Chapter 3 WHAT COUNTS AS “ENGINEERING”: TOWARD A REDEFINITION
Alice L. Pawley
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INTRODUCTION
Women’s persisting underrepresentation in engineering disciplines, at all academic and
professional levels, is determined to be a considerable problem for engineering education.
Alarmingly, still relatively recent data indicate that the rate at which women are increasingly going into engineering undergraduate degree programs is decreasing, suggesting that
we may be far from understanding its cause (Grose, 2006). Much of the existing research
on gender in engineering within the engineering literature focuses on this “underrepresentation of women” problem through the analytic lenses of pipeline models and chilly
climate models, although a few other models have been proposed, such as a transmission
line (Watson & Froyd, 2007), or, outside engineering, the glass ceiling and labyrinth (Eagly
& Carli, 2007; Morrison, White, Van Velsor, & Center for Creative Leadership, 1994). These
models tend to frame the issue of women’s participation in engineering as a problem of
insufficient numbers.
The frequent use of pipeline and chilly climate models implies certain conditions and
conceptualizations about the problem we think we are trying to solve. Pipelines imply that
the reason women are not in engineering professions is because they leak out at certain critical transition points, particularly from high school and college, and between degree programs. While there is evidence to support this model, some scholars have argued that this
does not accurately map women’s experiences (Xie & Shauman, 2003); for example, there
is no room in this model for women to “leak” back in to the pipeline (and associated metaphors of contamination are brought with them when leaks do occur), although women returning to the traditional STEM workforce after raising children is a common life path. In
addition, the metaphor allows us to overlook the question of fault: pipes leak, and we need
not concern ourselves with the faulty or otherwise problematic infrastructure that permits
the leaks, but instead patch up any holes and move on. In contrast to pipelines, chilly climates imply that there is something environmentally hostile about a workplace or learning place, which either a) a given population is ill-equipped to survive and needs special
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WHAT COUNTS AS “ENGINEERING”: TOWARD A REDEFINITION
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60
equipment to do so, or b) is experienced only by a given population and that requires them
to have additional tools to survive.
Despite their limitations, the two models work well together, as pipeline models focus
on the results of leaks, while the chilly climate focuses on the cause of the leaks. However,
each of these is also an imperfect metaphor, and while together they have proven somewhat
effective until now, the disturbing downward trend of women’s participation rates in college-level education programs in engineering suggests the metaphors are also not sufficient.
To develop a new theory that might help us differently understand women’s participation in engineering, I have used as an analytical lens the metaphor of borders and boundaries. Through the use of this metaphor, I evaluate the actual language of engineering faculty members, gathered through interviews, to argue how that language may exhibit certain
kinds of boundary work, resulting in the perpetuation of a gendered discipline of engineering (Pawley, 2007).
A “boundary” in this context is a theoretical tool to help us understand people’s experiences. In people’s talk about their disciplines, they often invoke metaphors (sometimes
geographical ones) to represent what counts as their discipline and what does not. A boundary is not a defined “line” but, rather, is determined by the margin of a clump of accepted
practices; different people may determine this edge differently. Words like “outside” and
“within” are markers of such a metaphorical boundary; the margins of what is acceptably
considered “within” are delimited by a conceptual “boundary”(Lakoff & Johnson, 1980).
Boundaries therefore are “real” in the sense that people make decisions about their behavior based on where they perceive the boundary to be (Anzaldúa, 1987; Gieryn, 1983, 1999;
hooks, 2000; Klein, 1990, 1993, 1996; Pawley, 2007, 2009).
Elsewhere I have used the faculty interview data to make visible engineering faculty
members’ universalized narratives of “applying science and mathematics,” “solving problems,” and “building things” (Pawley, 2009). I have then argued that we (being either researchers or faculty themselves) can use the tools of a boundary work frame—recognition,
definition, reproduction, and resistance of boundaries—to see alternative ways to reinforce
or resist these narratives (Pawley, 2007, in review). Together, these frameworks allow us to
see what is reported in this paper: that the narratives that are described as though they are
applicable to all contexts and all people actually seem only to apply to certain contexts and
certain people.
Boundaries can be a useful tool to help us see what marks “acceptable” from “unacceptable” in terms of knowledge and ways of being. These normative concerns have been the
subject of much feminist critique; indeed, bell hooks has argued that only by understanding
the “margin” (a boundary concept) can we hope to understand the “center,” and in fact, that
the margin provides definition of the center (hooks, 2000). Thinking about boundaries of a
concept or process or way of being prompts us to ask both sides of the following questions:
s
Where is the boundary set? What is included, and what is excluded?
s
Who set the boundary here? Who is excluded from setting this boundary?
s
Who benefits from the boundary being here? Who is punished?
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Specifically in this paper, I describe two “localizing” ways that engineers implicitly define
engineering. These localizing mechanisms make use of ideas of space (or the “where?” question) and actors (or the “who?” question) to make visible holes in the “Swiss cheese” of engineering; in other words, by taking a universalized narrative and applying a localizing lens
of space or actors, we begin to see how the contributions and work of women have been systematically marginalized in the definition of the discipline of engineering. These additional
dimensions will let engineering educators begin to see for themselves that which feminist
scholars have been arguing for decades: that much of engineering has historically focused
on the problems defined by men and for men operating in paid work or military environments, and overlooked the work environments historically populated by women, such as in
domestic or service environments (Hacker, 1993; Hacker & Hacker, 1987). Consideration
of these additional dimensions in the definition of engineering allows us to then see that
a localized picture of engineering appears “gendered,” that the discipline is constructed in
such a way that the consequences of the discipline’s definition weigh differentially on women
than men. This gendered construction allows us to draw the underrepresentation of women
away from the discourse of “equal representation” and instead into the realm of social justice, where the profession of engineering begins to argue to rectify its historical focus on
“solving problems” in paid work arenas, high-tech products, and First World contexts by
expanding its explicit focus to include the historical and continuing problems experienced
by women and people in Third World contexts. Ruth Simmons, former president of Smith
College when Smith developed the first ABET-accredited engineering program at a women’s
university in the country, described it thusly, saying:
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A whole generation after the women’s movement, five out of every six engineering students and nine out of ten engineering professors are male. Engineers literally design and build much of the human environment. Women must not accept
so marginal a role in so important a field (Simmons, 2002).
By helping engineers see the gendered asymmetry built into their own definitions, in combination with their identification with rationality and logical thinking, this framework helps
convince the social project of engineering to be more socially just before simply trying to
recruit more women into the existing system.
BACKGROUND
There seems to be a revival of interest in explicitly connecting engineering in the United
States with the aims of social justice. Organizations such as Engineers Without Borders
are growing, and undergraduate programs in “humanitarian engineering,” such as that at
Colorado School of Mines or Penn State University, are being institutionalized. Modern
pioneers in the engineering education literature include Caroline Baillie, George Catalano,
and Donna Riley, who have each strongly articulated a reconceptualization of engineering
practice and engineering education away from their close historical relationship with the
military, and closer to meeting the global needs of environmental sustainability, human
rights, and peace (Baillie, 2006; Catalano, 2007; Riley, 2008).
Baillie, C., Pawley, A., & Riley, D. (Eds.). (2012). Engineering and social justice : In the university and beyond. Purdue University Press.
