Governing inclusive STEM futures? Gendered performativity of governance efforts to promote STEM to future women workers

Abstract

With hopes of new technologies to co-create solutions to societal challenges, enlarging a diverse workforce in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) becomes a governance as much as an industrial concern, not least due to acute worker-shortage in STEM occupations. Gender-segregation remains challenging within STEM, including in the Nordics despite longstanding welfare policies of gender equality–a so-called Nordic gender equality paradox. This paper explores recent governance discourses and practices responding to this across political, industrial, NGO and educational contexts to promote STEM interests and career prospects to young women in a case from Denmark. In doing so, we unpack (I) how governance discourses perform a politics of necessity to promote STEM to more (women) students, and (II) how such politics manifest in promotion events with promising ideas of a more ‘feminine’ STEM future through local governance efforts. Yet, we also show how gender is performed in contradictory ways as a governance matter; at once contesting and reproducing stereotypes in striving towards a diverse STEM future. This, however, may counter-produce local engagements with targeted actors and their future-making.