The power and the pleasure? A research agenda for “making gender stick” to engineers

This article seeks to open up a new avenue for feminist technology studies—gender-aware research on engineers and engineering practice—on the grounds that engineers are powerful symbols of the equation between masculinity and technology and occupy significant roles in shaping new technologies. Drawing on the disparate evidence avail-able, the author explores four themes. The first asks why the equation between masculin-ity and technology is so durable when there are such huge mismatches between image and practice. The second examines this mismatch in the detail of engineering knowledge and practice to reveal that fractured and contradictory constructions of masculinity fre-quently coexist. The third theme addresses the suggestion that women and men might bring different styles to engineering. Finally, the author explores subjective experiences of engineering to argue that engineers’shared pleasures in and identification with tech-nology both define what it means to be an engineer and provide appealing symbols of power that act to compensate for a perceived lack of power or competence in other arenas. In the past (roughly) two decades, a growing body of feminist work has explored the gender-technology relation. It is possible to chart the emergence of fours streams of (still current) work in this area. The first—women i