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

Linked Fate and Black Solidarity

Challenges faced by Black men and women collectively underscore what Simien (2005) describes as linked fate, Black Americans’ belief that individual outcomes are tied to the group’s experiences (Dawson, 1994). Rooted in shared histories of enslavement and systemic racism, this concept aligns with Bronfenbrenner’s socio-ecological model (1977), emphasizing how racist environments shape collective consciousness. Linked fate provides the collective consciousness for solidarity. Simien (2005) found 85% of Black men and 71% of Black women expressed linked fate with Black men, while 78% of both groups felt it toward Black women. Linked fate presses how Black individuals’ recognition that individual progress is inseparable from collective experience emerges through interactions across social-ecological levels, where systemic racism continually shapes identity, values, and the pursuit of justice within and beyond institutions such as academia and STEM. Identifying a linked fate with other Black people can lead to collective action as a necessary form of resistance to White supremacy (Capers & Smith, 2016). Such recognition not only orients individuals toward collective struggle but also shapes the broader patterns of connection through which Black solidarity becomes possible (Hoston, 2009).

Black solidarity is grounded in racial identity and unified resistance, and it emerges as both a political and an effective response to oppression, allowing for coordinated responses to oppressive incidents and systems (Shelby, 2001). Black solidarity acts as a mode of knowing and affirming Black humanity in anti-Black contexts, given that the environments are designed for the constant demise and the intellectual erasure of Black people (McGee, 2025b). The Combahee River Collective (1977) insisted that Black liberation required intra-racial unity even amid gendered tensions, writing that,

Their statement emphasized that solidarity is not the absence of conflict but the willingness to remain in coalition while actively challenging gendered harm, modeling a form of linked struggle crucial for contemporary Black communities in White-dominated institutions. Black solidarity emerges as an interdependent survival praxis rather than a series of isolated acts or male-dominated projects. Under conditions of racial terror, Black women’s alignment with Black men and shared commitments to racial uplift emerge as collective strategies to protect Black life and cultivate the race’s moral development, not as evidence of patriarchal deference (Curry, 2017; Newman, 1999). This tradition grounds a view of racial solidarity as a moral and political necessity because anti-Black racism targets Black people as a collective and resistance must likewise be collective rather than individualized striving or assimilationist success (Curry, 2017; More, 2009). In contemporary educational and E&C contexts, this logic is taken up as justice-oriented solidarity, where confronting institutionalized anti-Blackness requires ongoing collaboration, reciprocal accountability, and shared action to affirm Black humanity within learning spaces (Jackson, 2020; More, 2009)

Black Misandry in Engineering

In 2010, William Smith introduced Black misandry as “an exaggerated pathological aversion toward Black men created and reinforced in societal, institutional, and individual ideologies, practices, and behaviors” (p.267). Smith (2010) further argued that Black men carry at least two stigmatized social identities as they move through institutional spaces: (1) as a member of the African American¹ race (facing stereotypes and racism) and (2) as a Black man (facing assumptions and stereotypes about Black men specifically). Smith’s assertion also implies that racism and racism + sexism operate in different ways. For example, a student may be treated a certain way simply because they are Black, but there is certain treatment reserved for people who are both Black and a man and that treatment is different from people who are both Black and a woman. Thus, like their female counterparts, Black men in STEM must cope with both gendered and race-based strategies (Smith et al., 2007) to counter structural Black misandry in higher education institutions.

In E&C contexts, Black misandry manifests as routine hyper-surveillance, racial profiling, and presumptions of danger or deviance that position Black men as out of place in classrooms, labs, and even co-curricular spaces, often enforced by faculty, staff, peers, and campus police (Brooms, 2025; Haley, 2025). Black male E&C students are frequently treated as academically suspect, assumed to be athletes rather than scholars, given lower expectations, and denied full belonging while navigating constant racial and gendered microaggressions that signal they are both hypervisible and invisible (Burt et al., 2018, 2020; Greene et al., 2025; Spencer, 2024). These dynamics produce nonnormative role strain and racial battle fatigue, forcing Black men to overperform, continually “prove” their intelligence, and manage stereotypes to be recognized as legitimate engineers (Burt et al., 2018, 2020; Brown et al., 2024; Greene et al., 2025; McGee, 2016; Spencer, 2024). In this sense, Black misandry in engineering is not only an ideology but a set of everyday institutional practices that systematically constrain Black men’s opportunities to thrive in these fields (Brooms, 2025; Haley, 2025).

