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What counts as “engineering”: Toward a redefinition
Abstract
Women's persisting underrepresentation in engineering disciplines, at all academic and professional levels, is determined to be a considerable problem for engineering education. Alarmingly, still relatively recent data indicate that the rate at which women are increasingly going into engineering undergraduate degree programs is decreasing, suggesting that we may be far from understanding its cause (Grose, 2006). Much of the existing research on gender in engineering within the engineering literature focuses on this "underrepresentation of women" problem through the analytic lenses of pipeline models and chilly climate models, although a few other models have been proposed, such as a transmission line (Watson & Froyd, 2007), or, outside engineering, the glass ceiling and labyrinth (Eagly & Carli, 2007; Morrison, White, Van Velsor, & Center for Creative Leadership, 1994). These models tend to frame the issue of women's participation in engineering as a problem of insufficient numbers. The frequent use of pipeline and chilly climate models implies certain conditions and conceptualizations about the problem we think we are trying to solve. Pipelines imply that the reason women are not in engineering professions is because they leak out at certain critical transition points, particularly from high school and college, and between degree programs. While there is evidence to support this model, some scholars have argued that this does not accurately map women's experiences (Xie & Shauman, 2003); for example, there is no room in this model for women to "leak" back in to the pipeline (and associated metaphors of contamination are brought with them when leaks do occur), although women returning to the traditional STEM workforce after raising children is a common life path. In addition, the metaphor allows us to overlook the question of fault: pipes leak, and we need not concern ourselves with the faulty or otherwise problematic infrastructure that permits the leaks, but instead patch up any holes and move on. In contrast to pipelines, chilly climates imply that there is something environmentally hostile about a workplace or learning place, which either a) a given population is ill-equipped to survive and needs special equipment to do so, or b) is experienced only by a given population and that requires them to have additional tools to survive. Despite their limitations, the two models work well together, as pipeline models focus on the results of leaks, while the chilly climate focuses on the cause of the leaks. However, each of these is also an imperfect metaphor, and while together they have proven somewhat effective until now, the disturbing downward trend of women's participation rates in college- level education programs in engineering suggests the metaphors are also not sufficient. To develop a new theory that might help us differently understand women's participation in engineering, I have used as an analytical lens the metaphor of borders and boundaries. Through the use of this metaphor, I evaluate the actual language of engineering faculty members, gathered through interviews, to argue how that language may exhibit certain kinds of boundary work, resulting in the perpetuation of a gendered discipline of engineering (Pawley, 2007). A "boundary" in this context is a theoretical tool to help us understand people's experiences. In people's talk about their disciplines, they often invoke metaphors (sometimes geographical ones) to represent what counts as their discipline and what does not. A boundary is not a defined "line" but, rather, is determined by the margin of a clump of accepted practices; different people may determine this edge differently. Words like "outside" and "within" are markers of such a metaphorical boundary; the margins of what is acceptably considered "within" are delimited by a conceptual "boundary"(Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Boundaries therefore are "real" in the sense that people make decisions about their behavior based on where they perceive the boundary to be (Anzaldúa, 1987; Gieryn, 1983, 1999; hooks, 2000; Klein, 1990, 1993, 1996; Pawley, 2007, 2009). Elsewhere I have used the faculty interview data to make visible engineering faculty members' universalized narratives of "applying science and mathematics," "solving problems," and "building things" (Pawley, 2009). I have then argued that we (being either researchers or faculty themselves) can use the tools of a boundary work frame-recognition, definition, reproduction, and resistance of boundaries-to see alternative ways to reinforce or resist these narratives (Pawley, 2007, in review). Together, these frameworks allow us to see what is reported in this paper: that the narratives that are described as though they are applicable to all contexts and all people actually seem only to apply to certain contexts and certain people. Boundaries can be a useful tool to help us see what marks "acceptable" from "unacceptable" in terms of knowledge and ways of being. These normative concerns have been the subject of much feminist critique; indeed, bell hooks has argued that only by understanding the "margin" (a boundary concept) can we hope to understand the "center," and in fact, that the margin provides definition of the center (hooks, 2000). Thinking about boundaries of a concept or process or way of being prompts us to ask both sides of the following questions: • Where is the boundary set? What is included, and what is excluded? • Who set the boundary here? Who is excluded from setting this boundary? • Who benefits from the boundary being here? Who is punished? Specifically in this paper, I describe two "localizing" ways that engineers implicitly define engineering. These localizing mechanisms make use of ideas of space (or the "where?" question) and actors (or the "who?" question) to make visible holes in the "Swiss cheese" of engineering; in other words, by taking a universalized narrative and applying a localizing lens of space or actors, we begin to see how the contributions and work of women have been systematically marginalized in the definition of the discipline of engineering. These additional dimensions will let engineering educators begin to see for themselves that which feminist scholars have been arguing for decades: that much of engineering has historically focused on the problems defined by men and for men operating in paid work or military environments, and overlooked the work environments historically populated by women, such as in domestic or service environments (Hacker, 1993; Hacker & Hacker, 1987). Consideration of these additional dimensions in the definition of engineering allows us to then see that a localized picture of engineering appears "gendered," that the discipline is constructed in such a way that the consequences of the discipline's definition weigh differentially on women than men. This gendered construction allows us to draw the underrepresentation of women away from the discourse of "equal representation" and instead into the realm of social justice, where the profession of engineering begins to argue to rectify its historical focus on "solving problems" in paid work arenas, high-tech products, and First World contexts by expanding its explicit focus to include the historical and continuing problems experienced by women and people in Third World contexts. Ruth Simmons, former president of Smith College when Smith developed the first ABET-accredited engineering program at a women's university in the country, described it thusly, saying: A whole generation after the women's movement, five out of every six engineering students and nine out of ten engineering professors are male. Engineers literally design and build much of the human environment. Women must not accept so marginal a role in so important a field (Simmons, 2002). By helping engineers see the gendered asymmetry built into their own definitions, in combination with their identification with rationality and logical thinking, this framework helps convince the social project of engineering to be more socially just before simply trying to recruit more women into the existing system.
... We depend on our engineering credentials and experience to establish an insider understanding of engineering as a field, and to lend credibility to our work with engineers. At the same time, we rely on other knowledge traditions to inform our critiques and to shape the contributions that we hope to make to engineering [18]. We all aim to use our disciplinarily diverse backgrounds to make engineering more engaged and socially aware. ...
... For some, integrating social justice means refining engineering for community development principles with aims to "enhance human capabilities" [56], [57]. For others, diversity, inclusion, and access within engineering practice motivate their participation in social justice, asking what the boundaries of "what counts" as engineering practice and who is left out while these boundaries are being drawn [18]. Donna Riley argues, it is inherently a part of "social justice," especially related to engineering practice that makes it so difficult to define stating, "Its mutability and multiplicity are, in fact, key characteristics of social justice ( [9], pg. ...
... Diversity and inclusion efforts are often grouped into contextualizing for integrating social justice into engineering education. Alice Pawley provides a unique analysis of interviews with 10 tenure track faculty on the boundaries around engineering practice and identity [18]. This examination shows the importance of more gender inclusion. ...
