Tragedy struck L’Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, Canada in December of 1989 when a man who had been denied admission to their engineering department shocked the community by “systematically murdering every female engineering student he could find,” according to Lael Parrot in the article “Women in Engineering: Society Could Benefit From More Female Engineers.” Parrot explains this man believed he had been denied admission because of the admittance of women in the engineering program. This incident, rare and tragic, gave visibility to the issue of women in engineering in Canada prompting a task force investigation. The task force was titled the Canadian Committee on Women in Engineering (CCWE) and “consisted of 18 men and women who visited schools and engineering firms across the country, listening to testimonies of hundreds of educators and engineers” (Parrot 1). The CCWE then created a report—Women in Engineering: More than Just Numbers—which included recommendations for educators and employers to increase the amount of women in engineering. This report is a significant piece of the history of women in engineering setting “a precedent for reducing discrimination in all aspects of the profession” (Parrot 1).

Canada’s tragic event in 1989, though an isolated one, prompted a broad study of women in engineering and gave visibility to the shockingly low numbers of women studying engineering as well as recommendations to fix this problem. The low number of women in engineering continues in today’s academic and professional spheres, and the many reasons why are still being analyzed today. I believe that communication with its established importance in the field of engineering beginning in the classroom has a significant affect on the interest and retention of women in engineering. I will argue women can be either encouraged or discouraged to take on the role of engineer through communication. Encouraging women to take on the role of engineer is imperative because of the lack of women currently in engineering.

Women in Engineering: Where are they?

A study done by the National Science Foundation in 1998 found that only nine percent of working engineers were women as reported by Amy Sue Bix in her 2004 article “From ‘Engineeressses’ to ‘Girl Engineers’ to ‘Good Engineers’: A History of Women’s U.S. Engineering Education.” Nancy Betz researched the lack of women and minorities in science and engineering in the compilation book Minorities and Girls in School: Effects on Achievement and Performance edited by David Johnson. Betz describes how the lack of women in engineering becomes increasingly frustrating since women tend to earn better grades than men in both high school and college (Johnson 110). Though women are earning the grades required to study engineering, the lack of women engineers indicates there are factors outside of academic performance which are discouraging women from pursuing engineering. One important part of engineering in many aspects, such as interest in the subject and retention in the subject, is communication. Communication can encourage or discourage women from choosing engineering and affect how women are viewed as engineering students.

Initial Encouragement and Discouragement

One of the most significant and initial forms of encouragement comes from school. A major factor contributing to the lack of women in engineering has been a lack of self esteem for women. They simply do not visualize themselves as engineers in their futures. One major factor in this lack of visualization is “verbal persuasion,” as Betz labels it, from guidance counselors (Johnson 114-6). Women’s inability to visualize themselves in the role of engineer may be a result of career recommendations which can give women a specific role for the future which is usually domestic. Many women who may be considering a career in the field of engineering are met with resistance from high school guidance counselors. Betz notes some of the common responses from counselors to women which include “engineering is normally thought of as a man’s field,” “if you were a teacher you could have your afternoons and summers off to be with your kids,” and “engineering is awfully technical and doesn’t give you a chance to help people” (Johnson 114-5). Women are being discouraged from being engineers by being encouraged to take on the role of “traditional domestic woman.” By pointing out the lack of women in the field, the benefits of teaching when it comes to family and the desire to help others, counselors reinforce the roles that have been socialized to women and men and invite women to play a role that has probably been reinforced previously through family, social circles, the media or any combination of these and limitless other factors.

Guidance counselors need to establish an initial visualization and verbal persuasion showing women they can be engineers. By giving women specific role models in engineering, guidance counselors could show women that engineer is a role women can take on successfully. And by reinforcing women’s established academic success both in high school and college, counselors could build women’s self esteem creating a more positive outlook on their career in engineering. Though these suggestions may provide more initial encouragement for women, guidance counselors providing negative “verbal persuasion” are not the only form of communication which establishes negative roles for women in engineering (Johnson 116). Before focusing on how communication affects the retention of women in engineering, taking a closer look at gender in communication reveals many important applicable factors to the study of communication and women in engineering.

Feminine Communication

Before separating feminine and masculine communication to understand more clearly the distinctions of each, I will define how I will use these terms throughout this paper. The terms women and men will be used when referring to one’s biological sex. Female and male and feminine and masculine will be used when referring to socialized gender and communication styles. Since women tend to communicate in the feminine style and men tend to communicate in the masculine style we can assume most women will fit into feminine communication and most men will fit into masculine communication.

