Jessica O. Perez, a faculty member of electromechanical engineering technology at Cal Poly Pomona, will be the guest speaker at the Cal State San Bernardino Women in Engineering Club event today, Wednesday, April 11, 5-6 p.m.

The presentation, “Understanding the Experience of Women in Undergraduate Engineering Programs at Public Universities,” will be held in the Santos Manual Student Union, Room 215. The event is free and open to the public. Parking at CSUSB is $6.

Perez, who specializes in qualitative research to understand how people see engineering, will talk about a study that conducted interviews of 22 women in various stages of their engineering education and discourse analysis in various sections of engineering gatekeeper courses. Since women earn bachelor’s degrees in engineering at a rate of less than 17 percent at public universities in California, the study was completed to understand how women experience undergraduate engineering programs.

The following questions were examined:

  1. How do women experience undergraduate engineering programs at public universities? 
  2. What role does classroom discourse play in shaping women’s experience in “gatekeeper” courses?  
  3. To what extent does the intersectionality of a) transfer status b) first-generation college status and c) race/ethnicity and gender impact this experience?

“The experience of the women is a journey of a cultural migrant; they leave one culture for another,” the study says. “The women are negotiating comparative norming, defining one’s success in reference to another’s; and are motivated by outcome expectancy, the promise of a secure future.”

Perez earned her bachelor’s degree in geology from Cal Poly Pomona, her master’s degree in geotechnical engineering from UC Berkeley, and her doctorate in engineering education from Claremont Graduate University. Perez was part of Education Partnership Program at UC Irvine and is passionate about empowering female engineering students and helping underrepresented students succeed in their studies. 

The talk is sponsored by the Women Engineering Club, a newly registered CSUSB student club, which is an IEEE Women in Engineering Student Branch Affinity Group, also recently chartered. IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity.

IEEE Women in Engineering (WIE) is one of the largest international professional organizations dedicated to promoting women engineers and scientists, and inspiring girls around the world to follow their academic interests in a career in engineering and science.

For more information about the Women Engineering Club at CSUSB, contact the student chair, Arusyak Hovhannesyan, at wie.chair.csusb@gmail.com, or George M. Georgiou, the faculty adviser, at georgiou@csusb.edu.