Women in STEM face unique challenges that are often nebulous and difficult to identify. Since it all starts with education, I interviewed Jenna P. Carpenter, a seasoned engineering dean who has demonstrated remarkable outcomes using these interventions. Her engineering school boasts 60 percent female faculty (three times the national average).

Carpenter is the founding dean and professor of the School of Engineering at Campbell University and immediate past president of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE). She is an expert on issues impacting the success of women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and innovative STEM curricula.

She was awarded the 2023 ABET Claire Felbinger Award for Diversity and Inclusion, a co-recipient of the 2022 Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education from the National Academy of Engineering, the 2019 ASEE Sharon Keillor Award for Women in Engineering Education. In 2015, DreamBox Learning recognized her as one of the Top 10 Women in STEM Who Rock! for her advocacy.

Carpenter shared that there has been a significant accumulation of research demonstrating various barriers impacting the success of women in STEM, but they all boil down to unconscious bias. She explains,

“The biases that you have in the U.S. may be different if you were raised, say, in Asia. It’s called unconscious bias because we're not aware of it―it’s not the same as our conscious values and intentions. Because these biases may be opposite our intended values, it's difficult to get people to realize that we're........

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