Hidden in Plain View: Feminists Doing Engineering Ethics, Engineers Doing Feminist Ethics

Donna Riley

Received: 26 May 2011 / Accepted: 14 October 2011 / Published online: 28 October 2011

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Abstract How has engineering ethics addressed gender concerns to date? How have the ideas of feminist philosophers and feminist ethicists made their way into

engineering ethics? What might an explicitly feminist engineering ethics look like?

This paper reviews some major themes in feminist ethics and then considers three

areas in which these themes have been taken up in engineering ethics to date. First,

Caroline Whitbeck’s work in engineering ethics integrates considerations from her

own earlier writings and those of other feminist philosophers, but does not use the

feminist label. Second, efforts to incorporate the Ethic of Care and principles of

Social Justice into engineering have drawn on feminist scholarship and principles,

but these commitments can be lost in translation to the broader engineering com-

munity. Third, the film Henry’s Daughters brings gender considerations into the mainstream of engineering ethics, but does not draw on feminist ethics per se;

despite the best intentions in broaching a difficult subject, the film unfortunately

does more harm than good when it comes to sexual harassment education. I seek not

only to make the case that engineers should pay attention to feminist ethics and

engineering ethicists make more use of feminist ethics traditions in the field, but

also to provide some avenues for how to approach integrating feminist ethics in engineering. The literature review and analysis of the three examples point to future

work for further developing what might be called feminist engineering ethics.

I intend the phrase ‘‘feminist engineering ethics’’ to represent a variety of feminist approaches to

engineering ethics and engineers’ approaches to feminist ethics. Walker (1989) among others has

cautioned us against singular approaches to feminist ethics that re-establish hegemonic systems of

thought. Here I focus on what engineers can learn from feminist ethics rather than the converse. Though

there is likely a case to be made that feminist ethicists may have something to learn from engineers, as an

engineer I hesitate to speculate in any detail about these synergies until a conversation between feminist

ethicists and engineers has progressed further.

D. Riley (&) Picker Engineering Program, Smith College, 155 Ford Hall, Northampton, MA 01063, USA

e-mail: [email protected]

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Sci Eng Ethics (2013) 19:189–206

DOI 10.1007/s11948-011-9320-0

Keywords Care � Justice � Agency � Sexual harassment � Feminist engineering ethics

Introduction

Feminist legal ethics, feminist business ethics, and feminist medical ethics are well

established fields of scholarship (Holmes and Purdy 1992; Larson and Freeman

1997; Mashburn and Martin 1999 1 ). Yet the phrase ‘‘feminist engineering ethics’’ is

rarely if ever uttered; at the time of this writing googling the exact phrase ‘‘feminist

engineering ethics’’ produces no results whatsoever. What might be the benefits of

bringing the work of feminist ethics to bear on scholarship in engineering ethics?

What might engineering ethicists offer the field of feminist ethics? Interestingly, one

can find the ideas of feminist philosophers and feminist ethicists in some engineering ethics scholarship, but the feminist label has been conspicuously

dropped. What might account for both the late appearance of feminist ethics in

engineering, and the decision of some scholars to closet their works’ feminist

orientation?

To begin to answer these questions, in this article I review key ideas from

feminist ethics that speak to engineering education and practice. I then explore how

engineering ethics has addressed gender concerns to date by examining three

separate and significant contexts in which feminist scholarship has emerged in

engineering ethics. First, the work of feminist philosopher and engineering ethicist

Caroline Whitbeck blends feminist thought into engineering ethics, but without

naming it as such. Second, groups of scholars have sought to bring notions of care,

and separately notions of justice, into engineering ethics curricula, echoing

conversations from a large body of scholarship in feminist ethics. Third, the most

recent video from the National Institute for Engineering Ethics, Henry’s Daughters, explicitly takes up gender concerns, particularly sexual harassment, as an ethical

issue. In this case the film largely fails to connect with feminist scholarship. In

critically examining all three of these efforts to combine engineering ethics with

feminist or gender concerns, I hope to constructively point to areas where more

work is needed. In closing, I propose some ways forward for developing explicitly

feminist approaches to engineering ethics.

This effort grows out of a workshop I attended on feminist ethics at DePauw

University in June 2010. An engineer by training, I first approached the field of

engineering ethics in a graduate course, then as a participant in a Graduate Research

Ethics Education (GREE) workshop, and as an instructor of ethics for undergraduate

researchers. Later as an engineering faculty member, I incorporated ethics into my

courses and into our overall curriculum through collaboration with other faculty

(Riley et al. 2004, 2006). My approach to scholarship on gender emerged first from

an activist’s perspective in college, and ultimately led to a departmental affiliation

1 While Mashburn and Martin argue that the field of feminist legal ethics is underdeveloped, the fact that

they use the phrase ‘‘feminist legal ethics’’ in a book chapter reviewing that field demonstrates far greater

development than in engineering.

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with gender studies at my institution. I began exploring feminist ethics while

preparing a course on science, technology and ethics that incorporates both feminist

ethics and feminist and postcolonial science and technology studies (Riley 2008).

The DePauw workshop provided me with a solid introductory background to the

feminist ethics literature, and helped me to think about major themes in feminist

ethics that are most relevant to engineering and engineering ethics.