How do we combat the “culture of disengagement” (Cech, 2014) in engineering education? How do we effectively prepare students for the sociotechnical nature of engineering practice? As engineering educators, our responses to these questions often emphasize contextualization. Efforts to encourage engagement with public welfare, sociotechnical thinking, or social justice among engineering students often begin - and sometimes end - with illuminating the broader context of engineering practice and problems. For socially-minded engineering educators, contextualization is nearly always a virtue.
This paper analyzes and critiques practices of contextualizing engineering. Based on a qualitative content review of recent engineering education literature, we first describe and classify different modes of contextualization. In some cases, contextualizing means adding personal context or alternative perspectives to cultivate empathy with users or stakeholders (e.g. Gupta et al., 2016). In others, contextualization is part of integrating sociotechnical thinking into engineering curriculum (e.g. Claussen et al., 2019). This takes a variety of forms, but often includes examination of the socio-cultural contexts of engineering problems and foregrounding the social aspects of engineering problem definition (e.g. Erickson et al., 2020). A third mode of contextualization is found in social justice-centered approaches to engineering, which contextualize by emphasizing the often obscured power relations that engineering contains and upholds (Riley and Claris, 2003). The first two approaches take contextualization as their primary end. Adding additional context is intended to deepen students’ understanding of a problem, but not necessarily to suggest how they ought to solve it. The third approach, social justice-oriented engineering, takes a stronger normative stance. Contextualization here is a means to help students identify social injustices that engineers can then help to ameliorate (Leydens, Lucena, and Nieusma, 2014).
We interpret the results of our content review through our personal experiences as researchers and educators in STS and engineering education. We, like many engineering educators, are wary of overly prescriptive ethics instruction which elides power dynamics and places too much onus on individual actors (Tang and Nieusma, 2017). Contextualization as an end is a tempting solution; however, we also recognize the risks of illuminating complexity without providing direction (Nieusma, 2015). We see flaws in our own balancing act, often defaulting to more contextualization in an effort to render content more acceptable to students and engineering colleagues, or to avoid charges of bias. Ultimately, we argue for a balance of contextualization and normativity. We promote an alternative approach to contextualizing engineering that emphasizes engineers’ civic responsibilities and, crucially, the integration of their intersectional roles as citizens and professionals. This mode of contextualization embraces the idea of sociotechnical thinking but encourages engineers to work towards public welfare as an end goal.
... First, these cultural norms emerged out of and were identified in the author's prior ethnographic work on engineering educational settings (Secules, Gupta, & Elby, 2016), and were implicated in the construction of classroom-based marginalization. Other ethnographers of engineering education have also noted the prominence and impact of masculinity/gender (Foor et al., 2007;Pawley, 2008;Tonso, 1996Tonso, , 2006, meritocracy/competition (Foor et al., 2007;O'Connor, Peck, Cafarella, & McWilliams, 2016;Stevens, Amos, Jocuns, & Garrison, 2007), and whiteness/racial normativity (Battey & Leyva, 2016;Foor et al., 2007). Finally, these three themes seemed perhaps an uncontroversial starting place for insiders to engineering education; I hoped that various stakeholders would be able to basically agree that engineering exhibited these three norms, even if they might struggle to define or explain them, or might not know why they exist. ...
... Thus vocabulary was but one piece, a definitional boundary piece (Klein, 1996;Pawley, 2008), of the active work of demographic exclusion in the discipline of engineering. Although the defining term united the engineering discipline in opposition to other work, its professional formation was also driven by disparate and interwoven industrial, labor, governmental, and academic forces shaping the character of activities of civil, mechanical, chemical, electrical, and other branches of engineering (Zussman, 1985, p. 4). ...
... seamstress, midwife). The solving of problems in the domestic domain, namely home economics, was given a subordinate gendered role in educational institutions (Bix, 2002;Pawley, 2008). But the structural barriers were contested comparatively early on (e.g., by early female engineers who in spite of being ignored and unsupported made technological advances and a strong case for their own importance in the field), and the events of World War II and the 1960s protests brought strides, albeit contested, for available educational and professional options for female engineers (Bix, 2000;Oldenziel, 2000). ...
Research in engineering education often takes an orientation which is not anchored in a historical, political, geographical, institutional, or cultural context. Research citing pedagogical best practices are prominent, hypothetically determining the " best practice " for all populations, at all locations, and at all periods in time, past and future. Likewise, many papers focusing solely on the cognitive psychological factors (e.g. self-efficacy, motivation) affecting learning or achievement imply that the cultural norms and interactional/structural contributions to that psychology are either irrelevant or immutable. This paper takes the view that in order to make wise choices and progress as a discipline, engineering education needs to understand both its culture and its history. By becoming cognizant of and marking cultural practices, we become capable of transgressing or subverting them. By becoming aware of the historical formation of the discipline, we acknowledge the structures which have contributed to our present day culture, and we become attuned to the forces which may be continually shaping us in the present day. This paper will present a partial historical and cultural account of the formation of engineering as a discipline, its demographic makeup, its narratives and norms. This account is grounded in three engineering educational cultural norms: competition, masculinity, and whiteness. It draws on a combination of work in critical history and Science Technology and Society fields, and the author's literature reviews of engineering education publications. While primarily relying on secondary sources, it is in the combination of the accounts, the connection to present day educational cultural settings, and the communication to a specific audience of educational stakeholders that comprises this work's intellectual contribution. A prominent theme of the historical narrative is to suggest a reflexive relationship between the demographic representation of the discipline and its cultural normativities. This interrelationship suggests ways in which our deeply held cultural practices may be intrinsically related to our historical and ongoing demographic makeup. This problematizes prominent diversity narratives of which spotlight minority demographic identities in engineering as a novel and isolated concern. It also suggests certain cultural normativities as potential sources of demographic exclusion.
... The construction of gender and sexuality affects work choices and experiences, with 'male work' such as engineering linked to male power and consequently higher status and better paid than women's work (Henwood 1998). Images of engineering as a masculine profession which is both tough, heavy and dirty (though inaccurate) and hightech, corporate and for-profit play into gender stereotypes and the perception of being unsuitable for women (Pawley 2012;Powell et al. 2009). ...
... Engineering has been constructed as male and unsuitable for women (Pawley 2012;Powell et al. 2009). This gendering has, at least in part, been transmitted by a 'male' culture of 'tinkering' with machinery frequently given a female persona (McIlwee and Robinson 1992) and the transmission on of gendered knowledge from father to son (Holth and Mellström 2011). ...
This paper investigates four questions related to ethical issues associated with the involvement of engineers and scientists in 'military work', including the influence of ethical values and beliefs, the role of gendered perspectives and moves beyond the purely technical. It fits strongly into a human (and planet)-centred systems perspective and extends my previous AI and Society papers on othering and narrative ethics, and ethics and social responsibility. It has two main contributions. The first involves an analysis of the literature through the application of different ethical theories and the application of gendered analysis to discussion of masculinities in engineering and the military. The second is a survey of scientists and engineers to investigate their opinions and experiences. The conclusions draw together the results of these two contributions to provide preliminary responses to the four questions and include a series of recommendations covering education and training, ethical approval of work not involving human participants or animals, the need for organisational support, approaches covering wider perspectives and the encouragement of individual ethical commitment.
