"Managing by not managing": How gay engineering students manage sexual orientation identity

Abstract

From a social constructivist paradigm I explored the experiences of 7 openly gay engineering students to understand how, if at all, they made sense of the intersections between their engineering and sexual orientation identities. By eliciting stories through individual and focus group interviews, a narrative approach allowed me to capture the influence of students' experiences prior to college as well as their expectations for the future to situate their college experiences within the broader developmental narratives of their lives. Overall, these 7 students' narratives point to the ways the culture and climate within engineering, moderated by norms regarding masculinity, affected their experiences as gay men within the academic engineering context.