'Girls Coming to Tech!' A History of American Engineering Education for Women

Engineering in the United States was long regarded as masculine territory. For decades, women who studied or worked in engineering were popularly perceived as oddities, outcasts, unfeminine, or inappropriately feminine. Amy Bix tells the story of how women gained entrance to this traditionally male world, starting with a handful who entered engineering colleges in the late 1800s. During World War II, government, employers, and colleges recruited women to train as engineering aides, but in the 1950s, women still comprised less than one percent of engineering students. Postwar pressures for change pushed all-male Georgia Tech and Caltech to become coeducational, while MIT and other schools gradually accepted more female undergraduates. Gender-related tensions continued to make engineering a challenging choice for many women. Yet today's young women take it for granted that they have the right to explore technical interests, the right to enroll in the nation's most prestigious engineering and science schools. Amy Bix explains how and why these hard-won gains occurred, permanently reshaping American college education, engineering, and science.

Speaker: Amy Sue Bix, Iowa State Univ.