ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on engineering education and gender. One way of beginning to address what this might mean is to consider the close relationship between vocational education and work. In the contemporary social formation, the terms ‘work’ and ‘industry’ themselves are gendered masculine. To begin with, the pattern of employment which best fits the term ‘work’ in the popular imagination is uninterrupted full-time permanent employment, a pattern which has historically fitted men rather than women. Engineering is readily characterised as a profoundly modernist enterprise, predicated, at least in its dominant formulations, upon linear notions of progress, where the questioning of such notions is all but impossible within the terms of the discipline. Behind the great abstraction of exchange, there continues the meticulous, concrete training of useful forces. Engineering as a discipline, as it is structured within universities, bears a close resemblance to the more overtly male-governed social institutions, the church, the masonic lodge, the army.
