Discourse Community
Part of defining what this discourse community is, includes defining not only what they are, but also what they are not. Women in engineering are not like men in engineering, because if they were, then they would not be their own discourse community.
Based on John Swales’s essay The Concept of Discourse Communities, women in engineering are their own discourse community. In the essay, Swales defines six characteristics that classify a discourse community. Women in engineering fit five out of these six traits. First, Swales claims a
discourse community “has a broadly agreed set of common public goals” (Swales). Engineering women have a common goal of wanting to improve the world. The second trait is “mechanisms of intercommunication among [members]” (Swales). Obviously not all female engineers are able to communicate with each other; however, there are many groups that send emails to their members, such as the Women in Science and Engineering program at NC State and the National Society of
Women Engineers. In these emails, they send news alerts, information about meetings, event schedules, etc., which is the third discourse community characteristic: using “participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback” (Swales). The fourth characteristic is having shared forms of literacy, which, for women in engineering, would include shared newspaper articles. The last characteristic that fits women in engineering is the sixth one, which states that there is a hierarchy within the community for the people with expertise.
Out of the six Swale’s characteristic, only one of them does not apply to women in engineering. This characteristic is the fifth one that says the community “has acquired some specific lexis” (Swales). This means that the group has terminology only used within their community. Through my observations and research, however, I did not find any evidence of this in the women in engineering community.
The next question to ask is whether women in engineering is a primary or secondary discourse. Using James Gee’s definition of primary and secondary discourses, I would classify women in engineering as a secondary discourse. According to Gee, a primary discourse is how we first “make sense of the world and interact with others” (Gee). This is one way of saying the primary discourse is the community in which you grow up with, such as your family. A secondary discourse is any other community you are a part of, such as a church group.
For this reason, I classify women in engineering as a secondary discourse. One does not grow up and automatically view the world from the perspective of a female engineer. That comes with time as one learns and practices “saying, doing, being, valuing, and believing” in the ways of a female engineer (Gee).