Creating Counterspaces in Canadian Engineering Education: Moving to the Center

Gender and Engineering

Even though “there is nothing inherently or naturally masculine about technology” (Oldenziel, 1999, p. 10), there are widespread cultural associations between technology, engineering, and masculinity that have evolved alongside our understandings of technology and gender. Technologies, including those designed and used by engineers, frequently “incorporate symbols, metaphors, and values that have masculine connotations” (Wajcman, 2007, p. 289). These understandings of technology and gender solidified as North American engineering became professionalized during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and barriers to entry for women became more explicit (Oldenziel, 1999; Secules, 2019). While these formal hurdles no longer exist for most women engineers in Canada, cultural associations between engineering and masculinity persist (Gill et al., 2008). For example, Secules (2019) noted how masculinity is reproduced through gendered dress, sexualized comments, and other social performances in engineering education spaces.

The idea of engineering as masculine is connected to conceptions of engineering as purely rational, technical, objective, and apolitical (Stonyer, 2002). In interviews with men engineering faculty members, Hacker (1981) found they distanced themselves from emotions and their physical bodies to focus on logic and machines, often ranking technical knowledge as more important than social relations or other stereotypically feminine qualities. Similarly, Pawley (2009) found that engineering faculty members viewed applied science and math, problem-solving, and making things, as central to engineering practice. Faulkner (2000) has also noted that, regardless of the gender of an individual engineer, technical skills, attitudes, and work (associated with masculine instrumentalism) are more highly valued in engineering than social competencies and tasks (associated with feminine expressivity). In fact, this duality is often seen as exclusive: engineers cannot be viewed as simultaneously technical and social (Faulkner, 2000). Women engineers particularly are challenged by this sociotechnical dualism, as they are simultaneously highly visible as women yet invisible as engineers (Faulkner, 2009), and their engineering identities may be more fragile as a result (Faulkner, 2007). Wajcman (2007) has written about how women pursuing technical careers “were being asked to exchange major aspects of their gender identity for a masculine version without prescribing a similar ‘degendering’ process for men” (p. 298), and Faulkner has demonstrated how engineering careers are often perceived as “authentic” for men and “inauthentic” for women (2009).

Attention to gender in Canadian engineering has largely focused on women’s participation in the field, rather than exploring engineering gender norms more broadly. Canadian engineering professional associations and academic programs have recognized a need to increase gender diversity since the 1990s (Engineers Canada, n.d., a). While progress has been made, women’s current representation in engineering still falls short of gender parity. As of 2022, 25.2% of undergraduate engineering students in Canada identified as female, along with 28% of postgraduate engineering students and 15% of licensed professional engineers (Engineers Canada, 2022, 2023). Years of minimal increase in gender representation indicate that Engineers Canada’s goal of raising the percentage of women among newly licensed engineers to 30% by the year 2030 is unlikely to be achieved (Engineers Canada, n.d., b, 2023). Women’s representation in academic engineering positions is also low: while 44% of Canadian postsecondary academic staff are women (Statistics Canada, 2025), in engineering that number falls to 19.5% (Cukier et al., 2024).

While these numbers are bleak, understanding gender in engineering requires us to look beyond numeric representation (Riley et al., 2014). The report, More than just numbers (Canadian Committee on Women in Engineering, 1992), was published roughly two years after the December 1989 massacre at l’École Polytechnique Montréal, during which a shooter who claimed he was “fighting feminism” singled out and fatally shot 14 women, 12 of whom were engineering students (Rise Up!, n.d.). This explicit act of misogynistic terrorism “jolt[ed] engineers and non-engineers alike into deep contemplation” (Canadian Committee on Women in Engineering, 1992) on the status of women in engineering. The report recognized that demographic underrepresentation is a symptom of a larger root cause, and unless cultural issues like systemic bias, accountability, and attitudes towards women engineers are addressed, efforts to change demographics will be fruitless.

Gender and Higher Education in STEM

Alongside the gendered implications of engineering and other STEM disciplines, STEM faculty members must also contend with gendered aspects of postsecondary institutions. There are widespread beliefs that women, especially those with childcare duties, are less devoted than their men colleagues to their research – even when statistics on publication rates and grant applications indicate that they perform equally (Blair-Loy & Cech, 2022; Trautner et al., 1996). Women faculty members in STEM may experience social isolation due to their gender, caused by negative collaboration and networking experiences, or a lack of opportunities to receive mentorship (Smith, 2014; Trautner et al., 1996). Appropriate mentorship may be hampered by gendered expectations. Specifically, men mentors may prefer to challenge their mentees and focus on competition and independence, which is at odds with typical socialization of women, which focuses on collaboration, dependence, and integration (Chesler & Chesler, 2002). Isolation can pose significant challenges to establishing a meaningful academic network, applying for collaborative grants, and learning how to navigate university structures and norms – all of which impact a faculty member’s ability to gain tenure and promotions.

