Defeating the gendered work culture in engineering: A successful story from sustainability focused engineering start-up in Australia

Engineering organisations seem to embrace various policies and practices to nurture gender inclusive work cultures. The emerging studies from organisational behaviour suggest that an inclusive work culture needs to be nurtured through the deep rooted moral values of its key stakeholders. However, there is a lack of literature that has addressed theoretically and empirically how moral values can be cultivated within engineering organisations to embrace an inclusive work culture. Using 14 individual in-depth interviews with key stakeholders of a sustainability-focused start-up engineering organisation this paper highlights how sustainability focused work ideologies could bring those important moral values into the engineering work cultures. The results obtained provide interesting insights to the future research to explore further how sustainability focused work ideologies can have practical applications in fostering gender inclusion in engineering.