Breaking Barriers: the Role of Women in Engineering
Abstract
Women have had a hard time in the engineering fields. Women did not start getting into the engineering fields until the 1980s to the 1990s as more engineering programs were open to women, the number of women in the engineering programs increased dramatically. Women want to be a part of engineering because it needs a diverse set of minds to solve the world’s problems and come up with innovative ideas. The opportunities in engineering are vast such as aerospace, electrical, computer, chemical, and so many other engineering programs. Even though there are all of these different types of engineering programs why are there so little women? Engineering is the branch of science and technology concerned with the design, building, and use of engines, machines, and structures. Even though we know what engineering is, do we know about women in engineering. Studies show that engineering has one of the lowest representations on average for women, but do we know the history behind how women got into the engineering fields and what some created. Women who studied or worked in engineering were popularly perceived as oddities at best and at the worst outcasts, because they defied traditional gender norms.
In the 1950s women only made up less than 1 percent of students in the U. S colleges and university engineering programs. In the year of 2010-11, sixty years later, women earned 18. 4 percent of engineering bachelor’s degrees, 22. 6 percent of master’s degrees and 21. 8 percent of doctorates. Even though those levels of female representation fell far short, but by the twenty- first century, women’s participation in American engineering programs had become accepted even officially encouraged. In a more historical term, it represented a dramatic shift in the pure essence of engineering education, which was presumed to be purely masculine. Women who pursued engineering were labeled as others, a small, threatening group of outsiders “invading” a man’s world. Leading up to World War II and beyond, some of the nation’s most advanced technical institutions refused to enroll female undergraduates. Women were often time discouraged from attempting to begin an engineering education.
A few young women who were admitted into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before World War II struggled against a hostile intellectual and social environment. Some who resisted coeducation feared that girls could not fit “naturally” into technical programs. During World War II and throughout the 1960s, key institutions gave up and gave in, one at a time, under various political, legal, and social pressures to let women into their institutions.
Advocates of coeducation insisted that given a fair chance, a large number of women could hold their own in engineering classes. They had to convince and rid people of their doubt that admitting women would not change the quality of technical training and that enough women would be interested in engineering to make college recruitment worthwhile. Even after that female students gained new opportunities to enroll in engineering, however, many were disheartened, deterred, or driven away by a cold and even antagonistic atmosphere. The debate over a women’s place in engineering served as a meter of gender biases, displaying society’s limits on what is accepted as masculine and feminine cognitive categories.
Powerful cultural systems facilitated and legitimated “proper” choices for college majors for women versus men. The tradition and authority that had long made engineering a virtual male monopoly often made women feel like uninvited intruders in classrooms, laboratories, and residence halls. Also, isolation and other various degrees of harassment made everyday campus life difficult for many female engineering students. Intellectual and sexual tensions overshadowed and complicated their relationships and interactions with male classmates, other women, male professors, and administrators. However, casual acquaintances who reacted with laughter, scorn, or disbelief to the phrase woman engineer. Personal support, resources, and luck helped a growing number of women complete engineering degrees, often with distinction and pleasure, during the decades following World War II. More so, engaged female students, women professors and professionals, and male allies started working vigorously to promote the campus and cultural dialogues that were more than necessary to battle discrimination against women in engineering.
In the process, they raised profound issues about the gendered nature of childrearing and early education, the legal and cultural manifestations of second-wave feminism, the acceptability of women’s aspirations, and the nature of engineering itself. For example, when female white engineers were scare, female black engineers and those from other minority backgrounds were even rarer. Many countries, including France, Norway, Bulgaria, and Portugal, have witnessed a sharp rise in women’s presence in engineering over recent decades. Although gender discrimination has by no means been eliminated, the experiences of these women in non- American engineering studies have followed a distinctly different history. Historically, women in engineering programs stood out due to their rarity, even more than in science or medicine. Although relatively well-off white women gained opportunities to attend all female institutions during the early nineteenth century, coeducation at the high levels of study appeared far more slowly. Oberlin college, founded in 1833, soon admitted female students and African Americans alongside white men, living up to the standards of the institution’s progressive outlook on learning as a vehicle for social outreach and the abolition of slavery.
State universities such as Wisconsin and Michigan moved toward coeducation over the next few decades, a trend that gained a lot of momentum in 1862, when Congress passed the Morrill act creating the mechanism to support public land grant education. However, the legislation did not require land grant institutions to allow in female students; those in some eastern and southern states often denied or delayed women’s access, while other schools, such as Nebraska and Cornell, became coed relatively early.
Women had long been inventors and innovators, even if they did not apply for legal patent protection. Across cultures and through generations of food preparation, farming, and home making, women for centuries had acquired and refined a wide range of technical skills and experience. Women produced embroidery and textiles, both in the household and early industrial employment, and women in seventeenth century France found employment as laborers who built canals. Also, some women invented different things that we still use in present day, such as Marie Ban Britton Brown, the inventor of the closed-circuit television security. She started this invention when she noticed the security threats to her home and devised a system that would alert her of any strangers at her door and contact the authorities as quickly as possible. Her original invention consisted of a camera, monitors, peepholes, and a two-way microphone. The finishing touch was the alarm button that, when pressed, would immediately call the police. Her groundwork for the modern closed-circuit television system is now widely used for surveillance, home security systems, push button alarm triggers, crime prevention, and traffic monitoring. In addition to Mrs. Brown’s invention of the closed-circuit television system, we have another woman to thank, Lyda Newman created the model of the hair brush in 1898. The brush improved both hygiene and efficiency of earlier models, including evenly spaced rows of bristles, open slots to get rid of debris easily, and even a component in the back to allow for cleaning with ease. However, all this made it unusually difficult for women to break in to engineering, and the story of how they did so tell us as much about engineering as about the women.
Jobs were scare for women; few women were welcome in machine shops or factories. This account of women’s entry in engineering studies reflects a broader aspect in historical context and the play of gendered dynamics within the changing patterns of American life. Just as any other social institutions, an individual women’s experiences in a higher education were mediated by the stereotypes, realities, and expectations of gender identity. In present day life (2000-present) women still are dealt a bad hand in the engineering field. Women often time still must put up with the different types of disagreements and criticism for people who do not approve of the engineering major that the women have. Women often leave the engineering fields due to being heavily judged for choosing such a “hard and difficult” major like engineering and working in extremely difficult workplace conditions. Also, women in engineering still deal with the same problems the other women did during the time of World War II. Finally, it may be concluded that women in engineering are not being treated how they deserve to be treated. Women are still dealing with unfair companies who do not want to hire them because of their gender. Also, women are still are not being paid equal to men engineers.
