Gendered Engineering: Gender essentialist ideology or rational response?

• In Event: 1563 - Gender Segregation and the Culture or Structure Quandary

Abstract

Gender essentialist ideology has received increasing attention as a segregating force in women’s higher educational and professional choices. This contrasts with earlier accounts emphasizing the contingency and mutability of the gendering of professional domains. Women’s paltry share of engineering higher education has been a particular concern in recent literature. Engaging with scholarly explanations of the gender segregation of higher education, we examine the case of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Russia is a revealing case because of the deliberate attempt of the Soviet state to draw women into masculine strongholds, a policy that secured near gender parity in engineering higher education by the end of the Soviet era. The Russian case does not fit the theory that economic development augments the influence of gender essentialist ideology by facilitating self-expressive career choices. Moreover, analyzing Russian women’s subject choices after the fall of the Soviet Union, we find that women’s higher education field choices “follow the money” in terms of the best-paid industries for women graduates. We contribute to theory by suggesting modifications to the concept of gender essentialist ideology which take account of temporal and cross-national variation, and propose a means of integrating wages into analyses of higher education subject choices.

Authors

• Sarah Ashwin, London School of Economics

• Irina Kozina, National Research University Higher School of Economics

• Roberto M. Fernandez, MIT Sloan School of Management