A woman's work is never...shown? Histories of the ‘representation’ of women’s technoscientific labour since 1945

Value

£306,172 (fEC)

Partners and collaborators

Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) Women’s Engineering Society (WES); International Network of Women Engineers and Scientists (INWES); Science Museum Group (SMG)

Description

In recent years, researchers have tended to focus on excavating and celebrating female ‘hidden figures’ in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths (STEM). While this work is important and necessary, A Woman’s Work takes a different approach. Instead of programmatically recovering exceptional figures or world-altering contributions, it focuses instead on examining a different kind of invisibility: the ‘ordinary’ women who – ironically – are already represented in national collections in photographs, industry brochures, careers guides, and marketing material but whose collective achievements are less likely to be found in the written historical record and wider cultural understanding.

These representations of women’s technoscientific labour, which together form a captivating mix of visual sources, are the starting point for A Woman’s Work, which will systematically research them, developing novel methodologies for ensuring these rich, multifaceted images can be used to tell more resonant, realistic, and engaging stories of women’s technoscientific involvement.

Creating these new approaches means zooming out from individual narratives, no longer looking to exceptional examples of women’s success, to examine larger patterns of where women’s labour has tended to cluster, which, as Rees Koerner and Gooday (2022) have hypothesised, is more likely to be in the applied technosciences, like the engineering subsets, and to involve teamworking. Bringing together collaborators from museums, universities, and engineering societies, A Woman’s Work will identify where women’s work is made visible in collections and archives.

Over the course of the project, as methods are developed and refined, A Woman’s Work will use case studies from 1945 to 2000 to historicise these representations, contextualising how and why women’s labour was, in these instances, actively made visible. It will design and share open access methodological approaches and resources to help build capacity for locating and using visual sources by interested parties, including academics, educators, societies, and policymakers as well as museum curators, for use in future materials aimed at broader publics that ensure the stories of these ‘visible figures’ are used to produce more authentic, relatable, and impactful histories of STEM.