The lecture gives an overview about the categories “sex” and “gender” focussing on science and technology.

We carried out a case study, titled “The situation of independent women engineers in Austria”, that deals with the issue of independent work by women in the technical-engineering field. The survey commissioned by FFG (Austrian Research Promotion Agency) approaches the situation of independent female engineers in Austria from various angles. This included questions on the engineers’ specific areas of activity, their everyday work, as well as their specific experiences in starting up businesses and motives for doing so.

Gender into Teaching was the first project in Austria to develop strategies, how to implement gender topics into two fields, physics and electrical engineering at a Technical University. The faculties’ motivation to participate is to increase the number of female study beginners (number of female students: electrical engineering: 7%, physics: 15%) as well as to change their public image, which they feel is negatively connoted and biased in favour of men. The total number of beginners is decreasing. One possible reason for this is the recent rise of so called Fachhochschulen (universities of applied sciences) which offer more focussed and shorter programs of study for various engineering fields.

Within the Leonardo-da-Vinci Project “Eco Stands For – Quality standards of Vocational Training for European Eco-Counselling” we took the role of the gender expert and were responsible for gender awareness raising measures like gender training as a part of the vocational training course. We also served as gender consultants for the project team and the working groups.

Gender inequality in male-dominated fields like engineering is still an often debated phenomenon. But how is the situation in the diverse field of environmental studies? The project “Green jobs – up-to-date and diverse” examines the gender differences in environmental education programmes.

Integrating gender inclusive and gender neutral terminology makes an important contribution to equality between women and men since the use of language reflects the reality of a particular society. To acknowledge the differences in its students, scientists and employees TU Graz has set a good example and launched a guideline for using gender inclusive language in speech and writing. Regarding the great proportion of international academics and employees at TU Graz, the guideline also contains a section for gender inclusive language translated to English.