As Engineering Studies enters our sixteenth year of publication with this special issue on gender in engineering, we build on fifteen years of publishing innovative interdisciplinary work in this space. Looking back to 2009, the first article in our first issue was Wendy Faulkner’s Doing Gender in Engineering Workplace Cultures. I. Observations From The Field (part 1 of a two-part series completed later that year).Footnote1 Since that time, we have published special issues on Engineering Masculinities in Water Governance, Men and Masculinities in Engineering, Exclusion and Inclusion in U.S. Engineering Education, and Discursive Boundary Work Around Gender, Inclusion, and Exclusion in Engineering and Industrial Design.Footnote2 In addition to our special issues, we have published numerous other articles on gender, race, and power as well. Table lists all such articles.Footnote3 We are proud to note that our top three most cited articles of all time and our top three most read articles of last year all appear on this list.
Table 1. Gender, Race, and Power in Engineering Studies: 2009 – spring 2024.
The work represented in Table comes from a wide range of disciplines and utilized a wide range of methods. Its contexts span classrooms, universities, workplaces, government, the field, the internet, podcasts, and research landscapes. What is less widely represented, however, are geographic locations. Nearly all of the work comes from the US, and to a lesser extent, Europe. As we move forward into our sixteenth year and beyond, we hope to receive submissions that present analyses from a wider range of countries and expand our critical understandings of engineers and engineering in other parts of the world.
The three articles in this issue build on lines of exploration dating back to previous issues. Most directly, Shannon K. Gilmartin and colleagues’ article entitled ‘Early-Career Assignments and Workforce Inequality in Engineering’ and Floris van der Marel and colleagues’ article entitled ‘Moments That Matter: Early-Career Experiences of Diverse Engineers on Different Career Pathways’ advance a line of research featured in our 2021 special issue on early career engineers.Footnote4 Both articles present intersectional analyses that grapple with the complexities of gender, race and ethnicity in contemporary engineering workplaces. Gilmartin et al. explore ‘stretch assignments’ (i.e. assignments that involve new and unfamiliar work and can prove readiness to advance in one’s career) and find that there are ways in which they can intensify gender and racial/ethnic inequalities in engineering workplaces. Drawing on data from the Engineering Majors Survey (EMS), a nationwide, multi-year study funded by the National Science Foundation, this nuanced analysis delves deeply into complex dynamics surrounding access versus impact or effect. Women reported more access to stretch assignments than men did, but the anticipated impact of those assignments in terms of raises and promotions was more favorable for men; women did not expect the same career rewards to come as a result of their stretch assignments as men did. Furthermore, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and Pacific Islander engineers reported fewer opportunities for stretch assignments and were more often given “documentation” assignments. Not surprisingly, these groups were similar to women in terms of anticipated impacts of stretch assignments, that is, they expected fewer career rewards to come from them than did White engineers and men. The authors offer explanation for these, as well as other patterns they identified, by contextualizing the findings through the lens of status characteristics theory.
Next, Van der Marel et al. present findings from interviews with 33 early career engineers from multiple industries/fields in the US. They explored experiences that were meaningful and how those meaningful experiences related to autonomy, competence, relatedness, and career intentions. In doing so, they found differences between genders and racial groups that align with prior research on ways in which early career experiences differ for White men, women, and people of color. Among other differences, they found that White men’s meaningful moments most often positively supported their sense of relatedness (meaningful interactions and connections with others), whereas the meaningful moments for women and people of color more often undermined their sense of relatedness. Their interviews also explored participants’ intentions to stay or leave their organizations and revealed that men who intend to leave would do so to increase their impact, White women would do so to pursue more engineering analysis and see their impact more, and women of color would do so because they felt insufficiently challenged. The latter finding in particular would seem to make sense in light of Gilmartin et al.’s finding that people of color reported fewer stretch assignments (i.e. fewer opportunities to be challenged).
Lastly, Bartlett’s critical examination of the history and politics of the Purdue Spatial Visualization Test: Rotations (PSVT:R) picks up lines of research seen in Amy Slaton and Alice Pawley’s 2018 analysis of ‘The Power and Politics of Engineering Education Research Design’ and the dominance of large ‘N’ research designs therein, as well as Donna Riley’s analysis of the role of ‘rigor’ in perpetuating inequalities through engineering education research.Footnote5 All of these articles raise vital, critical questions about dominant approaches to engineering education research. Bartlett traces the creation of the PSVT:R and its subsequent uptake in engineering education, documenting problematic and gendered assumptions, methods, and evidence of validation throughout the test’s history. She demonstrates that the instrument may not actually measure mental rotation, explains how ‘gestalt processing’ was created to justify spatial instruments that favored men, and argues that the isometric imagery style used in the test further politicizes it due to its gendered roots in engineering graphics. Bartlett’s analysis points to a host of reasons that continuing this line of research, and the programs based on it, are misguided and problematic. It presents an excellent example of the widespread appeal of studying down in engineering education research.Footnote6 Bartlett’s account is a story that has long needed telling, and it represents the kind of critical scholarship we need more of.
In coming years, we look forward to receiving more articles that continue to build on the valuable work listed in Table , as well as articles that take us in entirely new directions – to new spaces, places, and times.
Notes
1 Faulkner, “Doing Gender in Engineering Workplace Cultures.”
2 Zwarteveen and Rap, “Engineering Masculinities in Water Governance”; Beddoes, “Men and Masculinities in Engineering”; Beddoes, “Exclusion and Inclusion in U.S. Engineering Education”; Beddoes, “Discursive Boundary Work.”
3 See Reference List for full citations. Table does not include short response pieces published in issue 7(2–3). It also does not include all articles that may mention gender or race/ethnicity but do not have a piece centrally about these topics.
4 Brunhaver et al., “The Early Career Years of Engineering.”
5 Slaton and Pawley, “The Power and Politics of Engineering Education Research Design”; Riley “Rigor/Us.”
6 Beddoes, “Institutional Influences that Promote Studying Down.”
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