Here's a great book you should know about: Eisenhart & Finkel, Women's Science: Learning and Succeeding From the Margins. If you haven't time for a whole book, you could look at their chapter in The Gender and Science Reader, ed. Lederman & Bartsch, entitled Women (Still) Need Not Apply. If that's still too time consuming, maybe you'll just listen to me talk about it here. Here's the one sentence summary:
The liberal critique of science and standard recommendations for compensatory strategies are unlikely to have the desired effect of increasing the number of women and minorities in science because they seek to attract individuals to a practice that does not reflect their interests and concerns.
Now, here's my contextualization of the article in relation to the issue of pleasure in science and engineering.
Eisenhart and Finkel argue that boys and men, especially white males, already have access to a range of scientific experiences that most can or do experience as pleasurable. Attempts to draw more women, and men of color, into science by providing them access to these existing experiences are likely to fail. This is because science as it is currently taught and practiced does not reflect the interests and concerns of -these out-group members. The nature of scientific practice and education must be changed, they say, or at least opened up, to allow for a range of experiences and types of engagement that can be experienced as pleasurable by many different types of people. Women in engineering progams and other kinds of compensatory strategies cannot provide this kind of change; these efforts are aimed at getting women to measure up to existing group standards. Women are being encouraged to find pleasure in that which they often experience as alienating, and are made to feel inadequate for their inability or unwillingness to embrace the kinds of pleasure that many men so readily seek or find so comforting.
One the one hand, the myth of science and engineering as that which is devoid of emotion. On the other hand, the white lab-coated scientist (a white male) who cries "Eureka!" at the moment of discovery. One the on hand, the notion that it is practiced dispassionately. On the other hand, Oppenheimer describing the atom bomb project as "technically sweet".
And then, the new story - women don't want to go into science because it is dispassionate - or it doesn't hold pleasures that appeal to them.
But here is what I think. I think that what is intellectually pleasurable, work of hand and mind that inspires love and erotic joy for the object of study, is not different for women and men. It is only what we are taught about appropriate objects to inspire the erotic in our intellect that differs. And what is appropriate for us to do with that emotion, that differs.
Boys may love machines and trucks. But they may not let their love show, they must hide it, and it comes out again in twisted sorts of ways. Girls may not love machines and trucks - unless they want to be called dykes, in which case they still should not love machines and trucks, because those are for the boys. Girls may love gardening, and quilting, and sewing, and cooking. They may speak openly of their love for these pursuits. But they have to pretend that there is no engineering or science involved in these things.
Men shape an official technological world that is largely devoid of things relegated or relating to women. When objects from those outlawed areas impinge on official technodom, it makes everyone uneasy, and when emissaries from outside official technodom want inside, it makes things uneasier still, and when those strangers want to start studying those strange objects then the whole project is blown up. This is all because technological men understand part of what it is to be a man as doing technology in the way that men do technology. I tinker, therefore I am.
For these men, I don't know what's worse - a woman who's attracted to engineering just as it is, or a woman who wants to change the nature of how engineering is practiced. The first one - if she loves what I love, then how do I know who I am? The second one - she's going to destroy the object of my love! Bad deal either way. No wonder they are so resistant.
4:25:40 PM 
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