Feminism and engineering

Abstract

Can you be feminist and an engineer? This paper explores this question and aims to show some of the breadth of experience and meanings involved in constructing this combination. Specifically, for this study we used ourselves as the sample population. We are four women engineers who identify themselves as feminists, with Ph.D. degrees and interests in education. Our backgrounds include electrical, environmental, and industrial engineering and teaching experiences at large and small private and public universities. Our experiences with formal courses in pedagogy and feminism range from none to quite extensive. For this study, we each wrote an essay in response to questions of how we combine feminism and engineering as well as our opinions on feminist pedagogy. We used these essays as data for a qualitative analysis from which several common themes and differences emerged. In this paper, we briefly describe ourselves and present our definitions of feminism. We provide illustrations of our most common themes from our reflections. The two most frequent themes were those of social justice for engineering including making the engineering community more welcoming to a diverse group of people and wanting to enhance student learning. Consideration of feminist pedagogy led to a third theme of critiquing the engineering process itself including who and what is studied. Finally, we present our variety of views on our motivation for investigating feminist pedagogy and its use in engineering education