‘Nuts and Bolts and People’ Gender Troubled Engineering Identities

Abstract

How and where boundaries are drawn between ‘the technical’ and ‘the social’ in engineering identities and practices is a central concern for feminist technology studies, given the strong marking of sociality as feminine and technology as masculine. I explore these themes, drawing on ethnographic observations of building design engineering. This is a profoundly heterogeneous and networked engineering practice, which entails troubled boundaries and identities for the individuals involved – evident in interactions between engineers and architects, and amongst engineers, around management and design. There are complex gender tensions, as well as professional tensions, at work here. I conclude that engineers cleave to technicist engineering identities in part because they converge with (and perform) available masculinities, and that women’s (perceived and felt) membership as ‘real’ engineers is likely to be more fragile than men’s. Improving the representation of women in engineering requires foregrounding and celebrating heterogeneity in genders as well as engineering.