I started my part-time PhD at the University of Sheffield in April 2022. My research will investigate the information worlds of female engineering undergraduates.
The inspiration for my research has come from a few places. Firstly, my experience as an academic librarian working with engineering students. The gender balance on engineering degree courses in the UK is heavily weighted in favour of men: in 2021/22, approximately 20% of students on engineering and technology HE courses were women. When you look at how many of those students will graduate and go into careers in engineering, the picture is worse: women account for 15.6% of engineers in the UK.
From my own perspective as a librarian, I have seen how masculine the culture of the engineering classroom can be. It has always made me wonder, how does this impact learning for the few women students going through these courses? And as a librarian the aspect of this I am most interested in is their information behaviour. I don’t know what my research will find. But I am interested to dig into the experiences of women engineering undergraduates, and try to uncover if their information behaviour, as an aspect of their learning behaviour, could have a gendered component to it. I believe that women’s experiences in the STEM classroom are worthy of study, as this is a perspective that has been neglected in LIS research.
My research question was also inspired by my lifelong feminism. I have always been keenly aware of gender dynamics, so exploring LIS (library and information science) research through a feminist lens is hugely exciting for me.
A final note on my positionality: I take an intersectional, trans-inclusive, social constructionist view of gender. I do not believe there is anything inherent about women that would make our information behaviour distinct from men’s, just as I do not believe that women are somehow biologically hard-wired to prefer arts and humanities subjects over STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). I am interested in how women students’ dual identities as women and as engineers are constructed and navigated throughout their time at university, and how the potential conflict between those identities might impact women’s information behaviour.
Woodsie Research 