Social isolation is compounded by experiences of discrimination and harassment (Gunter & Stambach, 2005; Miner et al., 2019; Trautner et al., 1996). Even dressing for work poses challenges related to gender performance, as women may feel the need to dress professionally (but not too feminine) to retain authority and respect from students and colleagues in men-dominated disciplines (Lester, 2008). Trying to avoid stereotype threat (i.e., feeling the need to push back on stereotypes of women being less competent at STEM by striving for excellence) can lead to imposter syndrome and burnout (Burgess et al., 2012). Overall, this “chilly climate” in academic STEM (Hanson, 2020) has significant implications for the career trajectories and mental health of women faculty members in STEM.

There are also demonstrated gender differences in the types of work expected of faculty members. Women typically perform more service than men, even when controlling for factors such as rank and years of experience (Guarino & Borden, 2017; Trautner et al., 1996). In many cases, these service assignments may be due to a need for token representation in STEM faculties, especially for women of color (Kachchaf et al., 2015). This service work does not necessarily lead to leadership opportunities which bolster promotion applications (Xu, 2008); for example, women may participate on committees but not chair them (Mitchell & Hesli, 2013). In addition, women may be penalized for doing equity-related work, facing hostility or devaluation from colleagues due to this work’s conflict with dominant narratives of STEM disciplines as objective and apolitical (Blair-Loy & Cech, 2022; Cech & Sherick, 2019). Navigating the heavy load of service work, alongside the nature of EDIA and social justice work, requires emotional labor (Hochschild, 1983). Women and faculty members of color who carry out a disproportionate amount of equity-focused work must manage the emotional toll in indifferent or hostile environments. However, this service work may provide women with opportunities to engage in meaningful interactions and create connections with other women colleagues (Bird et al., 2004). This has implications for how STEM faculty members build their professional networks, which are often gender homophilous (Belle et al., 2014).

Expectations about women faculty members’ work may also come from their students. Students may perceive women as being more approachable for special treatment, such as asking for a make-up exam or grade adjustment (El-Alayli et al., 2018). Women faculty members may also feel an expectation to play the role of “mother” in terms of providing emotional support for students (Lester, 2008). Thus, women may be expected to do work in their role as faculty members that is valued differently (i.e., less) and may require more time than the work of their men colleagues.

Previous research focused on faculty members in engineering education has not strongly attended to gender. Coso Strong et al. (2021) explored early career faculty transitions in engineering education. Their results highlight the importance of negotiating the legitimacy of their engineering education work, which involved understanding their roles, establishing visibility, and finding purpose. However, gender is only briefly mentioned as a factor impacting a young woman faculty member’s mistaken identity as a graduate student, which was a challenge to her establishing visibility within her faculty. Interdisciplinary scholars in engineering education must navigate tensions between the masculine nature of engineering and feminine nature of education (Bix, 2014). Building on Coso Strong et al.’s (2021) work, we believe that this masculine/feminine dualism may be contributing to the challenges in establishing the legitimacy of EER within engineering faculties. This disciplinary gendering may compound existing discrimination and microaggressions faced by minoritized groups in engineering education. Work to create identify-affirming spaces for engineering education scholars must therefore attend to gender.

Counterspaces in STEM

In addition to exploring mechanisms of marginalization, many scholars have identified ways in which women, people of color, and others who are minoritized within STEM fields can build a sense of belonging. One way this can be accomplished is through counterspaces: sites where deficit notions about minoritized populations can be challenged, and “where a positive collegiate… climate can be established and maintained” (Solorzano et al., 2000, p. 70). While Solorzano et al. defined counterspaces in terms of racial and ethnic identity focusing on Black students’ experiences in the United States, other scholars have extended the notion of counterspaces to places of belonging for groups that are racially and ethnically mixed and minoritized in STEM (Ong et al., 2018). Counterspaces can help minoritized engineering students challenge stereotypes and make space for “counterstories” that acknowledge the complexities of their “whole selves” that do not align with the White masculine norms of the dominant group in engineering (Carll et al., 2024). While counterspaces traditionally exist on the margins of academia in the form of peer groups, mentoring relationships, and diversity-focused conferences, Ong et al. (2018) emphasized the potential to create counterspaces in central academic spaces, including at the department level, where marginalized students, faculty, and staff feel secure, have a critical mass of peers, and experience care for their well-being.