Feminist Ethics: Some Major Themes

It is not possible to provide a comprehensive summary of feminist ethics here, but it

is important to introduce scholars in the engineering ethics community to some of

the most relevant themes in feminist ethics that may intersect productively with

engineering ethics. This review focuses on key insights from feminist scholarship in

five thematic areas: critiques of masculinist (androcentric) ethics; questions of

power and moral agency; the debate over justice and care; feminist professional

ethics; and applied feminist ethics specifically related to science and technology.

Critiques of Masculinist Ethics

Feminist scholarship often begins from a place of critique, examining a body of

knowledge or existing practice that has not been feminist, uncovering sexist norms (also racist, classist, ageist, ableist, heterosexist, and other norms), identifying ways

in which women and others have been excluded or silenced, and conceiving new

ways forward. Feminist ethicists began in this vein with critiques of masculinist

ethics; they pointed out problems with traditional ethics’ calls to universals,

depersonalization, and abstraction, in which relationships and social or political

context are mere distractions (Walker 1989). Feminist ethicists argued that this one-

size-fits all, decontextualized approach was systematically excluding certain values

and moral considerations. What Walker calls an ‘‘alternative epistemology’’

emerged that introduced feminist ways of knowing in ethics. These approaches

require attention to specific persons, as opposed to abstract ideals, emphasizing

relationality. A focus on relationships in turn necessitates the construction of narratives, which provide context for ethical consideration. For narratives to be appropriately understood and taken into account requires the ability to communi- cate. Just as ‘‘the personal is political’’ for feminists, the personal is also moral, and the moral is personal.

Walker (1989) further notes that attention to context also means the moral is

political; the construction of cases and their analysis embodies a politics of language

and a politics of academic and social institutions. Thus feminist ethicists examine

rhetoric and discourse around an issue or situation, ask who is a moral agent, and

how social structures constrain or facilitate agency. Resisting universals, deper-

sonalization and abstraction means that feminists must wrestle with ‘‘moral

remainders’’—the unfinished business that is left to us when ethical decisions are

necessarily imperfect and we must attend to the relational fallout.

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To illustrate how these concerns play out in working through ethical problems, it

may be helpful to consider an example from the field of bioethics. Parks (1999)

explicates how ethical androcentrism manifests itself in the particular case of

maternal substance addiction, and how a feminist approach leads to very different

treatment decisions.

Ethical androcentrism presumes a self that is atomistic, independent, self-

sufficient, rational, and willing; the moral agent, on this view, does his moral

reasoning in an ideal state, where his reason is ‘‘pure’’ (that is, untainted by

contingencies), he is free from the influence of others, and he can take an

objectivist ‘‘view from nowhere’’ (167).

These androcentric ethics exist in a medical field that also retains a male bias;

Parks notes that despite the fact that 40% of substance addicts are women, they

comprise only 7% of research subjects in this field. With addiction defined as a male

problem, treatment programs also take this atomistic approach in which individuals

come to control their addictions in isolation from social factors like poverty, racism,

or mental health issues that might affect one’s addiction. Few addiction treatment

programs address the needs of pregnant women or women with children, rendering

their addiction invisible, and giving addicted women few places to turn. At the same

time, pregnant addicts are often targeted out of concern for their fetuses in ways that

stigmatize or punish the woman. An androcentric conception of moral agents as

rational decision makers uninfluenced by social forces causes pregnant women who

are addicted to be labeled ‘‘prenatal abusers,’’ ascribing intent to life circumstances

often beyond the woman’s control. Parks argues that a feminist approach would

consider the systems of power in which addiction occurs, including poverty, racism,

and lack of access to health care. Responses such as institutionalization, incarcer-

ation, and forced sterilization are no longer ethically defensible; instead, research on

female addicts and their particular challenges and needs can lead to appropriate

treatment and prevention of addiction, affording moral standing to women, not just

the fetuses within them.

Power and Moral Agency

At the heart of feminist approaches is a concern about power. Feminist ethicists

understand moral agency in terms of power, asking who is recognized as a moral

agent, and how agency is constrained or facilitated by power relations. Andrew

(2001) notes that feminist ethics has the potential to establish women as empowered

moral agents. Nelson (2001) argues that identity (e.g., as female, as queer, as Latina)

is linked to moral agency. How others identify a person can constrain that person’s

range of moral agency, and how people identify themselves can influence their own

awareness of their ability to act. Interestingly, Nelson uses a professional ethics case

to illustrate her point, in which a doctor makes the call not to tell a patient he has

leukemia; a nurse questions this decision. When the doctor dismisses the nurse’s

professional moral judgment as emotional over-involvement, the nurse works with

her peers to develop a counter-story that reclaims the nurses’ moral agency as

professionals.

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While some early conceptions of feminism understood power in terms of gender

alone, women of color writing in the area of feminist theory developed the idea of

intersectionality, critiquing gender as the sole category of analysis and characterizing

how multiple identities (race, gender, class, sexuality, ability, and other identities)

operate simultaneously to shape one’s experience of oppression and privilege (hooks

1984; Crenshaw 1991). Building on this work, transnational feminism works at the

intersection of nationhood and economic condition (in addition to race, gender, and

sexuality) to resist globalization and imperialism (Harding and Narayan 1998;

Narayan and Harding 1998; Jaggar 2009a). For example, Kittay (2009) analyzes the

practices of migrant carework, articulating the kinds of moral harm done when caring

labor is commodified in a global economic framework, and workers sacrifice the

most significant relationships in their own lives to care for others’ families.

