“All told, if black and Hispanic women received engineering degrees at the rate of their white male counterparts, about 30,000 more women of each race would have earned engineering degrees from 2013 through 2015," said CJ Libassi, author of the report and former policy analyst for Postsecondary Education at the Center for American Progress. "That would be a tenfold increase for black women and a five-fold increase for Hispanic women, given that only about 3,000 black women and 6,000 Hispanic women graduated with engineering degrees over this period.”

Libassi also pointed out that America would have produced 13,000 more black female computer science bachelor’s degree holders and 17,000 Hispanic women with credentials in the field. Many times more than the existing number of black and Hispanic computer science bachelor’s degree recipients from 2013 through 2015, which were about 4,000 and 3,000, respectively.

“We must convey the importance of what engineers do — and that engineering is everywhere and in everything we see and do,” said Stephanie G. Adams, president-elect of the 12,000-member ASEE. “We must create opportunities for them to tinker, to break things and to question how things work. We need practicing engineers to serve as role models. We need community leaders and organizations to continue to create and support programs, camps and initiatives. We must make it clear that promoting engineering is a priority.”

Adams was lauded as “living proof that an African American woman can soar to the highest levels of the high-tech world, if given the opportunity.”

Presenting this year’s Tubman Award was Jeffrey Harris, founder and managing partner of a consultancy that specializes in the recruitment and advancement of traditionally underrepresented populations in engineering, technology and medicine.

Harris told Adams that he couldn’t imagine anyone more deserving of the award — or more representative of its namesake, the celebrated 19th century abolitionist who risked her life to lead hundreds of slaves and family members to freedom via the Underground Railroad, an elaborate network of safe houses.

“Harriet Tubman admonished us never to stop — to keep going,” Harris said. “Dean Adams’ career is a model for Ms. Tubman’s words.”

Since earning a doctorate in interdisciplinary engineering from Texas A&M University in 1998, Adams has held positions at Virginia Tech, Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

In 2016, Adams assumed her current post as dean of the Frank Batten College of Engineering and Technology at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, only the third black woman to lead an accredited U.S. engineering program.

“If we want to see a shift among women in engineering, we need to acknowledge that, just like in Hollywood, we must start doing some things differently,” Adams said. “Change is needed at every level.”

Harris, the Ohio-based consultant, said the plans that prove most effective share the same basic elements:

• In 2015, African American women received just 937 — or fewer than 1 percent — of the 106,658 bachelor’s degrees awarded by U.S. engineering programs, according to a 2017 study by Purdue University, the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) and the Women in Engineering ProActive Network (WEPAN).

Sadly, that figure was down from about 1,100 degree recipients a decade earlier.

• Minority women who aspire to a career in engineering won’t find many role models — at least role models who look like them — in the halls of academia. Barely 16 percent of the nation’s roughly 28,000 engineering faculty members are female.

African American women, Hispanic women and Native American women have even less representation — at 0.54 percent, 0.8 percent and 0.02 percent, respectively.