Women to replace the ‘front officers of technology'? On the development of technical studies for women in the soviet occupation zone and the GDR (1946–1971)*

Abstract

One of the most marked changes in the career situation of the engineers, coming in the wake of the social restructuring in GDR state socialism, consisted in the latent challenging of technical competence as a component of male gender identity and it followed from the state's aim to increase the proportion of women in the technical intelligentsia. Despite all such efforts, however, the homosocial culture of engineering education remained unbroken during the fifties. Not until the mid sixties was there a clear increase in the percentage of women students in engineering. This development reached its peak at the beginning of the seventies. The study analyses, from the perspective of technical studies for women, continuity and changes in higher technical education in the GDR.