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WHAT COUNTS AS “ENGINEERING”: TOWARD A REDEFINITION
In her 2008 publication %NGINEERING AND 3OCIAL *USTICE Riley argues that it is part of the
nature of “social justice” that it be difficult to define: “Its mutability and multiplicity are, in
fact, key characteristics of social justice” (p. 1). In the same way, its definition is inherently
social in that it is based on groups’ definitions of what is right and wrong, what is and what
should be. Instead of encompassing a set of specific and fixed ideals, Riley encourages us to
think of social justice as “a continuing process and an ongoing struggle.” (Riley, 2008, p. 1)
That being said, Riley readily acknowledges the shared history of social justice movements in the US as “the struggle to end different kinds of oppression, to create economic
equality, to uphold human rights and dignity, and to restore right relationships among all
people and the environment” (2008, p. 5)—to wit, the collective action for workers’ rights
and economic justice, the environmental movement, and the civil rights movements for
women, people of color, and LGBT people, among others. The women’s rights movement
helped birth a literature of feminist critiques of science and technology, and it is this literature that prompts the subject of this paper. Indeed, while we may only now be regularly hearing “engineering” in the same breath as “social justice,” feminist critiques of engineers and
engineering hearken back to studies in the early 1980s by Sally Hacker (1981) and Cynthia
Cockburn (1983). In this section, I outline a particular literature drawn from science and
technology studies (STS) and women’s studies that focuses on understanding the definition
of “engineering” as explicitly avoiding the work or concerns of specific oppressed groups.
Engineering’s epistemological definition is intertwined with the history of engineering’s professionalization, which, some argue, occurred as a function of gendered notions of
status and work. In particular, this link is discussed in Oldenziel’s (1999, 2000) histories of
American women engineers and the historical masculinization of technology, Bix’s (2000,
2002, 2004) work on women’s technical education in both engineering and home economics,
and Frehill’s (2004) work on the gendered construction of engineering disciplines through
their historical professionalization. These three historians also are explicit about the role of
academic engineers in the construction of disciplinary boundaries that preserve class and
gender privilege. In particular, Oldenziel argues that engineers who were scientifically trained
in the universities embodied a classed and gendered threat to shop- and field-trained engineers because they attained their occupational positions through the use of:
. . . [a] form of engineering knowledge [which] was not linked to the patriarchal
and class authority of the workplace, but was based on the new cultural authority
of science and math. Not only were academic engineers often accused of failing
to prepare their students to face the reality of the production floor, but academic
ideals threatened to become associated with gentility and femininity. (2000, p. 21)
Frehill echoes Oldenziel’s argument in her study of engineering publications from 18931920:
The increasing significance of engineering education and the use of engineering
colleges to screen out those people who were not considered fit to be engineers is
one important mechanism by which middle-class men maintained control of the
engineering profession. (2004, p. 400)
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Frehill goes on to argue that, not only was the profession of engineering constructing itself
to exclude women’s participation and contributions in the first part of the twentieth century, but that:
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the advocates of engineering education carefully crafted discussions of engineering
work to appeal to adventurous young boys, emphasizing the manly qualities needed
by engineers and the manly outdoors training engineering students received. Indeed, one could become a man by enduring the hardships associated with becoming an engineer. (2004, p. 400)
Thus, although the establishment of engineering departments in coeducational universities
ostensibly opened up the possibility of acquiring qualifications as engineers to women, engineering education’s origins in male-dominated apprenticeships (and later its close ties with
an exclusively male military) marked the field as essentially masculine, effectively excluding
women without the need to resort to formal and overt boundaries. As engineering became
more integrated with science through its introduction into higher educational systems in the
second half of the nineteenth century, engineers became increasingly concerned with protecting the scientific status of their field from the “diluting” effects that they feared women
would introduce (including a parallel decrease in status-related characteristics like salary).
Additional research relevant to the study of academic engineering practice is situated
in the arena of home economics. Histories of the development of the discipline “home economics” let us view the construction of a discipline and profession that also constructed
itself around the uses of science and technology but was differently gendered than engineering (Apple, 1997; Blaszczyk, 1997; Stage, 1997a, 1997b). Emerging from the Progressive Era, the founders of home economics wanted women to apply the logic of scientific
management to domestic contexts to develop better, more effective, and more efficient ways
of operating the home. Improved health, hygiene, and sanitation, improved knowledge of
nutrition, more efficient technologies for lighting, heating, and cleaning, and management
techniques for supervising servants and raising children, all organized around the home,
constituted the realm of a new, science-oriented understanding of the domestic sphere, created and maintained by women.
What is crucial about this history with respect to the construction of engineering is the
realization that the actual tasks awarded to home economics could easily have been considered “science” or “engineering” tasks had they been in a different context. Nutrition can be
characterized as a combination of chemistry, biology, and food engineering, except when
in the context of feeding a family. Sanitation engineering forms a large portion of civil engineering and is often considered its own discipline, but in the home it is morphed into
basic hygiene and cleanliness. The characteristics of “hygiene” have been adopted by medicine and biomedical engineering, except in the context of women’s health and menstruation (Appel, 1994). Developing lighting systems in industry is considered electrical engineering—and, indeed, is largely the reason for electrical engineering’s initial existence—but
is characterized as home economics in the context of electrifying (especially rural) private
homes (Kline, 1997).
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Bix (2002) has done important work on the history of women’s technical education,
which, even after the time when they were admitted into colleges of engineering as engineering students (as opposed to “special” students who completed coursework but who were
never granted degrees), developed through the lens of consumerism in home economics
departments. That women trained in home economics’ equipment majors also found employment in such nontraditional areas as “testing radio transmitters, receivers, and airplane
motors . . . [or] testing components of a new US Navy automatic pilot” (Bix, 2002, p. 741)
is intriguing, and this strongly suggests the gendered categorization of disciplines. Bix’s
work illustrates how the construction of a discipline—in this case, home economics—was
intensely bound to how people thought about the impact of gender on abilities, interests,
and work. What is critical about this example, however, is that home economics was being
constructed as different from engineering specifically, and that the populations of home
economics programs are so polar to populations of engineering programs. A starker example of the impact of gender on the differentiation of disciplines would be difficult to find.
It is this explicit exclusion of the work and conditions of entire groups of people from
the definition of engineering that makes the epistemology of engineering a subject of social
justice-related concern. It is also this exclusion that I will argue we engineers can remedy by
learning to recognize the boundary work we are engaged in WHILE WE ARE ENGAGED IN IT—in
other words, developing our capacity of “reflection-in-action” (Schön, 1995) and our facility to embody different content or ways of being as engineering.
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METHODS
The research here is qualitative in nature in order to investigate a set of faculty experiences
in depth. Participants were ten tenure-track or tenured faculty members who had their main
tenure appointment in an engineering department at a school of engineering in a large
research-extensive university in the United States. Participants were invited to participate
based on their membership on various standing school-level committees, and such that a
variety of engineering disciplines, academic positions (assistant, associate, full professors,
administrators) were represented in the final pool. Four women and six men participated
from seven different departments of engineering; participant characteristics are not identified more individually in order to protect their anonymity.
With each participant, I conducted at least two semi-structured interviews on different topics, including their definitions of engineering, and their research, teaching, and service work. Interviews were designed to take 90 minutes, but they ranged from 68 minutes
to 2 hours and 8 minutes. Each participant spoke with me for between 2.25 and 4.5 hours
in total. Upon the conclusion of each interview, I completed an interview summary form
(drawn from Miles & Huberman, 1994, p. 53) that asked:
1.
What were main issues in the interview?
2.
Summarize the information you got, or failed to get on each target question.
3.
Anything else interesting, salient, illuminating, or important in this interview?
4.
What new (or remaining) target questions do you have in considering the
next interview?
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Completion of this form after each first interview helped identify questions to follow up on
in the second interview; returning to the summary forms for both interviews per participant
during coding helped triangulate research findings.
