ABSTRACT
Recruitment, retention and educational development programs for teaching staff all come under the broad label of intervention programs and the foci and theoretical underpinnings of these programs are constantly being reappraised and challenged within Australia. Intervention programs in science and engineering sit at a controversial intersection between feminism and these masculine identified fields. They are the site of one of the main feminist challenges to the masculine professions and as such they have been contested, debated and developed. Over the past ten years I have collaboratively developed and implemented a number of educational programs, working with teaching staff to provide more genderinclusive practices in science and engineering education. I have implemented these programs at both the secondary and tertiary levels of education, as well as in Australia and the United States. Over that time, many layers of complexity have been explored through developments in feminist theory, feminist theories of education, feminist critiques of traditional science and engineering and major developments in our understanding of gender construction. Unfortunately, particularly in Australia, there has often been a separation of the theory from the practice of intervention programs and programs have suffered from excessive pressures for ‘action’ and ‘change’ at the expense of research, reflection and theorizing.