... Traditional engineering problem solving approaches focused on optimization can be reductionist and thus incongruent with the principles of sustainability because the larger context is ignored when defining boundaries and constraints. In fact, creating boundaries opens the gates to deliberately defining what should be considered in engineering work, or what counts as valuable in engineering [5,6]. Optimization requires tradeoffs, maximizing desirable effects while minimizing undesirable effects [7]. ...
... Sustainability resides on the boundary between engineering and non-engineering content [5,43]. Efficiency, however, is supported by the dominant discourses within engineering and upheld through rigor [44,45], depoliticization, meritocracy [17], and technological determinism [46]. ...
Engineers are increasingly called on to develop sustainable solutions to complex problems. Within engineering, however, economic and environmental aspects of sustainability are often prioritized over social ones. This paper describes how efficiency and sustainability were conceptualized and interrelated by students in a newly developed second-year undergraduate engineering course, An Integrated Approach to Energy. This course took a sociotechnical approach and emphasized modern energy concepts (e.g., renewable energy), current issues (e.g., climate change), and local and personal contexts (e.g., connecting to students’ lived experiences). Analyses of student work and semi-structured interview data were used to explore how students conceptualized sustainability and efficiency. We found that in this cohort (n = 17) students often approached sustainability through a lens of efficiency, believing that if economic and environmental resources were prioritized and optimized, sustainability would be achieved. By exploring sustainability and efficiency together, we examined how dominant discourses that privilege technical over social aspects in engineering can be replicated within an energy context.
... As we endeavor to change the culture of engineering education to be more inclusive to students from all backgrounds, we simultaneously acknowledge that society in general-and specifically the current engineering education system-is raced, gendered, and classed. That is, engineering education was historically designed by and for middle to upper-class white men [8,9] , which unfortunately is a history that continues to dominate the engineering curriculum and culture [9][10][11] . Here, we challenge the status quo of this longstanding and implicitly exclusionary tradition. ...
... As we endeavor to change the culture of engineering education to be more inclusive to students from all backgrounds, we simultaneously acknowledge that society in general-and specifically the current engineering education system-is raced, gendered, and classed. That is, engineering education was historically designed by and for middle to upper-class white men [8,9] , which unfortunately is a history that continues to dominate the engineering curriculum and culture [9][10][11] . Here, we challenge the status quo of this longstanding and implicitly exclusionary tradition. ...
In this paper, we present results and implications from two studies focusing on the participation
of African American and Latina/o students in ethnic student organizations. Conducted
independently by two research teams, the two studies provide striking similarities in their
findings. The combined body of work provides unambiguous evidence for the common
assumption that participation in ethnic student organizations at predominantly White institutions
bolsters underrepresented students’ engineering identity development, persistence, and success in
engineering studies and subsequent careers. Findings related to African American student and
alumni participation in the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) mirror several findings
from the study of Latina/o students in the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE).
Specifically, results from the two studies share three common themes. Participants describe
NSBE and SHPE as 1) providing opportunities for or explicitly emphasizing the development of
professional and leadership skills; 2) having access to an engineering role model or becoming a
role model themselves; and 3) creating a family-like support system. This paper focuses on the
implications for institutional policies and college-level professionals derived from our combined
body of work. We advocate for faculty, staff, and administrators to recognize the value of student
participation in NSBE and SHPE and actively support student participation in these
organizations. Furthermore, we suggest methods and pathways by which these key institutional
players may support students; most important of which is through creating academic and social
counter-spaces on their campuses. Doing so may ultimately enhance recruitment, transition to
college, and persistence in engineering for students of color.
... Critical scholars have described engineering education as an institution characterized as raced, gendered, and classed [1][2][3][4][5] . We agree with this assertion, particularly in that the current normative state of engineering education requires students to either adopt or adapt to a narrow range of assets and characteristics in order to pursue higher education. ...
... Typically used by education scholars to investigate the experiences of students of color, we are theoretically expanding the use of CCW and FoK to also include others who are currently underrepresented or marginalized [1][2][3][4]15 in engineering education, such as: first generation college students, women, lower socioeconomic background students, students older than the traditional college age, students identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer, and students with non-linear pathways into engineering study. ...
... Scholars have written about engineering education as being a "raced, gendered and classed" institution. This is a way of saying that the system educating engineers has historically been designed by and for White men, mainly in the upper-to-middle class [1][2][3][4][5] . Unfortunately, it is this history that has consequences even today for the content of engineering curriculum as well as who becomes an engineer 3,6,7 . ...
... This is a way of saying that the system educating engineers has historically been designed by and for White men, mainly in the upper-to-middle class [1][2][3][4][5] . Unfortunately, it is this history that has consequences even today for the content of engineering curriculum as well as who becomes an engineer 3,6,7 . Even now, women, students of color, first generation college students, lower-income students, and/or students who start college significantly later than 18 years of age are at best underrepresented, and at worst socially marginalized in many engineering classrooms. ...
This paper describes the development of a unique interview method based on Peggy McIntosh’s
“serial testimony” technique. Our “singular testimony” technique preserves many of the
hallmarks of the serial testimony technique, specifically:
1. Giving participants the opportunity to share their personal narrative, or testimony, about
unearned advantages and unearned disadvantages as they perceive them;
2. Allowing participants to speak uninterrupted;
3. Exhibiting no judgment and expressing no rebuttal to participant responses;
4. Returning to a particular advantage/disadvantage for further exploration and follow up
questions in additional “rounds.”
We have piloted our interview technique with recent engineering graduates, and found it to be
efficacious for eliciting participants’ perceptions of unearned advantages and disadvantages
related to their engineering education. In this paper, we (1) describe how we adapted the serial
testimony technique into a singular testimony interview method, (2) present our results related
to participants’ perceptions of unearned advantages and disadvantages, and (3) discuss how a
particular trait can be perceived as an advantage by one participant, but as a disadvantage by
another. We will also present specific examples of certain unearned traits (such as economic
status) that some participants simultaneously viewed as both advantages and disadvantages in
pursuing their engineering education. We end with implications for using this method to
illuminate visible and invisible forms of privilege and oppression, underrepresentation, and
marginalization that undergraduates may experience during their engineering education.
... In the US, our efforts to broaden participation in engineering are in response to a history of exclusion of several overlapping demographic groups. Decades of gender segregation in the labor force during the turn of the 20th century meant women were largely confined to the domestic domain while men dominated the industrial domain and the burgeoning field of engineering (Bix 2002;Pawley 2008). Racial and socioeconomic segregation in education (Slaton 2010) and work (Blackmon 2009;Secules 2019;Zussman 1985) restricted access to engineering to middleclass White men. ...
