Guest Editorial – Men and Masculinities in Engineering: Volume 1

Over the past year, Engineering Studies serendipitously received a number of submissions about men and masculinities in engineering that have led to this special issue. Nearly a decade ago, I noted that research on men and masculinities in engineering education contexts was problematically scarce.¹ Since then, I have continued to advocate the need to ‘study up’ by shifting the focus of gender research in engineering education to dominant groups and structures.² I am therefore pleased to present this special issue with three contributions that are based on data from men engineering students and focus on masculinities in engineering education contexts. Accompanying those contributions is a recent historical look at some of the effects of masculine engineering culture through the eyes of women engineers who graduated in the 1970s. The studies in this issue represent international perspectives from Sweden, Spain and the United States. They also importantly highlight different types of masculinities, avoiding generalizations about hegemonic masculinity.

In the first article of this special issue, ‘The Pride and Joy of Engineering? The Identity Work of Male Working-Class Engineering Students’, Anna T. Danielsson, Allison J. Gonsalves, Eva Silfver and Maria Berge explore the socially- and discursively-produced identity work done by four men mechanical engineering students in Sweden. Drawing on ethnographic observations, interviews and student video-diaries, they found that the technicist masculinity of the mechanical engineering program aligns easily with these students’ identity trajectories. For one of the students, however, the laddish masculinities re/produced in the program led to a ‘troubled’ identity trajectory. Additionally, project work proved more difficult to incorporate into some of the students’ identity trajectories. This article makes an important contribution to intersectional studies of gender by highlighting the ways in which a ‘working-class’ identity affected these students’ trajectories. While intersectionality has received increased attention in engineering education over the past decade, it is still nearly entirely in the context of research on women.³ This article shows that for men, too, gender is never an isolated construct, but rather is always complicated by the other aspects of identity with which it is bundled.

Next, in ‘Making the Familiar Strange: An Ethnographic Scholarship of Integration Contextualizing Engineering Educational Culture as Masculine and Competitive’, Stephen Secules likewise draws on ethnographic data to critically analyze aspects of masculinity in engineering education in the United States. Secules reflects on his own ethnographic observations of masculinity, competition, and competition-as-masculinity in engineering education though historical lenses. He demonstrates an example of interdisciplinary integrative scholarship by highlighting often unseen and taken-for-granted aspects of masculine engineering education culture and summarizing salient historical literature on those aspects. Readers of this article will likely also note resonances with Amy Sue Bix’s history of engineering education competition culture published in our previous issue.⁴

In the third article, ‘What Late-Career and Retired Women Engineers Tell Us: Gender Challenges in Historical Context’ by Laura Ettinger, Nicole Conroy and William Barr II, we can see what some of the effects of masculine cultures have been on women over the past fifty years. Based on a survey with 251 women engineers in the United States who graduated from college in the 1970s, this article demonstrates that gender in engineering is deeply embedded in interpersonal interactions and social and institutional structures. Like Secules, Ettinger, Conroy and Barr use a historical lens to elucidate their findings. The engineers who were surveyed graduated in a decade when the proportion of women gaining undergraduate engineering degrees in the U.S. rose nine-fold, but during their careers that proportion plateaued and has been constant for the past 20 years. Their experiences therefore reveal much about the hopes for, and frustrations of, attempts to reach gender parity in engineering education.

The issue concludes with a second contribution from Europe. In the report ‘Gender Equality Perceptions of Future Engineers’ by Isabel Pla-Julián and Jose-Luis Díez, we see important findings about men engineering students’ perceptions of gender equality. This comparative study is based on survey data collected from men and women students in both humanities/social sciences and engineering. Notably, compared to the other groups, the men engineering students (inaccurately) perceived the most social equality between men and women, and were the group that gave the least importance to efforts to promote social equality. These differences highlight the need for further comparative research between engineering and other disciplines, as well as between men and women.

Along with a previous special issue of Engineering Studies on Engineering Masculinities in Water Governance published in 2017, this special issue represents the journal’s continued commitment to being a leading outlet for innovative gender research in engineering and engineering education contexts. I look forward to further conversations on these topics in the journal. A second special issue dedicated to men and masculinities is anticipated in coming years. Thank you to all of the contributors who made Volume 1 possible.

Notes

1 Beddoes and Borrego, “Feminist Theory in Three Engineering Education Research Journals.”

2 Beddoes, “Institutional Influences that Promote Studying Down in Engineering Diversity Research”; Beddoes, “Selling Policy Short?”; Beddoes, “Agnotology, Gender, and Engineering”; Beddoes and Panther, “Gender and Teamwork.”

3 Beddoes and Borrego, “Feminist Theory”; Meiksins et al., “Women in Engineering.”

4 Bix, “Mastering the Hard Stuff.”