Special Gender Studies for Engineering?

Today we are confronted with a new challenge in product development: "Diversity" needs to be implemented in the engineering design and development teams. Such diversity means to "mirror" within the teams the characteristics of different customer groups: the two genders, the different age groups, and the different cultural background corresponding to the cultural differences represented in today's society. Thus the products and services developed in this way are expected to serve more specifically the different customer groups within society. This approach has already been proven successful, e.g., in some areas of car design and consumer goods. Therefore, science and engineering should in this sense become concerned with "diversity" across society. In particular engineering education needs to focus on different student groups, especially women. Both enterprises and universities have to put emphasis on co-operation in order to achieve such focus on these new and different customers groups. But what sounds so easy in a pragmatic view, becomes more and more difficult under considerations of the traditional patterns in engineering education. It means accepting different motivations and experiences of students, especially women. It means also to accept different ways of teaching and learning and thus, different strategies in both engineering education and research. One way to develop engineering education further as suggested here, shows the new approach of "Gender Studies in Engineering" to be described in this paper. (Contains 2 figures.)