Development of a national survey focusing on the relationships between race, class, and gender on the persistence of women engineering faculty

Abstract

Our study investigates the persistence of women engineering faculty in U.S. institutions with respect to the intersectionality of race, class, and gender. This investigation will be achieved through a national survey of engineering women faculty. The present paper focuses on the development of the survey. Informed by the theory of intersectionality, in this survey, race, class, and gender are explored from institutional, symbolic, and individual dimensions of oppression. This paper presents the initial process of the creation of scale items and the methodological challenges in using the concept of intersectionality for a scale/survey instrument. The survey is being systematically developed through a step-by-step process involving planning, construction, and qualitative evaluation. An extensive literature review on the persistence of women faculty has been conducted to identify concepts and constructs related to each area of interest. Future work will include additional content validation and pilot testing to confirm the validity and reliability of the instrument.