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Article Excerpt
WOMEN WHO TRAIN AND WORK as professional engineers in Canada and other industrialized countries are women operating on male turf. Unlike professions such as medicine and law, both of which are much closer to gender parity, engineering remains "archetypically masculine" (Wajcman, 1991: 145). In spite of nearly two decades of "women into engineering" campaigns supported by government and industry, the numbers of women entering engineering have been described as "derisory in most countries" (Faulkner, 2000: 92). The Canadian Council of Professional Engineers (CCPE) notes that, though the proportion of women in Canadian engineering schools increased annually after 1972, in the last few years it has levelled off at about 20% (CCPE, 2003). While hardly derisory, these numbers fall far short of gender parity.
Retention of women in engineering over the long haul is also likely to be a problem given that the growth in numbers of those actually practising the profession is among women in their late 20s and early 30s (CCPE, 1998). These women are also at the age where family formation becomes salient. The arrival of children seems to be one critical point at which women, but not men, leave the profession, move to part-time work, and in many other ways put their careers "on the back burner" (Ranson, 1998; 2000).
Motherhood, it seems clear, is a significant watershed, and one that policymakers and others concerned about retaining women in engineering should take seriously. But the reasons why it is such a watershed--and hence what needs to be done to compensate for its effects--may be more complicated than the conventional explanations about work and family balance suggest. A more elaborated explanation is that motherhood, as embodied and material experience, exposes a major fallacy inherent in the liberal discourses of equality and gender neutrality, which establish the terms for women's entry into male-dominated occupations and workplaces in the first place. These terms allow women to enter, not as women, but as conceptual men (Snitow, 1990: 26). This conceptual cover is blown when they become, or think about becoming, mothers. For many women (especially those who themselves internalize the gender neutrality discourse), actual or prospective motherhood compels them to confront identities as "engineer" and "mother" that may be "mutually incongruous" (Jorgenson, 2000: 7) and require complex negotiation and management.
In this paper I examine this more nuanced explanation, and explore its implications for all women in engineering, whether or not they are or will become mothers. But because women in engineering share with other women working in male-dominated occupations and workplaces the challenges of being "travellers in a male world" (Marshall, 1984; Gherardi, 1996), I use engineering also in an exemplary sense. Thus I begin the paper with a general discussion of women working in male-dominated organizations and occupations, and then consider the implications of motherhood in such environments. These issues are then taken up in an analysis of interviews with 37 women engineering graduates, drawn from a larger study of engineers and engineering work.
Women in a Man's World
The experiences of women on male-dominated turf have perhaps been most closely documented in Kanter's (1977) landmark study of women salespersons in the formerly all-male sales force of a Fortune 500 company in the United States. This study introduced the concept of tokenism to many researchers in the field of work and organizations. Kanter's research predated the large-scale entry of women into the professions (and, by extension, into many male-dominated workplaces) since the 1970s (Wajcman, 1998). Much of this expansion was impelled and facilitated, in the wake of the second wave of the women's movement, by a discourse of liberal feminism whose goals included equality for women and men under the law, and the same employment opportunities for working women as those enjoyed by men (Lorber, 2001).
Unlike Kanter's tokens, more recent women entrants to male-dominated occupations have had more legal, and, increasingly, cultural support for their presence on male turf. But while the terms of their participation have changed somewhat, the difficulties foreshadowed in Kanter's study (difficulties which Kanter herself thought force of numbers would help to eliminate) did not instantly disappear. A 1992 report by the Canadian Committee on Women in Engineering cited many stories of sexism, systemic discrimination and workplace inequality, and a series of "common and difficult" barriers faced by women engineers (Canadian Committee on Women in Engineering, 1992: 60).