Justice, Care, and Beyond

In the 1970s and 1980s, as feminists sought to bring women into an ethical picture

that had previously excluded them as moral agents, some significant early work

focused on difference, and on what had been left out of moral theorizing done

mostly by men. This work often utilized experiences that were either stereotypically

or ‘‘biologically’’ women’s domain—caring, nurturance, and motherhood—seeking

to bring focus to relationality absent in traditional ethics. Noddings (1984) critiqued

conceptions of rights and justice that had ignored relationships, offering as an

alternative an ‘‘Ethic of Care’’, building on Gilligan’s (1982) observation of

difference in how men and women spoke about ethical questions: men tended to use

rights language, and women the language of relationships and care for others.

Care Ethics was later criticized as potentially re-inscribing women’s subordina-

tion (Bartky 1995). Card (1995), for example, posits that women’s tendency to care

is constructed from power dynamics that restrict women’s choices. She cautions

against an ethic emphasizing relationship when not all relationships are healthy.

Narayan (1995) builds on the notion of unjust power relations in Care Ethics by

chronicling the role of ‘‘care’’ in the history of colonialism, where patronizing

imperial interests justified their actions as caring for those less fortunate, denying

others’ agency. While some care ethicists (Tronto 1987, 1993; Warren 2000) bring

considerations of power into the Ethic of Care, questions remain about how to

address injustice or how to engage the uncaring or the uncared-for in society.

Some feminists have worked within the justice tradition, while critiquing its

flaws. Okin (1989) sought to apply theories of justice to the family as a site of

gender inequality. Young (1990) challenged narrow conceptions of justice as

distributive, offering instead a framework based on oppression and domination. She

shows how denial of difference facilitates oppression, while challenging oppression

in its multiple forms can allow for true participation from a diverse public. Cannon

(1988) draws on the experience of black women in history and literature to locate

justice as a central theme in black womanist ethics. More recently Vidhu (2004) has

called for a critique of development in terms of feminist theories of justice and

Jaggar (2009b) has used Iris Young’s concept of gendered vulnerability to add a

gender dimension to theories of global justice.

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Some have argued that justice and care frames are complementary or compatible

(Koehn 1998; Held 1995); both provide a departure from traditional, masculinist

ethics, though neither is without its flaws. Thus, we are left in a place of living with

the inadequacy of imperfect theories; a universal theory may be not only elusive, but

also undesirable (Walker 1989).

Feminist Ethics and Professional Ethics

Business, law and medicine—professions engineers often choose as sites of

comparison—have traditions in professional ethics explicitly labeled feminist. Other

professions such as social work also have longstanding feminist ethics traditions

that are an integral part of their mainstream professional ethics (Hugman and Smith

1995).

Feminist legal ethics has entertained the care-justice debate as a central focus,

with some scholars also writing on contextual analysis, postmodern and ethno-

graphic approaches to narratives, and the inclusion of multiple voices (Taylor et al.

1999). Feminist business ethics has addressed communication and the importance of

listening (Derry 2002) and has taken up the question of who is a moral agent, using

care ethics to revise stakeholder analysis (Wicks et al. 1994; Burton and Dunn

1996). Feminists have critiqued the epistemological and ideological assumptions of

traditional business ethics and made visible its construction in a sexist, racist, and

classist setting and its support of patriarchal and capitalist power structures (Larson

and Freeman 1997). Walker’s (1989) characterization of the space of feminist ethics

appears to represent well the kinds of issues that have emerged within these

particular professions, and that we might expect to see in feminist engineering

ethics.

Writing about professional ethics as a whole, Tronto (2001) considers recent

trends toward the management of professions that were once considered autono-

mous. On the one hand, she finds autonomy of professions problematic because it

excludes non-professionals’ participation in ethical decisions. However, she also

finds it problematic to place managers in a position of power over professionals

making ethics decisions. A manager, whose expertise is in organizational manage-

ment, may seek to constrain actions that seem to go above and beyond what is

expected within the organizational structure. However, professionals acquainted

with particular norms of practice may see such actions as being ethically required.

Tronto challenges professionals to recognize the collective nature of competence and

make professional boundaries more porous, to see how power, distance and hierarchy

can undermine professional competence rather than maintain it.

Applications

One way to move beyond the care-justice debate is to ground oneself in the context

of real lives and real problems. Such work is inherently interdisciplinary,

encompassing women and gender studies, political science, sociology, history,

and other disciplines. While philosophers may not always recognize interdisciplin-

ary scholarship as ‘‘ethics’’, these sites of inquiry hold great promise for feminist

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ethics because they ground ethical problems in women’s lives through multiple

lenses, epistemologies and methodologies. Many applications of feminist ethics

intersect with engineering: reproduction and bioethics; ecology and environment;

transnational feminism, globalization, and development; and war and militarism

(Riley 2008). Many of these topics are also taken up by feminist science and

technology studies scholars (e.g., Cockburn and Dubravk 2002; Cowan 1992;

Subramaniam 2001; Wacjman 1991). Unfortunately these discussions rarely cross

engineering’s disciplinary boundaries. Work in feminist ethics ought to be

recognized as part of the field of engineering ethics, but feminist approaches and

topics are not typically included. The problems here are closely related to the

challenges identified by those working at the intersection of science and technology

studies (STS) and engineering ethics (Johnson and Wetmore 2008), where certain

types or scales of analysis are not adopted as part of engineering ethics, and STS

eschews work that is too applied to engineering ethics as interventionist.