In counterspaces, we can push back on the dominant masculine norms in engineering and connect to people with similar values as we work to define the field of engineering education in Canada. For us as women faculty in a male-dominated and masculinized field, and for our graduate students, many of whom are women and/or racialized, counterspaces allow us to create our own structures and thrive within existing ones. Counterspaces allow people from marginalized groups “to be neither hypervisible nor invisible, but comfortably visible in identity conscious and identity affirming surroundings” (Carll et al., 2024, p. 22) – a possible solution to the in/visibility paradox articulated by Faulkner (2009). For us, these may be counterspaces for engineering education (i.e., spaces where engineering education norms and values can thrive within a traditional postsecondary engineering context), or counterspaces within engineering education (i.e., smaller niches within the engineering education community).

While the definition of counterspaces is applicable to any non-traditional group existing in the margins of STEM education spaces (Solorzano et al., 2000), we would be remiss not to acknowledge that Solorzano and Ong’s use of counterspaces center around the idea of race, as does much of the literature regarding STEM counterspaces. We believe that the lack of formal infrastructure for engineering education, low number of engineering education scholars, and low representation of women in engineering in Canada indicate that we are still on the margins when compared to the existence and demographics of traditional engineering departments. Our work aims to illuminate gendered norms around the creation of counterspaces for/within engineering education. However, as White women, we are members of the dominant racial group in engineering. This means that additional norms or expectations in engineering and academia connected to whiteness are less visible to us, and the counterspaces that are welcoming to us may still reify such norms. We emphasize Ong et al.’s (2018) call for additional scholarship focused on counterspaces for women of color in STEM education.

Collaborative Autoethnography

Autoethnography has been positioned as a feminist method as it creates space for embodied emotions, raises oppositional consciousness, takes seriously the claim that the “personal is political,” and can be committed to the future of women (Ettorre, 2016). Collaborative autoethnography (CAE) is a qualitative research methodology in which a group of researchers aim “to gain a meaningful understanding of [the] sociocultural phenomena” demonstrated by a variety of data (Chang et al., 2016, pp. 23–24). This meaning-making is carried out through the collective analysis and interpretation of researchers’ individual and collective work.

Research begins with data collection for sharing and probing the phenomena under study, often in the form of individual written responses to reflective prompts. This is followed by additional data collection for further sharing and meaning-making, such as recordings of group conversations. Data analysis and interpretation are then carried out to determine themes and prepare for dissemination. While these phases represent a general path for CAE research, CAE’s strength is in its emergent quality; it “should not be limited to a particular approach or style of representation” (Chang et al., p. 25), allowing researchers to follow emerging themes and iterate in ways that are appropriate for their research contexts and questions.

CAE was particularly useful for this research study as it created space for us to be both participants and researchers in the work. As women early-career EER faculty members, our perspectives and experiences formed a corpus of research data that we could collaboratively analyze to provide insights that answered our research question. CAE also provided space for conflicting perspectives, alternate viewpoints, and uncertainty, as we frequently asked ourselves: how is this related to gender? CAE enabled us to present our findings without erasing complexity.

Data Collection

The initial round of data collection took place in January-February 2023. We created a set of prompts that guided weekly reflective writing. We were interested in how we, as early-career EER faculty members, negotiated building an “academic home” for ourselves, as well as the affordances and challenges of our engineering education-specific positions. At that point in our research, gender was not an explicit topic of investigation. We crafted prompts (Table 1) that were open-ended enough to identify different emergent themes but still required us to discuss specific experiences and feelings.

We collectively wrote 35 pages (a mix of typed and hand-written) in response to these prompts. Each week, we met for an hour to discuss what we had written, asking questions about each other’s experiences and feelings, exploring alternate perspectives, and looking for similarities and differences. Most meetings were held in-person, with one online. Our meetings were audio-recorded and transcribed. We drew on this initial dataset to publish a conference paper focused on engineering identity and belonging (Hladik et al., 2023).

