Negotiating Multiple Identities: The Intersection of Race and Gender in the Lived Experiences of South African Female Engineers

Engineering remains a highly gendered and racialised profession in South Africa, shaped by enduring historical inequalities and the imprint of institutionalised exclusion that structures women’s experiences of belonging and professional legitimacy. While women’s underrepresentation in STEM is well documented, there remains a limited body of qualitative, intersectional, identity-focused research examining how women engineers negotiate professional identity within everyday organisational contexts. Addressing this gap, this qualitative study draws on semi-structured interviews with nine women engineers working across diverse engineering fields in South Africa and employs inductive reflexive thematic analysis informed by an intersectional and social constructionist framework. The findings identify one overarching theme, Negotiating the Intersection of Multiple Identities, capturing how women’s professional identities are continuously negotiated within engineering cultures characterised by the continued privileging of narrow norms of competence and belonging. Identity negotiation was shaped by intersecting gendered and racialised norms, with variation linked to pressures of professional legitimacy, relational positioning, and anticipated life-course considerations. The study demonstrates that professional identity negotiation among women engineers is a relational and ongoing organisational process rather than an individual or episodic response to workplace demands, and offers analytically transferable insights for scholarship on identity, belonging, and legitimacy in masculinised and historically unequal STEM contexts.