Doing Gender in the Conference Hall: Do Men and Women Behave Differently in Engineering Scientific Environments?

ABSTRACT

The literature on women in STEM areas displays the barriers that women face at scientific workplaces, showing important interaction where they do and undo gender. However, there is a lack of research about the extent men and women do and undo gender in networking environments. This is a participant observation at Human-Computer Interactions annual conferences in a mainly male-dominated environment. It explored how researchers are ‘doing’ and ‘undoing’ gender focusing on two main dimensions: the gender roles adopted by men and women during the presentations and social activities, and the gender contents exposed in their research talks. A first result shows that sex and gender issues are trivialized in research contents by both men and women researchers. A second result reveals that men and women unintentionally and successively ‘do’ and ‘undo’ gender as a strategy to fit into a neutral and accepted identity of engineering and computer scientists.

KEYWORDS:

• Doing gender
• research networking
• gender content
• visibility
• engineering identity
• conference

Acknowledgements

I sincerely appreciate Dr Carina González for her invitation to participate in the first edition, Dr César Collazos president of AIPO, Pere Ponsa and Daniel Guash, and Ernesto de la Rubia and Maria Lourdes Moreno, organizers of the following editions. I am grateful for the friendly conversations with the male and female attendees to EnGendering Technology of three editions of in ‘Interaction’ for creating a warm environment. I also want to thank Michelle Jones and Kristin Hickey for her previous reading and advice during the elaboration of this work and two previous reviewers for their valuable comments on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ana M. González Ramos is Coordinator of the GENTIC: Gender and ICT Relationships in Knowledge Society, consolidated research group of Catalonia (2014SGR1199) at the IN3 (Internet Interdisciplinary Institute) in the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Previously, she was associate professor in the Universidad de La Laguna and the Universidad de Cádiz (Spain). She has conducted various competitive projects on international mobility and she has written articles in Gender, Place and Culture, Women’s Studies International Forum, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, and Tertiary Education and Management. She was a visiting scholar in Education Research Institute at University of Costa Rica, PREST Manchester Institute, Institut für Hörere Studien, Universidad Católica de Pelotas (Brasil) and Universidad de La Habana.

ORCID

Ana M. González Ramos http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1808-0291

Notes

1. http://aipo.es/index.php.

2. https://engenderict.wordpress.com/.