In September 2023, we had several discussions about what we could see emerging from the data, what questions we still had, and what we wanted to explore further. From November 2023 – January 2024, we used situational mapping (Clarke, 2005) to create a visual representation of the different elements, actors, constructions, issues, symbols, etc. within our data. From January-February 2024, we repeated our process of individual writing/reflection and group discussions using the prompts in Table 2. We were interested in how our responses to the previous year’s prompts may have changed, so we chose to repeat some of our initial prompts and add additional prompts that responded to issues that were professionally pressing to us.

These prompts led to 20 more pages of reflective writing and three hours of transcribed discussion meetings. Our data corpus includes 55 pages of reflective writing and eight transcripts of 1-hour discussions.

Analysis

We held multiple meetings to review the data, return to our situational map, and reflect on what we felt were the most powerful aspects of the work. We noted that gender was implicated across our map: many of our human actors were women, masculinity and femininity featured in most notes related to sociocultural/symbolic elements (e.g., “education as a feminized field” and “engineering as a masculinized field”), gendered norms underlay many of the discursive construction of actors/groups (e.g., “finding my people” and “importance of the technical engineer”) and our major issues/debates (e.g., “how to reconcile different identities” and “how to belong when we are ‘twice removed’”). Thus, gender became our focus for additional analysis.

Individually, we reviewed the data and coded broadly for “gender”, the only code used in this round, and, as a construct, purposely left undefined. Even though all three of us are women, our positionalities showcase varied lived experiences. In addition, each of us had different levels of familiarity with literature on gender theory. It was therefore expected that we would take different approaches to coding, resulting in different data being coded, or for the same data to be interpreted as connected to gender in different ways, with multiple, conflicting perspectives acceptable in CAE (Chang et al., 2016). We created space for these different interpretations, while collectively narrowing in on some general categories (Table 3).

After merging our coded files (which included every individual coded instance of “gender”), we each individually re-coded the data with the categories in Table 3. Each researcher also wrote memos about how well the categories fit the data, what was missing, and what tensions were emerging. We met again to discuss which categories resonated, which felt restrictive, and what broader themes were emerging. This collective meaning-making allowed us to understand our different perspectives and discuss tensions we felt both within the data and among our interpretations. With these discussions in mind, Stephanie went through the collectively coded data and created a summary of the main ideas and tensions within each category. Each researcher then drew on this summary and our previous discussions to determine overall themes, which we present in the Findings.

As we wrote this article, we continued to reflect on our emerging arguments, and additional experiences and ideas that were not included in our original data surfaced. We collectively agreed they provided additional context, nuance, or clarification to our points, and integrated them into the findings where appropriate.

Building Counterspaces through Feminized Networks

A major theme that emerged from our research is how we created counterspaces for engineering education work through feminized networks of support and collaboration. We use the word “feminized” here to indicate that these networks included people who push back on masculine norms in engineering and/or academia, rather than being networks exclusively of women – though women were prominent in our data. Within these counterspaces, the traditional masculine norms that permeate our professional context, such as the prioritization of technical research over educational work, logic and efficiency over emotion, and competition over collaboration, were eschewed. We could also affirm shared values and express emotions and vulnerabilities in these counterspaces.

The Role of Caring Labor in Creating Engineering Education Counterspaces

We each repeatedly discussed how strongly we valued caring about and mentoring our students:

This care work – “labor undertaken out of affection or a sense of responsibility for other people, with no expectation of immediate pecuniary reward” (Folbre, 1995, p.75) – is important to all of us. While we believe this relational work is critical in creating counterspaces for engineering education, we noted that such work takes time away from the research activity necessary for us to achieve tenure and promotion, and from our personal lives.

We each voiced different perspectives on being identified as mothering figures through our care work. As we were analyzing the data, Jill reflected that she was comfortable with her role as a mother “bleeding into” her academic role. In one of her reflections, she wrote:

During one of our meetings, Jill wondered if her comfort with a mothering role was due to her identifying more strongly with education side of “engineering education” rather than engineering, which she believes to have more shared characteristics with motherhood such as nurturing, facilitating, and supporting.

In contrast, Stephanie only discussed motherhood in the context of having her own future children. She wanted to keep the role of “mother” solidly in her personal life. In June 2024, Stephanie attended two different engineering education conferences while visibly pregnant. She was frustrated by the conference experiences, and upon reflection, realized this was because she felt she was being primarily recognized as a future mother rather than as an academic who was presenting papers and co-chairing conference sessions. Informal conversations frequently turned to her pregnancy – both from her own excitement or the well-wishes of other academics who were mothers. In this way, it was difficult for her to foreground her scholarly identity and establish herself professionally within the national and international engineering education communities.