Each interview was digitally recorded and transcribed using a style sheet to keep the
transcript conventions consistent. The recordings were transcribed verbatim except for
most crutches of speech, were proofread by two research team members, and were sent to
the participant for verification and confirmation.
The verified transcripts were coded in two main passes: the first pass categorized big
chunks of transcripts (across all interview participants) into coarse-grained categories determined in advance from the literature (boundaries, defining engineering, gender, identity,
and pressure agents), and the second pass took each coarse-grained coded text and broke
the text down into ad-hoc subcodes. After 45% of the text had been finely coded, a repetition of ideas was clear, and I started rearranging the subcodes into patterns and categories.
The categories that describe the different kinds of boundary work are reported in a paper
in review (Pawley, in review); the patterns that categorize the localization of engineering
definitions are reported in this paper.
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RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: MAKING THE UNIVERSAL LOCAL
Elsewhere, but with the same data set, I have developed categories of universalized narratives of engineering—of engineering as applied science and mathematics, as solving problems, and as making things (Pawley, 2009). Here, I argue we must make these narratives
more honest by making use of two ontological questions. These questions are framed as
“where?” and “who?” and represent dimensions of space and actors. As mentioned above,
the boundary metaphor is useful in these questions in its definition based on inclusion and
exclusion: where we ask questions about “who” defines problems in engineering, we then
must remember to ask “who does not” define the problems. The subsections that follow
explore the dimensions of space and actors in consideration of “where not” and “who not,”
which highlight how these constructs are gendered in the context of engineering. For each,
there is a set of relations that require our attention: the relationship between legitimate work
as paid work and work in industrial, commercial, and military contexts, historically completed by men, and the relationship between unrecognized work, unpaid work, and work
in domestic contexts, historically completed by women. These relationships compel us to
question the implicit power relationship then between engineering focusing its institutional
gaze on legitimate work (that is accomplished by men in privileged workspaces) and failing to consider the value of improving the process of doing devalued work accomplished
by women and people of color.1
WHERE? ENGINEERING AND SPACE
In their boundary work of differentiating engineering from science, business, or other
disciplines, participants used various notions of space and spatial dimensions to provide
arguments for disciplines’ similarities as well as differences. Several such spatial characterizations are discussed here: engineering in relation to industrial spheres; how those industrial contexts limit engineering to certain commercial environments and to itself consisting
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WHAT COUNTS AS “ENGINEERING”: TOWARD A REDEFINITION
of paid work; the connection of engineering to the military sphere; engineering and large
scales of production; and the notion of disciplinary identity through institutional location.
ENGINEERING AND INDUSTRIAL SPHERES
One way that engineering’s connection to industrial contexts was highlighted was in contrast to science. An assistant professor struggled to rationalize a self-identification as an engineer with a belief that there was little that rationally separated science from engineering:
I don’t know, I hesitate to say it because I feel like engineer—I think it’s all about
the culture, and how we’re trained, and the sequence of courses that we take, and
what’s emphasized in the courses. The end goal is all the same. We’re working on
the same problems—the limnologists and I, and the environmental engineering
students. Theirs is a lake, ours is a tank in the lab or in the wastewater treatment
plant. The physics, chemistry, biology . . . the math—it’s all the same. Even the
problem solving structures start to converge.
This participant makes use of the disciplinary narrative of problem solving to describe the
work of engineers, but recognizes that scientists also solve problems, and in some cases “the
same problems.” The participant also makes use of science disciplines, including math, to
indicate the content of both areas being the same. Yet it is THE CONTEXT of where the problems
are situated that seem to differentiate engineers from scientists: “[t]heirs is a lake, ours is a
tank in the lab or in the wastewater treatment plant.”2
This consideration for industrial contexts also permeated throughout participants’
broader conceptualizations of engineering, as suggested through the perception that the
products of engineering must be “close” to an application, or that they “matter” in ways that
science does not. One associate professor described students in relation to industrial contexts:
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Well, I would say that, is there something that’s an engineer that we supply as a
product to industry, it’s our undergraduates who are people who are capable of
doing problem solving in given—given lots of information they can formulate a
question and an answer to that and tell you why it’s going to work or not work.
They can pull it all together and solve the problem.
This fairly common metaphor amongst engineering faculty, that students are “products” for
industry, reflects not only a belief about the career path of students, but also demonstrates
how language stems from engineering epistemology. In the same way that engineering
educators hope to provide students with authentic engineering experiences through their
education, their educational process itself is conceived of as a procedure by which a product for industry (students as newly minted engineers) is generated. Yet they seem not to be
concerned about the power relations they are using to model their students’ growth (such
as the inherent connection with capitalistic modes of production), nor questioning whether
likening human beings unto objects with little agency does injustice to their students both
individually and collectively.
The following extensive quote allows us to see how a full professor believes that engineering’s presumed career path for undergraduates results in solving the wrong kinds of
problems. The faculty member begins by describing the magnitude of the basic problem of
clean water access still experienced by a staggering number of people on the planet:
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[. . .] We have to increase water supplies by 300,000 people every day until that
time. That is a huge number. And obviously not likely to occur. But if, what have
we done if we don’t start beginning at least on that. And so I’m not worried about,
my problems at the moment, I don’t, I think I face are not problems of “What’s the
right nut to put on this bolt,” or whatever. That’s an engineering problem, no question. These problems to me are villages of 100,000 people kinds of problems and . . .
Interviewer: So do you think there’s a, I mean, so you’ve distinguished that as different from classic engineering. So do you think classically, engineering, that hasn’t
been what engineers do?
Participant: I don’t think so.
Interviewer: So why is that?
Participant: Because I don’t think engineers have been given the consciousness to
some extent for that. No one’s really challenged them on anything. I mean, we’re
happy to go to work for the GMs and the Fords and the GEs [General Electric],
and these companies have been able to live with boundaries. They have not grown
into, some have grown into international firms, but they haven’t necessarily thought
about the international nature of their business.
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This participant’s argument is clearly that problems defined in industrial contexts tend to
not be the “right” problems to solve in consideration of a global context. Instead, engineers
should focus on the basic quality of life issues for people in poverty, in this example. However, this same participant reported being punished—“disciplined” in a different sense of
the word—by being denied a promotion because of the focus of the participant’s research
on social justice concerns and engineering. We will revisit this same participant again in
discussing “do-gooder engineering,” later in the last section of this chapter.
A full professor also problematized both the narrative of engineering as problem-solving and the setting of engineering in industrial contexts through some explicit boundary
language related to the concept of physical space:
Well, we can, we can do—it is a problem for engineering to figure out an optimum
solution to an assembly line balancing problem or a, it is a problem for engineering to think about what’s the most efficient way to solicit individual preferences for
some kind of a utility function. But what I—so that’s one level of problems: here is
a challenge that is unsolved and must be solved. But the application area problems
come from industries, and more and more come from lifestyle issues that at one time
we thought of as being shaped by industry but are not solely industrial concerns: of
living at home, managing music at home. You could go to hear a symphony or you
could have a CD in their living room. Well, where is the industrial boundary when
the CD is in your living room? It’s in your living room. So the idea that there are
environments and markets that create problems that have to be, that have unusual
challenges that have to be solved is where I think engineering problems come from.