Background: The history of engineering education perpetuates a cultural inertia favoring dominant groups. Engineering education research on broadening participation implies a change towards a desired outcome: increased diversity, equity, and inclusion in the engineering profession. However, many research designs focus on knowledge generation without centering a process of change within research activities or collaborations. Purpose: In this theoretical article, we critically examine the current norms of qualitative research on broadening participation to center research designs that push towards change. Scope: First, we present a simple change model as a way of discussing prototypical qualitative research designs in terms of their component parts. We find that these research designs are limiting in terms of enacting significant change. Next, we point to a variety of institutional norms and values that inherently limit research innovation and impact in these contexts, including the traditional policies, practices, and values that shape our work. Lastly, we draw from experiences in our own work to introduce alternative approaches that center change for equity and inclusion within broadening participation research designs and frame this discussion using the same change model concept to highlight those features. Conclusion: In conclusion, we call for more innovation in qualitative research design and suggest some strategies for innovation that push beyond traditional approaches to instill change.
... Instead, decisions about what counts as engineering and who decides have deep implications for equity in STEM education. They position some individuals and communities as possessing knowledge and others as needing teaching and remediation.They label some practices as valued and some as invisible or irrelevant(Pawley, 2012). These ideas become baked into institutions, policies, and evaluation systems to the extent that they are taken for granted and assumed to be free of value, bias, or judgement. ...
For decades, scholars across a variety of fields have been calling for a re-examination of the ways we address inequities in STEM education.
Over the last year, we have been able to take a few hours each week to step back from our current work, reflect on our assumptions, learn from others, and explore new ways that our research could both uncover and help dismantle inequities and racism in the STEM education system. This eBook, and the series of blog posts on which it is based, is the result of these conversations and this reflective process. Our goal is to explore the themes and ideas that emerged from the year and how these might fundamentally change the way we think about STEM, work with families and children, and conduct research. We also hope this resource will serve as a catalyst for ongoing discussions within and beyond the STEM education research community. In the following chapters, we reflect on a variety of topics, including approaches to collaborating with families, asset-based perspectives on STEM education, and equity- based strategies for engaging families with engineering. While our reflections focus on engineering education and our work with families, we believe the themes that emerged for us over the last year have implications across STEM domains and learning contexts.
... This not only places a firm emphasis on education being for economic purposes, but also highlights the way in which knowledge is both created and preserved by those in power [52]. LOs can thus be considered as statements about what belongs within engineering [53] with the drawing of disciplinary boundaries acting to "preserve class and gender privilege" [54]. In this sense educators have a powerful influence over those that they teach [55]. ...
Neoliberal ideologies continue to pervade higher education throughout the world, this having profound consequences for both academics and students within engineering education.
In adopting neoliberalism, universities focus on treating students as consumers who must be satisfied. Efforts to widen participation within engineering are often placed in the context of valorization and appear to concentrate on market driven issues of supply and demand as opposed to equity driven arguments of social justice. Learning outcomes have been utilized as a tool to serve utilitarianism and enable performance monitoring at the expense of emergent learning. Pressures to obtain high grades and employment upon graduation increase levels of student individualism and competitiveness. Many of these factors act to discourage teamwork and the inclusion of diverse perspectives.
Academics are expected to generate large amounts of research funding and are subject to an audit culture which is enforced using ‘excellence frameworks’ and ‘satisfaction surveys’. The use of student feedback as an indicator of performance has acted to stifle innovation and hinder moves away from traditional teaching practice and means of assessment. Increased competition, not only from other institutions, but also internally between departments is believed to stifle collaboration.
This work in progress study sets out to explore the features of neoliberalism evident within UK engineering education, and the ways in which these features act to impede progress toward the ongoing calls for socially responsible engineers who can work across disciplinary boundaries. The aim is to encourage active discussion, firstly about whether the aims and ambitions of engineering education, as conveyed through government, professional bodies and industrial stakeholders, can be fully realized within our current education systems, and secondly, around alternative philosophies that nurture and support engineering students and their learning.
... The students are guided to use the PESTLE framework (political, economic, social, technical, legal, and environmental) to analyze energy challenges from a multidimensional and interdisciplinary perspective [26]. The course emphasizes the importance of "place" (i.e., learning that is relevant to the local context) [27][28][29][30][31]. Students are exposed to other ways of being, knowing, and doing that deviate from the dominant masculine Western White colonial discourse [32][33][34][35][36][37]. For example, in traditional engineering education contexts, the textbooks and classroom sample problems are often based on stereotypically masculine interests (i.e., cars, sports, and guns), and they skew towards incorporating White male characters [38]. ...
In the spring of 2021, the University of San Diego’s Department of Integrated Engineering taught the course, “Integrated Approach to Energy”, the second offering of a new required course, to nine second-year engineering students. The sociotechnical course covered modern energy concepts, with an emphasis on renewable energies and sustainability, and it exposed the students to other ways of being, knowing, and doing that deviated from the dominant masculine Western White colonial discourse. Following the course completion, we interviewed five students by using a semistructured protocol to explore how they perceived of and communicated about engineers and engineering. We sought to identify the takeaways from their course exposure to sustainability and the sociotechnical paradigm, which were central to the course. The findings suggest that the students were beginning to form sociotechnical descriptions, and that they were still developing their understanding and perceptions of engineers and engineering. Moreover, we observed that they were still wrestling with how best to integrate sustainability into those perceptions. There was an a-la-carte feel to the students’ conceptualizations of sustainability as it related to engineering, as in, “you can ‘do’ sustainability with engineering, but do not have to”. We argue that engineering students likely need these pedagogical paradigms (sociotechnical engineering and sustainability) woven through the entirety of their engineering courses if they are to fully accept and integrate them into their own constructs about engineers and engineering.
... This includes a reorientation of postsecondary engineering programs towards students' development, and accurate understanding of the skills, knowledge, and proclivities of practicing engineers. Reflected in Learning Outcomes #2 and #4 of ABET [32], researchers continue to call for university engineering programs to do a better job at helping students recognize the political and values-driven dimensions of engineering [12,[46][47][48][49]. Proponents of university-based makerspaces have pointed towards their role in developing students as activist engineers, who can "develop holistic, systemic solutions to complex social and environmental problems through collaborative making that centers around the collective good" [12] (p. ...
In the last decade, postsecondary institutions have seen a notable increase in makerspaces on their campuses and the integration of these spaces into engineering programs. Yet research into the efficacy of university-based makerspaces is sparse. We contribute to this nascent body of research in reporting on findings from a phenomenological study on the perceptions of faculty, staff, and students concerning six university-based makerspaces in the United States. We discuss the findings using a framework of heterogeneous engineering (integration of the social and technical aspects of engineering practice). Various physical, climate, and programmatic features of makerspaces were read as affordances for students’ development of engineering practices and their continued participation and persistence in engineering. We discuss the potential of makerspaces in helping students develop knowledge, skills, and proclivities that may support their attending to especially wicked societal problems, such as issues of sustainability. We offer implications for makerspace administrators, engineering program leaders, faculty, and staff, as well as those developing and delivering professional development for faculty and staff, to better incorporate makerspaces into the university engineering curriculum.
