Women in STEM: Understanding Gender Through Theory

Women in STEM Disciplines
Alice L. Pawley
School of Engineering Education
Purdue University
November 9, 2010
Walking boundaries...
Women’s Studies Noon Lecture
:
Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Women in STEM Disciplines

DisciplinesSTEMinWomen

Disciplines
STEM
Women

Disciplines
STEM
Women
feminist

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Research in Feminist
Engineering
or... RIFE

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Research in Feminist
Engineering
or... RIFE
Gender in JEE ADVANCEASK WIETY CAREER

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER
Assessing Sustainability Knowledge
third-wave transnational feminism

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER
Gendered space in Journal of Engineering Education
intersectionality, gender spectra

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER
Academic STEM institutions as gendered, raced
intersectionality, gendered institutions, discourse analysis

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER
Engineering’s boundaries through photographs
gendered objects, action research

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER
Engineering’s boundaries through photographs
gendered objects, action research
Students’ stories to learn about institutions
intersectionality, social change, decolonizing methods

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER
Domain analysis (Spradley 1980)

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER
9
types
of
inter-‐rela0onships
1. Strict
Inclusion:
X
is
a
kind
of
Y
2. Spa0al:
X
is
a
part
of
Y
3. Cause-‐eﬀect:
X
is
the
result
of
Y
4. Ra0onale:
X
is
a
reason
for
doing
Y
5. Loca0on-‐for-‐ac0on:
X
is
a
place
to
do
Y
6. Func0on:
X
is
used
for
Y
7. Means-‐End:
X
is
a
way
to
do
Y
8. Sequence:
X
is
a
step
in
Y
9. AIribu0on:
X
is
a
characteris8c
of
Y

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER
1. Engineering education researchers
rely on a demographic deﬁnition
of gender.
2. Most research cites
underrepresentation as motivation
to conduct gender research.
incorporate very few theoretical
frameworks when researching
gender.

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER
rely on a demographic deﬁnition
of gender.
2. Most research cites
underrepresentation as motivation
to conduct gender research.
incorporate very few theoretical
frameworks when researching
gender.
We need researchers who:
•understand and value
intersectionality
•see gender as more
complex than ♀ or ♂
•connect theory to
method

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER
Academic Career Pathway (ACP)
Institutional Ethnography (IE)

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER
HRD-0811194

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER
1. How applicable are pipeline,
climate metaphors to actual
women’s lives (in Purdue STEM
disciplines)
2. What might be new metaphors to
help us see additional places to
work on?

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER
Methods:
Collection: Oral history, Participatory
research
Analysis: Open, axial coding;
Discourse analysis

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER
1. How do women faculty
experience Purdue as an academic
STEM institution through policies?
2. Where are disconnects between
intent and experience?

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER
Methods:
Institutional ethnography (Smith)

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER
Methods:
Institutional ethnography (Smith)
We need researchers who
• understand agency and
structure
• can learn across disciplines
• can use many research tools

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER Learning from Small Numbers

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER EEC-1055900Learning from Small Numbers

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER
Learning from Small Numbers

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER
1. How do underrepresented
undergraduate engineering students
describe their interactions with
educational institutions through
personal narratives?

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER
1. How do underrepresented
undergraduate engineering students
describe their interactions with
educational institutions through
personal narratives?
2. What institutional factors do these
narratives reveal that affect the
educational persistence and success
of white women and students of
color in undergraduate engineering
educational institutions?

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER
Methods:
Research: in-depth open interviews
with undergraduate white women and
students of color in engineering:
“Tell me how you got to be where you
are.”

