Diversity in Environmental Engineering—Successes and Challenges

Recent advances in technology and communication have made distances between places like Boston, Beijing, and Bombay less relevant and have firmly delivered us into the age of globalization. The global economy has brought great opportunities for businesses to create new partnerships while delivering their products and services to new markets in the 21st century. Engineering has emerged as a global enterprise, and employers have recognized the need to reshape their organizations to reflect the diversity of their markets. For them, diversity is rapidly becoming an economic necessity. For the United States, it is also a sociocultural imperative.

Despite efforts by the government, academia, and businesses, the lack of gender and ethnic diversity in the engineering profession remains a major challenge to the future success of the U.S. economy. The proportion of women and minority freshman in engineering has declined since 1995 (Chubin et al. 2005). Some have attributed such declines to the limitations of the American secondary and postsecondary education systems (Smith 2004), which continue to move talent from school to the engineering workforce, but in the process, lose a disproportionate number of women and minorities.

The Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors (AEESP) recently completed a study of the diversity of students and faculty of named environmental engineering degree programs (Jones et al. 2006). This study also evaluated gender and ethnic diversity in the environmental engineering workforce. AEESP used data available from the Engineering Workforce Commission, American Society of Engineering Education, U.S. Department of Labor, and the National Science Foundation to survey the number of women, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans among the target populations. A previous study by this organization had estimated that the nationwide numbers for environmental engineering degrees in 2004 were 1,245 BS degrees, 590 MS degrees, and 119 Ph.D. degrees (Jones et al. 2005). That paper also reported estimates of 1,100 and 45,500 for environmental engineering faculty and practitioners, respectively.

AEESP's recent survey concluded that the environmental engineering student body has better gender diversity than the field of engineering as a whole. Women received 42, 42, and 31% of environmental engineering BS, MS, and Ph.D. degrees, respectively, in 2003–2004 compared with 20, 22, and 17% of BS, MS, and Ph.D. degrees from all of engineering (ASEE 2004). Gender diversity was lower among environmental engineering faculty (14.9% women), but higher than all engineering faculty (9.9% women) (ASEE 2003). Women appeared to be better represented in the environmental engineering workforce (22% female) than in all engineering (11% female) (USCB 2000).

Even though gender diversity in environmental engineering has shown improvement in recent years, ethnic diversity in this discipline has remained similar to engineering as a whole and is significantly lower than the ethnic diversity of the U.S. population. The AEESP survey concluded that although African Americans comprised 12.3% of the national population, they accounted for 2.4, 2.5, and 1.7% of environmental engineering BS, MS, and Ph.D. graduates, respectively. They accounted for 4.9% of environmental engineering faculty and 4.2% of the environmental engineering workforce (USCB 2000; ASEE 2003, 2004). Similarly, Hispanic Americans constituted 8.9, 2.4, and 1.7% of BS, MS, and Ph.D. degree recipients, respectively, and 2.9% of faculty and 3.1% of practitioners, while accounting for 12.5% of the national population. Native Americans comprised 0.9% of the U.S. population and accounted for 2.0, 0.7, and 0%, respectively, of BS, MS, and Ph.D. graduates, and represented 0% of faculty and 0.3% of the environmental engineering workforce.

Clearly, young Americans, especially women and minorities, are not attaining engineering degrees at rates commensurate with their capacities to learn or at levels acceptable for our society's long-term welfare. There is a great opportunity here for environmental engineering educators and scholars to enhance learning experiences of all students in the classroom by combining our new knowledge about how people learn and our assets of diversity. In the next 12 to 15 years, undergraduate student enrollment is expected to increase by 2.6 million (Smith 2004). More than 80% of this increase will come from African American and Hispanic populations—the very populations that appear to fall through our leaky environmental engineering education pipeline.