Feminine and masculine forms of communication are very different. As Sandra Ingram and Anne Parker write in their book Gender and Collaboration: Communication Styles in the Engineering Classroom, “women make use of such communicative strategies as active listening, posing questions and soliciting input from others in order to make decisions, which are often based on consensus” (11). Drawing on psychological studies, Mary M. Lay in her article “Interpersonal Conflict in Collaborative Writing: What We Can Learn from Gender Studies” shows women’s natural inclination to become more connected to others and collaborative. Lay writes “females find self-identity through collaboration and relationships” (7). Lay goes on to describe how even from an early age women tend to be more collaborative trying to create a “community of equals” (8). Lay elaborates showing how strongly women connect to others though communication. Interpersonal relationships become the basis for how women view themselves (Lay 7). Lay describes a feminine communication style for the classroom highlighting women’s abilities to collaborate well with others and encourage equal participation from those they are working and communicating with. She shows the strong contrast between men’s and women’s preferred communication in the classroom writing “many women then seek a collaborative experience within most classroom settings, while men feel more comfortable in classes where debate and competition rule” (Lay 13).

The previous research shows women have a natural tendency to create a community when they communicate. They also build strong connections and bonds and tend to communicate seeing others as equal to them. Women tend to communicate in a more equal collaborative setting whereas men tend to communicate in a more hierarchical competitive setting. Women create important interpersonal relationships through communication which become a significant part of how they view themselves. Men however tend to have a very different style of communication.

Masculine Communication

The masculine communication style contrasts greatly from the feminine communication style. Unlike women, men tend to have a more competitive aspect to their communication. Ingram and Parker write:

Because the male approach to relationships is more authoritative and competitive, interaction is used primarily as a means of maintaining or gaining status. Thus it is characteristic for men to command attention verbally through such methods as boasting, interrupting and taking longer and more frequent turns in conversation (11).

Lay too notes in a quote from her article that men even from an early age tend to make “a structured hierarchy of peers” when they interact with others (8). This research shows that men tend to be hierarchical in their role as a communicator than women. And, men create dominant/submissive roles in their communication whereas women create equal roles in their communication. The established differences between masculine and feminine communication styles become particularly apparent and significant in collaborative work settings.

Retention

A significant part of the engineering classroom is collaborative work with other students. Though few women actually enter engineering programs in college, the retention of women in these programs is also a problem. Though women participate in collaborative classroom projects, they may be encouraged by their peers to take on the role of secretary by facilitating group work—setting up meetings, keeping members on task and taking notes for the group. Though women are a part of the group, their participation may not be as valued as men’s participation because of the secretarial roles they are encouraged to take on. As Elizabeth A. Flynn et al. write in their article “Gender and Modes of Collaboration in a Chemical Engineering Design Course” when it comes to collaboration, “female socialization patterns have encouraged women to accept male domination and have discouraged them from recognizing their own subordination” (452). But how does communication in engineering encourage women to be taking on these subordinate roles?

The previously established tendencies in masculine and feminine forms of communication coupled with the obvious dominance in numbers by men creates an environment for women to become subordinate in group work as a response to the role the men take as dominant group members in hierarchical group dynamics. According to Flynn et al. the hierarchical mode of communication is “dominant and is associated with a masculine mode of discourse, so it is characterized by collaboration that is carefully—often rigidly—structured, driven by highly specific goals, and carried out by people playing clearly defined and delimited roles” (452). Since the vast majority of students and faculty in engineering are men, the masculine form of communication within groups can be assumed to be the rule rather than the exception in engineering classrooms and groups. As Flynn et al. state “if most collaboration is hierarchical as we have defined it, then collaboration is surely dangerous for women” (454).

In hierarchical modes of communication, men become dominant inviting women to play the role of subordinate through their communication modes within groups. Isabelle Thompson notes in her article, “Women and Feminism in Technical Communication: A Qualitative Content Analysis of Journal Articles Published in 1989 through 1997,” results of case study findings focusing on gender and collaboration show “men continued to treat women as clerical workers and to silence and ignore them without women realizing that they are being treated this way” (165-6). The fact that many women do not realize that they are not being equally valued for their communication abilities in groups makes the problem of gender and collaboration in engineering even more difficult because according to Ingram and Parker even in environments supporting cooperative learning from men and women, men’s “more aggressive interactional style” can result in “the devaluation of women’s contribution’s” only reinforcing men’s dominant roles and women’s subordinate roles (14). Pushing women farther into the subordinate role negatively affects both men and women because not only are women being demoted to the role of secretary, but also men are not being able to take advantage of the differences in communication and learn a more feminine communication style which can be effective in many collaborative settings..

