  Each year, significant investment of time and resources is made to improve
diversity within engineering across a range of federal and state agencies,
private/not-for-profit organizations, and foundations. In spite of decades of
investments, efforts have not yielded desired returns - participation by
minorities continues to lag at a time when STEM workforce requirements are
increasing. In recent years a new stream of data has emerged - online social
networks, including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram - that act as a key sensor
of social behavior and attitudes of the public. Almost 87% of the American
population now participates in some form of social media activity.
Consequently, social networking sites have become powerful indicators of social
action and social media data has shown significant promise for studying many
issues including public health communication, political campaign, humanitarian
crisis, and, activism. We argue that social media data can likewise be
leveraged to better understand and improve engineering diversity. As a case
study to illustrate the viability of the approach, we present findings from a
campaign, #ILookLikeAnEngineer (using Twitter data - 19,354 original tweets and
29,529 retweets), aimed at increasing gender diversity in the engineering
workplace. The campaign provided a continuous momentum to the overall effort to
increase diversity and novel ways of connecting with relevant audience. Our
analysis demonstrates that diversity initiatives related to STEM attract voices
from various entities including individuals, large corporations, media outlets,
and community interest groups.