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER
Methods:
are.”
Education: personas and informance to
help engineering educational
administrators learn from small
numbers

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER
Methods:
are.”
Education: personas and informance to
help engineering educational
administrators learn from small
numbers
We need researchers who
• aren’t afraid of complexity
• ﬁt methods to context
• can learn sans generalizability

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER
What should sustainability mean?
boundaries in engineering education

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER
How do we study gender “better”?
crossing boundaries into women’s studies

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER
How is gender built into our institutions?
boundary work in professional contexts

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER
How do we redeﬁne engineering to be more inclusive?
boundary work redeﬁning engineering with students

Disciplines
STEM
Women
Gender in JEE
ADVANCE
ASK
WIETY
CAREER
How do we redefine engineering to be more inclusive?
boundary work redefining engineering with students
How do we redefine institutions to be more inclusive?
boundary work restructuring academic engineering

Disciplines
STEM
Women
boundary work in research

Disciplines
STEM
Women
boundary work in research
October 2009
Journal of Engineering Education 309
Universalized Narratives: Patterns in How
Faculty Members Define “Engineering”
ALICE L. PAWLEY
Purdue University
BACKGROUND
U.S. engineering educators are discussing how we define engineering to our-
selves and to others, such as in the recently released U.S. National Academy of
Engineering (NAE) report, Changing the Conversation. In these conversations,
leaders have proposed the skills, knowledge, processes, values, and attitudes
that should define engineering. However, little attention has been paid to the
daily work of engineering faculty, through their engineering research and
teaching students to be new engineers, that puts these discipline-defining
ideas into practice in academia.
PURPOSE (HYPOTHESIS)
The different types of narratives engineering faculty explicitly or implicitly
use to describe engineering are categorized. Categorizing these common nar-
ratives can help inform the nationwide conversation about whether these are
the best narratives to tell in order to attract a diverse population of future
engineers.
DESIGN/METHOD
Interviews with ten engineering faculty at a research-extensive university were
conducted. Interview transcripts were coded thematically through coarse then
fine coding passes. The coarse codes were drawn from boundary theory; the
fine codes emerged from the data.
RESULTS
Faculty members’ descriptions moved within and among the narratives of
engineering as applied science and math, as problem-solving, and as making
things. The narratives are termed “universalized” because of their broad-
sweeping discursive application within and across participants’ interviews.
CONCLUSIONS
These narratives drawn from academic engineers’ practice put engineering at
odds with recommendations from the NAE report. However, naming the
narratives helps make them visible so we may then develop and practice telling
contrasting narratives to future and current engineering students.
KEYWORDS
discourse analysis, engineering epistemology, faculty work
I.INTRODUCTION
In the summer of 2008, the National Academy of Engineering
published a new report, Changing the Conversation, which argues
that engineers (and particularly engineering educators) should
change the message of engineering away from the difficulty and
elite character of the profession towards one of social relevance and
“making a difference” (Committee on Public Understanding of En-
gineering Messages, 2008). This report aimed to investigate the
American public’s understanding of what engineering is and what
engineers do, and to provide a set of tested messages that might im-
prove that understanding. The report noted that “[c]urrent and past
engineering outreach to the public and message development have
been ad hoc efforts…[and] although a variety of useful tactics have
been tried, no consistent message has been communicated, even
among projects by the same organization” (p. 4). The report also re-
marked that “[m]ost current messages are framed to emphasize the
strong links between engineering and just one of its attributes—the
need for mathematics and science skills. In other words, current
messages often ignore other vital characteristics of engineering,
such as creativity, teamwork, and communication” (p. 10).
This report comes at a time of significant professional reflec-
tion in the engineering education research community on the na-
ture of engineering and engineering beliefs, values, and knowl-
edge (see, for example, Grimson, 2007; Heywood, 2008a, 2008b;
Heywood, Smith, and McGrann, 2007; Heywood, McGrann,
and Smith, 2008; Royal Academy of Engineering, 2008; Smith
and Korte, 2008), which has been made particularly visible by the
inclusion of an “engineering epistemology” category within the
engineering education research framework laid out by the Engi-
neering Education Research Colloquies (2006). In addition, the
NAE report was published shortly after the Year of Dialogue by
the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), which
has spurred leading engineering education researchers to articu-
late their manifestos on the future of engineering education (see,
for example, Fortenberry, 2006; Gabriele, 2005; Haghighi, 2005;
Shulman, 2005; Streveler and Smith, 2006; Wormley, 2006). To-
gether, these two discussions, one of the public images of engi-
neering and the other of the future directions of engineering edu-
cation, intend to influence not only engineering outreach
activities, but also the practice of engineering faculty in how and
what they teach as engineering.
However, it is unclear that mainstream engineering faculty
members value these same conclusions, let alone make decisions
about what to teach or research based on these public treatises. How
do engineering faculty in the U.S. view their work of educating en-
gineers? This paper works to uncover the daily “disciplining” work
of constructing and reconstructing a discipline,work that results in
defining engineering alongside any public outreach campaign,that
engineering educators do in their teaching, research, and service
within schools of engineering. This paper documents three narra-
tives that research participants used to explain their work to others