Caroline Whitbeck: Feminist Ethics by Any Other Name

Caroline Whitbeck is an engineering ethicist who was also a groundbreaking

feminist philosopher in the 1970s and 1980s. Early on she learned first-hand about

power/knowledge relations in the academy. In writing about maternity in the early

1970s, Whitbeck found that accepted philosophical forms of expression emphasized

intellect to the exclusion of embodiment, presenting a major obstacle to writing

from her experience of motherhood. She reflected on this in her Afterword to ‘The

Maternal Instinct’: ‘‘Lesson: if you are introducing new content, it is more readily

received if you work within accepted forms—the problem is that the forms

themselves make it impossible to deal adequately with certain content…’’ (Whitbeck 1983: 195). Whitbeck’s engineering ethics complies with conventional

forms, but it also builds on a foundation in feminist philosophy. What might be left

out from her work (and others’) because of the forms demanded in engineering

ethics? To bring to the fore what is feminist in Whitbeck’s work, in this section I

contrast her approach with what I consider to be typical or mainstream approaches

to engineering ethics, exemplified by three well-known, best-selling and enduring

textbooks in engineering ethics (Fleddermann 1999; Harris et al. 2005; Martin and

Schinzinger 1996).

One of the main contributions to engineering ethics credited to Whitbeck is the

‘‘agent-centered’’ approach to teaching engineering ethics, in which students are

placed in the role of ethical actor (Whitbeck 1995). This builds on a shift away from

theoretical abstractions toward a case-based approach, but instead of students

playing the role of ‘‘judge’’ reviewing cases—another form of abstraction—they are

placed in the role of decision-maker. While this attention to agency can be

supported by any number of arguments, including learner-centered approaches to

engineering education, it resonates strongly with previous work of feminist

philosophers on power and moral agency.

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Whitbeck (1995) notes that while problems in ethics are often presented as a

conflict between two alternatives, it is more appropriate to think of them as subject

to multiple constraints (like engineering design problems), not all of which may

necessarily be met. This seems to echo Walker’s (1989) discussion of ‘‘moral

remainders.’’ However, while moral remainders are static—an imperfect solution

we must settle for—design within constraints leaves open the possibility of

continual iteration toward a creative solution that, while not necessarily perfect,

may be a little better each time.

In Whitbeck’s (1998) textbook, she fully develops the analogy between ethics

and design in a section entitled ‘‘ethics as design: doing justice to ethical problems.’’

This seems problematic at first: will the engineering design process be uncritically

plunked down on top of ethics problems? Will the author take a reductionist

approach to moral problem-solving complete with flow diagrams as in traditional

texts (Harris et al. 2005; Fleddermann 1999)? Can the promise of ‘‘doing justice,’’

itself unusual in the world of engineering ethics, be fulfilled? This section of the text

does not rush in with an ill-fitting model, as engineers are often wont to do. Rather it

focuses on drawing moral lessons from the design process for approaching ethical

problems. There is no directive of steps to follow; instead important concepts are

identified and interpreted, such as how to deal with ambiguity. If one compares

texts, Whitbeck’s work stands as a critique of the moral problem-solving approach

presented in Harris et al. (2005) and Fleddermann (1999).

The third element, scattered throughout Whitbeck’s book, is mentions of feminist

philosophers, prominent women, and feminist cases as a matter of course. These are

rarely or never mentioned in other engineering ethics texts, and include environ-

mental advocates Rachel Carson and Lois Gibbs, female whistleblower Inez Austin,

and feminist thinkers Annette Baier, Iris Young, Carol Gilligan, Kathryn Addelson,

Martha Nussbaum, and Natalie Dandekar. Cases include the Montreal Massacre

(misogynist and explicitly anti-feminist mass murder of women engineers at the

University of Montreal), Harris v. Forklift (sexual harassment case), and the Dalkon

shield intrauterine device. These acts of inclusion point out what we’ve been

missing and implicitly call out masculinist bias in other mainstream texts.

Whitbeck’s book also stands out in its explicit mention of racism (the use of the

actual word, rare in engineering—p. 228). Race comes up in discussions of the

Tuskegee Syphilis experiments, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and environmental

justice. Whitbeck raises class issues in her discussion of professional autonomy,

echoing some but not all of Tronto’s (2001) concerns about professional ethics and

power relations of professionals with respect to the public and to management.

Broaching these subjects in a fashion that is true to feminist concerns breaks

important new ground in engineering ethics and calls attention to the work yet to be

done.

It might be noted that Martin and Schinzinger (1996) also take up the issue of

racism (and reference the Ethic of Care without mentioning feminism). However,

perhaps in order to maintain palatability to an engineering audience, they put on an

appearance of objectivity or balance that undermines any project of dismantling

racism. They consider discrimination and reverse discrimination as if they might be

the same, as if one can erase the historical legacy of slavery in the United States, as

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if one can pretend there are no structural inequalities based on race in the present

day. They approach labor issues similarly, at first taking a critical look at anti-union

clauses in professional codes but failing to offer any analysis of power, ultimately

concluding that ‘‘it is not always obvious that a strike or other collective, forceful

action on the part of employees is unprofessional, excessively self-interested, or

disloyal to employers’’ (205). By conceding racist, sexist, and anti-labor framings of

the problems they consider, they limit the moral space of available action.

