Analysis of gender-based violence as cause of the gap situation in engineering in Latin America

Abstract

This study is based on the idea that the engineering discipline is embedded in a sociocultural scenario in which hierarchically organized masculinities are derived and reproduced within an unequal society. Epistemically, dichotomies persist and are inscribed in symbolic systems that attribute "hard" skills, "the rational" and "the technical" to the masculine and superior, while soft skills, the emotional and the human, to the feminine and inferior. The main premise guiding the study is that gender gaps in the educational and professional fields of engineering disciplines are a consequence of, among other aspects, the configuration of insecure environments for women based on the historical construction of their inferiority, as a characteristic of patriarchal societies. In accordance with the above, the purpose of the study is to identify and characterize expressions of violence, discrimination, biases, and gender stereotypes experienced by women in their journey through the engineering field in Latin American societies. The theoretical framework constitutes social theories of gender and violence to carry out a mixed content analysis that integrates automatic text processing and analysis techniques based on the stages of the CRISP-DM methodology, and the inductive qualitative approach through the constant comparison method (CCM). The basis is a corpus configured from (auto)biographical and autoethnographic narratives of female engineers obtained from various sources. The aim of this work is to test different approaches and techniques, to define the data-mining and non-automatic analysis process that will be performed in the study. It includes the elaboration of a theoretical-conceptual delimitation of the studied phenomenon and developing the first four stages of the mining method: Real-world problem definition, understanding the data, preparing the data, and the first tasks of modeling/delimiting the mining problem. The preliminary conclusions highlight the contribution of the conceptual and theoretical framework constructed, the theoretical approach to the gender violence category, and the usefulness of the automatic content analysis applied techniques.