Suzanne Franzway

I still wanna be an engineer! Women, education and the engineering profession

Womens low enrolment in post-school engineering degrees continues to be a problem for engineering faculties and the profession generally. A qualitative interview-based study of Australian women engineers across the range of engineering disciplines showed the relevance of success in math and science at school to their enrolling in engineering at university. However, for a significant number of the women the positive self-image connected with school success was not maintained by their workplace experience. Using a mixed methods approach, further investigations of the attitudes and experiences of working engineers at three large firms suggest that engineering workplaces continue to be uneasy environments for professional women. Particular issues for women working as professional engineers are identified in this paper and some educational strategies are suggested in order to better prepare engineers for an inclusive and participatory professional life.

Women Working in a Greedy Institution: Commitment and Emotional Labour in the Union Movement

This paper seeks to move beyond the restrictions of limited representations of womens participation in the union movement. Through a focus on the union movement as a ‘greedy institution’, it is argued that womens union involvement requires complex and dynamic negotiations with its gendered discourses and practices. As a greedy institution, the union movement demands considerable depth of commitment and loyalty, as well as high levels of work and emotional labour. Based on a study of a network of women union officials, this paper discusses the ways women interpret three main aspects of trade union work: commitment, workload and emotional labour. I argue that the strategies the women officials employ do not remain static within a limited frame of gender difference from men. Rather, they must engage with the effects of male dominance of the union movement as well as the difficulties associated with union activism, family, service to members, leadership, and care in order to take up the political opportunities available in this greedy institution.

‘Oh you must be very clever!’ High‐achieving women, professional power and the ongoing negotiation of workplace identity

This paper uses a gender perspective to problematise the connection between high educational achievement and a fulfilling professional career. Drawing data from an Australian study of women working as professional engineers in a range of locations, the paper investigates the ways in which the identities produced in the women’s educational experiences require further negotiation in dealing with the realities of their divergent workplaces. Through a deconstruction of the power relationships that form a key feature of the women’s reported workplace experience, the women are shown to engage in a range of tactics in the effort to achieve a degree of workplace acceptance and some professional recognition. The paper concludes by urging renewed attention to changing engineering education and workplace culture if the profession is to attract and retain able women.

Engineering Ignorance: The Problem of Gender Equity in Engineering

Feminist politics aims to dismantle womens inequality by naming and challenging sexual oppression and gender disadvantage. In modern Western feminism, work is an important site for this politics. It is both means and ends. Feminists argue that work itself should be redefined so that work activities outside the labor market are recognized and demand that the conditions of work within the labor market be transformed to recognize diverse gender relations and practices. Feminists therefore argue that womens unpaid work should be valued, that we should be aware of how certain tasks become gendered, that things valued as feminine should be reevaluated, and that women have equal access to all forms of work so that unpaid work is distributed more equally.2 These gains are the means to achieving feminist ends. Feminism brought womens work, which has been largely invisible, onto the stage and has effectively destabilized assumptions that womens work is gender-neutral (paid) or unimportant (unpaid).3 Feminist campaigns for political change through womens access to paid work on equal terms with men have challenged assumptions about mens natural capacities, as much as they have womens.4

