Engineering and Social Justice: In the University and Beyond

3. What counts as "engineering": Toward a redefinition

59 D Chapter 3 d What counts as “engineering”: toWarD a reDefinition Alice L. Pawley 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 What counts as “engineering”: toWarD a reDefinition 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...