A critical feminist analysis of the marginalization of immigrant women engineers: Subtle semantics, redundant assessments and conflicting jursidiction

As more racialized professionals have immigrated to Canada, the contradiction between recruiting immigrant professionals for specific labour market needs and recognizing them as such has become more evident. For racialized immigrant women with expertise in male dominated professions the barriers are profound. Using available data, this study has estimated that 12,077 women engineers have immigrated to Canada since 1978 yet there has been no research on issues of immigrant women's access to engineering or the economic integration of immigrant women engineers. This thesis examines the critical role that both regulatory bodies and racism in immigration policy play in the marginalization of immigrant women engineers. Within the literature, issues of gender and race have been conceptualized independently. There has been little focus on the ways in which gender and race interact as relational processes in shaping access to professional engineering. This theoretical thesis concludes with implications for policy and future research.