Sebastian Bernhard

In view of the persistent gender inequality in engineering and its relationship with engineering identity, I set out to advance the contemporary understanding of this relationship. To achieve this, I employ the analytical framework of the pragmatic view on Dual-Character Concepts to illustrate how engineers’ conceptualisation and actual use of engineering identity can give rise to a context-dependent concept ENGINEER that exhibits a descriptive and normative dimension of concept-membership. From a Relational Egalitarianism perspective, i.e., a perspective emphasising that social equality demands treating and regarding others as possessing equal moral status, this will allow me to demonstrate how decisive others’ belief in oppressive scripts is for this contextual inequality. It can be shown that such beliefs violate the moral demand for social equality in engineering by violating the moral obligation to respect others’ status as universal discourse participants with a fundamental right to physical and psychological integrity and an autonomous capacity to freely choose speech acts. As I will illustrate, this is due to the fact that they can either result in categorisations and classifications that conceptually exclude women and hinder their recognition as true engineers, or impede their autonomy by obstructing or deforming the effectiveness of their intentions.

Decades of research and initiatives have led to only minor improvements in the gender balance in engineering/STEM. Accordingly, the gendered numbers of engineering/STEM remain unequal. Taken together with the fact that diversity fosters strongly needed innovation, this is both troublesome and puzzling. Correspondingly, this stresses the need for more in-depth research into the reasons for the persistence of these disparities. As we suspect, the answer may be the existence of gendered limits of choice in deciding to become an engineer. To research this, we provide a literature-based analysis from a philosophically informed Science and Technology Studies perspective. As a first step, we sketch a socioculturally aware picture of gendered engineering culture and identity. Second, we introduce a perspective of feminist philosophy on gendered limits of choice in contexts of gender oppression. Taken together, this perspective allows for understanding the unequal numbers in engineering as the result of choice-limiting forms of gender oppression resulting from ideologically gendered engineering culture and identity. However, this allows for paving an educational and transformative approach – with this chapter counting as a potential kickstart for it – fostering a critically conscious form of autonomy and mobilising a solidarity-based form of collective power.