Setting the scene

Abstract

Although we interviewed each woman in our sample as an individual, listening, and later reading, with fascination about her life, we were always aware that her personal history should be viewed against a social and cultural backdrop. In order to appreciate the context in which these engineers live and work we need to understand how it is that in the 1980s, in two Western countries where advanced capitalism prevails, they are still part of a tiny minority: women engineers.