“She’s a Way Better Programmer Than Me”: Implications for Racial-Gender Solidarity Among Black Engineering and Computing Graduate Students

Background: Within the challenging landscape of U.S. engineering and computing (E&C) doctoral programs, Black students navigate systemic racial barriers. While both Black men and women face marginalization, their experiences are shaped by distinct raced-gendered stereotypes. A critical, understudied dimension is whether Black men, who face their own gendered racism (Black misandry), can perceive and articulate the unique intersectional oppression faced by their Black women peers. This perceptual recognition is a foundational, yet often overlooked, precondition for building racial-gender solidarity.

Purpose: This study investigates how Black men in E&C doctoral programs perceive and describe the marginalization of Black women. It explores whether they recognize raced-gendered forms of bias and examines how these perceptions, or the lack thereof, influence the potential for solidarity within the Black STEM community.

Theoretical Framework & Methods: Guided by Critical Race Feminism and the Sociology of Perception, this qualitative study centers the raced-gendered realities of Black women while analyzing Black men’s interpretive frames. We conducted in-depth interviews with 28 Black men enrolled in E&C doctoral programs across the United States. Data were analyzed to understand how participants framed the experiences of Black women in their departments.

Results: A significant majority of participants (75%, n = 21) acknowledged the marginalization of Black women, articulating it through three key themes: Intellectual Devaluation; Exclusionary Practices, Profound Isolation. Participants in departments with few or no Black women struggled to articulate their experiences, often relying on speculation.

Conclusion & Implications: The findings reveal that Black men in E&C doctoral programs often possess a nascent awareness of Black women’s intersectional marginalization, rooted in their own experiences with racism and an emergent sense of linked fate. However, this recognition frequently fails to translate into deep intracultural empathy or active solidarity due to a critical structural barrier: profound underrepresentation.