‘I couldn’t be more of a female’: the ‘World-Travelling’ of Black South African women into industry engineering and STEM academia ‘worlds’

In recent times, there's been an increase in calls for the engineering terrain to be transformed. To show how Black South African female engineering development are implicated, this paper untangles the salient aspects of raced, gendered and aged related exclusions, and resistance strategies at the intersection of critical gendered principles of recognition and decolonial feminist World-Travelling encounters. It incorporates a participatory storytelling approach, whereby data were collected from 9 Black South African women in the engineering industry and Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths (STEM) academic work context who were at various stages of their careers. The paper contributes by empirically highlighting how aspects related to exclusion, stereotyping and resistance strategies feature in the professional development of young Black South African women in engineering industry and STEM academic workspaces. Furthermore, this paper demonstrates how two related, yet distinct framings on transformation can be weaved together in order to facilitate equitable masculine study and employment contexts.