The Construction of Gendered Professional Identities: Engineering Students’ Relational Identity Work

Scholars studying technical organizations have shown that engineers construct gendered professional identities during engineering education, but less is known about how these patterns emerge. Thus, we investigate how engineering students relationally construct professional identities when working together in gender-diverse teams, specifically paying attention to interactional dynamics. Based on an ethnographic study of engineering students’ teamwork at a technical university in Scandinavia, we identify micro mechanisms in their social interactions: accepting, rejecting, and withdrawing identity construction mechanisms. These mechanisms constitute a relational identity construction pattern, as male students construct identities as project managers, specialists, and entrepreneurs, while female students construct identities solely as project managers, underlining unequal access to the three identities. Concurrently, our findings suggest an inequality of worth entangled with the project manager identity. We further contribute to the debate on gendered professional identities in engineering with an interactional understanding of how gender patterns emerge.