The American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET), the Women in Engineering ProActive Network (WEPAN), and the American Physical Society Committee on the Status of Women in Physics (APS) offer a novel ADVANCE partnership proposal for the purpose of helping to meet numerous high-level calls from government, industry, and academe for a larger, diverse engineering workforce.

Demands for innovation, coupled with demographic shifts, and, most recently, the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and racial violence that have had gendered and racialized workforce impacts, create an urgent need to ensure that academic engineering environments are inclusive and equitable for diverse women faculty. This need will not be met unless engineering systems, cultures, and colleges shift explicit and semi-explicit structures, and implicit “mental models” that keep sexism and racism in place (Kania et al., 2018). 

The goal of the ASEE KnowlEDGE Initiative is to align engineering systems of accreditation, professional societies (ProSs) and academic colleges and departments, to ensure the inclusive and equitable success of diverse women engineers. Ultimately, embedded in our goal is the understanding that because diverse teams can embody enhanced capacity for problem solving, innovation, and resilience, inclusion of diverse women faculty advances engineering disciplinary excellence in a way that a homogenous professoriate cannot.

The KnowlEDGE Initiative extends the work of ASEE’s ADVANCE Adaptation Engineering Deans Gender Equity (EDGE) Initiative. As depicted in the Social-Ecological Model, engineering systems change to promote equitable, inclusive engagement of diverse women engineers requires change at the individual leader, engineering college, professional society and accreditation levels. For more information on the KnowlEDGE Initative Theory of Change, click here.