Disciplines
STEM
Women
boundary work in teaching
October 2009
ALICE L. PAWLEY
Purdue University
BACKGROUND
engineers.
DESIGN/METHOD
RESULTS
CONCLUSIONS
KEYWORDS
I.INTRODUCTION
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Disciplines
STEM
Women
October 2009
ALICE L. PAWLEY
Purdue University
BACKGROUND
engineers.
DESIGN/METHOD
RESULTS
CONCLUSIONS
KEYWORDS
I.INTRODUCTION
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36

Disciplines
STEM
Women
October 2009
ALICE L. PAWLEY
Purdue University
BACKGROUND
engineers.
DESIGN/METHOD
RESULTS
CONCLUSIONS
KEYWORDS
I.INTRODUCTION
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36
Whose words and
ideas do we read as
“knowledge”?
Can we
critique ideas and
respect our
differences?
Whose
contributions do I
learn are valuable in
this ﬁeld?
Whose history are
we learning? Are people
like me part of it?
How is power
used or shared in
this classroom?
Do I feel welcome
to contribute my
ideas and questions?

Disciplines
STEM
Women
boundary work in service
October 2009
ALICE L. PAWLEY
Purdue University
BACKGROUND
engineers.
DESIGN/METHOD
RESULTS
CONCLUSIONS
KEYWORDS
I.INTRODUCTION
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37
!
Acknowledgements
This event is presented in
conjunction withIntersections: A Student
Conference on Diversity.
This year's Intersections
theme is "Many Voices, One
Campus: Living the
Questions"; more
information is at!
http://www.purdue.edu/diversikey.!
We are very grateful for the financial
support of these organizations:
Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership Excellence, the
College of Consumer and Family Sciences, the Diversity
Resource Office and DiversiKey, the ADVANCE Research team,
and the College of Science Women in Academia group.
Thank you to the abstract reviewers (listed
alphabetically):
Omolola Adedokun, Colleen Arendt, Dina Banerjee, Megan
Grunert, Mindy Hart, Jordana Hoegh, Beth Holloway, Julia Kalish,
Rene Ketterer, Daphene Koch, Alice Pawley, Wendy Peer,
Johannes Strobel, Michele Tomarelli, Ralph Webb, Anna
Woodcock.
Purdue Center for Faculty Success
Purdue University
Phone: (765) 494-9407
dvance-cfs@purdue.edu Date: February 19, 2010
Time: 8:00 AM - 4:30 PM
Location: Stewart 310
Gender and STEM
Research Symposium
Thanks also to the symposium planning
committee:Dina Banerjee, Lana Rice, Alice Pawley, Saranya Srinivasan, and
Suzanne Zurn- Birkhimer.
- 28 -
- 1 -