... In their 2012 book, Engineering and Social Justice: In the University and Beyond, editors Baillie, Pawley, and Riley worked with other researchers to present examples of bringing social justice, a key element of sociotechnical thinking that has inspired our team's research, into engineering classrooms and fields of research [15]. In her chapter, "What counts as 'engineering:' Toward a redefinition," Pawley focuses on the questions of "where" engineering is defined and "who" defines the problems [16]. Her findings point out the boundaries that are often drawn around "true" engineering work, and the challenges such boundary-defining efforts present for sociotechnical integration (since anything beyond the purely technical is usually excluded from being seen as relevant to engineering work). ...
... To address this, over the past two decades, there has been increasing research to understand the deeper and fundamental problems about the culture of engineering education and the engineering profession [3]. Researchers have started to critically question how the narratives within engineering education construct and define what is 'engineering' [4]. Classroom research shows that the teaching methods, course content, and attitudes all consistently perpetuate a male-normed culture and are biased against women. ...
There has been little progress in increasing the diversity of engineering over the past three and a half decades. Much of the diversity work in engineering has an implicit liberal feminism and fails to deconstruct the hierarchical social categories and the underlying ideals of engineering culture. There is a growing need to critically look at the embedded culture of engineering and how this presents a barrier to diversity. This paper provides a critical review of key ecofeminist literature and how engineering education can learn from ecofeminist approaches. The ecofeminist framework aims to breakdown dualisms that artificially separate humans and nature, and rather emphasizes the essential interdependence of all organisms. The aim of this work is to better understand how ecofeminism could be used as a framework to change the culture of engineering education to create a more inclusive environment and foster a greater holistic skillset in our students.
... This framework of interactional feminism has been noted in a methodological and theoretical review in the engineering education community (Beddoes & Borrego, 2011) and has been applied to the investigation of gendered team roles (Tonso, 2006). Other feminist scholars have also noted the boundary work of constructing both the discipline of engineering and gender in the narratives of engineering academics (Pawley, 2008) and engineering workplace norms (Faulkner, 2007). ...
Background
To explain educational problems such as student attrition, engineering education literature often focuses on the characteristics of individuals. In 2006, Ray McDermott and Hervé Varenne called for examining the “cultural construction” of educational problems, uncovering how multiple actors create and inscribe meaning to the educational problem.
Purpose
We apply the cultural construction framework to examine how the educational problem of a student being “not cut out for engineering” is constructed within the context of a specific electrical engineering course. We focus on culturally taken‐for‐granted course structures, practices, and interactions, all of which produce the local enactment of this common educational problem.
Method
We used ethnographic methods, including field‐noted participant observations, one‐on‐one participant interviews, and video‐recorded student work on lab assignments. Coordinating multiple data streams enabled us to question explanations couched in terms of individual ability and background, and to illustrate how ability hierarchies were constructed in the educational context.
Results
Our findings illustrate how several mundane and seemingly innocuous aspects of engineering classrooms add up to construct the educational problem of our focal student as “not cut out” for engineering. Contributions to this construction included lecture seating positions, interactional norms in lecture and lab, and labels made meaningful through institutional and interactional processes.
Conclusions
The forces at play in constructing educational problems for students are deeply embedded in institutions, disciplines, and society, making it difficult to generate a simple list of instructional interventions. We highlight cultural construction analysis as a potentially fruitful orientation for researchers and practitioners to find the particular sites and tools for local intervention.
... Critical analyses of computing require risking suspicions of disloyalty. Given that large-scale computing work largely takes place in US industrial, commercial, or military domains (Pawley, 2012), social justice efforts in high-tech fields must question some of the most powerful institutions in the world. Change agents can push computer scientist and engineers not only to " welcome people on the margins, " but also to support local efforts of grassroots communities who are challenging hegemonic social relations like institutional racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, and environmental degradation (Pawley, 2012, p. 80). ...
Computing is highly segregated and stratified by gender. While there is abundant scholarship investigating this problem, emerging evidence suggests that a hierarchy of value exists between the social and technical dimensions of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) and this plays a role in the underrepresentation of women in the field. This ethnographic study of women's experiences in computing offers evidence of a systemic preference for the technical dimensions of computing over the social and a correlation between gender and social aspirations. Additionally, it suggests there is a gap between the exaltation of computing's social contributions and the realities of them. My participants expressed a yearning to contribute to the collective well-being of society using their computing skills. I trace moments of rupture in my participants' stories, moments when they felt these aspirations were in conflict with the cultural values in their organizations. I interpret these ruptures within a consideration of yearning, a need my participants had to contribute meaningfully to society that remained unfulfilled. The yearning to align one's altruistic values with one's careers aspirations in CSE illuminates an area for greater exploration on the path to realizing gender equity in computing. I argue that before a case can be made that careers in computing do indeed contribute to social and civil engagements, we must first address the meaning of the social within the values, ideologies and practices of CSE institutions and next, develop ways to measure and evaluate the field's contributions to society.
... As Pawley in "What counts as engineering" shows, the history of defining engineering, including who defines and how engineering has been defined, has everything to do with who has been allowed in (and kept out of) engineering, who benefits from engineering (and who does not), and what areas of human life have received the positive impacts of engineering (and which ones the negatives). Hence the definition of engineering is at the heart of the profession's problematic relationship to social justice [10] . When the people and the processes through which engineering is defined leave out important domains of human life from being considered worthy of engineering analysis while privileging others like the military or corporations, they make the definition of engineering inherently about social justice. ...
What role can the social justice (SJ) dimensions inherent in engineering science (ES) courses play in promoting student engagement and learning? What role can this integration play in educating more socially just and perhaps better engineers? While the other papers in this session address these questions in diverse ways, this one provides a framework for these questions by defining SJ, identifying what inherent means in this context, explaining why engineering sciences are a fitting, yet problematic, curricular site for integration, and presenting challenges and opportunities related to this integration. First, we explore why the ES are considered the sacred cow of engineering education. Second, we show certain ways in which SJ dimensions are inherent in the ES. Third, we provide an operational definition of SJ as it relates to engineering and six engineering-for-social-justice (ESJ) criteria to guide educators attempting to integrate SJ in ES courses. Fourth, we outline how two specific curricular examples of this integration engage these criteria. Fifth, we present challenges and opportunities involved in this integration. Finally, we allow the voices of engineering educators attempting these integrations to share their perspectives. Through the framework presented here, and the examples drawn from the other papers in this session, we seek to encourage other engineering science educators to consider integrating social justice into their courses.
... Chase [32] calls narrative inquiry a ''flourishing'' methodology in the social sciences, while it has been characterized as an ''emerging'' methodology in the field of engineering education [33]. Several conference papers published in the last few years utilizing narrative analysis at the American Society for Engineering Education and the European Society for Engineering Education support this assertion [34][35][36][37][38][39]. We chose to use narrative analysis because we believe that the most important findings of our interviews were not inherent in simply what participants said, but how the participants either did or did not construct meaning from it, and what remained unsaid [40]. ...