Black Women Navigating E&C Spaces Performing Legitimacy, Bearing the Burden

Black women in E&C occupy uniquely marginalized positions that are often rendered invisible within both racial and gender equity efforts. Although often recruited to bolster institutional diversity metrics, they are subjected to identity taxation, otherwise known as the Black tax, which constitutes burdensome expectations to mentor students of color, represent institutional diversity, and conform to White, heteropatriarchal norms of professionalism, all while navigating hyper-surveillance and epistemic exclusion (Dortch et al., 2025; McGee et al., 2022). Table 1 draws on data from the American Society of Engineering Education to demonstrate the extreme underrepresentation of Black women in the engineering professoriate. Rather than being recognized for their intellectual contributions, Black women are often positioned as laborers within systems that exploit their presence without altering the institutional culture that marginalizes them (McGee et al., 2023).

Central to their navigation of E&C spaces is a continual negotiation of identity, in which Black women must self-monitor, code-switch, and manage perceptions of competence to maintain legitimacy (Fletcher et al., 2023; Ross et al., 2021). Black women must downplay their race, gender, and familial commitments to gain access, only to find that such concessions do not protect them from isolation, erasure, or epistemic oppression (Prescod-Weinstein, 2020). Scholars argue that Black women resist this erasure through constructing peer networks, invoking Black feminist epistemologies, and occupying conceptual spaces that challenge dominant definitions of what it means to be an engineer (Cull, 2021; Lane & Id-Deen, 2023). These acts are forms of survival and resistance, but they are also largely unrecognized by the institution and peers, including Black men, whose own marginalization does not always translate into solidarity.

Understanding this disconnect is critical. While Black men in E&C also endure racialized stress and exclusion, research suggests their understanding of Black women’s experiences is often limited by gendered blind spots or shaped by masculinist narratives of STEM success (Watkins & McGowan, 2022). The assumption that shared race necessarily fosters shared perception overlooks the particular forms of labor and marginalization that Black women encounter (McGee, 2025a; Nicole et al., 2026). For example, Black women often provide critical academic and emotional support to their male peers, yet are rarely perceived as facing greater or qualitatively different burdens (Watkins & McGowan, 2022). Understanding Black men’s perceptions of Black women therefore requires attention to Black women’s structural location within E&C spaces, as well as to how these spaces reproduce White patriarchal gender hierarchies that impede the development of racial–gender solidarity among Black men and women. Interrogating these dynamics is essential for moving solidarity beyond rhetoric toward a truly transformative coalition.

Sociology of Perception and Critical Race Feminism

This paper examines how Black men in STEM doctoral programs perceive Black women, using the sociology of perception as an analytical framework. The sociology of perception was first proposed in 1950 by Arthur Child as a way to distinguish mental facts from other social or cultural facts while also understanding how external factors impacted these perceptual facts within the mind. As Friedman (2011) expanded, “the sociology of perception emphasizes that perception is a culturally constructed process, and seeks to identify the perceptual conventions, perceptual traditions, perceptual norms, and processes of perceptual enculturation associated with membership in different perceptual communities” (p.188). The sociology of perception falls under the broader umbrella of the sociology of knowledge, providing a way to understand the integral link between mental perceptions and phenomena outside of the individual (Child, 1950). While the utility of the framework is clear, perception remains understudied (Friedman, 2011).

The sociology of perception is rooted in social constructivism; thus, this approach posits that reality is socially constructed. People do not perceive within a vacuum, but rather, these interpretations are shaped by society as well as personal experiences. Perception can be thought of as the process of forming impressions (Friedman, 2011). Individuals interpret others, relationships, events, contexts, and everything in their environment and may or may not form the same perceptions of others within this environment (Friedman, 2011).

Given the socially-constructed nature of perceptions, context and personal experiences matter immensely. Friedman (2016) argued that racial perception is often guided by a White-normative lens, which treats Whiteness as an invisible standard and marks Blackness as “different.” Within this framework, Black individuals in stereotyped environments face disproportionately harsh judgment compared to other settings (Riddleberger & Motz, 1957). Oswald and Adams (2023) argued that marginalized perceivers occupy a unique perceptual position shaped by their continual awareness of identity-based threat and unequal power relations. For Black perceivers, this awareness emerges from navigating environments where their identities are frequently stereotyped and surveilled. As a result, they engage in the constant monitoring that McGee describes as stereotype management (2016), a tactical attunement to cues of safety and threat that requires the continual allocation of cognitive and emotional resources to reading their environments. Rather than distortion, this heightened vigilance is a strategic adaptation to racialized contexts, shaping what is noticed, how attention is distributed, and how meaning is constructed in spaces where their competence is persistently questioned.

