Integrating Gender and Diversity in Engineering Education and Research

• In Event: Sustainability & Transformation in Engineering Education - II: The Narratives & Limits of Engineering Education Reform

Abstract

Engineering is crucial for the development and implementation of sustainable and, thus, inclusive technologies that serve the needs of society’s diverse range of people. Feminist Technology Studies have long pointed out that technologies are often gendered, be it explicitly or implicitly (e.g. Berg/Lie 1995). As ‘artifacts have gender’, multiple ideas have been developed, how to overcome the so-called male bias in engineering research and design, such as the prominent initiative “gendered innovations” (Schiebinger et al. 2011-2018). Lately, national and international research funding organizations in Germany and the EU have joined the call for more inclusive engineering solutions and demand that projects applying for research funding integrate a gender and/or diversity perspective.
Whereas there is a lot of research on how technologies are gendered, so far very little is known about how these reform initiatives are met within engineering: What does gender and diversity mean to engineers? How do they think about gender and diversity in relation to their ‘genuine’ engineering expertise? And, how – if at all – do engineers take gender and diversity into account when teaching students, doing research or designing artifacts?
This paper is based on empirical research. We conducted qualitative interviews with engineering scholars at three German technical universities, covering a broad range of areas of academic engineering. The aim is to reconstruct the entanglements of engineering knowledge and expertise with ideas about gender and diversity. First findings show that there are primarily two ways of narrating the relation between gender/diversity and technological innovations/engineering solutions.

Authors

• Tanja Paulitz, TU Darmstadt

• Bianca Prietl, Technical University Darmstadt