Despite considerable work to encourage girls and women to enter the profession, engineering continues to be heavily male dominated, a situation which has implications for quality and gender equity. The gender disparity is accentuated by women being more likely to leave the profession than men. A number of studies have investigated why women leave engineering. This study focuses on the converse question, 'What makes some women stay when many others leave?' A survey of a cohort of Australian female civil engineers found an unusually high retention rate. Interviews with volunteers from the group revealed that they had all entered the profession strongly believing in themselves as engineers, a belief that had endured despite the difficulties they encountered. As found in other studies, many of these women had experienced being isolated, overlooked and marginalised in the prevailing masculine culture of engineering workplaces. Their persistence in the profession appeared to be connected to steps they had taken to ensure that their work environment matched their expectations of interesting, challenging and enjoyable work in a supportive and inclusive culture. The implications of their experiences for other women engineers and for engineering managers are suggested.

Women's low enrolment in post-school engineering degrees continues to be a problem for engineering faculties and the profession generally. A qualitative interview-based study of Australian women engineers across the range of engineering disciplines showed the relevance of success in math and science at school to their enrolling in engineering at university. However, for a significant number of the women the positive self-image connected with school success was not maintained by their workplace experience. Using a mixed methods approach, further investigations of the attitudes and experiences of working engineers at three large firms suggest that engineering workplaces continue to be uneasy environments for professional women. Particular issues for women working as professional engineers are identified in this paper and some educational strategies are suggested in order to better prepare engineers for an inclusive and participatory professional life.

In Australia, as in most other developed countries, women constitute less than 10 per cent of engineers and they are leaving the profession faster than men. Engineering organizations have taken up managing diversity as a key policy to improve the recruitment and retention rates of women engineers. This article contributes to the developing literature of critical approaches to diversity by drawing on data from three large engineering companies to argue that this policy fails to challenge the prevailing sexual politics in engineering. We propose the concept of ‘sexual politics’ in order to stress that gender is relational, contested and always political. In failing to engage with the sexual politics in engineering organizations, managing diversity obscures the systematic nature of women's disadvantage and men's advantage in the workplace. Only when these politics are recognized, confronted and transformed will engineering careers be more equitable.

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The disproportionate under-representation of women among engineering faculty and workplaces, and the tendency of women engineers to drop out of the profession in higher numbers than their male counterparts, continues to be a problem in Englishspeaking countries. 1 Within the literature on women in engineering there has been an increased emphasis upon the need to refocus attention away from strategies that target women as the site of solutions, to those that address the workplace culture within engineering faculty and workplaces (Mills et al. 2006). This paper aims to contribute to this work via an exploration of cultural imaginaries of the 'engineer' and the implications of this for women engineers and the gender balance in engineering. The discussion flows from a research project about women engineers based on 51 in-depth interviews with 10 men and 41 women engineers. 2 The interview sample is generally representative of the spread of Australian women engineers in terms of age, career progression, employment type, geography and engineering field. We interviewed civil, structural, electrical, metallurgical, mechanical, aeronautical, chemical and environmental engineers at a range of ages and career stages in companies, consultancies and government agencies. We also interviewed engineers in regional and remote parts of Australia.The paper opens by canvassing two of the main explanations for women's underrepresentation within the engineering profession. Each revolves around a representation of women and their actions as either driven by reproductive roles or, alternatively, as technically under-confident and unskilled by virtue of their socialisation into femininity. Gathering support from feminist studies on women and technology, this paper suggests that these explanations recirculate a discourse about women and technology that circumscribes the possibilities for women within the profession of engineering.In the discussion that follows we argue that there are two distinctive and dominant narratives about what it means to be a woman engineer. While all the women engineers interviewed expressed confidence and passion in the technical aspects of engineering work, one group of interviews (just less than half the sample) recirculate discourse in which women engineers are 'just as good as' men engineers. A second group of interviews emphasise women's difference and offer a more far-reaching critique of engineering work culture and its effects upon the quality of engineering interventions. 'Difference' narratives offer a radical alternative to prevailing perceptions of the 'good engineer', emphasising professional values and ethics within engineering work. In exploring the way women engineers negotiate the contradictions and limitations of prevailing cultural norms about women and engineering, we hope to challenge cultural perceptions about women and