Human Resources
In the climate crisis, we can’t forget the who.
Opinion by Shannon Gilmartin, Angela Harris, Christina Martin-Ebosele, and Sheri Sheppard
Fires raged in California during our study of undergraduate environmental engineering students’ career plans. For several days, the San Francisco Bay Area was blanketed in unbreathable orange air. The effects of environmental decline are not equally distributed: some communities face severe long-term consequences while others are buffered by regional wealth against environmental hazards [See “Toxic Legacy,” November/December 2021 Prism.]
Solutions to the global climate crisis tend to focus on the how and with what, examining technical innovations and societal policies for substantive change. Our study looked at the who—who will design technological solutions and synergistic policy to transform people’s attitudes and behaviors around environmental degradation? Who among those disproportionately affected by environmental decline will lead the solutions? We saw an urgent need for attention to this “people space.”
Our findings suggest a need to focus more on gender and racial inequality in environmental engineering education. Systems-based approaches in curricula and growing undergraduate student interest in the major are positive signs. However, three interrelated areas merit the attention of educators in order to realize substantive change: student recruitment, stereotypes in the field, and professional development.
Environmental engineering sees a relatively high proportion of women degree-earners, but racial diversity among them is limited. In the US, women earn half of all environmental engineering bachelor’s degrees—a far greater share than in most other engineering fields. However, White women compose the majority of that fifty percent. In contrast, Asian and Latina women make up just five and six percent, respectively. Black women (at 1 percent) and Indigenous women (at <1 percent) represent even tinier percentages. Environmental engineering must amp up recruitment efforts to build racial and ethnic diversity.
In addition, environmental discourse is deeply gendered and racialized. Environmental policy and climate science have excluded women from leadership—particularly women of color living on the front lines of environmental degradation. In a 2019 New York Times article, political and civic leader Heather McTeer Toney emphasized that while Black communities in the US face severe and disproportionate environmental risks every day, their voices are unheard or tokenized in decision-making about solutions. We see these disparities as at least partly the result of entrenched racialized gender stereotypes in environmental activism and climate communications. Drawing from White and western constructions of gender, men are associated with the business and science of the environment, “battling” decline, while women are seen as “naturally” responsible caretakers of earth and community. Such a binary understanding leaves the experiences of people of color on the margin. Environmental engineering educators need to foster conversations about how widely held gender and race beliefs net only a small White male elite seen as fit for environmental leadership.
Finally, career readiness builds from meaningful interactions, networks, mentorship, and curricular and cocurricular resources, but data suggest that these interactions don’t occur at the same rate for women and men in environmental engineering majors. Among undergraduate respondents to our national survey, women reported less-frequent conversations about their professional options with faculty and classmates than men did. Yet, among all other engineering majors, women reported more-frequent conversations about professional options than men. Why, in a newer, younger, smaller field positioned to transform how we live sustainably and reduce environmental risk, are women not talking as much about their careers as men? Why do we see hints in our data that women from underrepresented racial/ethnic minority backgrounds are talking with faculty about professional options more than men are, but these women are talking with their classmates less?
Educators must engage more deeply with gender and racial inequality not only as they relate to environmental risk but also in the lived experiences and leadership pathways of students. Which groups have strong interest in environmental problem-solving but perceive no substantive support for a pathway upwards and thus pursue other majors or jobs that do not fully leverage their expertise and experience? How can environmental engineering curricula be reframed to bring more students into and to the top of the field, equipped with public leadership skills? Our raging fires, toxic wastewater, and sinking cities demand rethinking not just how to solve problems but also who will do so, with what support from our educational system.
Shannon Gilmartin is a senior research scholar at the Stanford VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab and an adjunct professor in mechanical engineering at Stanford University. Angela Harris is an assistant professor at North Carolina State University in the Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering Department and a member of the university’s Global Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WaSH) research cluster. Christina Martin-Ebosele is a product design engineer and recent mechanical engineering graduate of Stanford University, where Sheri Sheppard is a professor of mechanical engineering.
This article is based on the authors’ 2021 ASEE Annual Conference paper “Who Will Lead Us Out of Climate Crisis? Gender, Race, and Early Career Pathways in Environmental Engineering.”