Addressing underrepresentation of young women of color in engineering and computing through the lens of sociocultural theory

In the past several decades, women have made considerable progress toward gender equity in the USA, but women in general and women of color in particular continue to be underrepresented in some fields of STEM, notably engineering and computing. Women of color in these fields are also underrepresented in the STEM education research literature. In this article, we review the literature on sociocultural theory and empirical research grounded in it to propose a framework for thinking about how young women of color encounter and experience engineering and computing in local educational contexts, and how their encounters and experiences might be enhanced and lead to more sustained interests and identities in these fields. The framework motivates an examination of the interrelationships among institutional practices, normative discourses, identities, interactional dynamics, and experience-near external exclusions in the contexts of the young women’s lives. As such, our concerns are less with provision of the content per se of engineering or computing and more with the structure, organization, and discourses of the educational contexts in which the groundwork is laid for the development of interests and identities related to these fields. We briefly review significant challenges faced by middle and high school girls and young women of color as they encounter in-school and out-of-school practices and interactional dynamics related to engineering and computing, respond to local and societal discourses circulating about these fields, form social and personal identities with respect to these fields, and grapple with external exclusions, e.g., undocumented legal status and unresponsive institutions, affecting pursuit of engineering and computing. We then examine ways in which scholars taking sociocultural approaches have addressed these challenges through action research. Next, we assess the promise and limitations of these efforts in overcoming the challenges. Due to the sociocultural perspective that frames our approach, the research methodology used in the work we review is primarily qualitative, and the approach to action is primarily participatory action research. We conclude the paper with a preliminary synthesis of research on the sociocultural system in which young women of color in the USA and Canada encounter and pursue engineering and computing, including its foundational components in mathematics and science education. We argue that this system repeatedly plays out in unequal opportunity structures, deficit discourses, marginalizing interactions, conflicting identity demands, and external exclusions for many young women of color. The system carries expectancies that make sustained participation in engineering and computing risky and difficult, even if these young women have interest, ability, or ambitions to pursue these fields. We propose a program of response to these barriers, based in sociocultural practice theory.