WISE Choices? Understanding Occupational Decision-making in a Climate of Equal Opportunities for Women in Science and Technology

Since the launch of the Women into Science and Engineering (WISE) campaign in 1984, many initiatives to increase the participation of women in these areas of work have been launched under its banner and the WISE approach has come to represent the dominant discourse on equal opportunities for women in science and technology, having a major influence on both policy and practice. This article examines the WISE discourse in depth, arguing that WISE has had only very limited success because it is so narrowly focused on women's 'choices', which it understands as being constrained both by a lack of information about scientific and technological work and by a masculine image of science and technology which, it infers, is alienating to women. Drawing on empirical research which examined both women's and men's occupational decision-making processes, this article takes issue with this construction of the problem, arguing that whilst the assumptions of the WISE discourse cannot be supported empirically, the discourse itself nevertheless continues to structure and limit the space women have to speak of the conflicts and contradictions they experience, explanations for which require a better understanding of the ways in which subjective experiences of both gender and sexuality impinge upon work choices.     

Learning to become graduate students: Japanese women's experience in the research unit in engineering

Based on the analysis of 16 interviews with women first-year master's students at two national engineering schools in Japan, this article examines the socialisation role of compulsory undergraduate research experience in Japanese women's decisions to pursue graduate education and choices of the programme. The findings suggest that research experiences in a small independent research unit within the major department convinced Japanese women engineering students of their academic and social success as graduate students in the current environment. Although participants generally adapted themselves to the research unit through their research, there is a variation in the degree to which they were smoothly integrated into the research unit, reflecting organisational and individual differences.     

Who Studies Women's Studies?

ABSTRACT This article reports the initial findings of a study of the cohort of students who entered Liverpool John Moores University, England, to study women's studies in the autumn of 1994, basing its focus on the survey carried out as soon as the students entered the University and the in-depth interviews carried out later in that semester. The work proceeded within the tradition of grounded theory research and endeavoured to avoid prepared hypotheses in order to allow the themes to emerge from the students' answers. From the initial findings, the very strong emphasis on the salience of the students' choice of women's studies and the experiential importance of identity as a concept was striking. The article debates the theoretical difficulties in the theorising of identity in relation to the empirical, existential project of the students.     

Learning and Teaching in Higher Education: the use of personal experience in theoretical and analytical approaches

Abstract

This article is drawn from my research work, where I have interviewed students on a combined women's studies course through the 3 years of their degrees. I worked with 14 students in total, mainly non‐traditional entrants. The women combined their women's studies programmes with a range of other subjects (including literature, law, sociology, health studies, psychology and more), so giving me good comparisons between a range of academic subjects. My research has indicated that although it is not always recognised as academic study, the women have found the use of personal experience both challenging and exciting in developing the tools needed for theoretical and critical analytical approaches. I will conclude by suggesting that to take account of gender issues, as well as considering other marginalised groups, subject areas need to develop approaches to learning and teaching which encourage the use of personal experience in enabling students to engage in theoretical and analytical approaches in their study.     

School exclusion and educational inclusion of pregnant young women

This article analyses the school exclusion and subsequent educational inclusion of pregnant young women participating in a course of antenatal and key skills education at an alternative educational setting. It examines the young women's transitions from ‘failure’ in school to ‘success’ in motherhood and re-engagement with education. This article draws on participant observation- and interview-based research carried out with pregnant young women and staff at an alternative educational setting in London in 2007–2008. The young women's participation in the course represented a severing of past negative experiences in mainstream education, allowing a renewed focus on education alongside a positive maternal identity. The setting represented a form of inclusion, and the young women appreciated the focus on their social and emotional well-being, yet the limited academic provision in some cases continued to reinforce an educational exclusion.     

