Leadership and Management in Engineering

Within the engineering profession, women have traditionally been in the minority, especially in management and leadership roles. In Washington State, however, three women engineers, Denise Cieri, Stacy Trussler, and Wendy Taylor, lead a multibillion-dollar roadway design and construction project to ease congestion and improve traffic flow on the state’s second-most-traveled corridor, I-405. This paper provides excerpts from interviews with Cieri, Trussler, and Taylor in which they discuss the factors that influenced their successful careers and lives. In addition, Mr. Kim Henry, the Eastside Corridor project director, describes what it has been like for him to work with these three women.

The engineering industry is welcoming more women into the ranks, but few have made it through the boardroom door. It is imperative that companies incorporate more women into all levels of employment, but especially upper leadership positions, for three reasons: the labor pool is shrinking, lack of women among leadership dampens an organization’s productivity, and bottom-line results are better for organizations with women on the board. This article discusses these reasons and then describes five traits women (and men) can develop in preparation for effective leadership: persuasively communicate, lead with heart, take care of yourself, see the big picture, and know yourself.

The Leadership Institute, funded by the National Science Foundation to encourage women faculty in engineering and science to prepare for academic leadership roles, was designed to increase the accessibility of such training for faculty in the Midwest by providing short-term workshops within their geographic area at low cost. The leadership training was limited to women who had already received tenure and focused on the portable business and leadership skills women need to make a successful entry into department chair and dean positions. The participants learned about budgeting conventions at their home campuses, but most of the training was designed to generally equip them for academic leadership roles. This article describes the training and reports the results of longitudinal data collection to document the movement of women faculty into named leadership positions and assess the effectiveness of the leadership training

To address the dropoff of women in engineering at the graduate level, the Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE) program at Syracuse University collaborated with the Graduate School and Colleges of Engineering and Computer Science and Arts and Sciences to create a program for women graduate students in science and engineering. This paper provides an overview of available data on women in engineering and of the barriers they encounter. It then discusses the authors’ experiences with the WiSE Future Professionals Program (WiSE-FPP). Assessment data showed that WiSE-FPP provided a strong peer support network for program participants and gave the women an opportunity to engage with other women in STEM going through the same experiences. The peer mentoring offered by the program helped address barriers of isolation and the lack of successful women role models at the graduate level.

Despite tremendous gains over the past 30 years, women are still severely underrepresented in engineering and engineering education. The advancement of women into leadership roles in engineering education has the potential to make engineering as a career more attractive to young women and to encourage women currently pursuing careers in engineering education to aspire to leadership positions themselves. This article reports on a series of structured interviews in which women deans of engineering were asked to describe their role and accomplishments as dean, their career paths, and their perspective on the impact of gender on their leadership style. The interviews provide insights into how these women saw themselves as leaders and how they were leading their institutions in creating engineers for the 21st century.