Women in Engineering: History Matters

Based on the Grace Hopper Lecture, given by Ruth Schwartz Cowan in January, 2004 and the paper, “Early American Women Engineers” written by Joan Lee in December, 2003.

Ruth Schwartz Cowan is Janice and Julian Bers Professor of the History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania and Chair of the Department.

Joan Lee is a junior in the School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, majoring in Communications.

With regard to women engineers, there is both good news and bad. Since the end of World War II, the proportion of engineers who are women has increased markedly. In 1947, which is the earliest date for which there are reliable statistics, 0.3% of all engineers in the United States were women. Over the next forty years, the rate of increase was astonishing. By 1983, twenty years after Betty Friedan had published The Feminine Mystique and a little more than a decade after Congress had passed the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, the proportion was up to 5.8%. By the end of the millennium, after engineering colleges had spent millions of dollars making special efforts to woo and retain women students, the figure had almost doubled, to 10.6%.

That’s the good news. The bad news comes when you read further down the census charts, comparing the proportions of women in engineering to the proportions of women in other sciences and other professions. Back in 1947, around the time that the Society for Women Engineers was being formed, women made up 4.9% of all physicists, 16.6% of all astronomers and 7.0% of all chemists—not large proportions, but significantly higher than the proportion in engineering: 0.3%. This strange pattern has persisted through the era of affirmative action. In 1983, about 15% of all physicians and attorneys were female, as were about 23% of all chemists and 30% of all mathematicians and computer scientists—which makes the figure for women engineers, 5.8%, seem miniscule. By 1999 professional women had made astonishing advances in medicine, in the law, in the natural sciences—but only 10% of the engineering workforce was female. This means that engineering is, today, the most gender segregated of the professions, more segregated even than dentistry (16% female) and the clergy (14%).

In recent years, a small group of scholars, activists and human resource specialists has been trying to understand why engineering remains so completely dominated by men. Many explanations have been offered, ranging from the purely social (peer group pressure not to take advanced high school math and science courses) to the almost purely biological (right brain/left brain differences, innate spatial relations and analytic skills). The biological explanations, popular in the 1980’s, have now been almost completely discredited (if slightly lower average spatial relations abilities make women less fit to be engineers, how are so many of them able to sustain successful careers in physics, chemistry and architecture?). But the social explanations have continued to multiply; some say the problem could be solved by single sex math classes in middle school; others hope that familiarizing high schoolers with the “existential pleasures of engineering” is the solution; some want to bolster the self-esteem of female engineering students, or provide more role models for them; yet others believe that so-called “family friendly” workplace policies would do the job.

A serendipitous event in the summer of 2003 led one of us (JL) to a cache of documents which support the position long held by the other (RSC): namely that the current pattern of gender segregation in the engineering workforce is the result of historical patterns of discrimination. The documents are the records of a committee formed at the behest of Edgar Fahs Smith—the chemist who was then Provost of the University of Pennsylvania—to make recommendations about admitting women to courses in what was then called the Towne School of Engineering. Many of the documents are replies to an inquiry, made by John Frazer, then Dean of the Towne School, to other deans who may have had some experience with women students.

The year was 1917. The U.S. had already entered World War I; draftees were leaving their jobs and their campuses; the campaign for women’s suffrage was intense; many people were beginning to think about new roles for women, and many deans were beginning to worry about paying their bills, absent tuition checks, for the duration of the conflict.

One or two of the responses to Frazer’s inquiry were positive. Mortimer Cooley, Dean of Engineering at the University of Michigan, reported that the quality of work done by women in surveying and in the machine shops was so similar to that of the men that, “a blind man seeing them at work together would not know the difference.” The vast majority of the responses were, however, not enthusiastic, for a variety of reasons. Some deans thought that various expensive physical changes would have to be made (locker rooms, bathrooms, gymnasia; summer surveying camp lodging; one dean even thought that separate rooms for instruction in drafting would have to be built). In the face of historically low or currently uncertain demand, these changes did not seem economically warranted. Another frequently expressed concern was that women could not be satisfactorily employed after graduation. Several deans noted that virtually all of the women engineering graduates of their acquaintance had left the workforce as soon as they married (which was, of course, the normal middle class pattern in those days). Others, like C.R. Richards, Dean of Engineering at the University of Illinois remarked that in peace time women might be employable in “all branches of designing work in architecture, machine design and general structural design,” but that he would “dislike to see them engaged” in what he called “direct construction work,” meaning the supervision of men of a different, and lower, class. What was the point, these deans implicitly argued, of educating someone who was not going to work as an engineer—and not going to become a potential donor to her alma mater?

A few of the writers were enthusiastically negative: some because their school’s charters explicitly made them single-sex institutions, but others because they were actively repelled by the notion of a female engineer. “Nothing doing,” the Director of the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth wrote: “Didn’t suppose there was anything in mortar boards, or steel reinforcements, or bending moments, testing machines and least squares that would appeal to the fair sex. So with us the question is not even ‘Academic’. We have never even thought of it.”

In the end, the Penn committee voted to recommend that women be admitted to the Towne School—but neither the Provost nor the Trustees acted on the recommendation (the war emergency proved to be shorter than anyone had expected). Women were not allowed to matriculate in Engineering at Penn until 1954.

People who study academic institutions recognize that all these responses reflect different patterns of discrimination, based on stereotypical notions that people do not have sufficient interest or will power to combat or even discard. The net result of these early 20th century conditions was that, for the whole of the century, the number of women engineers would, of necessity, remain small. By 1930 or so, the bachelor’s degree in engineering had become the basic credential required for a career in engineering (before that time engineers were sometimes made on the shop floor)—so the failure of most engineering colleges to admit women insured that the career path would be out of bounds. (The numbers of women in the sciences ended up larger, because the bachelor’s degree which was the predecessor of the master’s or the doctorate, could be obtained at a single-sex or co-educational college.)

In short, the affirmative efforts that have been made to attract and retain women in engineering have been a great success; the number of women students and the number of women engineers has almost doubled every decade. But the baseline was low, which means that in engineering the historical patterns of educational discrimination and workforce segregation created an almost structural constraint. The net result is that gender equity in engineering will not be achievable for some time to come—and those who hope to achieve it will need to keep fighting.

*http://www.gecdsb.on.ca/d&g/women/women.htm