Femiminities in STEM: outsiders within

Abstract

This article describes a typological framework with axes relating to career and (non-work) relationship commitment to show how a specific cohort of women enact femininity(ies) in the context of the institutionalised practices that define science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) as a masculine domain. Based on the accounts of 25 women in such disciplines in an Irish university, four types are identified: careerist femininity; individualised femininity; vocational femininity; and family-oriented femininity. All of these are constituted in relation to the meanings attached to the masculinist STEM career which performatively render women outsiders. The typology moves beyond the career/paid work and work/life dichotomies to encompass both the re-envisioning of career as vocation (Type 3) and the development of a highly individualised lifestyle orientation based on a high commitment to both (Type 2). It points to the variation, complexity and contradictions in how women do femininities in the academic STEM environment