Women professors in engineering: a critical inquiry of gender inequality in academia

This thesis centres on gender inequality in academia by focusing on the lack of proportionate representation of women engineering professors, in comparison with the proportion of women engineering academics at more junior levels e.g. (senior) lecturer or reader. While the paucity of women in engineering has been much studied with undergraduate students or within the wider focus of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), this research is situated in the lacuna of both vertical and horizontal gendered occupational segregation of women engineering professors. Using a theoretical framework that combines Acker’s (1990) gendered organisations and Acker’s (2006) inequality regimes, alongside a methodological approach of critical realism, this study brings a novel approach to studies of gender inequality in academia.

This is a qualitative research study based on in-depth interviews with 26 women engineering faculty members based in the UK. The participants were either women engineering academics who had reached the professoriate, or were at mid-career level (senior lecturer or reader) and for whom the professoriate would be a career goal. The findings focus on both direct and indirect factors which affect the career advancement of women engineering academics to the professoriate. Using critical realist thematic analysis, three levels of analysis are presented.

The first level is that of experiential themes in which the participants describe the visibility of universities as gendered organisations in their descriptions of gendered discriminatory experiences. The second level of inferential themes looks beyond these surface-level descriptions and identifies ways in which these elements of universities as gendered organisations were invisible to these participants. The third level of dispositional themes delve further to identify mechanisms providing causal explanatory powers for these findings. One of the main mechanisms identified is the powerful and central nature of the authority trap: the more these women engineering academics needed authority to join the professoriate, the more authority was not granted to them by their male colleagues. Another causal mechanism contributing to the lack of women engineering professors is the influence of engineering as a field on the (in)visibility of universities as gendered organisations. Overall, this thesis makes an original contribution to the critical literature on gender inequality in academia by casting light on the experiences of women engineering academics as they progress from mid-career levels towards the professoriate.