Did the NAE Changing the Conversation Campaign Introduce the Care Penalty into Engineering?

Abstract

Over the past twenty years, the National Academy of Engineering of the United States of America undertook a campaign entitled, "Changing the Conversation." Explicit intentions of the campaign included raising public awareness of engineering, increasing the total number of engineers, and recruiting historically underrepresented groups to join engineering. In particular, marketing efforts developed inclusive "tag lines" aimed to diversify groups enrolled in engineering and increase the diversity of the professional engineering workforce. While changes in demographics were disappointing for some groups (i.e., little to no change was observed for people of color), generally, the campaign has been considered moderately successful for increasing the number of females joining engineering. This is speculated to be associated with the use of tag lines that helped to "humanize engineering" (i.e., emphasizing the "people helping" aspects of engineering rather than the "building things" aspects of engineering).