Whitbeck locates women’s lives and experiences in the center of her book and

incorporates the ideas of feminist philosophers, but she stops short of entering head-

on into foundational debates in ethics. She acknowledges a number of philosophers

who have critiqued abstract reason as the sole basis for ethics (including feminist

ethicists Kathryn Addelson, Annette Baier, and Iris Marion Young as well as

philosophers who argue rationality is contextual and/or socially constructed

including Alasdair MacIntyre, John McDermott, and Bernard Williams). Whitbeck

states that although she takes up some of their work in the book, she does not deal

directly with the content of feminist and other alternative normative ethical theories.

What is lost, and what is gained, from this strategy?

Feminist ethics are hidden in plain view because at no point does Whitbeck label

her approach, or the approach of other feminist philosophers she cites, as feminist.

Interestingly, feminists are mentioned as targets of the Montreal Massacre. This is particularly poignant because one of the women wounded in the shooting,

engineering student Nathalie Provost, pleaded with the killer to spare her life,

saying, ‘‘No, it’s not true. We’re not feminists’’ (Weston and Aubry 1990). What is

at stake when we use or shun the feminist label in engineering?

Whitbeck’s work makes visible a set of strategic choices one feminist

philosopher has made in connecting feminist ethics and engineering ethics. They

reflect in some sense her perception of what connections would be well received in

engineering ethics, and what would be a bridge too far. Both the literal violence

done to perceived feminists in the Montreal Massacre and the power relations of

what can be produced as knowledge within masculinist fields contributes to an

environment in which ‘‘feminism’’ is maintained as a bad word in engineering as

well as in engineering ethics. In the next section we will consider the work of

multiple scholars in the areas of care and justice that reflect additional strategies

around this ‘‘feminist problem’’ in engineering ethics.

Care and Justice: Adaptations and Co-Optations

Engineering educators have drawn on both care and justice conceptions of feminist

ethics in their work. Rather than an oppositional framing, there is a both-and

approach, or at least a respectful tolerance of both approaches, in engineering,

perhaps because the community of scholars working on either is small and forming,

or perhaps because late adoption has allowed for reliance on scholars who have

resolved or moved beyond justice versus care (Riley et al. 2009). At the same time,

the concepts of care and justice have become distorted in some applications within

engineering ethics. I point these out here in hopes of clarifying some of the

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meanings of care and justice in feminist ethics scholarship, so that engineering

ethicists can either use these concepts with greater frequency and fidelity, or else

more definitively differentiate their perspectives from those of feminist ethicists.

Advocates of the Ethic of Care in engineering include Pantazidou and Nair

(1999), who like Whitbeck make use of a design analogy. Rather than drawing

lessons from design for approaching problems in ethics, in this case they proceed in

the opposite direction, and ask what lessons can be drawn from the Ethic of Care for

the design process in engineering. They re-think the design process in terms of care,

using Tronto’s (1987, 1993) conceptions that take power into account. Similar to

Whitbeck, they do not identify Tronto or the Ethic of Care as feminist.

This work opens the door for future re-imagining of other forms of engineering

thought. The analogy to design begs the question of how care might be brought to

bear on engineering problem solving. Asking this question would require a critique

of the traditional engineering problem-solving approach, its abstractions, its

reductionism, and its ignorance of relationships, narrative, and context. In short,

it would be a feminist critique of masculinist problem solving in engineering.

Other engineers have adopted and applied the Ethic of Care in specific contexts.

In an extensive treatment, Kardon (2005) seeks to extend the Ethic of Care to a

number of structural engineering ethics cases. However, in Kardon’s work, despite

citations to Tronto, the Ethic of Care dissolves into the ‘‘standard of care’’ of

traditional engineering ethics. The cases are depersonalized, and care is concep-

tualized in relation to things—engineering knowledge, calculations, bolt connec- tions. People factor in a few cases but never directly—an engineer didn’t realize the

significance of a peer’s findings, for example, but nothing is said of respect for or

communication with this individual. Something was lost in translation, and we see

how the phrase ‘‘Ethic of Care’’ can be co-opted (albeit unintentionally) to mean

something quite different than it does in feminist ethics.

Perhaps the strongest critics of care approaches in engineering ethics are Vesilind

and Gunn (1998). While they freely use the label ‘‘feminist’’ in their engineering

ethics textbook, they critique the essentialism of ‘‘some’’ feminist ethicists who link

women with nurturing, cooperation and care (citing only 1970s work from feminist

theologian Mary Daly). However, rather than cite feminists who have offered

critiques of Care, they offer their own argument which appears to misread the

positions of most Care ethicists: ‘‘if men are indeed incapable of developing or

following a feminist ethic, then there could be no such thing as engineering ethics

because there are both male and female engineers’’ (73). Many Care ethicists have

gone out of their way to prevent such a reading, locating care with men as well as

women (e.g., Noddings 1984; Tronto 1987). While I do not necessarily wish to

defend Mary Daly’s argument, I will point out that their defensive reaction—offense

at the specter of men being deprived of moral agency—abstracts Daly’s argument from its context and shifts the focus away from the real harm done by centuries of

women’s actual deprivation of moral agency. Or, to put it another way, they read a call to end men’s monopoly on moral agency incorrectly as a claim that men should have no moral agency at all. Vesilind and Gunn (1998) go on to hold up some elements of feminist ethics and ecofeminism in the book. Does their critique (or the

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male privilege evidenced therein) create a certain distance from feminist ethics that

enables them to use the label?