For Kari, her personal disinterest in both literal and figurative motherhood led her to reject this identity for herself and to guard against both its unwanted application by others in professional contexts, and implications that it is something she should want, or an integral aspect of her womanhood. Kari thus experienced what Faulkner (2009) describes as part of an in/visibility paradox: in addition to working to maintain an engineering identity in a male-dominated setting, she must also work to be recognized as a “real woman” without being pigeon-holed into stereotypically feminine identities, i.e., an identity as mother, that she does not want. Her difficulties reconciling this tension led to discomfort on Kari part during our discussions of motherhood, and her relative absence from them as reflected in our data.

Regardless of whether we wished to be identified as “mothers” in our professional setting, caring labor was essential to creating counterspaces for students who may not fit into traditional engineering identities. Jill discussed this as one of the most meaningful parts of her work:

She acknowledged that traditional engineering and engineering education identities and practices can be “narrow” and not accommodate different students, and wanted to widen or “open up the space” (i.e., create a counterspace) for those students to engage in personally meaningful ways. We wanted to support students who felt like they were on the fringes of engineering due to their interests, histories, and identities, such as Indigenous students whose professors had never voiced interest in learning about the impact of engineering in Indigenous communities. Just as our feminized professional networks supported our learning and growth as engineering education scholars, we wanted to create counterspaces to support our students in cultivating their sense of belonging in engineering education.

Creating space for students also required attention to their needs, which is another facet of care work. We each shared experiences where we helped students through emotional distress, such as this example:

We explicitly connected students’ willingness to come to us with our gender and our perceived otherness as engineering education faculty members. We valued being able to help our students deal with non-academic challenges in their lives. However, we also acknowledged that “we’re doing more again”, referring to the additional emotional labor involved in supporting students this way.

In another example, Jill reflected on her experience managing the logistics of an extended off-campus learning experience that required lodging and meals in addition to the course content. She and a woman colleague put significant work into ensuring that students were cared for. Jill acknowledged she did this because she is a woman and mother and felt it was important to ensure students’ experiences of the whole course were positive, and their needs – physical, emotional, spiritual, as well as cognitive – were met. However, in our discussions, she also noted that she felt this care work was undervalued by (or invisible to) the administration in comparison to the more traditional and technical academic work done by, in this case, her male colleague. Thus, we experienced tension between care work being necessary for the creation of, and being valued within, those counterspaces, even while we worked within an institution that may not value or recognize such work.

When Counterspaces Aren’t Enough – Gendered Values in Institutional Processes

While our counterspaces provide us with personal and professional support, they do not mitigate the fact that we work and will be evaluated in an academic engineering setting with masculine norms. Our reflections and discussions revealed many instances in which the values that we perceived to be upheld in our professional context did not match our own values. These value tensions complicated our ability to move engineering education counterspaces towards the center of our faculty and institution. One tension that arose in our discussion was the valuing of competition over collaboration, as seen in the following excerpt from one of Stephanie’s reflections:

This created friction within our own group as Jill had shared that she was deemed a “rockstar” by a supervisor and felt criticized for sharing and being perceived as wearing this mantle of masculinity among colleagues who wanted to reject that own identity for themselves. We also felt uncomfortable with how the masculine norm of competition devalued our collaborative work together, articulated by Jill:

We all engage in significant collaborations with colleagues across different facets of our work, including co-teaching courses, co-supervising graduate students, collaborating on research grants and projects, and co-writing manuscripts. Across several of our discussions, we collectively affirmed our belief that our work – teaching, research, and service – is stronger due to this collaboration. However, we lamented institutional practices such as collaborative grant funding letters being addressed solely to the PI (ignoring the work of collaborators) and needing to indicate who is the lead researcher on a project or primary advisor of a graduate student (even if that work is shared equally). These were regular reminders that our preferred ways of working within our counterspaces were not recognized within mainstream institutional processes.

