Sebastian Bernhard

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.