Early feminist research and campaigning aimed to increase women’s participation in scientific and technological areas of work. One campaign was called Women into Science and Engineering (WISE). This was based on equal opportunities discourses and assumed that the reasons why young women were not choosing scientific careers was because of a lack of relevant information and their masculine images. Action research initiatives in schools (see, for example, Kelly, 1987) were also set up. These used interventions such as curriculum changes that would more readily illustrate the relevancy of science to women’s and girls’ everyday lives and provide women scientists as role models to alter pupils’ perceptions and to allow them to make more informed choices.
Henwood (1996) is critical of the narrow conceptualization of choice that she perceives in WISE initiatives. In particular she argues that it is not the masculine image that is problematic but the masculine culture of scientific work that impacts on decision-making. Henwood’s research is based on interviews with two groups of students who were attending a college of technology in South-East England in the mid-1980s. One group of students were taking a ‘traditional’ women’s course to become personal assistants. The second group of students were taking a ‘nontraditional’ course in Software Engineering. Henwood is concerned to analyse the reasons for these different occupational choices. Her framework for doing this is a discursive analysis of WISE intiatives.
Henwood’s research illustrates that although they may not have detailed information, young women do have some important knowledge about different careers that impacts on choice. One of the primary reasons why young women chose the personal assistants course was because of their concern about the hostility they would face if they entered scientific or technological professions. These young women also knew that their chosen occupation had less status and financial reward. Henwood comments in this respect that this left them ‘feeling most ambivalent about the work for which they had elected’ (ibid.: 211). The expected hostility is confirmed in the accounts of those young women who were taking the Software Engineering course who encountered sexism and antagonism. Nevertheless, they also felt pride in entering a ‘man’s world’ and were aware of its higher status and reward.
Central to Henwood’s analysis is how predominant discourses that are found in initiatives such as WISE structure the perceptions and practices of both these groups of women and on what is sayable and unsayable. Thus for the personal assistants:
WISE’s liberal ideology of equal opportunities works to prevent a clear articulation of the conflicts and contradictions they experience in making decisions about this future work. WISE says ‘opportunities exist’ and women have only to ‘give themselves a chance’. Thus, if these women are in traditional women’s work, it follows that they must have chosen freely to be there. (ibid.: 212)
In this therefore they only have themselves to blame for their lower status and income. For the software engineers equal opportunities discourses of ‘same as men’ silence women in a slightly different way. Here they cannot speak out about their difficulties because ‘this only serves to highlight their difference and, in dominant discourse, their inferiority and lack of suitability for this work’ (ibid.). Henwood also notes that what is completely absent from WISE initiatives and discourses is the threat to men’s sense of superiority and status that the entry of women represents. Henwood argues that what is needed is greater attention being given to the construction of masculine cultures in the workplace and how these construct ‘choice’.