Differently Academic? Constructions of ‘academic’ in higher education

This article draws on my research, in which I have interviewed a group of students over the course of their degrees. The women are all taking women's studies combined with a range of other subjects in a ‘new’ university with campuses in inner London and on its outskirts. This article considers the women's perceptions of both women's studies and their second subjects as "academic", as well as how they think both the university and the wider world value the academic nature of their various subjects. It asks whether subjects are only valued as "academic" if they focus on the writings of men, and are considered "objective", abstract and theoretical. Do students need to be seen to be "thinking like a man" in order to value their subjects and have them valued by others, or are there ways to be "differently academic"? It concludes by suggesting some alternative ways for institutions of higher education to consider the meaning of "academic" in higher education.     

A question of gender justice: Exploring the linkages between women's unpaid care work,education, and gender equality

ActionAid International implemented an action-research programme on women's unpaid care work in rural Nepal from March 2011 to December 2012. This social empowerment methodology, Reflect, enabled 106 women to gain recognition for their unpaid care work through their own collection of time-use data. The literacy skills women acquired facilitated greater representation in community meetings calling for a reduction in their unpaid care work rather than shifting this work to girls. The article draws on Fraser's model of gender justice to explore how women's literacy, girls’ education and a more equitable balance of care work are needed to improve women's status.     

Diverse experiences of women leading in higher education: locating networks and agency for leadership within a university context in Papua New Guinea

The ways in which women deliberately press back against practices of oppression and demonstrate agency in higher education institutions are highly contextual and culturally bound. The formal and informal networks that women develop and maintain are important elements of generating agency and enhancing women's access to and opportunities for leadership. This article presents a case study from research that explored women's leadership experiences in a higher education context in the Pacific Islands – Papua New Guinea. Situated within a feminist poststructural methodology, the research examined women's experiences of leadership and considered aspects that influenced women's access to formal leadership roles. The findings illustrated that the women faced numerous barriers to formal leadership opportunities. A range of culturally and contextually located approaches supported women to demonstrate agency with regard to their own leadership development and practice. This research highlighted the importance of considering the relationship between networks and agency and the impact of associated cultural and contextual practices within organisations, providing insights into the culturally located complexities of women's leadership in higher education contexts.     

A Question of Management Style: Women school governors, 1800-1862

ABSTRACT The article examines the way women managed schools prior to the rise of technocratic management practice and theory and explores the consequences for women of the introduction of 'rational' methods of bureaucratic management. The article begins by looking at women's access to management positions in education at the start of the nineteenth century. It then considers the structural and societal barriers constraining their work before focusing on the women governors' authority style. The work of women school governors is related to the wider question of gender and power and in particular to the historical construction of bureaucratic, technocratic management in discourses of 'reason', which is seen as a form of male power within the project of modernity. The women's work is placed in a Foucauldian framework in which women governors are simultaneously constructed as powerful and powerless due to their straddling of the discursive space of both 'public' and 'private'.     

Straight Roads and Winding Tracks: Swedish educational policy from a gender equality perspective

A review of Swedish educational policy and educational research indicates that labour market considerations have had a high visibility. Straight routes through the educational system have been laid out in order to equalise and make the system more efficient. Empirical studies show that women's strategies to combine education, work and family often resulted in ‘winding tracks’ through education. Predominant research models tend to adjust to the ‘straight roads’ of educational policy while women's winding routes have been set aside. The current Swedish goal of equality between men and women gives work and parenthood the same weight for both sexes. This article discusses whether this goal could set a challenging framework for a research agenda where more gender‐sensitive methodologies are developed as well as gender‐sensitive concepts, upgrading women's knowledge, experiences and values.     

