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

培养工科本科生的领导能力是当今科技行业成功职业生涯的关键。随着科技公司日益成为全球企业，增加领导层的多样性和包容性对它们的长期成功也至关重要。然而，在工程教育和行业中，如何实现这种更大的领导层多元化仍然是一个挑战。这项研究将作为一项基础性研究，探索身份认同如何塑造不同群体的工科本科生的领导信念。还将研究身份认同的影响，如种族和性别，以及身份相交对学生信念的影响。其目的是找出这些因素，并创建一个这些因素的模型，以告知学生如何看待领导者、领导力和学生自身的领导能力。这一映射的结果将有助于研究和教育社区通过创建影响学生领导技能信念的因素的基础模型，将多样化的工程师社区培养为行业领导者。这个项目的最终目标是创造新的教育方法，让学生相信他们可以成为领导者。本研究中使用的交叉性理论是基于这样的前提，即个人具有多个身份，这些身份的交集塑造了个人的经历。它还利用了自我效能感，即一个人相信自己能够实现一个确定的目标。因此，研究目标之一是通过从不同的工程学本科生池中招聘来包括广泛的身份。这将有可能探索学生的领导自我效能感，并阐明身份的交叉性，即种族和性别，如何影响这种自我效能感。个人自我效能感的强弱已被证明与个人在克服挑战以实现其既定目标的同时，对成功实现其既定目标的持续追求密切相关。这项拟议的研究旨在确定学生对领导者、领导力以及他们自己作为领导者的能力的信念，同时确定他们身份的交叉性如何影响这些信念。虽然有大量关于单一身份，如种族/民族或性别，对工程学形成或领导力发展的影响的研究，但身份交集对工程学学生领导力形成的细微差别仍然是一个巨大的知识差距。这一差距影响了长期留住和提拔多样化的工程师群体，以及他们在行业中晋升为领导角色。本研究采用质的研究方法，对工科本科生的领导自我效能感进行分析。学生将接受关于他们的领导信念的访谈，并将使用恒定比较的方法进行定性分析。研究结果将被用于构建工科本科生领导自我效能感的条件矩阵，其中身份认同和身份交集被整合在一起。最后，根据分析结果建立了领导自我效能感模型以及影响领导自我效能感的因素。

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.