What is it about?

This study explores how 15 Latina undergraduates in engineering at a Southwestern Hispanic-Serving Institution make sense of their engineering journeys with respect to their institutional and departmental environments and how they resist to unwelcoming conditions investigate the types of resistance behaviors that 15 Latinas employ to navigate their journeys in engineering programs at a Southwestern Hispanic-Serving Institution. We also investigate how Latinas' set of identities impact their experiences within those settings and help shape their resistance. Findings point to pervasive female underrepresentation in engineering and make a novel contribution to the field by indicating that attending a Hispanic-Serving Institution campus with robust Latiné representation can make it harder to analyze overlapping unwelcoming conditions in an intersectional way. Finally, the study includes key recommendations for higher education institutions and engineering departments to address Latina underrepresentation and enhance the educational experiences and sense of belonging of Latina students in engineering.

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Why is it important?

Despite recognizing the need to broaden participation in STEM and diversify the STEM workforce in line with demographic shifts in the U.S. population, both ethnic/racial and female underrepresentation persist. Latiné college students confront multiple barriers to academic achievement within STEM, including pervasive feelings of isolation and detachment from their university settings due to negative campus climate and departmental experiences (Hurtado, 1994). Latinas occupy just 1.7% of STEM jobs even as they comprise 6.7% of the broader U.S. workforce (National Geographic, n.d.). Only 2.3% receive bachelor degrees in engineering (Gonzalez et al., 2020; National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, 2019). Once Latinas enter these fields, they have to contend with a culture of pervasive sexism, navigating unwanted sexual advances, beratement, questioning of their intelligence and ability to handle complex tasks and of their scientist identities (Shuster, 2024). The challenges that Latinas encounter in STEM are magnified within engineering programs, the most segregated on the basis of gender (Banda, 2012; Villa et al., 2016). According to the National Society of Professional Engineers, or NSPE (2020), the engineering field lacks parity in racial, ethnic and gender diversity, acknowledging that these gaps in representation and expansion of opportunity need to be addressed. It is crucial that these gaps in representation and broadening participation be addressed holistically to provide opportunities for underrepresented groups in STEM to access the field and boost U.S. capacity for global competition.

Perspectives

In addition to identifying as women of color, a disproportionate number of Latinas enter STEM disciplines as first-generation students and multilingual learners (ML), finding themselves at the intersection of the “fourfold identity bind” (Shi et al., 2023) while encountering departmental and institutional environments not designed to respond to their material and emotional needs. Resultingly, understanding the experiences of Latinas in engineering and foregrounding their perspectives will help highlight their particular challenges and the assets they bring to the field even as they navigate challenging institutional and departmental contexts. Understanding how Latinas respond to these environments and how these environments shape their experiences and emerging scientist identities can, in turn, provide recommendations for urgently needed departmental and institutional structural reforms to ensure retention and broadening of participation.

Marina Lambrinou
Loyola University Maryland

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This page is a summary of: “We deserve to take up space”: Exploring Latinas’ resistance behaviors in engineering at a Southwestern Hispanic-Serving Institution., Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, April 2025, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/dhe0000663.
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