So, those marginalized within STEM environments are often perceived more harshly than majority groups. However, given shared experiences of marginalization, Black men may perceive their Black female counterparts differently than White men perceive Black women in STEM. This is not only impacted by these shared experiences, but also by impressions of the environment generally, as well as context-specific interactions within the context. As mentioned, perceptions are not static but actively shaped by individual backgrounds and contextual factors. Accuracy, however, depends on opportunities for observation and exposure duration (Campbell, 1967). For Black men in this study, more interaction with Black women in STEM may yield more accurate perceptions.

The sociology of perception and CRF provide a dual framework for understanding how marginalized individuals both see and are seen within systems of power. The sociology of perception helps explain how Black men’s interpretations of Black women are shaped by cultural norms, institutional contexts, and the perceptual hierarchies that privilege Whiteness and masculinity. Critical Race Feminism, in turn, grounds this analysis in the lived realities of Black women, insisting that their experiences of race and gender cannot be disentangled from the structures that produce them.

We posit that the sociology of perception and CRF reveal a critical synergy: perception is a socially-embedded, relational process. Consequently, the structural opportunities for interaction that shape Black men’s perceptions of Black women are not incidental but constitutive of the potential for racial-gender solidarity. Without the relational infrastructure for accurate perception, solidarity remains an abstract potential, unable to translate recognition into action. This combined lens leads us to a core thesis of this paper: accurate perception is a relational achievement, not just an individual cognitive one. The opportunities for observational exposure that inform Black men’s perceptions are the same relational channels required to transform a foundational linked fate into the active, sustained work of racial-gender solidarity.

Positionality Statement

This study is grounded in a critical research paradigm that recognizes knowledge production as situated, reflexive, and shaped by the social positions of those conducting it. Guided by Secules and colleagues (2021) and Esposito and Evans-Winters (2021), we approach positionality not as a procedural inclusion but as a methodological imperative within critical, intersectional inquiry. As such, we explicitly foreground our identities as researchers, not to decenter participants but to acknowledge that interpretation is never neutral. These frameworks emphasize the need for recursive reflexivity across the research lifecycle, attending to how researchers’ identities, ideological orientations, and institutional affiliations shape the construction, execution, and interpretation of qualitative studies. Accordingly, we center our positionality as a critical lens through which this project was developed and conducted.

Our interdisciplinary team includes two Black women, one Black man, and one White woman, with training in engineering, education, psychology, and sociology. Two team members have direct STEM experience, including one “recovering engineer” whose race-gendered experiences continue to shape her reflections. Our racialized and gendered positions informed every stage of the study, from designing interview protocols to identifying analytic themes. The Black women researchers contributed experiential and theoretical insight into intersectional structures affecting Black women in STEM, helping illuminate silences, resistance, and coping in participants’ narratives and preventing interpretations of Black men’s perspectives from flattening gendered oppression. The Black male researcher brought awareness of how race and gender operate within White patriarchal spaces. The White woman’s positionality prompted critical questioning of Whiteness and institutional authority, especially during peer debriefing. Our analysis was guided by ongoing reflexive dialogue across identity, disciplinary, and experiential differences, enabling a more nuanced and ethically grounded understanding of how Black men perceive the marginalization of their Black women peers.

Intersectional Marginalization of Black Women in Engineering & Computing

For some men, this recognition emerged not only through abstract reflection but through direct exposure to the gendered climates of their departments. Armel, a 4^th year doctoral student at Southern State University 1 studying Material Science and Engineering, described how the absence of women in his research group made sexist dynamics more visible rather than less. Reflecting on what he had observed, he explained:

Armel’s account demonstrates how the perceptual conditions for recognizing marginalization are shaped by men’s proximity to the exclusion of women. In his case, the combination of women’s near absence and men’s unchecked behavior made gendered hostility unmistakable. His reflection also illustrates an emerging intersectional awareness: he not only identified sexism but noted that the isolation would be magnified for Black women in particular.

