Gendered Engineering Culture: Why?

Ege Naz Özer
Department of Industrial Engineering, METU

Abstract

The world is a complicated place and time passes rapidly. As biological beings, we need some shortcuts for the required computation time and effort in our neural system. We have two tools to understand and act fast: prejudices and norms. They guide and direct us for predictability of social relationships and to understand each other’s actions.
Prejudice is an affective feeling, whether negative or positive, towards a person’s perceived group membership and characteristics such as gender, social class, age, education, beauty, occupation. We judge others' actions through our prejudices.
Norm is an accepted standard or a way of behaving or doing things. In social life, we have social norms, which are the accepted behavior that an individual is expected to conform in a particular group, community or culture at that point in time. Gender norms are expectations that women and men generally conform, and workplace norms are expectations on how individuals in the workplace interact, communicate, share, collaborate and coordinate.
The aim is to draw the system of the gendered engineering culture through norms, prejudices and our education system in Turkey. By putting an effort into this barren area of research as an Industrial Engineer, my objective is to raise the following questions to collectively find the desperately demanded answers: "Why?", "What can we change?" and "How?".

Short Bio

Ege Naz Özer completed her undergraduate study in Industrial Engineering Department of METU in 2018. Her research interests vary from engineering culture to applications of logistics modeling on humanitarian aid and competition policy. She currently is studying for her master’s degree at METU Industrial Engineering Department and has been working as a Teaching Assistant in the same department. At the same time, she is studying Sociology in Anadolu University.

VenueFriday, November 1, 2019 at 4.00 pm in IE 03