The increasing numbers of students from different backgrounds attending University across the western world has led to calls for the internationalisation of education at this level. Issues of inclusive curriculum have been the focus of much of this attention (Haigh, 2002). Here we examine the case of engineering education in terms of its capacity to become more inclusive with respect to gender. Starting from a review of the history and development of gender inclusive curricula in engineering, including studies of its effectiveness, this paper proceeds to discuss the authors' research on the perceptions and understandings of gender inclusive curriculum by engineering faculty and students at three institutions in Australia, UK and USA. Curriculum theorists have long established the position that curriculum refers to much more than the delineation of subject content or prescriptions about the method of teaching. In line with constructivist theory, curriculum includes assumptions about the prior experience and interests of the students, the syllabus (or content), the methods used, management of the classroom environment and the ways in which students are assessed. Research has indicated that any of these aspects tend to become tailored to the interests and perspectives of either the teacher or the dominant social or cultural group of students in the class, or both, which in engineering means mainly white males. Our initial study of the educational experience of practising women engineers revealed consistent gaps in terms of the recognition of their learning needs (Gill et al 2008a, 2008b). Hence we began to investigate gender inclusive education in an attempt to address this problem. The term ‘gender-inclusive’ curriculum has been used to describe a curriculum which has been consciously designed to recognise and acknowledge the evidence that males and females are likely to bring different cultural baggage to their learning experience. Such baggage will typically include, among other things, interests, approaches to learning, and strengths in types of assessment tasks. In an applied area such as engineering, an inclusive curriculum recognises that student experience of the applications of engineering in daily lives would vary according to gender, race, culture and class, along with individual interest. If, as constructivist learning theory suggests, all new knowledge must be linked to what is already known, it is imperative that teaching and learning makes reference to the different cultural knowledge that students bring in order to be effective.

In order to demonstrate the need for a more inclusive approach we began by investigating the range of ways in which a cross section of current engineering faculty and students view the curriculum in terms of its gender inclusivity. We used a survey instrument that was administered to volunteer students and engineering faculty. The results were then subjected to statistical analysis through SPSS to discover correlations between the attitudes and perceptions revealed.Follow up discussins with students were used to clarify some of the responses.

We argue that making engineering curriculum more inclusive is not a process of remediation but rather is a means whereby the latest advances in understanding the processes of teaching and learning are brought to bear on this particular area in ways that will resonate with the socio-cultural context of all the different individuals that comprise the current student body. From the analysis of this data, along with that gathered from our previous studies on issues of professional education and workplace experience for women engineers, the paper proposes a new construction of gender inclusive engineering curriculum for implementation in the 21st century.