Practicing engineers: professional identity construction through role configuration

This paper examines professional identity construction within engineering. It is meant to contribute toward better understanding dynamics surrounding women's status within engineering in the United States, where women comprise only 11% of the engineering workforce and the culture has been described as gendered masculine. This article considers the multiple roles engineers enact at work and how the discourse surrounding these roles may help to maintain a gendered image of engineering despite the actual practice. Using interview data from women and men engineers, this paper identifies six different roles that the engineers enacted at work. These roles range from being more technical to more social and are not presented in an either/or fashion as the social/technical binary would expect. From the participants' narratives, I found that engineers manage these roles within the context of their professional identity using a process I call ‘role configuration,’ which takes three different forms: balancing, grafting, and swapping. Women and men alike were comfortable with their multi-faceted roles, yet at times participants discussed the roles in a gendered and stereotyped manner. This discourse may help to perpetuate the gendered masculine image of the engineering culture and work despite the actual practices in which engineers engage.