Defining Gender in Engineering: Redefining Nondominant Discourses of Women in Engineering

• In Event: 60.065 - Decentering Dominant Discourses and Reimagining Privileged Spaces in STEM Education

Abstract

Objectives
The purpose of this work is to better understand the ways in which gender is constructed and made consequential in undergraduate engineering education. The underrepresentation of women in engineering continues to be a perennial problem. Research addressing this problem too often focuses on quantitative measures of women's success and/or persistence in the field without actively identifying the ways in which gender as a category is produced by classroom practices, and institutional structures and policies, ignoring the ways in which a gender label can become both hegemonic and heteronormative.

Theoretical Framework
My theoretical framework intertwines concepts from situated learning within engineering education (Stevens et al., 2008) and feminism with engineering education (Beddoes & Borrego, 2011); both focus on the individual in context. Situated learning foregrounds the ways in which individuals navigate pathways and trajectories both into and out of a community. I draw on feminist theories to show how these pathways and trajectories are gendered. Specifically I focus on interactional feminism and examine the ways in which gender is produced in the encounters and processes of everyday life. By focusing on discourse, interactional feminism rejects presumed binaries, and attempts to uncover gendered behaviors and interactions to produce new explanation as to how and why masculine biases persist in engineering.

Methods
I use ethnographic methods to examine three undergraduate engineering courses including two semester-length freshman design courses and one year-long senior design course. In addition to these courses, this study includes observations of the weekly planning meetings for instructors teaching freshman design, weekly staff meetings held by the instructor of senior design, and weekly team meetings from one senior design team. The data includes fieldnotes from over 250 hours of observation, as well as formal and informal interviews with students, instructors, and teaching assistants in the design courses.

Findings
Analysis of the data shows that gender is produced through 1) the spatial organization of engineering practice and 2) heteronormativity of classroom discourse. The spatial organization of gendered difference is evidenced in the production of public (masculine) and private (feminine) spaces (Haraway, 1991), as well as through the historical practices of the building itself. For example, evidence that the women's restrooms were retrofitted from men's remains. Classroom discourse practices are routinely organized around gender and heteronormativity. Team formation, for example, is a practice guided by students' expected sex category by dividing teams so that no single woman is on a team by herself. Ensuring women are not lone participants on a team is one strategy intended to improve women's experience (Tonso, 1996), but this practice often prescribes rather than disrupts expected gender roles.

Significance
This work illuminates how gender is produced and made consequential in routine practices of engineering education. Foregrounding gender in our understanding of teaching and learning allows for instructors and educators to design for more equitable instruction. Furthermore, understanding the effects of gender in one STEM discipline, will likely inform gendered practices in other STEM disciplines.

Author

• Joanna R. Weidler-Lewis, University of Colorado - Boulder