First generation college students can increase both the number and diversity of students in engineering. We use Lin's Network Theory of Social Capital, which describes relationships as being embedded with resources used to achieve a goal, as a framework for understanding undergraduate students' decisions to enroll in engineering studies. While much of the discourse on social capital in higher education focuses on inequalities and deficits experienced by first generation college students, our work helps to transition the discussion by highlighting the positive influence of education personnel as well as teachers and mentors associated with institutionalized programs. We use narrative analysis and two types of explicitly integrated complementary qualitative data to expand on Lin's theory. This paper presents an exemplar narrative describing what Lin calls the "invisible hand of social capital;" that is, when particularly resource-rich networks do not necessitate an individual knowingly mobilizing resources because information and resources are received in routine exchanges. Our findings support the need for continued proactive outreach, educational, and support systems that can serve as research-rich networks for first generation college students.
... Describing the history of the development of the home economics discipline, Alice Pawley (2012, p. 63) wrote, The founders of home economics wanted women to apply the logic of scientific management to domestic contexts to develop better , more effective, and more efficient ways of operating the home. Improved health, hygiene, and sanitation, improved knowledge of nutrition , more efficient technologies for lighting, heating, and cleaning, and management techniques for supervising servants and raising children, all organized around the home, constituted the realm of a new, science-oriented understanding of the domestic sphere, created and maintained by women. ...
Solving the Equation is a AAUW Report published in 2015.
This article explores the historical context and ongoing discussions of the iron ring ritual, a prominent tradition in Canadian engineering. We employ discourse analysis to describe and analyze components of the ritual itself, as well as more recent texts related to contemporary conversations about the ritual. We apply Alice Pawley’s scholarship on boundary work in engineering as an analytical framework and find the ritual has served to reproduce and map boundaries around engineering ethics and responsibility in Canada, and numerous actors have resisted those boundaries based on opposition to the colonial, misogynistic, and Christian values embedded in the ritual, as well as the ritual’s framing of engineering agency and responsibility. We reflect on the lessons this case can offer for members of the Canadian engineering and engineering education communities, as well as for those interested in the power and complexity of humanistic interventions in engineering.
The goal of the modules in this chapter is to create opportunities to think about complex, real-world issues in energy and sustainability. While the list of topics explored here is by no means comprehensive, each module is designed to help you learn how to consider technical and social contexts, engineering ethics, community needs, and public policy simultaneously.
This paper emerges out of ethnographic scholarship on marginalization in present-day engineering education. I pursue a scholarship of integration to contextualize my own and others’ engineering education research with critical, cultural, and historical accounts of engineering. I structure the narrative around the ethnographic themes of masculinity, competition, and competition-as-masculinity. Within each theme I situate present-day ethnographic observations of engineering educational culture, elaborate on those observations with historical context, and return to consider how historical context extends the original ethnographic observations. The implications for the study are threefold: (1) generating a new functional lens on engineering educational culture as masculine and competitive, (2) communicating useful historical context to stakeholders in engineering education, and (3) demonstrating the value of integrative scholarship to promote further interdisciplinary collaboration.
Engineering is clearly a global profession and this discipline has witnessed a major expansion of the impact of globalisation in terms of skills needed to work around the world and to recognise the value of broader interdisciplinary skills.
Women’s persistent underrepresentation in undergraduate engineering is a well-documented concern. One issue missing from many discussions on the topic, however, is that women are not equally underrepresented in all engineering majors. Furthermore, a significant portion of the research focuses solely on women’s experiences within engineering. We know far less about how key stakeholders, such as faculty, understand gender stratification in engineering education. Faculty are influential figures who have been shown to play a central role in introducing students to the profession and can significantly impact students’ experiences. This article addresses these gaps by examining the reasons engineering professors provide to explain women’s underrepresentation across majors. Using data from 23 in-depth interviews at one university, the findings demonstrate how the majority of faculty mobilize gendered images to position some majors as feminine and others as masculine, and then suggest that this impacts women’s choices of fields. Chemical engineering, however, served as an interesting case in this study because it was described as gender diverse. These findings contribute to discussions about the construction of gendered cultures within engineering and show how engineering faculty play a role in this process.
This book investigates the close connections between engineering and war, broadly understood, and the conceptual and structural barriers that face those who would seek to loosen those connections. It shows how military institutions and interests have long influenced engineering education, research, and practice and how they continue to shape the field in the present. The book also provides a generalized framework for responding to these influences useful to students and scholars of engineering, as well as reflective practitioners. The analysis draws on philosophy, history, critical theory, and technology studies to understand the connections between engineering and war and how they shape our very understandings of what engineering is and what it might be. After providing a review of diverse dimensions of engineering itself, the analysis shifts to different dimensions of the connections between engineering and war. First, it considers the ethics of war generally and then explores questions of integrity for engineering practitioners facing career decisions relating to war. Next, it considers the historical rise of the military-industrial-academic complex, especially from World War II to the present. Finally, it considers a range of responses to the militarization of engineering from those who seek to unsettle the status quo. Only by confronting the ethical, historical, and political consequences of engineering for warfare, this book argues, can engineering be sensibly reimagined.
This chapter surveys a range of educational and professional reform efforts in engineering carried out by
the Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace network and its members. These efforts are categorized in a way
that highlights the diversity of the approaches taken as well as their interconnections. Beyond documenting
and categorizing a range of contemporary initiatives in engineering and social justice, the chapter argues
that, to be most effective, ESJP members attempt to integrate their particular values orientations and
commitments with systematic attention to a wide range of organizational and conceptual problems that
inhibit engineering for social justice and peace.
In this paper, I import the conceptual tool of boundary work from other disciplines to the study of academic engineers and I expand on existing research on boundary work based on interviews from 10 engineering faculty members at a research-oriented university. Analyzing participants’ interview responses for language associated with boundary metaphors yields a rich lexicon of terms related to the complicated characterization and categorization of ideas and values that they associate with engineering. Through this analysis, I introduce the concept of boundary markers as conceptual objects that delineate the edge of a boundary. I define and describe a taxonomy of the different sorts of boundary work participants do as recognition, mapping, reproduction, and resistance. I argue that boundaries have characteristics of continuity, mobility, and functionality. This paper can enhance our understanding of academic engineering and engineering education by making visible – via a cognitive tool developed from their colleagues’ language – academic engineers’ own boundary work as they contest or reproduce boundaries of the profession and discipline of engineering.
In this paper, I import the conceptual tool of boundary work from other disciplines to the study of academic engineers and I expand on existing research on boundary work based on interviews from 10 engineering faculty members at a research-oriented university. Analyzing participants’ interview responses for language associated with boundary metaphors yields a rich lexicon of terms related to the complicated characterization and categorization of ideas and values that they associate with engineering. Through this analysis, I introduce the concept of boundary markers as conceptual objects that delineate the edge of a boundary. I define and describe a taxonomy of the different sorts of boundary work participants do as recognition, mapping, reproduction, and resistance. I argue that boundaries have characteristics of continuity, mobility, and functionality. This paper can enhance our understanding of academic engineering and engineering education by making visible – via a cognitive tool developed from their colleagues’ language – academic engineers’ own boundary work as they contest or reproduce boundaries of the profession and discipline of engineering.