Lay notes women have many natural talents as communicators and men are at a particular advantage when it comes to bringing gender into the study of communication and collaboration because they have much more to gain from women than women do from men (10). Lay quotes Roberta A. Hall and Bernice Sandler and describes masculine forms of communication as “highly assertive speech, impersonal and abstract style and competitive devil’s advocate” (13). Lay then continues to characterize women’s communication which makes learning a “cooperative enterprise” (13). Women tend to want more equal collaboration in the classroom while men prefer more competition (Lay 13). In order to create a more collaborative learning environment, the mode of communication must be changed from hierarchical. Two methods of communication that may be more conducive to more equally collaborative learning, according to Flynn et al., are dialogic and asymmetrical.

The dialogic mode of collaboration is more strongly associated with feminine discourse than hierarchical collaboration. The dialogic mode is “loosely structured, and the roles enacted within it are fluid—one person may occupy multiple and shifting roles as a project progresses” valuing the group effort and collaboration as an “essential part of the production” (Flynn 453). Putting the focus back on collaboration rather than the hierarchical competition may “counter masculinist tendencies toward individualism, aggression, and isolation” (Flynn 453).

Asymmetrical group communication balances the role of a leader with different group members having “different roles and different levels of responsibility” (Flynn 453-4). The asymmetrical mode of communication differs from the hierarchical mode of communication because there is not one dominating group member. And, it differs from the dialogic mode of communication because the group members do not share responsibility equally among all members. In asymmetrical group communication, each group member has an important but different role in the group.

Utilizing both dialogic and asymmetrical modes of collaboration in engineering classrooms would make the communication more geared towards women’s natural abilities as collaborators by focusing on the inclusion of every group member in a position of importance and rather than the competitive, dominating hierarchical communication, it would be more collaborative and connected to all group members. These methods of communication would include women rather than the currently exclusionary hierarchical method. These inclusive methods would give women the role of equal to men in collaboration rather than the role of subordinate. By giving women equality in collaboration, communication can engage women in taking on the role of engineer rather than exclude women from taking on the role of engineer. The methods of encouraging women to take on the role of engineer or the role of secretary can be more thoroughly analyzed through the theoretical work of Walter Gibson and Walter J. Ong.

Theoretical Implications

There are many theoretical implications that can be drawn from the given research on communication and women in engineering. As Walter Gibson writes in his article, “Authors, Speakers, Readers, and Mock Readers,” all communication is based on the idea of an imagined world where participants play roles as mock readers and speakers. The speaker guides the mock reader inviting them to play the role the speaker desires them to. Gibson provides a written example showing the speaker engaging the mock reader. He then explains “it is interesting to observe how frankly the speaker throws his arm around the mock reader at the end of the passage I have quoted” (264). Making the speaker sound like a persuasive politician or used car salesman, Gibson illustrates that the speaker holds the power to engage the reader through their communication to take on the role they feel comfortable with making them mock readers. The readers adjust their roles as mock readers based on how they are being engaged by the speakers and what role they wish to play in the scenario. Gibson’s theory of the mock reader as easily categorized into a role designed by the speaker can be applied to women in engineering showing the roles that women are engaged in by those around them.

By encouraging women to play the role of traditional caretaker, counselors were the speakers discouraging their participation in engineering. Then by assigning women the role of group facilitator, the dynamics of hierarchical classroom collaboration took women out of the role of engineer and into the role of secretary. The men became the speakers encouraging women to take the subordinate role to them through their use of masculine communication.

Is it possible to take the roles that women have been given in engineering and alter the communication method to highlight women’s natural abilities as effective communicators and therefore make women’s and men’s contributions to group work equally valued?

