Looking Gender and Science at micro level: Narrative Identity and the Socialization of Master Narratives

The paper focused on the role and socialization of master narratives about gender differences in attitudes toward science – cultural narratives place the various disciplines within a continuum that ranged from female to male: biology and other life sciences were on one end of this spectrum, while physics and engineering were on the other – by focusing on self-representation of a specific group of women who successfully achieved an academic career in engineering. In the study the Ricoeur’s concept of narrative identity is used to understand how women engineer active (and creative) negotiate their personal narratives within the above-mentioned cultural expectations. The introduction of a temporalised understanding of the self that the idea of narrative captures allows to overcome certain oppositions around which much thought on identity tends to revolve, notably the dualism of essential (stasis) versus constructed (change) concepts of identity and that of authentic experience versus ideological distortion. In this pilot study we interviewed all the female full professors and the 60% of female associate professors enrolled in Engineering Departments (n = 14) of the University of Pisa (Italy) in order to collect their self-representation and their conformity and deviation narratives, as well as their socialization experiences regarding gendered master narratives. The findings suggest the crucial role of socialization process and of the master narrative of gender roles and of gender and science which become the basis for the reflexive understanding and of the construction of narrative identity. In many cases we found a complex relation between socialization messages about gender roles/models/attitudes and master narratives about gender and science, that result in narrative identity which emphasizes a tomboy self-representation, that is an alternative way to interiorize the traditional construction of gender attitudes in science. We have to consider carefully this process in particular for policies that aim to offer a counternarrative on gender and science by using “female scientists” as ambassadors.