While again making use of the engineering as problem-solving narrative, the participant
both recognized the tendency to orient those problems around industrial contexts, and the
problems with so doing. In linking engineering to modes of production in a market-based
economy where individuals lack the skills of production to meet all their functional needs,
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WHAT COUNTS AS “ENGINEERING”: TOWARD A REDEFINITION
this participant admits the fact that modes of consumption operate in both work-related
and home-related contexts, and that engineers must therefore engage with questions of work
that occur in those home-related contexts. This participant went on to link in the industrial/
domestic dualism to the way engineering work is defined around paid-work:
And actually, what’s a little bit frustrating about it is that the major reason why I
believe you can extend engineering techniques into the home has less to do with
the consumer electronics model that I gave you a few minutes ago, and much more
to do with the fact that the healthcare industry, perhaps not with deliberate action,
but largely through a conscious set of steps has increasingly shifted work that used
to be paid work onto unpaid work. And so that doesn’t really change the fact that
it’s still work. And so if you think about engineering as a way of optimizing work
then wherever work is done engineering should be present.
In this quote, the participant involves a new industry model, that of the health care system,
and notes how political decisions have functioned to “shift” work from the paid domain to
the unpaid domain. As health care work has moved across this paid/unpaid work boundary, women are again impacted more than men via a combination of systematically lower
salaries, cultural expectations related to caregiving, and historical work of health care in
domestic contexts. These two quotes lead easily into a discussion of the relationship between engineering and paid work, along with the gendered implications of such a definition.
ENGINEERING AND THE COMMERCIAL SPHERE
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As suggested by the quotes in the previous subsection, engineering’s focus on industrial
contexts leads engineering to be defined through and around notions of paid work. One
participant discussed this connection in two ways: that engineering itself constituted work
that gets paid for; and that it tends to focus on improving paid work. In this quote, the participant suggests that unpaid work is beginning to be focused on by engineers, but only as
far as it supports paid work:
Well, I think there’s, I think engineering costs money. And I think that there hasn’t
been a way to capture the cost. But now that there’s a better understanding of the
consequence to the paid environment of the activities in the nonpaid environment,
then it’s worth engineering the nonpaid environment, so it better supports the paid
environment. Doesn’t tax the paid environment.
This quote connects with a familiar and well-worn gender argument—that unpaid labor
done in domestic contexts (in the US and elsewhere) is undervalued, not considered “work,”
and even now still done more often by women than men. However, it also presumes that,
when women enter certain areas of the paid workforce, they become subjects of engineering,
where work processes and anthropometry are considered. But in fact, paid domestic work
does not get to benefit either from the resources or attention of engineers who expect to be
paid for their work. This proves more insidious as women still constitute the majority of
paid domestic labor in the US and therefore still do not constitute appropriate subjects for
engineering. The argument that engineering “solves problems” by improving the quality of
working life then is only true when that work is paid labor done in industrial or commer-
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cial work contexts, thereby excluding the labor of poor and disenfranchised populations of
workers, including women and people of color.
This argument continues with the participant arguing for the study of “home engineering,” because as paid work is increasingly situated in the at home, the boundary between
home and work is becoming harder to distinguish:
The answer is, yes, I, that we should be studying home engineering as a contrast
to industrial engineering, because the home is becoming a nexus of work and citizenship and health management and leisure, and that there are aspects of that enterprise that are not aesthetic, but in fact are responsive to engineering concepts.
Could be done better, safer. The artist who works at home without ventilation needs
an air quality engineer to help work with them. The family who’s got a person who
needs to be lifted in and out of bed needs an ergonomics person to help them understand how to . . . [. . .] I’m saying you need to know the bed can’t go that close
to the window or else you’re going to dump Dad out the window.
Key to this quote is that the participant does not seem to think that “home work” was engineering in the old days—only when it is changing, now “becoming a nexus of work and
citizenship,” (where the home was arguably not so in the past) does it become worthy of
counting as engineering. At the end of the quote, this professor also provides some definition
to what engineering is—focusing on doing things better and more safely, and not looking
at aesthetics. The values of economy and practicality come through clearly, in contrast to a
more recent connection of engineering to creativity (Committee on Public Understanding of
Engineering Messages, 2008; Committee on the Engineer of 2020 Phase I, 2004; Wulf, 2007).
In some rather explicit boundary language, this participant argued that the boundary
was changing between home and work, and between paid and unpaid work:
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Because society is shifting, and society used to have a cleaner division between paid
and unpaid work. [. . .] Now, with the blurring of paid and unpaid work, and the
large amount of societal goals being met through unpaid work, like education or
health care, we need to be bringing engineering talents into those people’s, to assist them in accomplishing purposeful goals.
These are particularly illustrative examples, not only because of the boundary language being
used (“becoming the nexus,” “shifting,” and “blurring”), but also because the argument calls
for a redefinition of where “work” worthy of engineers’ attention occurs. Domestic work in
the United States and across much of the globe continues to be done more often by women
than men (Connell, 2002). These quotes suggest that, as women have entered certain areas
of the paid workforce, they have become the subjects of engineers’ attention. However, it is
still questionable whether work that remains unpaid and is situated in domestic contexts
should count as engineering—the latter quote suggests that it should do so when it supports
paid work. One concerned with issues of social justice might inquire as to the fairness of
this division: is it right or just that engineering has as its focus a context of problems when
a sex-segregated group of individuals are the beneficiaries?
One must also remember to ask who benefits from the inclusion of one kind of work
or another under the umbrella definition of “engineering.” One might argue that, because
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WHAT COUNTS AS “ENGINEERING”: TOWARD A REDEFINITION
engineers historically were so concerned about the status of their profession (as outlined
by such scholars as Noble and Layton), engineering focused on high-status occupations
and work in order to gain status itself. In other words, engineering could not focus on the
concerns of those who worked in the domestic and unpaid labor spheres because it was
low status, undervalued, and completed by women and people of color. Indeed, scholars
have argued that domestic and unpaid labor itself is undervalued because it is completed
by women and people of color.
ENGINEERING AND THE MILITARY SPHERE
The rhetoric of engineering around solving problems and serving society allows engineers
and engineering students to gloss over the role played by a major contributor in the American engineering profession’s history and present: the military. While military applications
may be played down in modern curricula of many disciplines, it clearly plays a significant
role in funding engineering research and engineering education.3 One full professor quipped:
Engineering has historically been involved with military activities. The old joke that
mechanical engineers build weapons and civil engineers build targets. [. . .] And it’s
true; it is very definitely connected with that.
An assistant professor felt that engineering education was strongly oriented around preparing students for certain industries, including military ones:
Participant: Just go to Career Day here and see who’s hiring. It’s all John Deere and
heavy machinery. Maybe that’s [name of state] agriculture. [. . .] Halliburton, yeah.
Talk to the students about where they’re getting jobs. That’s what they’re doing.
Interviewer: So how would you . . . It’s in heavy machinery . . . ?
Participant: Defense is another big one—weaponry, armor, yeah. I think it’s pretty
macho male-oriented stuff.
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Interviewer: Do you think that that influences what, who decides to become an
engineer?
Participant: Yeah, definitely. I know that more—I feel like I know, anyway, that by
talking with . . . I teach a freshman class, I taught it in the fall semester. I asked them
what they want to study. Most of the class is saying Biomedical Engineering. A couple of them are saying Mechanical Engineering, and I don’t know if that’s because
they know I’m in Mechanical Engineering and I’m doing other stuff in Mechanical
than what they would think. But no one says I want to work on defense products
or oil industry. But in reality, that’s where most of the jobs are.
A full professor explicitly argued a link between engineering’s focus on military contexts
with women’s underrepresentation in engineering:
It’s not like all of engineering is that way; in fact, parts of engineering that are least
connected to that are the ones that are most attractive to women—biomedical,
chemical, and industrial. But very clearly, mechanical and nuclear and these other
things are still very heavily involved—and electrical—are very heavily involved
with military. Sixty percent of all electrical engineers somehow work for the defense industry. Sixty percent!
