MORE | Spring 2023

Inequity in the Engineering Faculty Workforce: How Marginalized Groups Used Signaling to Hedge from Discrimination

Despite the focus on diversity, women and minority faculty are still underrepresented in engineering. The research team aims to research one strategy that marginalized engineering faculty may have used to shield themselves from discrimination and examine its opportunity cost. Statistical discrimination means a decision-maker uses observable characteristics to infer gender or race/ethnicity for proxy discrimination. The team would analyze engineering faculty’s published articles to examine whether marginalized engineering faculty use writing with higher linguistic complexity as a signal to avoid statistical discrimination. The researchers have been collecting data from the Journal of Engineering Education and other sources.