In 2011, Monica Cox broke a barrier for African-American women in engineering.
She became the first black woman to earn tenure in the College of Engineering at Purdue University at a time when women represented only 15 percent of tenured or tenure-track faculty in the school, according to data from the Office of Institutional Research, Assessment and Effectiveness.
According to Cox, the barriers she faced in trying to achieve this goal were not unique. The challenges came from the intersectionality of being a young, black and outspoken woman, said Cox, an associate professor in the School of Engineering Education.
“I must constantly educate people about ways to engage respectfully and inclusively with an ambitious woman of color,” she said. “At first, I saw this as a burden, but now I realize that one of the greatest opportunities that I have is to facilitate an open dialogue about issues of diversity, particularly as they pertain to women of color in higher education.”
Cox believes the ways in which discrimination, such as racism, sexism and classism, connect to oppress women are interconnected and cannot be scrutinized independently from one another.
“We’re exploring these traditional areas of oppression, but although these types of oppression might occur, we note that women still persist in engineering,” she said.
In September, Cox and her team of researchers received $1.4 million in funding from National Science Foundation for the research project “Why We Persist: An Intersectional Study to Characterize and Examine the Experiences of Women Tenure-Track Faculty in Engineering.”