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This connection of engineering with military contexts has also formed the basis of a feminist
critique of engineering and technology. Barton and Sally Hacker (1987) have described the
gendered division of labor constructed within and around military institutions; Sally Hacker
(1989) has also made arguments about the saliency of the continued relationship between
engineering education and the military, arguing that “[m]ilitary institutions are the central
patriarchal institutions of civilized societies, and depend on the subordination of women”
(p. 58) and further that “[o]ne way capital and military state [sic] worked together to accomplish social hierarchy was through control of engineering and technical education” (p.
59). Connell (1995) has argued that “[v]iolence on the largest possible scale is the purpose
of the military; and no arena has been more important for the definition of hegemonic
masculinity in European/American culture” (p. 213). Judy Wajcman (1991) has identified
“the identification of men and masculinity with the technology of destruction” (p. 96) as a
prevalent research stream in feminist scholarship, and she has explored the interaction of
military concepts of combat, technology and masculinity. From the point of view connecting gender and engineering with the problem of women’s underrepresentation, scholars
have argued that women’s underrepresentation in engineering and the sciences could be
explained by many women’s motivation to “help people,” (such as Miller, Rosser, Benigno,
& Zieseniss, 2000; Seymour & Hewitt, 1997) and that engineering’s connection with the
military seems to do the opposite. Amy Slaton (2010) extends this argument to note how
military and industrial topics granted higher status to universities: historically “a two-tier
system of engineering teaching and research emerged [which, with few exceptions] associated conventional subjects of interest to the military and industry with more prominent
schools, and a focus on urban or other social issues with engineering programs of lesser
status” (p. 116).
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ENGINEERING AND LARGE-SCALE REGIMES
Notions of scale also may impact the determination of appropriate contexts for engineers
and engineering. As suggested earlier, participants described the production of consumer
goods and industrial contexts for the development of objects and systems. One participant
felt that what differentiated domestic contexts from industrial ones and allowed engineers
to do work on the latter but not the former had to do with the kinds of assumptions they
could make about these different contexts:
I also think that we in engineering use models a lot. The models bring with them
some expectations of a worldview, some presumptive worldview. In—part of that
presumptive worldview is that there can be a single decision-maker, and a single
source or point where one looks at profits and losses. And when you have something like a family or a household you lose that. So that’s the absence of the same
structural equivalent that I think would make it a problem.
This quote suggests that domestic contexts disrupt the set of simple assumptions engineers
have developed about work environments. According to this participant, it is a scale of
simplicity-complexity that impacts what contexts engineers investigate.
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WHAT COUNTS AS “ENGINEERING”: TOWARD A REDEFINITION
Issues of object scale might also be a differentiating factor. A full professor tries to describe the situations an engineering license is or should be required from a practicing engineer:
So, for example, I can’t design a highway bridge without a license. I can’t design certain buildings, certain public infrastructure that’s critical require a stamped drawing from a licensed engineer. And those are essentially a means that the public is
trying to put in place that indicate that that engineer has been certified, they’ve
been vetted for quality, etc. But to be an engineer doesn’t require one to have that.
For example to design a chair that you’re sitting in doesn’t require a licensed engineer to do so. Some products we don’t have that sense of, so, a chair is an example.
This description suggests multiple dimensions where scale is relevant. Bridge construction—with their associated large size, environmental impact, financial cost, service to the
public, and cost of failure—requires an engineering license. But chair construction—with
smaller such costs—does not.
However, chairs and bridges are distinguished from each other along at least two other
metrics. Bridges are usually commissioned by governments or other civil infrastructures,
while chairs are via private enterprise; and the construction of chairs have a history of craftsmanship that is different from how most bridges are constructed.
An additional notion of scale was suggested by this associate professor trying to distinguish engineering research as done at universities from that done in industry:
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In my mind the ideal problem I’d like to work on is something that’s on [industry’s] 10 year research horizon but they don’t, that their management won’t let them
work on because it’s too long range. My understanding of research timelines is that
they’re all doing 5 year projects and 2 year projects, and we should be doing 5 year
and 15 year projects, you know, if you’ve got something that’s going to take 2 or 3
graduate students in sequence to do it, they don’t have the patience for that. And
that seems a lot more appropriate to use it as a learning project for a grad student
and . . . if something’s really important, they’ll put 5 people on it and solve it in 6
months. And that’s not appropriate for us to try to do.
This participant uses time frames to help understand how to differentiate industry-scaled
problems from academic-scaled problems. This quote indicates how the notion of scale
overlaps with time, a relationship explored more elsewhere (Pawley, 2007).
ENGINEERING AND INSTITUTIONAL LOCATION
Approaching the space dimension from another direction, one way participants differentiated engineering from other ideas or disciplines was through the use of their institutional
location and marking (making use of the space metaphor as a “field”). In trying to explain
the versatility and broad disciplinary coverage present at the study university, a full professor also indicated that “engineering” in a discipline name tends to mark it as engineering:
Participant: I’ll give you an example that’s very old fashioned, is that the Textiles
Department, in the School of Human Ecology, I could go to [a comparable university], maybe [another comparable university], I don’t know where, and that might
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be in the department of Engineering. It’ll be called textiles engineering. That’s an
old fashioned example, but that’s what my point is.
Interviewer: Why is that an old fashioned example?
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Participant: Because now people would go, “Phh, come on.” [. . .] Why would that
even be using the word “engineering” on that? In some schools, long ago, that was an
engineering field. [. . .] It has to do with the history of the culture of the university.
This seemingly coincidental selection of textiles as an example of how history determined
where disciplines should be administratively situated within a university is particularly interesting from a gender perspective. “Human Ecology” is becoming the new names of schools
that had previously been known as “home economics.” At this university, the participant
argued, the topic of textiles is located in a school overwhelmingly populated by women, as
compared to other universities, where it is located in a school overwhelmingly populated
by men. The reason for this institutional difference, according to this participant, is apparently, “simply the history of the culture of the university,” both of which are somewhat
disembodied. This professor indicates that the name of the topic also locates it in different
university cultures—where textiles is in a school of engineering, it is given the marker (Pawley, in review) of engineering in its name. The marker “engineering” of course also directed
men where they should apply for their education.
This reasoning may seem most unlikely, particularly in the context of the second part
of the quote and how the participant casts the case as “old fashioned.” Implicit in the participant’s “phh” are a wealth of assumptions about what others consider engineering to be
or not be. Engineering is not home economics, and the juxtaposition is perceived as ridiculous. But scholars working on the history of home economics have argued that the discipline was developed as a way to educate scientifically minded women, and other scholars
have argued that the study and working of certain textiles has also historically been cast as
women’s work both in and out of schools of home economics (such as in Gamber, 2003;
Lerman, 2003; Oldenziel, 1999). To understand why the connection between textiles and
engineering is so ridiculous to contemporary faculty, we must consider that engineering and
home economics developed historically with different relationships to the notion of gender,
when practitioners used different social markers and rules to differentiate men’s work from
women’s work, and to systematically devalue women’s work.
Another full professor also recognized the power that comes with institutional naming
in the context of material being included in part of a course. The participant had argued that:
[. . .] the idea that you would apply engineering techniques to the home, in nonindustrial settings is probably the one that [. . .] would probably evoke the most
controversy among engineers.
The interviewer followed this comment with a question:
So why do you think your colleagues might think that bringing engineering into
the home or applying engineering techniques to the home might be marginal or
somehow problematic or however?
