Comparing social representations of feminism among education and engineering majors: Insights for developing feminist pedagogies

Abstract

The present study uses Social Representation Theory to explore students’ representations of feminism with a view to informing principles for developing feminist pedagogies that can help foster egalitarian values among college students. The aim is to identify how Spanish students (n = 366) represent feminism and how these representations are shaped by participants’ gender, identification with feminism, or by studying feminized or masculinized disciplines. Students from Education (n = 192), a feminized qualification, and Engineering (n = 174), a masculinized qualification, completed a free association task using the Grid Elaboration Method to collect representations of feminism. A lexical analysis was conducted using the Reinert method. The results showed that a positive representation of feminism was the broadest (75.8%), with feminist-identified students defining feminism as a struggle for freedom. Feminist women emphasized the importance of achieving equality, and education students emphasized the importance of education in the process of women's empowerment. In contrast, 24.2% represented feminism negatively, as an extreme movement, especially engineering, non-feminist, and male students. These findings suggest that efforts aimed at developing feminist principles among students consider not only gender and feminist identification but also the context of feminized or masculinized disciplines as key spaces of gendered socialization. The study was carried out in the Basque country, Spain.