Discursive Boundary Work around Gender, Inclusion, and Exclusion in Engineering and Industrial Design

For our final issue of 2023, we are pleased to be able to bring together three articles on discourses of gender, inclusion, and exclusion in engineering and industrial design. This issue continues our tradition of publishing special issues on gender, inclusion, and exclusion in engineering (see issues 12(2), 11(3), and 9(2)) with a particular focus on the boundary work being done through discursive positionings. It adds new fields, types of data sources, and questions about the (re)production of gender and exclusionary norms in engineering to that line of special issues.

First, Kristin A. Bartlett and Stephanie Masta bring us into the world of industrial design podcasts – both of which are new spaces for the journal. They examine how gender is (re)produced in two popular industrial design podcasts – Minor Details and Context. The format of both podcasts is interviews with professional industrial designers, and gendering occurred in several ways throughout the interviews. On one level, there was an exclusionary dismissing and trivializing of women industrial designers. They were given less airtime than men, they were mentioned less frequently, and they were spoken of less positively than men designers. On another level, gendering of particular subfields as ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ was re(produced), with areas where women industrial designers more commonly work, such as toy design, were devalued, while areas where men more commonly work, such as consumer electronics, were highly valued. Additionally, design skills that were more closely associated with manufacturing engineering, such as computer-aided design, were valued more highly than ‘softer’ design skills, such as user research. In these ways, the podcasts do boundary work that enforces the masculinization of the industrial design profession and the devaluing of women in the field. Readers will see that there are many parallels with well-documented phenomena in engineering.

Next, Kai Lo Andersson and Catharina Landström take us into the world of a gender equality program at a technical university in Sweden and explore reasons for lack of progress in gender equality in engineering education. Their ethnographic account surfaces and names the ‘sole engineering genius’ as the dominant discourse of professional identity development and explores the gendered dimensions of that discursive figure. Their analysis shows how ‘the sole engineering genius’ works against gender equality efforts and provides rationales for rejecting the types of changes that would help decrease gender inequities. Rather than being a local or national phenomenon however, it is argued that this discursive figure plays a central role in academic engineering culture transnationally, undermining gender equality efforts in similar ways in other countries as well. This work adds to a line of other gender analyses from Sweden we have published in recent years, namely Anna T. Danielsson, Allison J. Gonsalves, Eva Silfver, and Maria Berge’s look at the identity work of male, working-class engineering students, and Andreas Ottemo, Maria Berge, Heather Mendick and Eva Silfver’s exploration of gendering in/of a makerspace there.¹

In the third article, Stephanie Lezotte takes us to three other universities, this time in the United States, to show how institutional contexts and neoinstitutionalism shape diversity and inclusion messaging and work. The multiple case study examined engineering units at three U.S. universities that received the same type of National Science Foundation grant that aimed to cultivate an inclusive engineering culture. Drawing on interviews, institutional documents, websites, and social media postings, Lezotte finds (among other things) that a discourse of legitimacy produced inertia that hinders diversity and inclusion efforts at two of the universities.² Similar to Andersson and Landström’s analysis, this article reveals how even in equity initiatives, efforts are undermined by gender norms and discourses of legitimacy. Lezotte challenges readers with this concluding question:

what if desired markers of engineering education legitimacy consisted of programs that enrolled and graduated high numbers of underrepresented students, hired and promoted high numbers of underrepresented faculty, invested as much funding for need-based scholarships as they did merit-based, normalized an inclusive curriculum that equally values technical and social content, embraced social science research methods as a valid form of inquiry, and encouraged students to apply informally learned funds of knowledge in their classrooms and labs?³

These three articles work together to surface dominant ideas of what legitimate engineering and industrial design are, who legitimate engineers and industrial designers are, and what they do. Notions of legitimacy are shown to reinforce and (re)produce gender, exclusionary norms, and institutional messaging that ultimately maintain the status quo. Such discursive boundary work warrants further critical examination, particularly in new and understudied spaces, and we welcome more submissions that continue these lines of inquiry.

Looking ahead to next year, Engineering Studies will continue to explore these themes and analytical lenses. We are excited to have yet another special issue dedicated to gender in the works for 2024, as well as a special issue about boundary work in engineering more broadly (not specifically about gender). In addition to those special issues, 2024 will take the journal and its readers into fascinating new spaces and places, including the European Commission’s Human Brain Project, the Purdue Spatial Visualization Test of Rotations, rainwater harvesting in Bolivia, and the video game software industry in South Korea. Stay tuned … 

Notes

1 Danielsson et al., “The Pride and Joy of Engineering?”; Ottemo et al., “Gender, Passion, and ‘Sticky’ Technology”.

2 Readers may find it valuable to compare Lezotte’s findings with those of Friedensen, Rodriguez, and Doran (2020) who also used departmental documents to analyze notions of the “ideal” engineer and whose findings have both similarities and differences to Lezotte’s.

3 Lezotte, “‘We’re supposed to be at the forefront’”.