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Women of Color in Early Career: A SWE/NSBE Collaborative Study

The Society of Women Engineers (SWE) and the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) collaborated on a qualitative research study to understand the experiences of women of color in the early stage of their engineering career. Only 6 percent of engineering bachelor’s degrees are earned by women of color (African American, Hispanic, Asian, or Native American/Alaska Native), and many who earn their degrees commonly encounter challenges in the workplace associated with implicit bias – in hiring, compensation, and performance evaluations. SWE and NSBE sought to understand the challenges female engineers of color in early career face, the strategies they use to overcome those challenges, and the supports that professional engineering organizations provide that are most impactful.

  • Download the full report
  • Read the paper presented at the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) conference in June 2017 sharing preliminary findings.
  • Read the paper presented at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) conference in April 2018.