We believe that tackling social justice issues is important in engineering education, even if there are many within engineering who believe that the discipline should be objective and neutral. Stephanie’s passion for weaving social justice throughout her research, teaching, and service work was not tempered by the knowledge that some people in her academic community may not share the same values:

She used “social justice warrior,” a derogatory term often used against women, people of color, 2SLGBTQ+ people, and others whose identities, attitudes, or work challenge dominant systems, to indicate that her social justice-focused engineering education work may be devalued or even ridiculed in her professional setting that prizes more technical engineering work. We are all deeply involved in social justice-focused engineering education initiatives, including efforts to decolonize and Indigenize engineering curriculum, a grassroots movement to rework the Canadian Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer to align with present-day values and ethical perspectives, and critical pedagogy. These movements and initiatives function as counterspaces within wider engineering culture. While we each find personal and professional meaning within interdisciplinary, social justice-focused work, we were keenly aware of differences between our work and that of our engineering colleagues:

Kari reflected on how making an argument for her research may lead to judgement, or questions related to “the overarching value of what I do or what we do” (Kari, discussion, Feb. 6, 2024) from her engineering colleagues. As engineering education researchers within an engineering faculty, we discussed the risk that the research topics, methodologies, and pedagogies in our engineering education work may be ignored or misunderstood (at best) or actively devalued and opposed (at worst) by engineering colleagues who will formally evaluate us for tenure and promotions. Our identities as women compounded this concern; the gendered nature of these value tensions (i.e., that values typically associated with masculinity are valued above those associated with femininity) reinforced the feelings of being an outsider that already exist for women in engineering. We deeply appreciated the support and recognition we have received within the counterspaces we have joined and built. However, we worried these counterspaces may not be enough in the face of institutional processes and norms with built in values that may devalue or oppose our work.

Contributions to Literature on Gender, Engineering, and Higher Education

Our findings align with those of Belle et al., (2014) as our professional networks were mainly (but not entirely) made of other women. These networks themselves became counterspaces where we could resist the “chilly climate” (Hanson, 2020) of academic STEM. Our work also extends previous research by highlighting how scholars in emerging interdisciplinary fields may experience gendered value tensions. In our case, gendered disciplinary norms and histories of engineering, education, and the other fields in which we have been trained impact our ways of being and working within engineering education. Riley (2017) explained how “women do different kinds of boundary work from men in claiming engineering identities within the discipline” (p. 256) and how doing this boundary work led to colleagues questioning her loyalty to engineering. Further, Jesiek et al. (2009) have noted an “identity crisis” in that engineering education is not always sure how to situate itself with respect to other disciplines. As scholars and critics of interdisciplinarity have explained, boundaries between disciplines are in constant flux as they draw from and influence each other (Graff, 2016). Thus, there is complexity inherent in the ways that gendered disciplinary norms are asserted or challenged within engineering education, a field already negotiating identity and fighting for legitimacy (Seniuk Cicek et al., 2023), which has implications for scholars who work within it. Some people, especially women, may feel less pressure to exchange or mask their femininity in engineering education, as their gender identity does not render their career “inauthentic” in the way it may be in engineering (Faulkner, 2009). However, a mismatch between engineering education culture and the values within institutional processes (e.g., tenure and promotions) can lead to gatekeeping of professional opportunities and rewards for engineering education scholars. These barriers complicate the issue of legitimacy faced by new engineering education scholars previously discussed by Coso Strong et al. (2021).

Our findings reflect nuance in how the role of motherhood is desired and conferred upon women in engineering education. Each of us had different levels of identification with being a “mother” within our personal and/or professional lives. However, we all agreed that the care work required to support our students was one of the most rewarding aspects of our professional roles. Connections between care work and “mothering” raise several questions: as women, is it possible to care deeply about and mentor our students without having motherhood conferred upon us? And does intentionally taking on a “mothering” role influence how we and our work are perceived in our masculine professional context?

To be clear, we do not view the role of “mother” within academic contexts as one that is inherently negative. Some of us are comfortable with that role, or even strongly desire it. However, if colleagues and students expect that role, it takes away our agency to choose whether or how we take on that role. That expectation then influences how people view us and the work we can/should do to support our students. Fletcher (1999) has discussed how in many technical workplaces, relational work (such as mentoring, getting to know people personally, etc.) is devalued or even “disappeared” because it does not align with norms of effectiveness, such as individually solving technical problems (pp. 90–91). Yet at the same time, women in technical roles are expected to perform relational work and even penalized for not doing it, even as it comes at the expense of research and leadership opportunities that “count” towards tenure and promotions (Judson et al., 2019). Thus, understanding the nuanced connections between care work, motherhood, and disciplinary norms and practices is something that requires further attention in engineering education.