Other participants echoed this narrative, explaining that there exists a host of sexist stereotypes that seek to classify women as intellectually inferior. For example, Jacob, a second-year student majoring in industrial systems engineering at Southern Technical University 1, provides a nuanced look at how race and gender might interplay to make that exclusion worse for Black women. He explains,

Jacob’s account reveals the compounded marginalization faced by Black women as he shares how his identity as a man is not only seen as inherently suited to engineering but also enables him to access the male camaraderie fostered in the homogeneously male environment of E&C. While Jacob shared his discomfort of often being the only Black person in the room, he simultaneously acknowledges that this experience is mitigated by his gendered access to belonging among his male peers. Importantly, Jacob extends this reflection by imagining how that experience would shift were he a Black woman, recognizing that the dual isolation of being both racially and gender-marginalized would further compound the difficulty of navigating these spaces.

Other E&C students also participate in intellectually devaluing Black women, creating a toxic environment. Samir, a 5th year PhD student at Southern State University 4 majoring in electrical and computer engineering, explains how a Black and Filipino woman, Sasha, was treated poorly by her classmates during a group project. He explains that:

Samir further explains that Sasha had a history of excellence in her coursework. Later in the semester, their professor published scores for an exam and while Samir had admittedly scored below average, he explained how an old teammate went around asking everyone what they scored on the test. When the teammate eventually arrived at Sasha, she was seemingly embarrassed to tell him her score. But after being repeatedly questioned, she simply showed him the score by putting her test down on the table for him to see. She had gotten the highest score in the class. Her classmate’s response was to say, “I can’t believe you got this” and to start looking for errors in her test’s grading. When faced with the reality that a Black woman had scored higher than him on the test, Sasha’s old teammate simply could not believe it. Instead of congratulating her, he attempted to justify his initial interpretation by looking for errors in her test grading, rather than simply accept reality.

The Male Huddle

In our prior work on gendered experiences in engineering, we identified six themes that characterized Black women’s experiences, one of which was the male huddle, a phenomenon where the men gathered and collaborated at the exclusion or the extreme minimization of women (Brockman, 2021; Robinson et al., 2015). Harold, a 4th year chemical engineering student at Southern Private University 1, explained how despite the numbers of women in his department increasing, he noticed an almost visceral reaction from the other men in his department. Harold explains:

Harold went on to explain that many of the women coped with this exclusion by excelling in their coursework. Like Sasha, they often received higher grades than the men in their classes and eventually gained the respect of their classmates. However, this respect was achieved only after repeatedly outperforming peers in a space already stacked against them and often this newfound respect was short-lived.

Several men linked the male huddle not only to peer dynamics but to the broader gendered culture modeled by senior faculty. These participants noted that the norms shaping men’s collaboration were reinforced by professors whose attitudes toward women signaled what, and who belonged in engineering spaces. One participant explained:

His account illustrates how sexist assumptions circulate informally among peers while also being directly and indirectly sanctioned by faculty. In this sense, the male huddle was not merely a student-level practice of exclusion but reflected a gendered climate in which men were positioned as the default engineers and women were treated as potential liabilities or exceptions. This faculty-reinforced culture further legitimized the patterns of collaboration, gatekeeping, and devaluation that participants like Harold and Rameen observed among their male peers.

Participants increasingly recognized that gender shaped not only who was included in peer networks but also whose work was affirmed and validated by faculty. Rameen, a first-year computer science major at Northern Private University 2, provides a nuanced look at how faculty create a culture that encourages the male huddle. Rameen starts his story by affirming that if he were a Black woman, yes, his experience would be different and, he then shares a story of what happened to one of his colleagues, Ayana, during a class they took together:

Rameen’s account reveals how faculty endorsement serves as a powerful gatekeeping mechanism, one that strengthens the male huddle by rewarding men for behaviors that women are penalized for. Conversely, witnessing this disparity deepened Rameen’s understanding of the gendered trials Black women face in E&C programs.

