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.

Gender budgets have now been introduced in varying forms in more than forty countries throughout the world. These exercises emerged out of feminist practical politics initially in Australia and later in a number of other countries. The idea of gender budgets gathered further momentum when the United Nations Beijing Platform for Action called for the integration of a gender perspective into budgetary decision-making. Most of these experiments share three core goals. They seek to: (1) mainstream gender issues within government policies; (2) promote greater accountability for governments' commitment to gender equality; and (3) change budgets and policies. However, very little research has examined their success in achieving these goals. In discussing the lessons learnt from the Australian experience, this paper adopts a feminist political economy perspective on the state as an analytical starting point for discussing the future of gender budgets elsewhere in the world.Gender Budgets, Women'S Budgets, Government Expenditure, Taxation, Economic Restructuring, Gender Mainstreaming,

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