In Walter J. Ong’s 1975 article, “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction,” Ong builds on the argument made by Gibson about the roles that readers play and the roles that speakers play in communication. Ong uses authors Ernest Hemmingway and William Faulkner as examples of how an author can invite readers to take on a fictional role as a response to what they are reading. For example, Ong writes in reference to Hemmingway’s writing “a feature more distinctive of Hemmingway here and elsewhere is the way he fictionalizes the reader” (13). Ong continues his description of the role that Hemmingway gives his readers “the reader—every reader—is being cast in the role of a close companion of the writer” (13). Hemmingway’s engaging style brought him popularity with many readers. Faulkner on the other hand, fictionalized his audience very differently than Hemmingway. Ong writes “Faulkner demands more skilled and daring readers, and consequently had far fewer at first, and has relatively fewer even today when the Faulkner role for readers is actually taught in school” (14). Faulkner challenged his audience to take on a less appealing and more difficult role than Hemmingway. If it is possible to change the roles your audience plays as Faulkner and Hemmingway have done through communication, then changing the modes of communication in an engineering classroom may provide different and more appealing roles for women beyond that of subordinate to men.

The dialogic and asymmetrical modes of collaboration are obviously more conducive to feminine communication and may give women more positive experience as communicators in engineering. This positive experience may help to retain women into the role of engineer rather than push them back to the role of secretary.

There are many reasons why it is imperative that women are encouraged to take on the role of engineer rather than the role of secretary. Beyond considerable personal benefits for individual women, all women would benefit from the breaking down of barriers and visibility of role models in women engineers. And on a different and undeniably vast level, the discipline of engineering itself would be improved through the addition of more women in engineering.

Women Benefit Engineering One significant issue in the study of women in engineering is keeping in mind why it is important for women to take on the role of engineer. As Parrot writes, women could redefine the whole profession of engineering making it more diverse and allowing it to “evolve into a profession that, through diversity, is better equipped to solve the problems of the 21st century” (4). For example, women in engineering have been found to be more interested in the liberal arts than men, according to Samuel C. Florman in his article “Will Women Engineers Make a Difference?” (1). Florman reports the findings of a study done at Cornell of freshmen students at 15 engineering schools in the late 1970’s which found “three times as many women as men enjoyed reading novels, short stories, drama, and poetry” (1). This study also found “women were much more interested than men in participating in preprofessional campus organizations,” and women were more likely to be interested in engineering because of their interest in the work whereas “more men than women were concerned about high anticipated earnings” (Florman 1). Other results included women were more likely to enter “humanitarian” fields in engineering and “women felt more strongly than men that a liberal-arts background is essential for engineers” (Florman 1). These overall results show women are able to bring a “broader view” to the field of engineering (Florman 2). With their stronger interest in liberal arts and humanitarianism, women “do bring a new dimension to the profession” (Florman 2).

With these given benefits to women in engineering and the obvious lack of women currently in engineering, something must be done to both encourage more women to study and retain women to continue studying in the field of engineering. Communication can create the opportunity for women to take on the role of engineer. Women need initial “verbal persuasion” to identify themselves as an engineer—especially from those in their early academic field such as guidance counselors. And, changing the current masculine form of hierarchical communication to a more feminine form of dialogic or asymmetrical communication will give women the opportunity to move past the role of secretary in collaborative work and into the role of engineer. Gaining more women in the field of engineering will benefit engineering by giving the field a broader perspective by adding the diverse qualities gained when men and women have the opportunity to work together equally.

Works Cited

Bix, Amy Sue. “From ‘Engineeresses’ to ‘Girl Engineers’ to ‘Good Engineers’: A History of Women’s U.S. Engineering Education.” NWSA Journal 16.1 (2004).

Florman, Samuel C. “Will Women Engineers Make a Difference?” Technology Review 87 (1994): 1-3.

Flynn, Elizabeth A., Gerald Savage, Marsha Penti, Carol Brown, and Sarah Watke. “Gender and Modes of Collaboration in a Chemical Engineering Design Course.” JBTC 5 (1991): 444-62.

Gibson, Walter. “Authors, Speakers, Readers, and Mock Readers.” College English 11 (1950): 263-69.

Ingram, Sandra, and Anne Parker. Gender and Collaboration: Communication Styles in the Engineering Classroom. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2002.

Johnson, David, ed. Minorities and Girls in School: Effects on Achievement and Performance. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1997.

Lay, Mary M. “Interpersonal Conflict in Collaborative Writing: What We Can Learn from Gender Studies.” JBTC 3.2 (1989): 5-28.

Ong, Walter J. “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction.” PMLA 90 (1975): 9-21.

Parrot, Lael. “Women and Culture of Engineering: Society Could Benefit From More Female Engineers.” Engineering and Technology for a Sustainable World 5.1 (1998): 1-4.

Thompson, Isabelle. “Women and Feminism in Technical Communication: A Qualitative Content Analysis of Journal Articles Published in 1989 through 1997.” JBTC 13.2 (1999): 154-178.