Gender Equality and Women Employment: Women Engineers in Cartoons

The impact of a multi-gender workforce is significant for the economic development of countries. Therefore, regarding the constant development of technology, it is essential to question the concepts of professions in which women are employed considering the roles given to women by old ideas coming from patriarchy, and to reconstruct and regulate them in the eyes of society. Today, some professions are still identified as male professions due to generalized gender roles which were constructed as an extension of the past. In particular, the engineering profession and the concept of engineering were related to masculine characteristics and engineering jobs are often associated with males. Reducing and eliminating occupational gender-based discrimination or accepting gender equality in professions can be achieved by educating individuals at an early age and raising their awareness. Various educational tools with visual or auditory functions (school education, social media, advertisements, television programs, etc.) can be used to raise this awareness. Cartoons are one of these types of visual tools used in the learning and teaching process of individuals in society. They usually have several features such as creating, managing, and raising a social perception of any theme and witnessing social change. Moreover, cartoons are powerful communication tools regarding their entertainment and sometimes provocative characteristics. Therefore, cartoons can be useful to create an environment to develop a gender equality environment that can have an impact on breaking the profession-gender perception in society and where the representation of the engineering profession other than male gender is normalized. This study aims to evaluate the concept of gender in engineering through cartoons. For this purpose, cartoons that reveal the perception of gender differences in engineering were analysed using the General Theory of Verbal Humor. The study was developed on the idea that cartoons may affect the reshaping of occupational definitions in terms of gender equality. Selected cartoons were gathered from online sources and the power of them as a communication tool was evaluated. As a result of the study, it is understood that the profession-gender perception in the cartoons containing the concept of engineer is in favor of men and it is seen that there is no professional gender equality.