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This article seeks to analyse the current position of women engineers in Brazil by proposing, as a preliminary, some fundamental features of female employment on the basis of official statistics, then women’s place in educational courses and in the functions offered by the profession. It notes certain obstacles with which women are confronted when they want to exert this trade and make it their career, based on talks carried out with men and women engineers trained between 1970 and 1990. It analyses the gender norms and stereotypes which could affect women’s entry in the world of the engineers or their professional trajectory. The historical dimension makes it possible to understand transformations and reorganizations in the sexual division of work.