Introduction

This chapter focuses on the male-dominated field of engineering and explores intersections of class and gender in relation to new graduates’ experiences of trying to establish themselves in this section of the labour market. Specifically, we draw upon the work of Bourdieu and his concepts of habitus, symbolic violence and misrecognition, as well as developing an understanding of symbolically recognized capital in the engineering field, which we suggest could be seen as a form of ‘engineering capital’ (an extension of Bourdieu's different forms of capital), to help us examine how and why young women access, participate in but then leave the field of engineering, while young men are supported to succeed. We start the chapter by locating the experience of those who studied engineering in the context of other participants in the Paired Peers study, showing how the graduate outcomes of most of the Paired Peers participants followed gendered patterns.

Different gender, different career aspirations and outcomes

The majority of young women in our study opted for femaledominated professions, such as teaching, administration and charity work (see Table 5.1). This included a number of female graduates who started with aspirations in traditionally male-dominated professions like law but opted out and switched to teaching. They said that they did so for the perceived compatibility of their chosen employment with motherhood, following the patterns found in other research of women choosing careers that reduce the likelihood of discrimination and are more ‘family-friendly’ (Chevallier, 2007).

The patterns of graduate career progression that we found among the participants in Phase 2 of our research could be seen to reflect understandings of the process of developing a career identity, where the way in which ‘individuals consciously link their own interests, motivations and competencies with acceptable career roles’ is considered to begin in childhood and is further developed throughout an agent's life course (Praskova et al, 2015: 145). Young children have been found to ‘identify caring tasks with women, machines and technology with men’, and as they begin to consider future career selves, few people stray from these and other hegemonic gendered ideas of what is considered a ‘suitable’ career for the ‘likes of them’ (Bradley, 2015: 111).