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WHAT COUNTS AS “ENGINEERING”: TOWARD A REDEFINITION
The participant responded:
Well, I think there’s probably a level of, “it’s just not what I learned.” It’s not central
to the course. We have a course in manufacturing engineering in [a department’s]
curriculum. We don’t have a course in home engineering. Ideas take on meaning
and value when they’re afforded some status like having a course named after them.
In this short interchange, a chicken-and-egg quandary is presented. Do courses get constructed around important ideas and material, or are the ideas and material important
because they are in a course? How do they inform each other? However, the fact that these
are combined in the participant’s mind does not diminish the value that the name of “engineering” has for marking course content as appropriately belonging within the bounds of
engineering at this institution. Note also the explanatory power that one’s own experience
(in this case, the participant conjecturing about colleagues’ experiences, all of whom might
be considered privileged elites in the context of the next section) seems to have for valuing
certain kinds of knowledge or disciplinary divisions.
WHO? ENGINEERING AND ACTORS: CONSTRUCTORS AND BENEFICIARIES
The larger body of research from which this chapter is drawn is motivated very intentionally
by the problem of women’s underrepresentation in engineering. The most direct (and wellworn) way of considering who is engaged in engineering could be to ask ourselves, what is
the gender of people who call themselves engineers? However, the research reported here
suggests three more ways of considering “who” that are based on some of the universalized
disciplinary narratives (Pawley, 2009) mentioned in the first part of this chapter: namely,
who defines engineering problems; who benefits from engineering solutions; and who actually makes the “things”? It is critical here also to look at how these answers may be gendered, but they also allow us to take an intersectional approach and see how engineering’s
boundaries are also raced and classed.
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WHO DEFINES ENGINEERING PROBLEMS?
In most cases, participants’ definitions of engineering as problem solving tended to take the
problem as a given, as something that had itself already been defined. One full professor
said that “society” defined problems, and engineers simply solved them; however, it seemed
from this response (as across the interviews) that engineers were somehow different and
separate from “society,” and that this society spoke with a singular and definite voice, clearly
articulating its problems. When asked specifically where engineering problems came from,
an assistant professor mused:
I like solving problems, so to me it’s just like they’re there, and I see them and I
find them, I just . . . I think it’s interesting, so maybe I make up problems because I
like the solving part of them. But that’s a good question, I don’t know if they need
to be solved.
In this quote, the participant suggests how problems seem preconstructed—“it’s just like
they’re there”—and it is simply the engineer’s job to pick them up and solve them. The participant’s comment about not knowing whether the problems chosen by engineers to solve
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needed to be solved was also interesting considering that the question that precipitated the
comment was more on where problems come from, and not implying that the problems
were not worthy of solving.
The subtleties of problem solving, such as how problems are characterized, seemed
sometimes to change over participants’ careers. A full professor contrasted an early career
definition of engineering from a later one:
Yeah, I think when I was just a fresh out of the box engineer, I think I thought technology could kind of carry the day just on its own. I mean I was pretty proficient
with calculation and with computing and with, oh, design as done by, in a fairly
elegant fashion, and the like. But, and so that proficiency I thought could carry the
day, and I thought most of the problems in this world were ones that could pass
through my calculator and there would be the answer.
And as I get older I think I begin to realize that the problems that we’re facing are
not ones of, typically anyway, that are going to be done by better and quicker and
faster computers. They’re going to be ones that involve perhaps some of that, but
much more a discussion of how we together as society can move forward. I mean,
the solution to the energy crisis that we’re sensing is coming along is not going to
be a better computer, typically. It’s going to be a dialogue with each other.
In this quote, this participant contrasted an elegant, calculator-oriented and technologically deterministic form of problem solving with a more negotiated and qualitative version,
one emanating from a societal-wide “dialogue” and “discussion.” There was a sense, in this
response, that there are multiple perspectives in “society,” and that disagreement amongst
different societal participants required a discussion about how problems should be defined,
or what problems require solving. Furthermore, this participant regularly expressed concern
throughout the interviews that engineers were focusing on the wrong problems, developing solutions that benefited the same privileged people, while continuing to fail to meet the
needs of those in poverty, under oppression, or neglected by the state and economy.
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WHO BENEFITS FROM ENGINEERING SOLUTIONS?
While most participants spoke easily about engineering being about problem solving, and
several linked engineering to solving the problems of society, only a few spoke about who
in “society” benefited from specific solutions. One could argue that men benefit more than
women from solutions that engineers develop. For example, an assistant professor’s research
is on bone implants, and to situate the research, it is put in the context of the problem of
osteoporosis in American populations:
Participant: Yeah, right. Oh no, first it’s like, “So many Americans have osteoporosis.” I have to justify . . . [. . .]
Interviewer: So does that mean that the majority of people who will receive bone
implants are women?
Participant: That’s really interesting. No, you would think so, but statistically, most
people that receive—it’s super interesting—the most people that receive implants
are rich white males.
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WHAT COUNTS AS “ENGINEERING”: TOWARD A REDEFINITION
Even around a problem that ostensibly afflicts women more often than men (Fausto-Sterling,
2005), this participant believes the solutions are used by men rather than women. This can
be understood as gendered via two arguments familiar to feminist science scholars: firstly,
that health conditions experienced more often by women tend to have less research done
on them (examples being things like breast cancer and menopause); and secondly, that
the technological solutions to problems have androcentric biases on them (Meinert, 2001;
Spanier, 2001). For example, the widespread health advice that one should take aspirin in
the event of a heart attack is based on research conducted on a population of men, not
women. Women’s symptoms for heart attacks are often different from those of men, and
require different medical responses. Indeed, it was not until 1993 that the National Institutes
of Health required scientific drug trials investigating treatments for conditions experienced
by both women and men TO BE CONDUCTED ON A POPULATION THAT CONSISTED OF BOTH WOMEN AND
men (Meinert, 2001).
In a separate instance of looking at the beneficiaries of engineering’s solutions, a participant argues that engineers tend to solve problems relevant to certain geographic locations,
and certain populations associated with those areas. In this quote, the participant argued
for the development and inclusion in the curriculum an engineering course that would be
focused on the “bottom of the pyramid”:
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You can draw a pyramid with the thicker part at the bottom, just like a pyramid in
Giza, and what you see is that the bottom of that pyramid is filled with many people that don’t make much money, and the upper part of the pyramid is filled with
fewer people that make a lot of money. And it seems to me the classic engineering
is designed at this point within our world for the upper part of that pyramid, primarily, pushing the envelope of better technology, no question, better and perhaps
even better technologies to serve the environment, or to serve the economy, or to
serve—but it’s generally for a fewer number of people I would argue. At least over
here, the research being done on the First World, or the Developed World. [. . .]
So in essence, again, I’m interested in doing—and I think I can defend it, that
there’s a need for looking at engineering for the bottom of that pyramid. Not the
very bottom necessarily, but the bottom two-thirds of it, for example. Which is a
profound number of people—four billion people, two thirds of the people on the
planet need someone to pay more attention to their technological needs because
it involves the very basics of their lives. And so it feels to me that I can work in areas that aren’t the necessarily highest technologies, but they’re areas that are profoundly going to impact a huge number of people.
This participant argued that, even though “classic engineering” solved worthy technological
problems and improved such socially valuable areas as “the environment,” it nevertheless
focused on the problems of the relatively fewer people at “the top” of the pyramid, those
people who made a lot of money compared to the much larger proportion of much poorer
people at the bottom of the pyramid. In this participant’s mind, engineering tended to focus
on the problems of the First World, the developed world, despite the critical and entirely
solvable problems of the Third World, things like (in the case of this participant’s research)
getting enough clean water to drink.
