“Maybe we‘ve become such tomboys that all behave the same”: Discourses and social forces in the culture of male-dominated academic science

• Main Authors: Snæfríðar- og Gunnarsdóttir, Hrafnhildur, Einarsdóttir, Þorgerður
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: Icelandic
• Published: Tímarit um menntarannsóknir 2015
• Subjects: Iceland
• Online Access: https://ojs.hi.is/tum/article/view/2075

This study explores the dominant discoursewithin the culture of computing,electric and computer engineering, mathematicsand physics at the University ofIceland. These fields are to this day maledominated. Much academic debate andresearch have focused on possible reasonsbehind the continuing under-representationof women in these fields. Educationalinstitutions around the world have initiatedprograms and interventions aimedat bringing more women into the sciencedepartments. The emphasis is primarilyon the idea of equal opportunities and attributingthe problem to characteristics ofwomen, such as lack of skills, interest andexperience. These efforts have proven ineffectivein increasing the number of womenwithin the fields. They have moreoverbeen criticized for focusing too narrowlyon the choices of individual women.Theory and methodMore recent work has underlined thatin order to understand the nature of theproblem we need to take into account thesocial and environmental factors at play,for example, institutional factors and themasculine culture surrounding the fieldsand dominant discourses. This paper discussesfindings of an MA study conductedat the University of Iceland. The aim of thestudy was to map the social forces, discoursesand power relations found withinthe physical sciences and technology facultiesat the University of Iceland. The studydesign was qualitative, rooted in DorothySmith´s institutional ethnography. It wascomprised of twelve interviews with tenfemale students in the above-mentionedfields. The main objective of institutionalethnography is to map the complex of relationsthat organize our everyday lives, theunderlying idea being that our everydayworlds are organized by institutionalisedsocial relations not wholly visible to us,that our activities and choices in our livesare co-ordinated with what people, unknownto us, are doing elsewhere at differenttimes. This study explored the dominatingdiscourses and gendered power relationswithin the faculties of the physicaland computer sciences at the ...