Paper short abstract:

The paper analyses the potential of interdisciplinarity as a strategy to redefine doing technology and how this may be a tool for improved gender balance, as a contribution to STS investigations into gender, science and technology relations. It also discusses if this strategy is applicable to universities.

Paper long abstract:

This paper contributes to the STS literature by investigating how a redefinition of what is means to do technology worked as an instrument to improve the gender balance of a large organization dominated by men engineers. This modification of the technology policy of this organization arguably was a renegotiation of gender power relations (Wajcman 2009). The strong, pervasive and durable equation between science and technology on the one hand and masculinity on the other has been used to explain men's inclusion and women's exclusion in STEM disciplines. This presents an empirical study the efforts to improve the gender balance in the Norwegian Public Road Administration (NPRA). By extending the concept of technology and introducing a greater emphasis on team-based interdisciplinarity, the NPRA has succeeded in improving considerably its gender balance with respect to managerial positions through a more interdisciplinary definition of what it meant to do technology, which allowed the inclusion of people (women) with a background in social science and landscape architecture. While the women engineers were held in particularly high esteem, also compared to men engineers, they were no longer the only category of women available for promotion. Thus, this paper shows how dualisms as technical-social, hard-soft and male-female can be bent and how an extended perception of technology provides for diversity in the conception of professional relevance. In the conclusion, the paper discusses whether this use of interdisciplinarity as a strategy for improving gender balance holds promise also in university contexts.