Styles of interaction Engineers do not generally work in isolation. Building design engineers collaborate with other engineers, CAD technicians, architects, contractors, suppliers and clients; software developers interact with other developers, integrators, testers and users. In both cases, I was struck by how quickly the engineers get down to business in interactions with colleagues and associates they already know. Typically, there is a quick exchange of How are you?s before getting down to the job at hand; if the topic shifts, it shifts to other work matters. Interactions between colleagues within the office are often initiated without social preamble. Occasionally, the engineers exchange some personal information or crack a joke. The overall impression is of work interactions that are cheery and respectful but strongly work-focused. This was true of women and men engineers alike, in all five workplaces. Where I did observe a gender-differentiated style of interaction was in the ways engineers address colleagues or collaborators. In one oilfield services base, virtually all the men use man as a friendly greeting or adjunct, as in Hey, man! or Thanks, man. Elsewhere, the more colloquially British mate and lad play the same role. Between close or friendly colleagues, these labels signal common identity and bonds. Between colleagues who are not working so well together, they can help to build working relationships. And when working with a new colleague, client or collaborator, they invite familiarity. Whatever the context, these labels clearly serve as acts of bonding. But crucially, the bonding performed here is fraternal; within the common cultural register, the greetings Alright, mate? or Hey, man! are applicable only to men. They are audible in their absence when it is a woman engineer who is being addressed. Similarly, the handshake was visible in its absence in the oilfield engineering company. There is a welcome back ritual when any of the operator and technician crew return to the base after a spell offshore or on leave. They seek out the chief engineer, shake hands and chat for few minutes, and then go around the other engineers in the office. Strikingly, men shake hands with men but not the women. This does not necessarily mean that the men are any less pleased to see, or any less bonded with, the women engineers in their teams than the men; there seems to be real affection towards the women too. What it does indicate is that two routine ways of signalling affection and bonds the handshake and the labels are not available to women. Such subtle absences may be more critical when women engineers interact with new colleagues or associates who are men. I witnessed a number of such occasions. On every one, the interactions seemed to me entirely business-like, respectful and civil. But there is none of the craic7 , nor the signalled familiarity, which the same men would frequently use when building working relationships with men they do not yet know. There is greater formality when a man engineer works with a woman engineer for the first time than with another man engineer. This suggests that bonding between women and men within engineering may be less automatic than between men and men, and that women engineers have to work harder to achieve the same level of easy acceptance with new associates.8 I saw hints of a similar phenomenon operating along race and ethnicity lines also. Unusually in one oilfield services unit I studied, four of the five field engineers are women: three are white (from Europe and the Americas), the other is a black African; the one man is from India. Whilst the all-white local crewmen here are entirely business-like and respectful in their dealings with the Indian man and the African woman even exchanging friendly information about their out-of-work lives it is in the offices of the white women engineers that they linger the longest and laugh the loudest. Similarly, in the building design company, where there are a handful of non-white faces, none of them Scots, the white Scots are cheery and respectful towards them, but I saw little evidence of close bonds. Also subtle but by no means trivial is the near universal use, at least in the UK, of the generic he when engineers refer to other engineers. This can take two forms. One is the use of he rather than he or she when referring to an engineer who is not known. The other is the widespread use of masculine terms men, boys, guys when referring to engineers en groupe. Fraser describes himself as a nuts and bolts person but talks of man management even though he has women working on his team. There is little awareness of the potential impact of gendered language, even amongst engineers who would wish to encourage and support women engineers. Many would probably argue that mere words make no difference to achieving this. But when a company director says, We put our key men forward, he is sending a quite powerful message to both men and women engineers present. At best, expressions like Hes the best man for the job and Talk to the electrical boys render women engineers invisible; at worst, they render the very category of woman engineer a non-sequitur. In contrast to the generic he, swearing was identified as a gender issue by several informants in the UK. Men often apologised for swearing in front of me. There is a rather quaint sense that women would be offended by swearing or have to be protected from it. In the event, the oilfield services company was the only workplace where I really noticed swearing. F'ing is used as punctuation by many if not most of the crew, engineers and managers. By all accounts, the swearing is at its most lurid offshore. For North African Leila, this is one of the things that make the job hard to bear: The swearing Ill never get used to the swearing! Similar reactions were expressed by two Middle Eastern men. One tells me that his wife doesnt like him swearing at work when he would never do so outside; he tells her It is a different world, implying, I sensed, the stress of the job and the particular mix of people involved. In this industry, it seems, swearing serves as a marker for belonging one that signals a preferred masculinity but not one all men are comfortable with. Perhaps for the same reasons, the style of management in oilfield engineering workplaces is blunt and confrontational. Paolo comes up to Terry one Wednesday morning: It was Saturday you came back, man. The client is paying $200,000 for this data and theyre screaming for it! Why havent you delivered it? Paolo then has a phone conversation with the lead engineer on the rig, in the course of which he says accusingly, So you still have missing data, even after a second pass?! Then in a more placating tone, Its just cause [his boss] is going to come in through the door in 20 min screaming! Sure enough, Paolos boss does harangue him about the data later that afternoon, saying, This is crap! Both Terry in the first exchange and Paolo in the last fall silent, face impassive, under the attack. One sees very plainly at such moments (and I witnessed many) the hierarchy and the pressures operating in this sector: everyone has someone above them giving them shit, and so hands it down the line. Exchanges between the staff (at all levels) also reveal short fuses and quick flare ups. These aggressive interactions may act as a test and demonstration of manhood. By contrast, the overall flavour of interactions in the building design and software development offices I observed is more genteel and respectful than those in oilfield services. Aggressive displays are considered bad form, and work-related tensions or conflicts are generally handled carefully, or at least in private.

QUESTION: Can you create an argument (300-400 words) on gender inequalities in engineering workplace BASED ON THE ARTICLE ABOVE thx...