DISRUPTING MASCULINITIES: Women Engineers and Engineering Workplace Culture

The disproportionate under-representation of women among engineering faculty and workplaces, and the tendency of women engineers to drop out of the profession in higher numbers than their male counterparts, continues to be a problem in Englishspeaking countries. Within the literature on women in engineering there has been an increased emphasis upon the need to refocus attention away from strategies that target women as the site of solutions, to those that address the workplace culture within engineering faculty and workplaces (Mills et al. 2006). This paper aims to contribute to this work via an exploration of cultural imaginaries of the ‘engineer’ and the implications of this for women engineers and the gender balance in engineering. The discussion flows from a research project about women engineers based on 51 in-depth interviews with 10 men and 41 women engineers. The interview sample is generally representative of the spread of Australian women engineers in terms of age, career progression, employment type, geography and engineering field. We interviewed civil, structural, electrical, metallurgical, mechanical, aeronautical, chemical and environmental engineers at a range of ages and career stages in companies, consultancies and government agencies. We also interviewed engineers in regional and remote parts of Australia. The paper opens by canvassing two of the main explanations for women’s underrepresentation within the engineering profession. Each revolves around a representation of women and their actions as either driven by reproductive roles or, alternatively, as technically under-confident and unskilled by virtue of their socialisation into femininity. Gathering support from feminist studies on women and technology, this paper suggests that these explanations recirculate a discourse about women and technology that circumscribes the possibilities for women within the profession of engineering. In the discussion that follows we argue that there are two distinctive and dominant narratives about what it means to be a woman engineer. While all the women engineers interviewed expressed confidence and passion in the technical aspects of engineering work, one group of interviews (just less than half the sample) recirculate discourse in which women engineers are ‘just as good as’ men engineers. A second group of interviews emphasise women’s difference and offer a more far-reaching critique of engineering work culture and its effects upon the quality of engineering interventions. ‘Difference’ narratives offer a radical alternative to prevailing perceptions of the ‘good engineer’, emphasising professional values and ethics within engineering work. In exploring the way women engineers negotiate the contradictions and limitations of prevailing cultural norms about women and engineering, we hope to challenge cultural perceptions about women and

Overview of the worldwide best practices for rape prevention and for assisting women victims of rape

The study provides an overview of the worldwide best practices for rape prevention and for assisting women victims of rape. It reviews the international literature and offers selected examples of promising practices. It addresses the comprehensive range of policies in the fields of gender equality; law and justice; economy, development and social inclusion; culture, education and media; and health. It presents a wide-ranging set of examples of best practice. It concludes with a series of recommendations, based on the social scientific evidence presented in the study.

An Australian Feminist TWist on Transnational Labor Activism

households on paid domestic labor. The formulation of a stalled revolution locates the problem within the heterosexual family in which a man is present to shoulder his fair share of housework and care work. Given the variety of family arrangements, including female-headed households, and the commodification rather than socialization of the feminized work of cooking, cleaning, and caring, negotiating for just arrangements in housework cannot end at home. Housework needs to be situated within the gendered logic of capitalism that commercializes domestic work to compensate for women’s paid work outside the home. Likewise, labor movements have to meaningfully respond to the feminization of domestic work, the dependence of the formal workforce on an informalized group of workers, and the transformation of private households into sweatshops.

Reconsidering Staking a Claim

Staking a Claim is the integrated work of three people, including Dianne Court who died tragically in 1986. At the time of her death, Court had almost completed a first draft of a PhD thesis on feminism and the state. Suzanne Franzway, then an emerging feminist scholar, and Bob Connell, Dianne Court’s supervisor and already well known for his work on gender and power (Connell 1987), integrated Court’s work with their own scholarship to produce Staking a Claim. As Franzway herself acknowledges, this is a piece of work that has ‘stood the test of time in a lot of ways,’ and remains a seminal text that conceptualises feminist theoretical understandings of the state. In late 2005 Sarah Maddison interviewed Suzanne Franzway in a retrospective review of Staking a Claim.

Work and home

Jane Jenson, Elisabeth Hagen and Ceallaigh Reddy (eds) Feminization of the Labour Force. Paradoxes and Promises (Polity Press) Cambridge, 1988; Willem van Vliet (ed.) Women, Housing and Community (Gower) Brookfield, Vermont, 1988; Sophie Watson, Accommodating Inequality, Gender and Housing (Allen and Unwin) Sydney, 1988; Christina Hardyment, From Mangle to Microwave. The Mechanization of Household Work (Polity Press) Cambridge, 1988.

Intimate Partner Violence and Housing: Eroding Women’s Citizenship

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is an extreme example of gender inequality that compromises women’s citizenship. This article discusses the effects of IPV on women’s housing circumstances based on the findings of a large national Australian survey. The analysis found that IPV erodes women’s citizenship, which includes their access to safe and affordable housing, connections to “home,” and participation in community life. Drawing on notions of gendered citizenship, this article provides new understandings about how women negotiate housing as a key dimension of citizenship in the context of IPV.