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From this participant’s perspective, engineering benefits the rich and powerful in a
global sense. How does this result in a gendering of engineering, apart from the obvious
fact that the rich and powerful in a global sense are most often men? Consider this participant’s research on water quality and filtration. Across the globe, when there is no local clean
water to drink, it is more often girls who are pulled out of school and sent to carry water all
day, not boys, whose education is considered more valuable (UNICEF, 2006; UNICEF Water Environment and Sanitation Section, 2005). The consequences of engineering focusing
on highly technologized solutions for wealthy beneficiaries can be argued to weigh more
heavily on women across the globe.
There are indeed many engineers who work for underserved global and local populations, but what is critical about these examples is that they exhibit the perception of faculty
of their own work. This participant was particularly vocal about how he did not recommend
his junior colleagues to engage in what he called “do-gooder engineering,” despite how he
valued it, because he believed the university did not do so:
There’s no way that I would, I don’t even urge my junior colleagues to get involved
in [. . .] any of these sort of oddball—I’ll call them that—courses. They should do
the classic stuff because that classic stuff is what tenure is all about. That tells me
there’s a disconnect here. It should speak to a disconnect. But they’re not, a junior
colleague should not fight the disconnect. That’s the job for a senior faculty person
like myself or whatever. They shouldn’t be in the, they have to live with the rules
right now, within those rules. And unstated, to some extent, but nevertheless, they
would be sinking their own ship and they would never get this opportunity to do
this kind of stuff if they didn’t live by sort of this kind of tenure pursuit, classic tenure pursuit that we’ve talked about. So, yeah, that’s a, anyway, so I’m very realistic
and pragmatic about that. I mean, it’s just the way it is.
This excerpt demonstrates a powerful case of boundary reproduction (Pawley, in review),
even while it yearns for the pushing out of the boundaries of engineering.
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WHO MAKES THE “THINGS”?
The conceptualization of engineering as “making things” was also integrated throughout
other participants’ indirect responses. Engineers were posed as people who “made things,”
whereas non-engineers did not. An associate professor recognized the skill of “making
things” was one that graduate students who had engineering backgrounds had, compared
to those with science backgrounds:
Probably the difference that shows up in the graduate students is that my engineering graduate students can actually make things! Not all of them, but most of them
can make stuff. [. . .] If you need a jig to do a test, then I can say, oh yeah, you know,
rough out a sketch on a piece of paper of a design, and they can look at it and nod
and go off and make it. [. . .] Go to the shop . . . not even necessarily if they went to
the shop and physically did it themselves, but at least they could have an interaction with the people in the shop and get it made.
What is subtly different in this description of engineering as “making things,” however, is
that engineering students were not expected to necessarily have the manual skill themselves.
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WHAT COUNTS AS “ENGINEERING”: TOWARD A REDEFINITION
Instead, the proxy skills of sketching out details for an object, and then the cultural and organizational knowledge that comes with visiting a machine shop and commissioning an
object to be physically made by someone else could also be sufficient. While managerial
positions are frequently a career stop for engineers, they seem to exhibit multiple gendered
sides. On one side, the connection of engineering to managerial duties has been argued to
“feminize” certain engineering disciplines (namely industrial engineering) because of its
connection to working with people and the hegemonically feminine characteristic of working well in and having the ability to facilitate groups. Foor and Walden (2009) have argued
how industrial engineering’s perceived link to business simultaneously marks industrial
engineering as a peripheral engineering discipline (industrial engineering’s name is even
parodied by students as “imaginary engineering”) and as a naturalized place for women to
be: “female students’ aptitudes for certain jobs are constructed from congruency with appropriate female behavior rather than from an ability to learn and perform skill sets that
have historically been associated with males” (p. 51). On the other side, managers have
class privilege over engineers that, as Connell (1995) has argued, describes “[a] polarity . . .
within hegemonic masculinity between [managerial] dominance and technical expertise”
(p. 194, my emphasis).
One must, therefore, ask the question of who actually “makes things” that engineers
design? In the context of the rest of the paper, it is those who are commissioned through
managerial work relationships to produce objects for the market economy. This manual labor, accomplished by others who have fewer working rights and protections from the state
than the managerial engineers make “things” that can be sold for profit. Engineering still
does not include manual labor that produces on the small scale of a household “things”
like children’s clothes or meals. Therefore, again, engineering does not legitimate domestic
work historically and still done disproportionately by women and people of color in lower
status occupations.
Foor and Walden’s (2009) choice of relating to industrial engineering is interesting for
another reason related to this theme. The “things” were most often related to physical objects, in comparison to processes. Industrial engineers’ work of redesigning jobs, organizations, and workflows seemed engineering insofar as they related to the redesign of physical environments—video display terminal designs and office setups, rather than the virtual
office work that goes on within the VDT. I did not collect data in this research study that
would facilitate specific further theorizing around the “realness” of “things,” although my
data suggest this research direction could be fruitful.
REFLECTION
When I did this original data collection, I considered myself a fairly close insider to the
world described by my participants. I had done all my academic work in engineering, I had
family members who were academics and talked about their jobs at home, I had a job in
which I talked with faculty members about their approaches to teaching and research, and
I had already spent a good number of years living in the “fake” world of higher education.
However, after several years now as living as a faculty member, I find myself a much
stronger insider/outsider than I did as a graduate student. My faculty job simultaneously
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ALICE L. PAWLEY
79
places me as an insider to this world of academic engineering, constructing it for others and
being disciplined in return, and as an outsider, someone who uses critical social theory from
women’s studies, sociology, and science and technology studies to understand engineering
education. I also continue to try to walk a boundary that separates engineering from not
engineering. From my vantage point on the edge, I look in to ask myself questions about
why engineering academics do the work they do the way they do it; I also look out to other
disciplines to see how engineers might learn from new (to us) theoretical frameworks, units
of analysis, and methodologies to better understand ourselves. Note that I talk about academic engineers as “we,” including myself as an engineer, for the purposes of most discussions. This insider/outsider/we space can be discomfiting, and maintaining a position on
the edge can require a keen sense of balance, one that does not always come easily. I try to
maintain my balance by retaining a spirit of questioning in what I do, whether teaching,
research, or service.
For example, I have now taught multiple years of first-year engineering students, and I
have found myself asking myself many of the same questions I asked my participants: why
am I including this content in this course, and how will this impact what my students think
engineering is? Do I overemphasize the power engineers have to “make a world of difference” (Committee on Public Understanding of Engineering Messages, 2008), or underestimate it? Do I describe engineering as a discipline used by the rich and powerful to improve
their own lives, or as a tool for social change for the most downtrodden in the world? Do
they continue to think engineering as about “making stuff” at the end of my class, or have I
prompted them to think the system they impact is much broader than the circle they draw
around components in a diagram? Do I instill in them the value of diverse ways of knowing
and respecting different kinds of knowledge, or do I reify in them the sense that engineers
know things the best? Is it better for them to think that engineering can touch all aspects
of one’s life, or that it can’t and one must build coalitions to help improve the world? I am
not sure. Yet every time I step into my classroom, I find myself highly conscious of how I
am “performing” engineering for my novice students.
I have also codesigned and cotaught a graduate class on the history and philosophy of
engineering education for several years, and I find myself relying on the language of boundary work to help novice graduate students (who are often particularly new to the context
of academic work) understand how engineering as an academic discipline has developed
the way it has. They come to the task often with technorationalistic views of progress: engineering is the way it is because it is the most optimized, most sensible, and most true, not
because of the wielding of power, of resources, and of ideas to protect the privileged and
keep out the oppressed. Reading things to the contrary can profoundly shake their worldviews. After four years of teaching this course, I have come to the realization that, if at the
end of the course the students are less sure about their definition of engineering than they
were when they entered, the course was likely a success. (They will be chagrined, although
not surprised I think, to read this.)
