Presence of female faculty members in colleges and universities is growing, but many programs continue to reduce the gender gap in an attempt to better balance gender representation in engineering faculty. While many programs report increasing percentages in female hires and retainment of women in faculty roles, reporting of gender as a percentage of the faculty body may not capture a full representation of interaction between students and female faculty. Faculty teaching assignments vary based on rank and professorship and the percent of the faculty body may not be the most insightful mechanism for capturing the true impact of a female hire on the students in a program. In order to better capture the female faculty impact, a study was conducted to map contact hours as a reporting mechanism that can be paired with percentage of faculty as a more robust representation of the gender distribution within a department. Course credit hours for undergraduate curriculum programs were mapped to faculty gender for multiple departments within a college of engineering. Credit hours as well as hours of in-class sessions were reported to capture the minimum contact between a student attending class and a faculty directing the class; results exclude office hours, email contact, and other out-of-class engagement, thereby representing a minimum contact hours number. The results from this exercise demonstrate that the faculty teaching assignment is not directly comparable to percent of body. Programs appearing to have less female faculty than national averages may not necessarily have less female faculty interactions. The compound metric capturing both credit hour and percent of body may be a preferred metric in understanding the exposure of students to female faculty role models.

received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Florida and his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota. Since 1998, he has been a member of the faculty in the College of Engineering at the University of Tennessee, where he is currently professor and associate head in the Materials Science & Engineering Department. Prof. Keffer is a multiscale materials modeler, using computational simulations to develop structure-property relationships in nanostructured materials. He was awarded a Fulbright Distinguished Lectureship to teach at

is a teaching professor in construction engineering at Iowa State University. A retired U.S. Navy Civil Engineer Corps officer (O-5), she has taught a design-build capstone course for civil and construction engineering students, project management for civil engineers, engineering leadership courses, and the construction engineering learning community. Hartmann received her Bachelor of Arts in Architecture in 1989 from Iowa State University. She received her Master of Science and PhD in Civil Engineering with an emphasis in Construction Engineering and Management from Iowa State university in 1996 and 2016, respectively.