This article examines howU.S. engineers constructed their profession within the context of changing structural conditions and hegemonic masculinity between 1893 and 1920. The professionalization of engineering and the linkages between engineering practitioners and colleges were forged during this period. At the same time, conditions for the construction of a powerful masculine self-identity in the workplace were also changing. Engineers’reflective and informative writings about their field in the professional publication Engineering News, the Proceedings of the annual conferences of the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education, and two career guidance books (all from the 1893–1920 period) document how engineers constructed their profession as a masculine one.
Explanations for women's continued underrepresentation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) have popularly employed a "leaky pipeline" metaphor. Recently, however, some have found the pipeline metaphor lacking in explanatory power for dealing with subtle, yet pervasive barriers embedded in specific cultures of engineering. The tension between culturally prescribed notions of masculinity, femininity, and engineering identities is one such barrier. Ethnographic interviews of 118 engineering undergraduates revealed multiple and shifting projects of constructing and claiming certain femininities and masculinities associated with engineering. Our analysis uses an intersection of feminist and discourse theory for a critical examination of multiple discourses contributing to the gendering of images, roles, positions, and a particular engineering discipline within our college and university culture. Loosened from the boundaries of gendered norms, this particular engineering discipline has become more "inviteful" to both women and men but requires different identity projects from each. Our goal is to contribute to discussions about gendered identities and cultures in engineering and to add our support to an emerging model in engineering education, the boundary model, for conceptualizing the movement of students into, across, and through the various domains of engineering.
A n n e F a u s t o -S t e r l i n g The Bare Bones of Sex: Part 1—Sex and Gender H ere are some curious facts about bones. They can tell us about the kinds of physical labor an individual has performed over a lifetime and about sustained physical trauma. They get thinner or thicker (on average in a population) in different historical periods and in response to different colonial regimes (Molleson 1994; Larsen 1998). They can in-dicate class, race, and sex (or is it gender—wait and see). We can measure their mineral density and whether on average someone is likely to fracture a limb but not whether a particular individual with a particular density will do so. A bone may break more easily even when its mineral density remains constant (Peacock et al. 2002). 1 Culture shapes bones. For example, urban ultraorthodox Jewish ado-lescents have lowered physical activity, less exposure to sunlight, and drink less milk than their more secular counterparts. They also have greatly decreased mineral density in the vertebrae of their lower backs, that is, the lumbar vertebrae (Taha et al. 2001). Chinese women who work daily in the fields have increased bone mineral content and density. The degree of increase correlates with the amount of time spent in physical activity (Hu et al. 1994); weightlessness in space flight leads to bone loss (Skerry 2000); gymnastics training in young women ages seventeen to twenty-seven correlates with increased bone density despite bone resorption caused by total lack of menstruation (Robinson et al. 1995). Consider also some recent demographic trends: in Europe during the past thirty years, the number of vertebral fractures has increased three-to fourfold for women and more than fourfold for men (Mosekilde 2000); in some Thanks to the members of the Pembroke Seminar on Theories of Embodiment for a wonderful year of thinking about the process of body making and for their thoughtful response to an earlier draft of this essay. Credit for the title goes to Greg Downey. Thanks also to anonymous reviewers from Signs for making me sharpen some of the arguments. 1 Munro Peacock et al. write: "The pathogenesis of a fragility fracture almost always involves trauma and is not necessarily associated with reduced bone mass. Thus, fragility fracture should neither be used synonymously nor interchangeably as a phenotype for os-teoporosis" (2002, 303).
BACKGROUND
U.S. engineering educators are discussing how we define engineering to our- selves and to others, such as in the recently released U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE) report, Changing the Conversation. In these conversations, leaders have proposed the skills, knowledge, processes, values, and attitudes that should define engineering. However, little attention has been paid to the daily work of engineering faculty, through their engineering research and teaching students to be new engineers, that puts these discipline-defining ideas into practice in academia.
PURPOSE (HYPOTHESIS)
The different types of narratives engineering faculty explicitly or implicitly use to describe engineering are categorized. Categorizing these common nar- ratives can help inform the nationwide conversation about whether these are the best narratives to tell in order to attract a diverse population of future engineers.
DESIGN/METHOD
Interviews with ten engineering faculty at a research-extensive university were conducted. Interview transcripts were coded thematically through coarse then
fine coding passes. The coarse codes were drawn from boundary theory; the fine codes emerged from the data.
RESULTS
Faculty members’ descriptions moved within and among the narratives of engineering as applied science and math, as problem-solving, and as making things. The narratives are termed “universalized” because of their broad- sweeping discursive application within and across participants’ interviews.
CONCLUSIONS
These narratives drawn from academic engineers’ practice put engineering at odds with recommendations from the NAE report. However, naming the narratives helps make them visible so we may then develop and practice telling contrasting narratives to future and current engineering students.
The demarcation of science from other intellectual activities-long an analytic problem for philosophers and sociologists-is here examined as a practical problem for scientists. Construction of a boundary between science and varieties of non-science is useful for scientists' pursuit of professional goals: acquisition of intellectual authority and career opportunities; denial of these resources to "pseudoscientists"; and protection of the autonomy of scientific research from political interference. "Boundary-work" describes an ideological style found in scientists' attempts to create a public image for science by contrasting it favorably to non-scientific intellectual or technical activities. Alternative sets of characteristics available for ideological attribution to science reflect ambivalences or strains within the institution: science can be made to look empirical or theoretical, pure or applied. However, selection of one or another description depends on which characteristics best achieve the demarcation in a way that justifies scientists' claims to authority or resources. Thus, "science" is no single thing: its boundaries are drawn and redrawn inflexible, historically changing and sometimes ambiguous ways.
Questions arising from research on automation and women's work have led me to explore patriarchal elements in the culture of engineering/management. In an elite technological institute, the engineering faculty, compared with the humanities faculty, reported more distance in childhood from experiences and qualities generally gender-linked with females—intimacy, sensuality, one's own body, social complexity. Engineers valued social hierarchy on a continuum giving most prestige to scientific abstraction, least to feminine qualities. Such values were transmitted in the engineering classroom, for example, through professors' jokes, to a new generation of engineering/ management. A persistent mind/body dualism was exhibited, subordinating sexuality and the body, and elevating scientific abstraction. The dualism translated into a mechanical view of the person and to continued separation of functions of mind and hand. Further examination of mind/body dualisms may help us to understand how the persistence of this body of ideas in Western technology affects labor processes, and in particular, women, workplace and machine.
