Engineering is often described as an enduring bastion of masculine culture where women experience marginality. Using diaries from undergraduate engineering students at four universities, the authors explore women’s interpretations of their status within the profession. The authors’ findings show that women recognize their marginality, providing clear and strong criticisms of their experiences. But these criticisms remain isolated and muted; they coalesce neither into broader organizational or institutional criticisms of engineering, nor into calls for change. Instead, their criticisms are interpreted through two values central to engineering culture: meritocracy and individualism. Despite their direct experiences with sexism, respondents typically embrace these values as ideological justifications of the existing distributions of status and reward in engineering and come to view engineering’s nonmeritocratic system as meritocratic. The unquestioned presumption of meritocracy and the invisibility of its muting effects on critiques resembles not hegemonic masculinity—for these women proudly celebrate their femininity—but a hegemony of meritocratic ideology. The authors conclude that engineering education successfully turns potential critics into agents of cultural reproduction. This article contributes to ongoing debates concerning diversity in STEM professions by showing how professional culture can contribute to more general patterns of token behavior—thus identifying mechanisms of cultural reproduction that thwart institutional change.

中文翻译：

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“我不是女权主义者，但是。. .”：精英意识形态的霸权和工程领域女性批判的局限性

工程学通常被描述为男性文化的持久堡垒，女性在其中经历边缘化。作者使用四所大学工程学本科生的日记，探讨了女性对其在该行业中的地位的解释。作者的研究结果表明，女性认识到自己的边缘地位，并对她们的经历提出明确而强烈的批评。但这些批评仍然孤立无声。它们既不会合并为对工程的更广泛的组织或制度批评，也不会合并为变革的呼吁。相反，他们的批评是通过工程文化的两个核心价值观来解释的：任人唯贤和个人主义。尽管他们有直接的性别歧视经历，受访者通常将这些价值观视为现有工程中地位和奖励分配的意识形态理由，并开始将工程的非精英系统视为精英系统。毫无疑问的精英主义推定及其对批评的静音效果的不可见性不像霸权的男性气质——因为这些女性自豪地庆祝自己的女性气质——而是精英意识形态的霸权。作者得出结论，工程教育成功地将潜在的批评者变成了文化再生产的推动者。本文通过展示专业文化如何促进更普遍的代币行为模式，从而确定阻碍制度变革的文化再生产机制，从而为有关 STEM 专业多样性的持续辩论做出贡献。