The Context

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The Context
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Reflections on Male Resistance to Women in Trades
and Technology

• Dr. Marcia Braundy, C of A, IP
• Journeywomen Ventures Ltd.

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Technology Times

• Masculinities and Feminist idea(l)s collide
• In technology-intensive learning and work
  environments
• the right to bear tools is a contested site

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Men Women and Tools

• Background
• Lived experience
• Interventions
• Research
• Problem
• Theoretical constructs
• Gender
• Masculinity
• Methodology
• The play

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ProblemWhat undergirds the fear that has
lead to the practices, historical and current,
experienced by women seeking training and work in
technical and blue-collar fields of endeavour?

• Methodolgy

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Theoretical constructs

• Gender is
• a culturally constructed framework
• women and men are limited by historical and
  socially imposed roles and practices
• these define their scope, opportunities, ideas
  and attitudes,
• their interactive, interdependent social
  relations (with Moser, 1993)

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Theoretical constructs

• bell hooks refers to it as
• patriarchal masculinity
• men are socialized to believe that without
  their roles as patriarchs they will have no
  reason for being (2004, p. 115)
• Bob Connell calls it
• hegemonic masculinity
• Emphasizing the masculinity of industrial labour
  has been both a means of survival, in
  exploitative class relations, and a means of
  asserting superiority over women (1995, p. 55).

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Theoretical constructs

• Patriarchal Masculinity
• Both women and men contribute to its daily
  reconstruction and reconstitution.

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Methodology

• Performative Autoethnography
• 19 Interviews 2001-2003
• Group and individual
• Interior British Columbia
• Lower Mainland
• Ottawa, Ontario
• Male Female Tradesworkers
• Senior bureaucratic officials
• Educators and EE consultants

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Methodology

• The Interview where an explicit clarity emerged
• Five Tradesworkers
• Four men and one woman

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Methodological constructs

• Performance as Epistemology
• Performance as an action site of learning, an
  ecological interstanding that invites
  co-evolving world(s) of performance and cognition
  in a transformative dance (Fels, 1998, p. 30)
• An epistemic framework for social change(Lather,
  1986, 2001)

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Methodological constructs

• Performative Autoethnography
• Data as Evocation
• Performance-based re/presentation of
  research(Gray, Ivonoffski, Sinding, 2002
  Gray et al., 2000 O'Riley, 2003 Saldana,
  2003)
• Sharing the stories to evoke an emotional
  understanding
• (Ellis, 2000,2002)

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Methodology

• Representing the research to both evoke and
  provoke
• An intervention approach

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Methodology

• The interplay of voices Dialogism Bakhtin
  Holquist, 1981, p. 426-428
• Narratives of lived experience
• A dataplay of participants voices
• Research and exposition in the literature
• The space between the audience and the text

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What I found

• Themes emerged
• Competency
• Socialization
• Breadwinner
• Sexuality
• The need to be essential
• The meaning of tools
• Fear of Change

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Theme Competency
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Theme Breadwinner
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Theme Fear of Change
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A conundrumThe meaning of tools
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The end of Patriarchal Masculinity ?

• With bell hooks (2004), I hope that men,
  particularly men in trades and technology, can
  also find the will to change, to interfere in
  patriarchal conceptions of men as dominators and
  discover the potential of greater mutuality (p.
  118) to shift from patriarchal masculinity (the
  traditionally preferred gender performance in
  these settings) to feminist masculinity, to love
  justice and freedom in ways that foster and
  affirm life (p. 111) paving the way to
  successful workplace equity..

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To do this

• We must first overcome the fear of change that
  has proven to be so deeply embedded.
• It is only when men stand with us, speaking
  clearly to all others, that the necessary
  movement will come.
• It takes more than lip service.

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• The play, Men Women and Tools (Braundy, 2002)
  is a pedagogical intervention into the social
  construction of gender relations at the beginning
  of the twenty-first century.

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• It is only a small step.