Facilitating a Sense of Belonging for Women of Color in Engineering

Women of color have been historically underrepresented in the engineering discipline. Recent studies suggest that women of color experience a double bind because of their gender and racial underrepresentation and consequently, experience feelings of isolation and lack of a sense of belonging to the community of engineers. This chapter describes Nephrotex, an engineering virtual internship program designed for first-year undergraduate students to democratize access to authentic engineering practices. The internship program incorporated principles of legitimate peripheral participation and learner-centered design to create a supportive and inclusive engineering learning environment. Using pre-post surveys and team chat data, analyses classified the experiences of women of color in the virtual internship. Through the lens of human factors engineering, it is argued that certain features of Nephrotex—intentionally designed to maximize the experience of underrepresented youth in engineering—facilitated a positive experience for women of color.