Technology and Culture 43.4 (2002) 728-754
In tracing the development of technical education in American colleges and universities, historians have tended, perhaps inevitably, to concentrate on engineering departments. Those programs tell an important story: the evolution of specialized disciplines from practical, shop-oriented learning to theoretical science. Also, engineering schools were (as many still are) dominated by male students and faculty, who often connected technical expertise to masculinity.
Yet, shifting our focus across campus, we find another center of technical training in the history of higher education: departments of home economics. Professors there cooperated with and modeled their outlook and teaching after science and engineering programs. At the same time, home economics was defined by and for women, explicitly addressing females' presumed sphere of interest, domestic life. In that fashion, these programs created an alternate vision of gendered knowledge, asserting a link between technical mastery and femininity—at least in the domain of the kitchen.
This construction of female technical awareness appears most clearly in the emergence of programs specifically aimed at teaching students about domestic equipment. As the twentieth century proceeded, American families adopted appliances of growing sophistication in increasing numbers, from electric refrigerators and ranges to waffle makers, microwaves, and food processors. Rapid changes in tools of cooking and housekeeping could prove confusing; home economists aimed to ease the transition by giving women systematic instruction in modern technology. As the appliance industry grew in size and economic significance, the notion of cultivating appliance consumers acquired particular potency.
This article illustrates that history by analyzing the department at Iowa State College (later University) that pioneered equipment training. Iowa State led the way in the nineteenth century toward inaugurating "domestic economy" as a field of female education; for many years in the twentieth century it surpassed all other American schools in home economics enrollment. More specifically, starting in 1929 Iowa State became the first (and for several decades remained the only) U.S. institution offering an undergraduate major in the study of household equipment. Over the twenty-five years between 1930 and 1955, the equipment department granted 308 bachelor of science degrees. Through the 1940s, Iowa State also remained the sole program granting a master of science in household equipment; by 1955, it had awarded sixty-one such graduate degrees. By then other schools (including Purdue University, the University of Minnesota, Ohio State University, Washington State University, and Teacher's College of Columbia University) had started their own equipment courses, yet Iowa State remained preeminent. One graduate student of the era remarked, "Iowa State College and Household Equipment are almost synonymous."
From the beginning, Iowa State's program was built around a fundamental assumption that women could and should acquire a practical yet scientifically based understanding of household technologies. Faculty created a context in which coeds were not only permitted but required to take apart and reassemble machinery in order to appreciate details of its construction, operation, and repair. Iowa State aimed to educate self-reliant homemakers who would confidently accept active responsibility for their kitchen equipment rather than cultivate attitudes of feminine helplessness. Other graduates would professionalize that knowledge, parlaying their education into employment with appliance companies, utilities, and publishing. Through extension-service publications, radio programs, and demonstrations, Iowa State faculty reached thousands of women outside the college each year with lessons about equipment. Such efforts bridged the production and consumption of new home appliances, attempting to ease the introduction of unfamiliar technologies while analyzing their value.
As leaders in the academic analysis of new kitchen technology, Iowa State faculty conducted systematic research and wrote numerous books setting out parameters and principles of this emerging discipline. Such textbooks filled an important niche; Household Equipment, written by Louise Peet and fellow faculty and alumnae, went through nine editions between 1934 and 1986, shaping the field for decades. These treatments embedded lessons in physics and engineering squarely inside culturally acceptable boundaries of woman's knowledge. Far from feeling threatened, Iowa State engineering faculty cooperated in equipment teaching and research. The college in Ames thus established kitchen appliance studies as a female technical space, one that sought to empower women to cope with modernized equipment.
Throughout the first half of the 20th century and into the second, women studying or working in engineering were popularly perceived as oddities at best, outcasts at worst, defying traditional gender norms. During the last half of the 20th century, activists fought to change that situation, to win acknowledgment of women's ability to become good engineers. To gain public recognition for women engineers, advocates celebrated their successes in the field. To improve the climate for women in education and employment, activists organized to call attention to problems and demanded change. To aid women directly, female engineers created systems of social, psychological, and financial mutual support. Through such strategies, conditions for female engineers changed noticeably over just a few decades, although many challenges remain.
The engineering profession and, consequently, the education process for engineers must respond to several new realities in order to be successful in the 21st century. Some aspects of the new reality that are relevant to engineering education are as follows: the globalization of commerce; the information revolution; innovations in technology; the new emphasis on sustainable development; recognition of the need for lifelong learning and gender equality; the role of engineers in nations' future prosperity and the political process; the rise of multinational corporations and new start-up companies; the trend toward transformation of the study of engineering into the "new liberal arts" coupled with emphasis on basic engineering/specialization; industry-university partnerships; the need for engineers to receive training in innovation/entrepreneurship and communication; and the need to attract more women into the field of engineering. In recognition of the new reality, the University of Calgary in Alberta has adopted the position that a four-year university program in engineering is reasonable for producing graduates that either enter the work force as "engineers-in-training" or enter further studies in engineering or in business, law, or medicine. However, the university strongly recommends an additional 16-month internship in industry for students wishing to advance into leadership roles. (MN)
Existing approaches to increasing diversity conceptually pose the problem as a leaky pipeline. Although the pipeline model has sup-ported several types of interventions, the mental model oversimpli-fies complexities of the underlying processes, focuses interventions at points of unwanted leakage, and suggests that leaks need to be plugged instead of systems renewed. Analysis suggests that even if leak-stopping interventions could be multiplied through significant increases in funding, they would remain insufficient to attain the goal of having student enrollments in engineering substantially reflect the demographics of the general population. Therefore, a new analogical model, which emphasizes flows of personal and interpersonal energy within the educational system, is offered to guide future interventions. Finally, suggestions for applying the model to increase diversity in engineering are proposed.
The history of engineering education for women helps identify the ways in which observers have interpreted the gendered nature of the engineering profession. Historically, women in engineering programs, even more than in science, stood out due to their rarity. Thus, their very presence led people to confront questions about what it means to be a man or a woman in a technological society, what it means to be a professional engineer. The paper concentrates on four technically-centered schools (RPI, Georgia Tech, Caltech, MIT) which had by policy or for most effective purposes remained all-male up to WWII or beyond. In the debate about whether to become coeducational, faculty, administrators, students, and alumni came to confront a difficult set of issues concerning gender and technology
Engineering education in the United States has a gendered history, one that reveals an ongoing debate over women's place in the predominantly male engineering profession. Historically, women in engineering programs, even more than in science, have stood out due to their rarity. Their very presence thus led university communities to confront questions about what it means to be a man or a woman in a modern technological society, what it means to be an engineer. The article concentrates on four technically-centered schools that had, due to implicit or explicit policies, remained completely or virtually all-male up to WWII or beyond. These case studies demonstrate that in the debate about whether to become coeducational, faculty, administrators, students, and alumni came to confront a difficult set of issues concerning gender and technology, traditions which tied technical knowledge to masculinity. The very process of rethinking admission and education policies led these colleges to discuss whether or not women had a place studying engineering and if so, on what terms they should be admitted. The author's work examines the period from the 1940s through the 1970s, asking questions about when, why, and how four schools (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the California Institute of Technology, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), moved toward coeducation.
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