Prometea Conference 2007

Detailed presentation of sessions:

Session 1: Gender dynamics of male and female careers (coordinated by Christine Waechter, University of Klagenfurt, Austria)

Comparisons between different fields of engineering and their interrelations, recruitment, full-time and part-time, survival curves and tenure, vertical segregation, pay gap, school to work transitions, worklife balance, double careers patterns, supportive and non-supportive factors in career development, etc.

Career paths in academic and industrial settings will be analysed in order to gain a deeper theoretical understanding of the mechanisms, positive and negative reasons leading to careers and to career changes of women researchers in academic and industrial settings. The following questions are of particular interest in this session:

From the point of view of male and female researchers, what positive and negative factors that have an impact on their research careers: are there gendered differences, regarding contents and context of work; corporate culture; work climate; career perspectives; supportive or hindering structures for ‘work-life-balance' (e.g. flexible working hours).
Reasons why women researchers leave jobs at different stages (e.g. dissatisfaction with job contents and work climate; lack of career perspectives; working in a non-engineering position/field; problems of compatibility of job and family affairs).
Do new, innovative, non-traditional settings foster careers for women engineers? What are the supportive elements? In which areas and levels can women researchers be found? What disciplinary background do they have? Are women researchers more attracted to environmentally considerate jobs in sustainable building and renewable energies than to traditional engineering jobs in civil engineering? Are old, traditional settings more reluctant to change with regard to gender equity? Is the work climate and work life in innovative settings more gender-inclusive than in traditional settings?
Do career paths in academic, public and industrial settings differ? And if so, in what ways? What career paths are attractive to women researchers? Are the areas of sustainable building and renewable energies a future field for engineering women to become entrepreneurs themselves?
Patchwork careers that cross conventional borders, e.g. women engineer researchers who at one time or another, or at the same time work for public and private institutions, or who exit into management or become entrepreneurs themselves (Minks 2001, Olson 2002, Clarke et al. 2004).

Session 2: Differential effect of organisational cultures on male and female careers (coordinated by Felizitas Sagebiel, University of Wuppertal, Germany)

Description and analysis of gendered organisational cultures and networks of engineering and technology research in academic, public and industrial settings. Effects of gendered organisational cultures and networks in developing E&T research careers.

The overt women career promoting and retaining criteria like e.g. mentoring activities, flexible working hours etc. have been already highlighted and analysed in several international projects and publications, anyway, both European reports on women in science/industrial research concentrate on the formal organisational cultures while neglecting informal structural elements in every day processes. Therefore the aim of this session is to analyse and understand the more informal or tacit factors of network and collaboration which affect the professional life of E&T research successfully or not (de Bruin 1990, Smandych/Martinson 2003). The following questions are of particular interest in this session :

Exclusion and inclusion in decision making processes. Research organisations social system with “own” values and norms, influence of the masculine culture on a female career, individual experiences and coping strategies.
Management of everyday research, relevant situations and activities of individuals, also teams and individual role performances in teams.
Organisational networks with the different existing forms of collaboration: conferences, team projects, publications, policy (Langberg 2003).
How mobility from one to another research organisation is combined with career processes and if and how these processes are gendered?
Indicators of organisational settings for career building of women in E&T research, document analysis of annual reports, websites, etc.. Additionally the working related differences of research activities in different sectors (academic, public and industrial).
Perspectives of organisational representatives confronted to the experiences of women and men researchers.

Session 3: Recognition of excellence in engineering and technology research (Coordinated by Liisa Husu, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Finland)

Impact on female and male careers of the gate-keepers and gate-keeping in research funding committees, women’s and men’s success rates in research funding, analysis of scientific publishing and publicity, patents, experiences of “excellent women” at the top of technological research, prizes and awards in technology and engineering.

