lxxv Charles, M. and Bradley, K. (2002). Equal but Separate? A Cross-National Study of Sex Segregation in Higher Education. American Sociological Review 67(4): 573-599.

lxxvi McDaniel, A. (2016). The Role of Cultural Contexts in Explaining Cross-National Gender Gaps in STEM Expectations. European Sociological Review 32(1): 122-133.

lxxvii Psychological Science (0956-7976) 29(4): 581–593.

lxxviii Pitt, R.N., Brockman, A., and Zhu, L. (2021). Parental Pressure and Passion: Competing Motivations for Choosing STEM and Non-STEM Majors Among Women Who Double-Major in Both. Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering 27(1): 1-29.

Note: View an extensive bibliography of the 2021 literature here.

Impact of Social Engineering Attacks: A Literature Review

Conference paper
First Online: 29 October 2021
Cite this conference paper

Walter Fuertes 6 ,
Diana Arévalo 6 ,
Joyce Denisse Castro 6 ,
Mario Ron 6 ,
Carlos Andrés Estrada 6 ,
Roberto Andrade 7 ,
Felix Fernández Peña 8 , 9 &
Eduardo Benavides 6

Part of the book series: Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies ((SIST,volume 255))

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Social engineering is the practice, which allows attackers to obtain sensitive or confidential information froma user of a system or organization, exploiting specific characteristics of the human being. This is considered to be still one of the most threatening attacks within the digital world. The current study aims to explore social engineering attacks with significant impact. We conducted a systematic literature review from 2011 to 2020, applying the Barbara Kitchenham Methodological Guide. The main findings are concentrated in companies, financial institutions, and even vehicle vulnerabilities, which has caused economic losses and a decrease in the image and reputation loss damage of individuals and companies. Most of the causes are related to human behavior, such as innocence, unconsciousness, and lack of training or capacity. The primary victims are newly contracted workers, people with a certain lack of knowledge, celebrities, politicians, and middle and senior managers. Furthermore, social networks and e-mail are the primary sources from which attacks occur. Finally, we identified that Phishing and Ransomware are the most significant attacks on companies and individuals.

Social engineering attacks
vulnerability

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2020 phishing statistics you need to know to protect your organization (2020), https://www.keepnetlabs.com/phishing-statistics-you-need-to-know-to-protect-your-organization/

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Acknowledgements

We want to thank the resources granted for developing the research project entitled Detection and Mitigation of Social Engineering attacks applying Cognitive Security. The authors would also like to thank the RED CEDIA’s financial support in the development of this study within the GT-Cybersecurity.

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Fuertes, W. et al. (2022). Impact of Social Engineering Attacks: A Literature Review. In: Rocha, Á., Fajardo-Toro, C.H., Rodríguez, J.M.R. (eds) Developments and Advances in Defense and Security . Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies, vol 255. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4884-7_3

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