Why should such barriers persist, especially in a discursive climate of gender equality and "family-friendly" workplaces? Acker (1990) contends that organizations are not gender-neutral spaces that women may enter on the same footing as men; neither can a "job" be defined as abstract and gender-neutral, performed by an abstract and disembodied "worker" who exists only in relation to the job. Acker's widely cited argument is that in the real world of actual workers, the closest approximation to the disembodied worker who exists only for the job is "the male worker whose life centers on his full-time, life-long job, while his wife or another woman takes care of his personal needs and his children" (Acker, 1990: 149).
Acker's description was until recently a good fit for most engineers. The template of the engineering professional developed out of a history of engineering as a profession with origins in military institutions (Hacker, 1989), and strong links to the symbolically masculine attributes of scientific and technical rationality (Wajcman, 1991). Recent initiatives to get women into engineering have usually been predicated on the assumption that "women must be modified to fit into engineering, not the other way round" (Faulkner, 2000: 93). In ethnographic research on engineering women in a variety of educational and work settings, Eisenhart and Finkel (1998) found that organizational expectations regarding commitment to workplace activities and the worker identity favoured people who were able to put work demands first. At the same time, these expectations were perceived by everyone concerned, women and men alike, as gender-neutral. The researchers came to view gender neutrality as a socially and culturally constructed discourse that "confers legitimacy on women's professional contribution only when they act like men" and "makes discussion of women's distinctive issues virtually impossible" (Eisenhart and Finkel, 1998: 181).
Recognition of the challenges of "making women fit" links to a broader critique of the liberal feminist position that gender equality means treating women and men the same. Rothman (1994) points out that, while liberal feminism works well in defending women's right to enter male worlds, and to "work at men's jobs for men's pay," it does little to defend women's rights to be women. In particular, it does not address the equal-treatment dilemma posed by motherhood, which is "the embodied challenge to liberal philosophy" (Rothman, 1994: 146), and the rock on which claims of gender neutrality must founder.
Mothers in a Man's World
Motherhood as a barrier to women's career progress in engineering is demonstrated in much research through the 1990s. Studies in the United States (McIlwee and Robinson, 1992), Britain (Devine, 1992; Corcoran-Nantes and Roberts, 1995; Evetts, 1994; 1996; Wajcman, 1998) and Canada (Ranson, 1998; 2000) all point to the challenges for women in combining "masculine" professional work and motherhood. They may find themselves, as noted earlier, in workplaces in which a discourse of gender neutrality masks clearly masculinist expectations about work performance and career progress. At the same time, they confront cultural expectations about mothers, framed around a dominant ideology of "intensive mothering" (Arendell, 2000; Hays, 1996) that directly contradicts workplace expectations. In contrast, the men with whom these women work are not subject to the same expectations regarding their family involvement. These men are much more likely than their women colleagues to have partners who can take on the bulk of family responsibilities (Wajcman, 1998; Ranson, 2000).1 For most men, the prevailing cultural expectation is that they will be responsible for their family's financial provision, whether or not their contribution is supplemented by working partners, and
whether or not they are also involved caregivers (Christiansen and Palkovitz, 2001; Ranson, 2001). Thus, as Evetts (1996) comments about her sample of women and men in science and engineering careers, men have ideological support for career development, whereas "women developing careers are pathfinders in an, as yet, relatively unsympathetic and underresourced world" (Evetts, 1996: 102).
Organizational responses in the form of "family-friendly" policies and programs would seem to be the way to overcome this underresourcing. But research evidence suggests they are not helping nearly as much as company rhetoric and popular discourse would suggest. While policies like parental leave or flexible work schedules are generally couched in gender-neutral terms, and are purported to be directed to both women and men, in practice their take-up by men has been minimal (Andrews and Bailyn, 1993; Pleck, 1993; Rapoport and Bailyn, 1996; Hochschild, 1997). This constitutes women as the prime beneficiaries of such policies, and further entrenches the idea that they are special concessions or benefits for women (Jones and Causer, 1995; Lewis, 1997) rather than rights to which all workers are entitled. Lift and Ward (2001) call this a "woman's problems" approach to equality--one that accentuates women's "difference" and seeks to accommodate it. Several British studies...
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