This session aims at exploring, from a gender perspective, the dynamics and patterns by which scientific excellence is constructed in engineering and technology research in different national settings and internationally. Different arenas of scientific excellence will be explored and compared in order to gain a deeper theoretical understanding of gendering of excellence in engineering and technology research. Furthermore, the aim is also to develop recommendations to the stakeholders on more gender sensitive and gender aware procedures. The following questions are of particular interest in this session :

How to combine the promotion of scientific excellence with the promotion of gender equality? Research has established that scientific excellence is not a “universal fact” but rather a social construction, and as such, opens to many kinds of biases, including gender bias.
Analysis of quantitative data on actors granting and awarding excellence.
Exploration, from a gender perspective, of several arenas where scientific excellence is constructed in technological and engineering research : national technology and engineering research councils and other similar bodies at national level allocating research funding; national and European journals; major national and European conferences, major national and European prizes and awards; patents
Identification of the gate-keepers in these arenas, referring to those who decide the criteria of granting excellence and those who apply these criteria in decision-making in research councils, selection and programme committees and in editorial boards;
Description of the “applicants” and those receiving funding, publicity and awards;
Experiences of “excellent women in technology” who have reached the top.

Session 4: Identification and evaluation of good practice (coordinated by Wendy Faulkner, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom and Carme Alemany, CEDIS, Barcelona, Spain)

Macro and micro-level policies and practices in the promotion and support of women’s careers in engineering and technology research, situation within wider socio-legal contexts in order to develop appropriate policy recommendations.

The continued under-representation of women in scientific careers testifies to the difficulties policy makers and practitioners face in developing appropriate methods to reduce occupational gender segregation and inequality, even in countries where women are generally regarded as empowered (Blackburn et al. 2002). Two key factors appear to have contributed to this difficulty. First, gender inequalities have only recently come to be seen as resulting from ‘complex, dynamic processes that cannot be easily tackled by reference to existing models or off-the-peg solutions’ (McCarthy 2004). Second, empowering women’s careers is itself problematic, since the promotion of certain activities or ideals at a macro level does not automatically lead to ‘empowerment’ (Oxaal and Baden 1997) at a micro level. In other words, external agencies cannot empower women through a single set of employment-related gender policies that are blind to the contexts in which they are applied. Accordingly, the following questions are of particular interest in this session :

Mapping and assessment of relevant policy and practice: identification of the range of organisational level (e.g. companies and universities) policies aimed at empowering and furthering the careers of women researchers in E&T, strength and weakness of these, relevant national and European policies (e.g. childcare provision entitlements, parental rights), practices of other empowerment processes which support the careers of women researchers but which are not related to policy framework or not driven by specific policies.
Detailed investigations of specific cases of good practice
Contextualisation and recommendations: empirically based policy recommendations, which take into account any structural limitations on transferability, and which recognise the need for policies to be effectively targeted (cf Faulkner et al, 2004),
Attention to the wider contextual factors affecting work, employment and individual career trajectories.
Analysis of women’s experiences of company level policies and practices in the context of particular industries, types of organisations (public, private) and legal frameworks.

Session 5 : Transversal issues raised by PROMETEA research (coordinated by Anne-Sophie Godfroy-Genin, ENS Cachan, France)

Recent changes in terms of contents of research interest and in terms of research policy affecting the process of inclusion or exclusion of women in E&T research: interdisciplinary developments of research, funding rules, development of international mobility, etc. At the same time, research on gender and S&T research raises in itself theoretical questions: relevance of existing classifications to describe research fields, gendered identities of men, gender theories in relation to technology.

The development of the PROMETEA research project had to confront to several transversal issues concerning both recent changes regarding research policies and practice (Bologna process, development of funding through contracts with partners, more and more interdisciplinary character of research interest, etc.) and more theoretical questions as choice of gender theories in relation to research on gender and E&T, definition of E&T domain, cross-comparative methodology, difference between women and technology studies and gender and technology studies, etc. What could be the impact of such questions on research hypotheses and therefore, on methodological choices and research outcomes? Do they influence the process of inclusion or exclusion of women in E&T research? Main topics proposed for this session:

Theoretical issues raised by PROMETEA methodology: classification issues, cross-comparison at large scale.
Fuzzy borders of engineering, technology and science, what impact on exclusion/inclusion of women researchers? What impact on research hypotheses for gender and science studies?
From women and technology to gender and technology: men also have a gender. How men and women interact and build their identities when working in E&T research?
Gender theory and technology.