When Rose Marra obtained her master’s degree in computer science in 1986, she says she “was in a very much male-dominated environment, and support would have been nice.” While she did have some mentoring as a professional, the male-dominated trend continued in her work environment. The topic of women in the engineering field has become a major research interest for Marra, an assistant professor in the College’s School of Information Science and Learning Technologies.

Since her student experience, the numbers have not changed substantially. “There is still a lack of women practicing and studying engineering,” Marra says. “Around 20 percent of all engineering undergraduate students are female.” To learn more about this phenomenon and hopefully shift the trend, Marra has worked on the Assessing Women in Engineering (AWE) Project since September, 2001.

The AWE Project is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and its goal is to have developed standardized assessment tools to research what brings and keeps women in engineering. To gather information, the AWE Project has networked with five Women in Engineering programs located on university campuses across the U.S. These programs, of which there are nearly 75, recruit and help retain women in their engineering programs.

With her academic counterparts at Pennsylvania State University, Marra has worked with program directors across the nation to gather information about women studying engineering at the undergraduate level. On AWE’s Web site, program directors can download free assessment tools and obtain helpful ideas on how to get women to come to, and to stay in the engineering field.

To go beyond this research, which focuses on activities outside of the classroom, Marra and her team were awarded a second grant from NSF. This new grant will analyze classroom experiences and see if environments vary for women by emphasis area and if women experience the environment differently than men. Marra says this grant, called Assessment of Women in Engineering In Student Environments, will help “discover what is going on, what is working and what isn’t in classroom settings.” She anticipates that once completed, the research “will be able to determine implications for educators and outline what needs to take place in engineering classrooms across the nation to retain women in the field of engineering.”