Exploring Gender and Phenomenography

A critical feature of phenomenographic study is its generation of the “outcome space” which constitutes the results of the study. The central idea underlying this article is that women may be “lost in space" — the phenomenographic outcome space. First, women seem to be literally missing in the majority of phenomenographic studies. These studies have usually been in fields in which women are poorly represented and in research samples in which women have not been present. Second, the traditional disciplines of study, the values of which largely determine the structure of the typically hierarchical outcome space, are patriarchal. Without attention to the hidden as well as the explicit aspects of what learners are coming to know, the understanding that we gain from the outcome space may be distorted. Third, the outcome space tends to be defined in many studies in cognitive terms, excluding or neglecting the affective dimension often associated with women's ways of knowing. This article explores the implications of looking for and elaborating on women's experience in phenomenographic research and suggests several ways in which women's experience might be recognised: by ensuring that women are included in research; by questioning in gender‐sensitive ways; by collecting and analysing the data with attention to the gendered construction of disciplinary knowledge and gendered ways of knowing.     

‘Special strengths for their own special duties’: women,higher education and gender conservatism in late Victorian Britain

The article discusses contributions towards female higher education made by a group of women whose views on gender roles were conservative, rather than feminist or suffragist. Four women's conservative ideals and interconnected work for women's education are reviewed in the context of late Victorian Oxford. This study is prefaced by a discussion of historical literature on women's higher education which concludes that twentieth century feminist historians have sometimes downplayed the role of reformers who deliberately disassociated women's educational reform from the advance of gender equality. A study of conservative reformers complicates definitions both of feminism and anti‐feminism, and provides an important reminder of the broader intellectual and political contexts which produced them both.     

A Risky Business? Mature Working-class Women Students and Access to Higher Education Correspondence : Diane Reay,Kings College London,UK. E-mail: Diane.reay@kcl.ac.uk

This article looks at the experiences of a small, qualitative sample of 12 working-class women attending an Access course in a large, inner-city further education college. The risks and costs involved in making the transition to higher education were evident in the women's narratives, and both material and cultural factors inhibiting their access to higher education are examined. The desire to 'give something back' which motivated all these women's attempts to move into higher education is discussed. The women were either juggling extensive labour market commitments or childcare and domestic responsibilities with studying. In such circumstances, when any sort of social life is sacrificed, what becomes visible is time poverty, and, in particular, a lack of time for 'care of the self'. Six of the women were lone mothers and it is further argued that complexities of marital status intersect with, and compound, the consequences of class. Beck's thesis of individualisation is used as a backdrop to the women's stories in order to highlight the costs of individualisation for the working classes, but also to problematise the discrepancies and disjunctures between projects of the self and the women's experiences of returning to education. The article concludes with an exploration of the consequences of a policy of widening access and participation for working-class mature women and suggests that, while currently all the change and transformation are seen to be the responsibility of the individual applicant, universities, especially those in the pre-1992 sector, need to change if they are to provide positive experiences for non-traditional students like the women in this study.     

Feminism and Constructivism

In this article, I explore the tensions between constructivism and feminism in teaching a course on social work practice with women. Drawing on modernist feminist theory, I examine the conflict between validating the stories that women construct for themselves, while raising women's awareness of the difficulties in constructing liberated stories in an oppressive society. I discuss strategies I have used in the classroom to address, albeit not resolve, these tensions.     

‘It's more flexible’: persistence of women engineers in the academy

The under-representation of women in engineering is an issue of concern for policy-makers. While much of the existing literature has focussed on understanding reasons for women's under-representation in engineering and related technical fields, there is a paucity of research that examines why women who are already in engineering persist. This study aims to answer the question, why do women engineers in academe persist in a discipline that is generally perceived to be inhospitable to women. Three main challenges, namely gender discrimination, lack of institutional and disciplinary support, and the rigid nature of the workplace, emerged as key impediments to women engineers in the private sector. In contrast, women engineers in the academy identified the flexibility offered by academic environments, the presence of personal support networks, and a passion for teaching and students as critical factors that influenced their decision to remain in academia.     