Another (sometimes overlapping) group of scholars has sought to discuss justice

approaches (and peace approaches) to engineering (Baillie 2006–2011; Engineering,

Social Justice and Peace 2010; Vesilind 2010). While the justice tradition has been

impacted by feminist scholarship as discussed above, it remains the case that not all

justice approaches are feminist. Within the Engineering, Social Justice and Peace

network, gender justice is an integral part of the conversation, but not everyone

comes to the work out of feminist commitments. Dangers of co-optation exist here

as well, as social justice can be equated with corporate social responsibility and lose

(among other things) its critique of economic systems of oppression.

This is particularly problematic in discussions of poverty and global develop-

ment. For example, Kickstart, an engineering non-governmental development

organization, claimed it had ‘‘the tools to end poverty,’’ designed its ‘‘moneymaker

pump’’ to be manufactured and sold locally in several African nations, creating local

jobs for manufacturers and materials producers. However, this strategy was

abandoned as capitalist logic favored cheaper and larger scale production of pumps

in China (McGregor 2006). Karnani (2007) challenges the ‘‘bottom of the pyramid’’

approach of marketing products to the poor in order to end poverty, demonstrating

how it actually exploits the poor, funneling their limited resources to further swell

corporate coffers, delivering products that sell a false sense of empowerment and

even capitalize on racist stereotypes as in the case of skin lightening cream. Allgood

(2010) of Procter and Gamble spoke at the Association of Practical and Professional

Ethics mini-conference on engineering and social justice about that corporation’s

efforts to distribute water filters in a number of developing countries. When pressed

on P&G’s motivations during the question and answer session, Allgood revealed

that while his personal commitment was to deliver clean water to people who

needed it, the bottom line consideration for P&G was gaining brand recognition and

trust among locals in order to market Always menstrual products to women. It is

only through this kind of open, critical discussion of global economic contexts that

we can fully implement social justice analysis in engineering ethics.

The tendency for both justice and care to be co-opted is not specific to

engineering, but it does suggest that any work toward feminist engineering ethics

may need to focus more explicitly on feminism and a clear articulation of values,

and more politically on structures of power in forms of expression, in ways of

knowing, and in professional and academic institutions.

Henry’s Daughters

The film project Henry’s Daughters (2010) is the third effort from the National Institute for Engineering Ethics (NIEE) at Texas Tech in collaboration with the

Great Projects Film Company (Paul Martin, writer, director, and editor). The films

and accompanying study guides are designed as classroom resources for engineering

educators, and pack many different types of ethics issues into productions lasting

approximately half an hour.

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Henry’s Daughters sought to close several gaps in topics covered by educational videos in engineering ethics including a focus on information technology and a

focus on gender and diversity (Loui et al. 2010). Female characters in previous

NIEE films had been part of management or were members of other professions

such as journalism or law. While placing female engineers as central decision-

makers in the film demonstrates the best intentions of the project team to address

gender as a significant issue in engineering ethics, there are some points of

disconnection with feminist ethics that create a film that is more harmful than

helpful. I personally know members of the project team who are very much

committed to positively addressing gender and diversity issues. I hope that in

developing an understanding of how this film fails from a feminist perspective we

can open new opportunities to forge better connections between feminist ethics and

engineering ethics in the future.

The story focuses on two sisters, Laura and Julie, who face a number of ethical

decisions as engineers throughout the film. To ascribe moral agency to women in an

engineering role is an essential first step in setting up a potentially feminist

framework for encountering ethical issues. The film, however, is not titled ‘‘Laura

and Julie;’’ the women are instead identified by their father (Henry), a prominent

engineer and lobbyist. Titling the film Henry’s Daughters may do some political work within engineering, reaching older male engineering professors who might

identify more closely with Henry. It also evokes the old trope that men should

respect a woman because she’s somebody’s daughter; respect is mediated through male protection and ownership. Other characters in the film seem to be aware of this

relationship, as Laura is rumored to have advanced in her job due to Henry’s

connections rather than her own merit. However, this mythology is quietly

dismantled through Laura’s competent actions throughout the film, another element

in the film that can be read as feminist.

The filmmakers’ biggest misstep may have been the decision to take on sexual

harassment as its first foray into gender issues, particularly without significant

expertise in this area guiding the project. The film was distributed widely among

engineering educators for use in the fall semester of 2010, with an invitation to use

the film in courses with students. However, there is no information in the study

guide or cover letter that accompanied the distribution that would help a screener to

be sensitive to audience members who may have experienced sexual harassment and

may come to them for help (or who may find the film upsetting to watch). It does not

suggest engineering educators become informed about their own institution’s

policies and procedures around sexual harassment. 2

The film strongly departs from feminist ethics when it reinforces the myth that

sexual harassment is about sexuality and attractiveness rather than about power and

sex discrimination (MacKinnon 1979). Laura, the older daughter, escapes sexual

harassment, while her sister Julie experiences three separate incidents of unwanted

attention in a 32 min film. The film’s explanation for this is that Laura is

2 This is missing despite specific suggestions I and others made at an early screening of the film at the

Association of Practical and Professional Ethics meeting in March 2010.

