Teaching Gender Issues To Undergraduate Engineering Students

As more women are graduating from Engineering Schools and entering work environments that are traditionally male, it is important to educate students, male and female, on gender issues. The School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Virginia has a Division of Technology, Culture, and Communication which offers an array of courses which address the interface between technology and society, technical writing and oral presentation, as well as engineering ethics. We have found that teaching gender issues is very effective when coupled with the teaching of ethics and values of professionals. In this paper, I discuss the specific materials, methods and basic philosophy of teaching that are effective in teaching issues of gender.