Exploring the ‘possible selves’ available to male and female engineering graduates

Lane (1997: 41) argued nearly a decade ago that “[engineering] is a subject where women are currently catastrophically underrepresented”. Unfortunately, this statement still holds true as the UK appears to have the lowest proportion of female engineering professionals in the EU (Kiwana et al., 2011) with only five and a half per cent working within the sector (ONS, 2015). In this paper we try to understand how the journey of seven engineering graduates unfolds in gendered ways: how their graduate, professional identities are being elaborated and developed, how they project themselves into the future and how their career choices are affected by gender.