Gender stereotypes among women engineering and technology students in the UK: lessons from career choice narratives

In the UK, women remain under-represented in engineering and technology (E&T). Research has, therefore, investigated barriers and solutions to women's recruitment, retention and progression. Recruitment into the sector may be supported by exploring the career decisions of women and men who have chosen to study E&T. Triangulating quantitative and qualitative data from E&T students at a UK university, this paper examines the gendered nature of career choice narratives. It finds that women often maintain contradictory views; upholding gendered stereotypes about women's suitability for the so-called masculine work, yet also subscribing to ideals that the sector is accessible to all who wish to work in it. This is explained using an individualist framework in which women construct an autonomous sense of self, yet are also shaped by a gendered self. Women's discourse around career choice, therefore, reveals the problematic nature of gender norms for achieving gender equity in E&T.     

Pulling Back the Curtain: Relearning the History of the Philosophy of Education 1

Women have played an undeniable part in shaping the history of philosophy and philosophy of education for at least 1,000 years. Yet, current anthologies, encyclopedias, and textbooks in the field rarely recognize large numbers of women's works as consequential to our understanding of the development of educational topics and debates. This article, using the work of Herrad of Hohenbourg (1100s), Julian of Norwich (1342-c.1429), Christine de Pisan (c.1364-c.1430), and Mary Astell (1666-1731) traces women's early philosophical arguments concerning their own nature and the purposes of education. The author argue that having access to this tradition will help to remediate false perceptions of women's thought and serve as an empowering legacy for all teachers and students.     

Predictive validity of five cognitive skills tests among women receiving engineering training

This article addresses two sets of theoretical and practical issues related to increasing the percentage of women engineers. First, the measurement of women's aptitude for and changes in skills during engineering training was assessed. Five cognitive skills tests were administered in a one-group pretest-posttest design to 24 baccalaureate women enrolled in an eleven-month engineering training course. Significant increases in skills were shown on three of the five assessments. Scores on a mathematics anxiety scale and a measure of conservation of horizontality are also reported. Second, the relationship of academic and demographic information and cognitive skills to degree of success in the program is reported. Pretraining spatial visualization scores predicted posttraining GPA group membership. The results are compared and contrasted with those of studies of male undergraduates. Implications are drawn concerning the ways in which evaluations of such programs can contribute to our understanding of the changes in skills that occur with training in engineering and of the factors that predict success in such programs.     

Girls' and Women's Issues in Counseling: A Theory‐Based Course Design

In this article, the development of a master's‐level course regarding girls' and women's issues in counseling is described. First, the pedagogical foundation for the course design is highlighted. Second, the learning goals for the course are outlined: (a) knowledge of counseling issues pertinent to girls and women in contemporary society, (b) development of effective interventions based on gender‐informed counseling approaches, and (c) awareness of counselors' advocacy role in improving the situation of girls and women. Corresponding teaching methods and class activities are also provided.     

Re‐presenting women and leadership: a methodological journey

Research on women's leadership has tended to focus upon detailed micro studies of individual women's identity formation or, alternatively, to conduct macro studies of its broader discursive constructions within society. Both approaches, although providing helpful understandings of the issues surrounding constructions of women's leadership, are inadequate. They fail to deal with the ongoing dilemma raised in both Cultural Studies and studies of discourse and identity, in relation to the negotiation of subjectivity and representation, that is, how broader societal discourses and media representations of women's leadership both inform, and are informed by, the lived experiences of individual women. In this article, a range of methodological approaches are outlined that were drawn upon in a study of a small group of senior women academics from ethnically and socioeconomically diverse origins. The authors examine how the women negotiated the frequent mismatch that arose between, on the one hand, societal discourses and media representations which often reproduced narrow and highly stereotypical accounts of women's leadership, and on the other hand, the individual women's subjective experiences of leadership which challenged such representations. It is contended that it is necessary to draw on a number of methodological perspectives in ways which trouble and unsettle homogenized versions of women's leadership in order to fully explicate more nuanced and complex ways of understanding how women's leadership identity is formed.