Research Initiation: A Study on the Intersection of Race and Gender on Leadership Formation of Engineering Students

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Development of leadership skills by undergraduate engineering students is a key to successful careers in today's technology industries. Increasing diversity and inclusion in leadership is also critical for long-term success of technology companies as they increasingly become global enterprises. Yet, how to achieve this greater diversity of leadership continues to prove challenging in both engineering education and industry. This research will serve as a foundational study that explores how identity shapes the leadership beliefs of a diverse population of undergraduate engineering students. The influence of identity, such as race and gender, along with the effects of the intersection of identities on students' beliefs will also be studied. The aim is to identify the factors and create a model of these factors informing how students view leaders, leadership, and the student's own ability to lead. The results of this mapping will contribute to the research and education communities' efforts to train a diverse community of engineers as leaders in industry by creating a foundation model of factors that affect beliefs about students' leadership skills. The ultimate goal of this project is to create new educational approaches for increasing students' belief that they can be leaders. Intersectionality theory, used in this study, is based on the premise that individuals have multiple identities and that the intersection of these identities shape an individual's experiences. It also makes use of self-efficacy, the belief a person has that they are able to achieve a defined goal. Thus, one of the research aims is to include a broad range of identities by recruiting from a diverse pool of undergraduate engineering students. This will make it possible to probe students' leadership self-efficacy and elucidate how intersectionality of identities, namely race and gender, affects this self-efficacy. The strength of an individual's self-efficacy has been shown to strongly correlate with the sustained pursuit by an individual to successfully achieve their defined goal, while overcoming challenges to achieve it. The proposed research aims to identify students' beliefs about leaders, leadership, and their own abilities as leaders, while identifying how the intersectionality of their identities affects these beliefs. While there is a strong body of research on the impact a single identity, such as race/ethnicity or gender, has on engineering formation or leadership development, the nuances of the intersection of identities on leadership formation of engineering students still remains a significant gap in knowledge. This gap impacts the long-term retention and promotion of a diverse community of engineers and their ascension to leadership roles in industry. The research is structured as a qualitative study to analyze the leadership self-efficacy of engineering undergraduate students. Students will be interviewed on their leadership beliefs and a qualitative analysis will be performed using the constant comparative method. The results will be used to create a conditional matrix of leadership self-efficacy of undergraduate engineering students, where identities and intersection of identities are integrated. Finally, a model of leadership self-efficacy and factors that affect this self-efficacy will be developed from the analysis results.