How women of colour engineering faculty respond to wage disparities

ABSTRACT

Women of Color (WoC) engineering faculty in higher education differ in their approaches to coping with inequities and salary disparities. This study draws upon McGee's Stereotype Management [McGee, E. O. 2016. “Devalued Black and Latino Racial Identities: A By-Product of College STEM Culture?” American Educational Research Journal 53 (6): 1626–1662; McGee, E. O. 2020a. Black, Brown, Bruised: How Racialized STEM Education Stifles Innovation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. https://www.hepg.org/hep-home/books/black,-brown,-bruised#] and Identity Taxation [Hirshfield, L. E., and T. D. Joseph. 2012. “‘We Need a Woman, We Need a Black Woman': Gender, Race, and Identity Taxation in the Academy.” Gender and Education 24 (2): 213–227] to understand how WoC in Engineering respond to race and gender-based salary disparity in engineering higher education. Results reveal that WoC contend with identity taxation that forces them to navigate gendered negotiation systems to achieve salary parity. The racial backgrounds of WoC appeared to influence how they managed the impacts of pay inequity. Stereotype management emerges as a form of identity taxation that WoC use to navigate their academic environments. Our research suggests that, rather than confronting their structural racism, institutions of higher education place the onus on scholars of colour to use strategies to protect themselves from the reality of race/gendered wage disparity.

KEYWORDS:

• Women of color
• engineering education
• higher education
• salary
• identity taxation
• stereotype management

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Dr. Meseret Hailu and Dr. Monica Miles and research assistants Jordan Rhym and Ruth Boyajian. all of whom provided critical assistance with data collection and analysis. We must also thank Dr. Tiffany Joseph and Dr. Laura Hirshfield for their guidance and expertise in the writing of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 By WoC, we mean women who identify as Black/African American; Hispanic/Latina; Native American/Indigenous; Asian American/Asian, and Pacific Islander.

Additional information

Funding

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Numbers 1535327, 1535456, and 1712618. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.