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unattractive: 32 years old, 3

unmarried, living with her sister, a ‘‘dowdy’’ dresser

with no trace of a social life.

This feminist fully supports the idea of presenting alternatives to marriage,

heternormativity, and nuclear families. But to present a viable alternative and

counter stigmas around unmarried women, Laura’s life would need to be full with

balanced interests and healthy relationships. Instead, all we see is work, living with

her sister, and drowning her emotions in cake. For college-age engineering students,

it is not helpful to reinforce the perception (real in its consequences) that female

engineers are not suitable partners (Seymour 1995; Tonso 1996, 2007). With two

female leads in the film, it would have been possible to present a variety of

approaches to work-life balance. A feminist storyline would have worked to

dismantle the myth that women engineers must choose between job and

relationships, between career and family. In squandering an important opportunity

to be part of the solution, this film becomes part of the problem.

Julie’s attractiveness is established early in the film when Laura’s boss Jeff

comments on her appearance. Julie’s teammates ogle her (as does the audience)

when she reaches under a car (at a gratuitous camera angle), revealing her ‘‘tramp

stamp’’ lower-back tattoo. Later Julie’s boss Barry blatantly hits on her when his

wife is out of town. A single question in the study guide addresses this problematic

narrative: ‘‘Does the fact that Laura and Julie are attractive enter into any part of the

interaction? Should it?’’ With the film itself leaving Laura’s attractiveness in

question, and with no counter-story connecting sexual harassment with power and

control, educators can do little to overcome social mythology and the film’s

narrative at once.

The film and study guide do not present common harms caused by sexual

harassment, such as time and focus lost or mental health impacts (Tong 1983). The

only evidence of harm we see beyond Julie’s facial expressions is her feeding her

emotions: eating cake while exercising on a treadmill. Laura enters a room with an

unimaginably large piece of cake and declares this is ‘‘what the doctor ordered’’ as

they proceed to talk about their bad days at work. That this scene portrays a

gendered approach to dealing with stress (it would be unusual to have a scene in

which men exhibited these behaviors) is only part of the problem. The combination

of eating cake while exercising on a treadmill seems both physically dangerous and

potentially symptomatic of an eating disorder. While sexual harassment can

contribute to the development of eating disorders (Sexual Harassment Support

2010), the film does not present the cake-eating in this light, leaving most viewers

unaware of sexual harassment’s toll.

While Loui et al. (2010) describe the film as presenting ‘‘subtle sexual

harassment,’’ many actions are quite brazen (though some might not meet the legal

definition of sexual harassment). For example, after Julie tells her sister about being

ogled, Laura confronts Marty as his supervisor. His retort: ‘‘Why would she have a

tattoo if she didn’t want anyone to look at it?’’ When Barry the boss asks Julie to

‘‘grab some dinner’’ she replies ‘‘isn’t your wife out of town?’’ and Barry says

3 While the study guide says Laura is 29, the voiceover in the film establishes that she is 11 years older

than her sister who just graduated from college, identified in the study guide as 21.

Hidden in Plain View 201

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smarmily ‘‘Yeah, that’s why I offered.’’ A more nuanced scenario might be for

Marty to deny looking at Julie at all, or for Barry to take cover in plausible

deniability, and claim he was asking to grab dinner as professionals (or as friends).

How to handle these situations (blatant or subtle) raises a series of interesting ethical

questions, but these are not presented in the study guide.

In addition to ogling Julie, Marty makes two racist comments to an African

American colleague, each likening him to an ape. Here again the portrayal is far

from subtle, and adding in Marty’s engineering incompetence, there is little to make

his character relatable. In actuality, acts of harassment are often committed by

people who are otherwise well respected, successful, and thought of as ‘‘good

people,’’ making a decision to confront inappropriate behavior more difficult.

The study guide asks: ‘‘Was Marty’s treatment of Warren harassment?’’ and

‘‘Should Laura have said something about Marty’s treatment of Warren (like she did

about the ogling of Julie)?’’ This second question is curious because Barry, the

project manager, was present at both incidents. Does team leadership not extend to

addressing interpersonal interactions, especially when they rise to this level of

hostility? Laura did not witness the interactions between Marty and Warren, nor

were they reported to her. While supervisors are legally and ethically responsible to

respond to bias incidents in the workplace, it seems that the standard being applied

to Laura lies beyond human capabilities. Instead of setting up a comparison between

gender and race-based harassment, it would have been interesting if Warren’s

character (or a different character altogether) were a woman of color, opening up a

discussion of intersectionality and the ways in which race and gender factor into a

single experience of harassment.

Three of eight study guide questions on gender focus on the ethics of perpetrator

behavior: ‘‘Are sexist comments disguised as ‘jokes’ acceptable? … Is it permissible for a male employee to put his hand on a female employee’s shoulders?

