Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and/or Queer/Questioning (LGBTQ+) college students are a minority group who face the emerging challenges of adulthood and career decision making, as well as the unique challenge of navigating a minority sexual or gender identity. Some emerging adults may find identity exploration and commitment to be a smooth process; however, emerging adults with marginalized identities, such as sexual and gender minority youth, may find identity development to be an arduous process as they navigate oppressive contexts. Engineering has historically been dominated by white, heterosexual males, where LGBTQ+ persons are underrepresented, possibly leading to unique sexual identity and career development experiences of LGBTQ+ engineering students. Currently, career and vocational identity development among LGBTQ+ college students and engineering students is understudied.

This study fills an important gap in literature about the relationship between career development and decision making and identity development. A nationwide survey of over 400 LGBTQ+ college students was conducted across all majors, followed by an additional survey of 88 LGBTQ+ students in engineering. As part of the survey, respondents answered questions about mental health, sexual orientation history, discrimination, educational and career development history, vocational identity, career decisions, and sexual or gender identity, as well as demographic information. Respondents also answered three open-ended questions about their career goals, perceived barriers to meeting those goals, and support systems which helped to address those barriers. Our preliminary results show that many more LGBTQ+ college students’ express confidence in their sexual identity than in their career identities, potentially indicating that LGBTQ+ students must first overcome feelings of alienation towards their sexual identity before they can comfortably develop their career identity.  This supports the “bottleneck hypothesis”, which indicates that LGBTQ+ youth may delay aspects of their identity, such as a career identity, until they have worked through the process of developing a LGBTQ+ identity.

This presentation will also summarize the reported barriers and supports to LGBTQ+ students achieving their career goals. Initial analysis identified 5 main themes in the reported barriers of the respondents, including health, discrimination, resources, technical skills and emotional ability. Additional analysis will contrast and compare the differences in responses between LGBTQ+ engineering students of the second survey with the responses of the initial survey of LGBTQ+ college students of all majors. The conclusions of this research will help to identity challenges and support systems more precisely, as well as lay the foundation for further supports to be built for LGBTQ+ students.


Career Identity Development of Lgbtq+ Engineering College Students

Division / Sponsors: 
Aerospace, Bioengineering, Applied Mechanics, Design Engineering Division, Advanced Energy Systems, Manufacturing Engineering Division, Noise Control and Acoustics, Nondestructive Evaluation, Diagnosis, and Prognosis (NDPD), Nuclear Engineering Division, Process Industries Division, Fluids Engineering, Heat Transfer, Materials, Microelectromechanical Systems, Safety Engineering and Risk Analysis, Computers & Information in Engineering


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2020/volume/84478

IMECE2020 - Virtual Conference

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.