Underrepresentation and Isolation

While we know that Black men and Black women are underrepresented, we rarely examine how they understand and perceive each other’s underrepresentation which limits our understanding of peer dynamics in STEM. Underrepresentation also emerged as a structural pattern that participants observed across their departments, shaping not only who was present but who remained. Alex, a biomedical engineering doctoral student, noted that while he interacted with several women at the graduate level, their numbers sharply declined at the faculty stage. Reflecting on recent departmental turnover, he explained:

Alex’s reflections highlight how underrepresentation is not simply a matter of pipeline scarcity but the outcome of gendered evaluative standards that narrow the pathway as women advance. For the men in this study, these structural patterns shaped their everyday interactions (or lack thereof) with women. In programs where Black women were absent or rarely retained, men’s opportunities to observe their experiences were significantly restricted, reinforcing the perceptual gaps.

Many participants had difficulty imagining what it would be like to be a Black woman in their department simply because they had no frame of reference. Hector, a 4th year chemical engineer at Southern Private University 1, explains: “Um, I would say that it – I could see that being different, um, just from what I’ve noticed of people…of the other women in my department and the PhD students. There aren’t any other African American women in my PhD program but from the women who are in the PhD program…” Since there was a complete lack of Black women in Hector’s program, he had to make approximations of what it would be like to be a Black woman in his context based on what he saw non-Black women going through. He explained that the few women who were in his department typically took longer to select an advisor. And if they did, they tended to pick the one professor who was a woman.

Todd, a 3rd year mechanical engineering student at Eastern State University, also fumbles with this question due to a lack of women in his department: “That’s really difficult to answer. That is a…I mean, okay, in the mechanical engineering department, there aren’t that many women. But they’re there. I guess I don’t really interact with them too much because they’re in other labs.” However, Todd goes on to explain that his advisor is a woman and explains that his view of how women are treated in the department is filtered through her. However, he realized STEM environments can produce different experiences for Black women in comparison to White women.

Tatum, a 3rd year material science student at Midwestern Private University 2, echoes this sentiment by explaining: “I would say that, it’s harder to answer that, Black woman, because there are none, there are no Black women in the department. Um, there’s a lot of women, but most of them are not underrepresented minorities.” He goes on to say, yes, he does think the experience would be different, but because there are no Black women with whom to share experiences with, he’s just not sure exactly how.

While some women successfully confronted and coped with being minoritized by gender and excluded from learning communities, the lack of representation in their programs sometimes led to them feeling isolated. Saleem, a 7th year, computer science major at Southern State University 4, explained his perception of how isolating E&C programs can be for Black women and how isolation is counterproductive to the format of these settings. Saleem recounts how his classmate, Mya, would try to isolate herself in classes and try to do assignments by herself:

Saleem went on to explain that Mya got a “bad vibe” from the environment and decided to get her master’s and leave the department to pursue her doctorate at another university.

Underrepresentation as Relational Breakdown

Ultimately, the most profound structural barrier to solidarity is the very underrepresentation the study set out to examine. As the accounts of Hector, Todd, and Tatum demonstrate, a ‘complete lack of Black women’ in their programs forced them to speculate about their counterparts’ experiences, often through the lens of White women’s realities. This absence fractures the very foundation of linked fate, reducing it to an abstract concept rather than a lived, relational reality. Mya’s story tragically illustrates the consequence of this perceptual void. Her isolation and eventual departure are not individual failures but the direct result of an institutional environment that, through its failure to achieve critical mass, makes it impossible to build the trust and mutual recognition necessary for survival, let alone solidarity (Ong et al., 2011; Stitt & Happel-Parkins, 2019). Thus, underrepresentation does not merely create a numbers problem; it actively dismantles the relational infrastructure required for empathy, coalition, and collective resistance.

Limitations and Future Directions

This study provides a crucial foundation by mapping the perceptual landscape of Black men in E&C; however, its focus on recognition, not action, unveils a critical next frontier for research. The pressing question is no longer merely if Black men see the marginalization of Black women, but under what conditions does this recognition catalyze into tangible solidarity? Future work must employ longitudinal and ethnographic methods to trace this pathway from perception to practice, investigating how linked fate can be mobilized to disrupt, rather than just witness, systemic inequity.

A profound limitation and central finding is that the very phenomenon of underrepresentation structurally limited this investigation. For many participants, the “complete lack of Black women” in their departments created a perceptual void, forcing them to approximate their peers’ experiences. This is not merely a methodological constraint but a stark reflection of the relational crisis within E&C. Consequently, research in institutions that have successfully cultivated a critical mass of Black students is urgently needed. Such settings can serve as vital natural laboratories to study how robust representation actively fuels linked fate and enables the relational work of solidarity.