Disciplines
STEM
Women
October 2009
ALICE L. PAWLEY
Purdue University
BACKGROUND
engineers.
DESIGN/METHOD
RESULTS
CONCLUSIONS
KEYWORDS
I.INTRODUCTION
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37
how is my teaching or
research accessible to
non-academics?
!
Acknowledgements
Campus: Living the
Questions"; more
information is at!
alphabetically):
Woodcock.
Purdue University
Phone: (765) 494-9407
Time: 8:00 AM - 4:30 PM
Gender and STEM
Research Symposium
- 28 -
- 1 -

Disciplines
STEM
Women
October 2009
ALICE L. PAWLEY
Purdue University
BACKGROUND
engineers.
DESIGN/METHOD
RESULTS
CONCLUSIONS
KEYWORDS
I.INTRODUCTION
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37
how is my teaching or
research accessible to
non-academics?
how does my
teaching or research
connect with the
“real world”?
!
Acknowledgements
Campus: Living the
Questions"; more
information is at!
alphabetically):
Woodcock.
Purdue University
Phone: (765) 494-9407
Time: 8:00 AM - 4:30 PM
Gender and STEM
Research Symposium
- 28 -
- 1 -

Disciplines
STEM
Women
boundary work for FiSTS
38
©2009 NWSA Journal, Vol. 21 No. 2 (Summer)
Feminisms in Engineering Education:
Transformative Possibilities
DONNA RILEY, ALICE L. PAWLEY, JESSICA TUCKER, and
GEORGE D. CATALANO
The goal of this paper is to examine the possibilities for explicitly femi-
nist work in engineering and engineering education. What does it mean
in engineering contexts to take a feminist perspective, and how might
this influence the profession and society? We seek to establish an under-
standing of feminist perspectives in the engineering community broadly
to recognize the connectedness of all forms of social injustice. Thus
feminist visions of engineering might address a broad set of concerns
such as militarism, racism, and global economic inequality as well as
sexism and heterosexism. Our exploration of three feminist frameworks
within engineering generates a set of questions for future research and
institutional transformation.
Keywords: liberative pedagogies / social justice / ethic of care / engineering /
feminist technology studies.
Introduction
We are a group of engineering educators who have come together in several
overlapping contexts to consider the relationships among engineering,
social justice, and peace, and to ask what feminisms have to offer engi-
neering education and practice (see, Frontiers in Education 2009). In this
paper, we describe theoretical frameworks, examples from our research
and teaching, and thought questions to help further a discussion about
what engineering education and practice might be like if they were done
from explicitly feminist perspectives, and with social justice and peace as
central goals.
This work is informed by feminist theory, which brings specific ques-
tions that employ gender as a category of analysis (Scott 1986), as well
as feminist activism, which offers experiential knowledge and tools for
change. It builds on the previous work of scholars who have analyzed
gender in the profession of engineering in historical and contemporary
contexts, taking up a variety of issues from workplace culture to profes-
sional ethics (Adam 2001; Dryburgh 1999; Oldenziel 2000; Frehill 2004;
Trescott 1983). Some scholars have focused their analysis specifically on
the context of engineering education, considering topics including cultural
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Disciplines
STEM
Women
39
http://femscitech.pbworks.com

Disciplines
STEM
Women
39
http://femscitech.pbworks.com
Friday Nov 12 10:50 am -12:05 pm
Crossing Borders: Strengthening connections between NSF’s
ADVANCE Program and Women’s Studies
Plaza Concourse Level, Rm Plaza Court 3

40
Disciplines
STEM
Women

40
Disciplines
STEM
Women Gender as:
more than women
changing over time
within people
intersectional

41
Disciplines
STEM
Women
STEM as:
speciﬁc, not generic
varying within areas

42
Disciplines
STEM
Women
Discipline as:
a noun (a discipline)
a verb (to discipline)

Alice L. Pawley
apawley@purdue.edu
Research in Feminist Engineering
http://feministengineering.org
Questions?
Thanks to RIFE team
National Science Foundation
and study participants.

Women in STEM: Understanding Gender Through Theory

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