2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal was the site in December 1989 of a mass shooting that remains the deadliest in Canadian history. Marc Lepine, who aspired to study at the school, murdered 14 women--most engineering students--before taking his own life; another ten women and four men survived their injuries. Lepine’s statements during the attack and his suicide note both indicated unequivocally his antifeminist motives, realized when he targeted women entering the engineering profession. In this paper, we analyze the shootings in cultural context, including analyses of film representations of the Ecole massacre from the 1990 documentary After the Montreal Massacre to Denis Villeneuve’s 2009 feature dramatization Polytechnique. Since the immediate aftermath of the event, feminist arguments about the violence, and the cultural issues which it symptomatized, have confronted "backlash" arguments, in which feminists are the ones accused of introducing political conflict into the tragedy.

Drawing on a long history of research into engineering's connections to militarism, violence, and terrorism, we relate the Montreal Massacre to more recent instances of violence against women and to online misogynist communities that promote them; the links of these communities to gaming and "geek" cultures means that engineering students may be exposed to them particularly often. We suggest the study of the films as a way for students and educators to understand the historical roots of contemporary backlash against inclusion efforts and as an occasion for exercising the empathy now often identified as a crucial force in creating a more engaged and just engineering profession.