Or vice versa? For a male employee to put his hand on another male employee’s

shoulders? Is it permissible for a male employee to compliment a female

employee’s appearance? Or vice versa?’’ This over-emphasis on perpetrators may

be directed toward preventing inappropriate conduct, but it leaves out not only those

who are sexually harassed, but also women and men acting as allies when friends

and colleagues experience harassment. In targeting compliance with certain

behavioral norms and in presenting situations that lack nuance and leave one right

answer, the film opts for unimaginative problem solving over transformative anti-

sexist education.

Questions that focus on the ethics of ally and respondent actions in the face of

harassment could refocus a problematic film in a more positive direction. For

example, Laura intervenes on Julie’s behalf expressly against her wishes in order to

stop Marty’s ogling. Understanding that sexual harassment is about power, this

intervention could seriously undermine Julie’s autonomy and moral agency. Asking

from the standpoint of an agent what else either Laura or Julie could have done,

scoping out the space of possible ethical action is an appropriate practice of feminist

ethics. Doing so could also lead to a discussion of institutional policies and the

responsibility of organizations in preventing harassment. This discussion would

indeed be complex and hearken back to Tronto’s (2001) ethical critique of

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managerialism, as many institutions view supervisors as having specific legal

obligations that would preclude many of the options identified above: intervening

directly, as well as respecting Julie’s autonomy (or even maintaining her

confidentiality were that an issue) might put the institution at legal risk.

Moving Forward: Feminist Engineering Ethics

In order to develop feminist engineering ethics, scholars doing feminist work must

be able to use the word openly without negative repercussions. Though there

continue to be real costs to doing so, use of the f-word is becoming more common

(Riley et al. 2009), and claiming and naming feminist ethical approaches may be the

only way we can broach certain topics with integrity and accountability.

In lieu of a conclusion, as this conversation is just beginning, I offer four areas in

which we (feminists doing engineering ethics, engineers doing feminist ethics)

might move forward in developing feminist engineering ethics. This intersection

provides a wealth of opportunities for the work of feminist ethics to benefit

engineering ethics and vice versa.

First, we need to address questions of epistemology in engineering ethics, as well

as in engineering. When engineers dismiss educational outcomes related to

understanding social context, communicating effectively, and engaging ethical

problems, this devaluation is often rooted in a mistrust of or disrespect for ways of

knowing endemic to other disciplines. By teaching engineering ethics, students can

gain from philosophy’s ability to name these ways of knowing and probe their

consequences for thought and action. Feminist epistemologies can break the hold of

positivism in engineering and open new possibilities for the profession. Until we

wrestle with epistemology in the ways other disciplines have, we will be unable to

meet larger goals for the profession including producing engineers who are able to

fully engage with the social and ethical aspects of their work.

Second, questions about power, agency, and the structure of the profession are

sorely missing from most approaches to engineering ethics. We might adapt

Walker’s (1989) analysis to suggest that feminist engineering ethics might begin by

asking questions such as who counts morally in engineering? Who is served, who

benefits, and who pays the cost? What communities do engineers claim to represent,

and who is actually represented? What modes of communication facilitate

interactions in engineering, and who has access to these? How does profession-

alization ‘‘deform the abilities of all concerned to hear and be heard’’ (23)? Who

decides what is ethical? Who holds whom accountable and how?

Nelson’s (2001) work on identity and moral agency leads us to ask, how is

engineers’ moral agency constricted, both internally and externally? Do the ways in

which we form our identities as engineers serve to limit our range of moral thought

and action? Do others’ perceptions of us—management, the public—further

constrain our moral agency?

We cannot shy away from ethical questions that are deemed political. We must

wrestle, for example, with engineering’s embeddedness in militarism and war, with

its complicity with and facilitation of free market extremism wreaking havoc on a

Hidden in Plain View 203

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global scale, and with its destruction of communities, non-human species, and

ecosystems in the name of ‘‘progress’’ or ‘‘development.’’

Third, feminist engineering ethics should interrogate forms of expression through

analysis of discourse and the construction of cases in engineering. Walker (1989)

notes the absence of the 2nd person plural in case studies, which excludes

collaborative deliberation and communication. She calls us to move away from

‘‘regimentation of moral reasoning into deductive argument; schematic examples in

which what is morally relevant is already selected and social-political context is

effaced; omission of continuing narratives that explore interpersonal sequels to

moral solutions’’ (24). In engineering, we have our work cut out for us, from

avoiding the use of passive voice that disguises agency, to getting beyond

reductionist single-answer approaches to technical and ethical problem solving. The

time is ripe to ask how are we constructing cases? What are our underlying

assumptions? Are people and interpersonal relations visible? Can we demonstrate to

students the ways in which communication is an ethical issue?

Fourth, what can be learned from other areas of scholarship—particularly

feminist professional ethics in other fields and feminist and postcolonial science and

technology studies—that might directly inform feminist engineering ethics?

Reviewing these literatures with an engineering ethical lens will provide new

avenues for research and strategies for change within the profession. It is in this area

of applied ethics that engineering ethicists may be able to offer a great deal to the

field of feminist ethics. The detailed and nuanced understanding of the intricacies of

ethics related to the development of technology can provide new questions explored

at the intersection of these fields, in areas such as environment and sustainability;

biotechnology; militarism and war; and globalization and development.

May the conversation continue.

Acknowledgments The author thanks participants in the DePauw Mellon workshop on Feminist Ethics, particularly Meryl Altman and Jana Sawicki for their helpful comments on drafts of this work.

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