Considering Counterspaces as a Theoretical Movement in Engineering Education

Our work highlights the importance of both counterspaces for engineering education and counterspaces in engineering education. The types of counterspaces explored in our findings align with those from Ong et al. (2018) for students of color in STEM, reframed with engineering education faculty members as the main participants. For us, the most powerful counterspaces were our peer and mentoring relationships within our feminized professional networks. These networks connected us to scholars with shared values, epistemologies, and research interests – something that is critically important for engineering education scholars who may alone or one of few in their institution. While they did not name it as a counterspace, the new engineering education scholars in Faber et al. (2016) noted how their weekly meetings became important sites of professional and personal support. Careful cultivation of this counterspace is necessary for us to survive and thrive.

We also recognized the value of EER conferences as counterspaces in which our work is valued. However, the discrepancy between how Jill’s decolonizing and Indigenizing work was valued at conferences versus in an institutional engineering event showcases how these counterspaces may still exist at the margins. This can lead to challenges integrating counterspaces into engineering institutions (i.e., moving them towards the center), such as colleagues who have never heard of our association conferences, or questions about how EER conference papers or journal articles should be valued in relation to other engineering dissemination venues. We also note the importance of niches or counterspaces within engineering education conferences that push back even more strongly on masculine norms by explicitly valuing social justice work or research that is grounded in the humanities. Some conferences have formalized these counterspaces in the form of special interest groups or conference tracks. This raises questions: Does having a formal EDIA track push such work towards the center of engineering education, or move it to a different margin? Would it be better to integrate EDIA throughout the conference? How can we navigate integration without losing the aspects of the counterspace that made it powerful in the first place?

Our work extends previous research on counterspaces by articulating the caring labour required to create and maintain these counterspaces. Caring labour is necessary in vulnerable conversations with our peers as we build our networks of support. Caring labour also underlies our day-to-day mentorship of our students as they grow as engineers and engineering education scholars. While it is valuable to explore the types of counterspaces and their benefits for those marginalized in engineering or engineering education, future studies should also make visible the caring labour that enlivens these counterspaces. This is especially important in the absence of formal institutional support, as minoritized faculty members take on additional work to help themselves, their colleagues, and their students thrive. This caring labour should be formally recognized in institutional processes as service to the academic community.

Finally, Ong et al. (2018) discussed STEM departments being counterspaces for marginalized STEM students that move towards the center of academic institutions. Some strategies suggested for creating departments-as-counterspaces include informal gatherings for minoritized groups, having policies against racism and other discrimination, tone-setting by leadership, facilitating interdisciplinarity, and encouraging a collaborative department culture (Johnson et al., 2017; Ong et al., 2018). Our data was collected before our Centre’s formal transition to a Department of Engineering Education. However, we saw glimpses of these strategies throughout our discussions and reflections. As we continue to push our engineering education counterspace towards the center of our academic institution, we must explicate the gendered norms that will continue to come into conflict. This will further our goal to promote an institutional culture that is inclusive of everyone, regardless of gender or other identity, in engineering and engineering education.

Questions to Promote Actionable Change

While we work to center engineering education counterspaces in academic institutions, we must ensure these counterspaces remain supportive and meaningful for those who are minoritized in engineering education. This requires all of us – faculty members, administrators, leaders, staff, and students – to reflect on the ways that dominant norms are present in our institutions, professional associations, conferences, and conversations. We offer the following questions as a starting point for actionable change:

• – How can we create academic spaces in which different epistemologies, methodologies, and ways of being are acknowledged and valued?

• – How do we position and speak about our work in relation to others’ work? What types of work receive public praise?

• – How do we evaluate and reward work conducted in collaboration with others?

• – How might institutional policies, such as those related to tenure and promotions, reify dominant norms that exclude or devalue work being conducted in the faculty?

• – How can we make caring labor in engineering education visible? How can we acknowledge and reward it, without expecting it from people with certain identities?

• – How do we determine what tracks, workshops, and keynotes to offer at our annual engineering education conferences? How can we continue to champion niches of support within these professional associations?

Answering these questions requires us to interrogate the gendered, racialized, and colonial history of our discipline. Our hope is that these interrogations will ultimately lead to engineering education communities that are more welcoming to all, especially minoritized groups. Further, these questions may also be helpful for reflection and social justice work in other STEM or STEM-adjacent fields.