In research, I retain a practice of critical self-reflection if only to thwart self-hypocrisy as
much as I can—it would be awkward and intellectually dishonest to critique others’ practice
of academic engineering without critiquing one’s own practice. I try to remain aware of my
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WHAT COUNTS AS “ENGINEERING”: TOWARD A REDEFINITION
research-oriented choices as having further repercussions than just on my own career. I have
developed a research group structured about something I have labeled “feminist engineering,” choosing this name deliberately because of my awareness of the disciplinary ripples
and permission this choice may have for others. With respect to research, I ask myself, how
will my applying for funding from this area structure what engineering research is for another colleague? How does the way I run my research group or participate on review panels
either constrict or loosen our conceptualization of this thing we all call “engineering”? Will
my colleagues in engineering recognize the potential value of doing critical research when it
comes to my tenure application, when there is no history of engineers doing critical theory
or critical research on engineering itself? Should they not, what will be the repercussions of
a negative tenure outcome on others trying to do critical engineering education research?
Although tenure itself is supposed to protect academic freedom in order to prompt the exchange of new and different ideas, will it instead function through its withholding as a threat
to conform to conventional and unaware notions of engineering research?
At the same time, I should not overlook the work I have done already to push out
boundaries. In 2010 I applied for and was awarded a National Science Foundation-funded
CAREER award titled “Learning from Small Numbers” to explore the stories of underrepresented undergraduate engineering students to understand how engineering education institutional structures impact their educational experiences. In this proposal, I explicitly advocated for using feminist, anti-racist, and decolonizing methods and literatures to study the
gendered and raced structures of engineering education institutions. I cited bell hooks and
Patricia Hill Collins, Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Kimberlé Crenshaw, for heaven’s sakes—not
common fare in engineering education research. But this and other research has convinced
me that we need people on the edge in order to shift the center (hooks, 2000) of academic
engineering anywhere closer to an alignment with social justice. I mean this in a normative
and political sense—just as a choice to claim engineering should NOT align with social justice
is normative and political. So I have chosen to sit on the risky edge—not only is this zone
as rich with transformative ideas and possibilities as it is with political risk, but I hope my
positioning can be a lighthouse for others, just as my colleagues’ work in engineering and
social justice was a lighthouse for me. Perhaps together we can shift the center of engineering education to be a little bit better aligned with the causes and practices of social justice.
CONCLUSION
When localizing constructs of space and actors are applied to understanding participants’
definitions and descriptions of engineering, a more gendered vision of engineering comes
into view than that described by participants’ more explicit universalized narratives. Thinking about space helps articulate the fact that engineering contexts are largely large-scale,
oriented around industrial, commercial, or military domains. Thinking about time demonstrates how engineering relies on how it was done in the past to point the direction for its
future. Thinking about actors encourages us to look at who is excluded from these universalized narratives in terms of the people who construct problems worthy of engineers’ attention, the people who benefit from engineers’ solutions, and the people who actually make the
“things” in the “engineering as making things” narrative, let alone the engineers themselves.
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ALICE L. PAWLEY
81
Admittedly, while this vision of engineering is more localized and specific in some
ways, it is very coarse-grained in others, and arguably still constitutes a vision that may exist in contrast to some more “real” practice. However, no “more correct” definition exists
“in the real world.” Rather, there is a complicated and social negotiation between how academic engineers talk about what they do, and how their practice is impacted by how they
talk about it. Each person contributes to and is impacted by different disciplinary narratives,
whether the universalized ones or the more local ones, and passes on some kind of articulation/experience to others whether they decide they are (or want to be) engineers or not. At
any point, a different narrative, a different possibility, may be articulated and experienced.
In their interviews, some study and pilot participants seemed on the verge of embracing a different vision of engineering. One participant described thinking that engineering
and nursing were not that different conceptually, and pointed out the patterns shared by
the engineering work largely done by men with the nursing work largely done by women.
Why don’t we think of nursing as engineering? Do we further devalue the historical work
of women by continuing to exclude it from the umbrella definition of “engineering?” Another participant described a set of research focused on wastewater treatment systems at
the municipal level, and I asked why similar research was not done on the context of rural
domestic systems. The participant expressed some surprise, and admitted that there wasn’t
a good reason why not, providing another opportunity to broaden the conceptualization
of engineering to encompass environments where women still do the majority of work. A
pilot study participant described focusing research on HVAC systems in commercial buildings; when asked why that context and not domestic contexts, the participant mused that it
stemmed from a desire to have some kind of “larger” impact. However, another argument
easily could be made that domestic contexts could have more impact than commercial ones
because of how American residential areas are relatively low density, and more people of
more varying ages spend more time in them than commercial contexts. Integrating domestic
contexts into this research not only could increase the reach and complexity of the research,
but also improve the living and working environments of more varied people, particularly
of women, children, and the elderly.
In each of these examples, the universalized narratives are present, but the localizing
dimensions of space and actors are less exclusive. Arguably, engineering continues to be a
powerful discipline because of the exclusion of the interests and concerns of the disenfranchised in society. As a privileged profession, we must decide whether we want to continue
to accept that definition, and whether we agree to place at risk some of our disciplinary
stature in order to become an inclusive and egalitarian, and a more socially just discipline.
If we so choose, then, the main task for engineering lies in the development of a more
complete implementation of its self-definition. If engineering wants to define itself around
universalized narratives of “applying science,” “solving problems,” and “making things,” then
let these narratives also work to undo the precedent of the systematic exclusion of people
and ideas. When viewed with a gender lens, the consequences of how the universalized narratives of engineering exist in the “real world” lie more heavily on women as a group than
they do on men. Disproportionately, women are not considered engineers, their work is not
worth engineers’ attention nor constitutes engineering, their knowledge does not consti-
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WHAT COUNTS AS “ENGINEERING”: TOWARD A REDEFINITION
tute engineering knowledge, their bodies are not considered in designing engineering solutions, and their problems are not considered engineering problems. There are other slices
of a global “society” who are also systematically excluded from these same parameters—the
poor, the uneducated, the “foreign”— but unfortunately, women often constitute the majority of those groups as well.
Overall, more authentically applying the universalized narratives to problems beyond
those constructed around paid work and for-profit contexts by people with wealth and
power will go far to making engineering a more equitable discipline. Ultimately, the act of
recognizing and making explicit the metaphors that engineering educators use—often unconsciously—can help determine about how both engineering “problems” and “solutions”
are constructed. Built into the metaphor of a boundary are ideas of inclusion and exclusion; understanding and harnessing this metaphor can help show how engineering educators use language to exclude or include ideas, types of problems, and perhaps people. Then
we can begin to see alternative metaphors and constructions that resist these exclusionary
borders in order to develop engineering into a profession that is more socially just, reflexive, equitable, and democratic.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank most profoundly the participants who contributed their insights and stories that
constitute this research. I also thank Christine Pawley and the editors and peer reviewers
for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter, and to Stephen Hoffmann, Sarah
K. A. Pfatteicher, and Michael J. Smith for supporting me in doing the original research for
this chapter.
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NOTES
1. Jennifer Schneider, personal communication, August 6, 2009.
2. And perhaps the scale of that location; for more, see Pawley (2007).
3. As an example, according to the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE)
2006 Annual Report, 93% of ASEE’s federal support comes from the Department of
Defense.
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