Gender education at Chalmers: How, when and where?

Report, 2023

Universities have for a long time tried to integrate gender and equality aspects into the education. In the engineering field, this has been done by including aspects of discrimination, segregation, bias and stereotypes into the education. This has not been easy: For many engineering teachers this is not seen as relevant since those are aspects that belong to the culture of engineering. For some it is not relevant because these are aspects that other professions should work on, for others because they do not believe there is anything to be done about the culture. This project takes a different perspective: Instead of working with stereotypes and bias, this project focuses on the gendered aspects of the subject areas of engineering education. The aim is to connect Gender & Technology studies with engineering education though action research, i.e. by incorporating new knowledge into engineering courses through STEM teachers.

The project identified that since 2009, over 18 EU-projects have been funded focusing on gender equality within STEM fields and/or academia. Most examples of changes to curricula to include diversity or equality questions relate mostly to pedagogical dimensions, or adding awareness of the culture of engineering work. Only a small fraction of the examples of gender inclusion into engineering education involve changes made to the technical/engineering/scientific content of the curricula. The few examples of Gender & Technology research reaching engineering students that were found, were most often materialized through a sort of “add-on” to the education, similarly to Chalmers MTS-credits. This voids the regular education of gender issues, and there is high potential for further integration. Thus, one of the findings of the project is that Gender & Technology research have yet a long way to go to become included in curricula in Europe. Another finding is that gender stereotypes are still reproduced in many of the attempts to integrate gender into the education, and there is still much work do be done to counteract stereotypical gender roles.