Multiplicity of “I’s” in intersectionality: Women's exclusion from STEM management in the Canadian space industry

Abstract

This study focused on the question of how there are so few science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)-professional women managers in the Canadian space industry. To address this question, I examined discourses and power-relations surrounding these STEM-professional women’s identities. I drew on, and reworked, the concept of anchor points, specifically asking: what is the range of anchor points associated with, and available to, STEM-professional women within the Canadian space industry? What is the relationship between select anchor points and structural (e.g., organizational rules, formative contexts), discursive (interrelated dominant ideas and practices), and socio-psychological (e.g., critical sensemaking) processes? How do these anchor points influence the exclusion of STEM-professional women from management/executive positions within this industry? I applied the critical sensemaking (CSM) framework to mundane, everyday discourses, in order to reconstruct the STEM-professional woman’s range of anchor points. This framework provided an avenue to surface the relationship between this range of anchor points, and the meta-rules, rules, and formative contexts of this industry. The CSM framework also assisted me in revealing the relationship of this range of anchor points with the STEM-professional woman’s dominant ideas and practices, and her critical sensemaking processes. Analysis of the STEM-professional women’s discourses, along with those of her male colleagues, brought to light not only the STEM-professional woman’s intersecting identities but also, importantly, the productive and oppressive power-relations at work in this industry. In this way, I was able to showcase the ‘how’ of exclusion of STEM-professional women from management/executive positions. With this empirical study, I am contributing to our understanding of how to reconstruct the multiplicities of ‘I’s’ that is the complex individual. I am also contributing to intersectionality scholarship by deconstructing the binary treatment of the ‘men-versus-women’ hidden assumptions within the relationality concept. In addition, I provide methodological clarity with respect to the CSM framework, building on previous authors’ definitions, and uses of this heuristic. This research initiative is also an important step to addressing social change within the Canadian space industry. I offer a plausible interpretation of the exclusionary day-to-day reality for STEM-professional women, and then build specific sites for micro-political resistance, targeting early career, mid, and late career initiatives, in order to effect social change in this industry.