Feminist Scholarship in Engineering Education: Challenges and Tensions

This article examines the current state of feminism in the emerging field of engineering education and identifies barriers, challenges, and tensions experienced by scholars and educators who have been involved with feminist engineering education initiatives. Using data from fifteen in-depth interviews, I identified seven categories of barriers, challenges, and tensions. The categories were: engineering knowledge, culture, and training; engineering education as an emerging research field; publishing; institutional constraints; productive, non-alienating critique and the feminist label; legitimacy and risk; and sustainability. The findings reveal similarities with other academic fields and provide support for prior findings on factors that inhibit the growth of feminism within a field. The article offers a base of knowledge for those interested in further developing feminist projects, those interested in the history of engineering education, and those interested in the history of feminism in academic fields.