9th Biennial ACSPRI Social Science Methodology Conference

Engineering has historically been shaped by socio-historic conditions and traditional masculine norms. Originating in military contexts with violent and mechanistic undertones, it privileges traits often associated with normative masculinity. This deeply ingrained culture not only fosters gender-based marginalization but also gains legitimacy as the status quo. Gender based marginalisation is therefore rife in nearly all engineering environments, both in the subversive idealisation of depoliticization, meritocracy, competition and neo-liberal individualism, in addition to overt sexism and misogyny through symbolic violence, spotlighting, stereotype threat and many more. Consequently, engineering culture delivers benefits to white, heterosexual, able-bodied, middle-class men in the form of a patriarchal dividend. Such a dividend ensures the ongoing dominance and privilege of this group who are invited to view themselves as fearless, enlightened benefactors rather than self-serving recipients of a biased social system. This begs the question of how these privileges are socially reproduced within our tertiary engineering education system. The legitimating and reproduction of this dominance can be conceptualised as hegemonic masculinity. Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) assert that such an undertaking necessitates holistic understandings of gendered hierarchies through the understanding of the mutual conditioning of gender dynamics between the dominant and subordinated groups. This requires nuanced understandings of the constructions of gender negotiations within engineering social institutions, an avenue of research that has often been overlooked in favour of problematising students from underrepresented groups. Such an approach not only illuminates the root causes of hegemonic masculinity within engineering but also provides stakeholders with the scope to dismantle these regimes. Tertiary engineering programs rely heavily on team-based learning, small scale social institutions that exist at the coalface of marginalising social practice and the associated promotion of hegemonic masculine culture.
This qualitative constructivist grounded theory study aims to understand these mechanisms of hegemonic masculine culture reproduction. This theory will be grounded in intensive semi-structured interviews with students and academics at Monash University in addition to videographic observational analysis of in-class teamwork interactions with the use of 360-degree table cameras. This poster presentation will outline the specific methodological challenges and opportunities encountered from adopting these aforementioned methods in the initial sampling phase of a doctoral study. In doing so, motivating the application of constructivist grounded theory approaches in critical studies of the sociology of education and leveraging complementary and innovative methods of qualitative data collection.