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by Jacqueline Couillard
At least 78 years have passed since the first woman entered IT at the University, challenging many in the college to consider their views on women's societal roles and capabilities. Over the decades, public opinion, personal experiences and percentages of women in science and technology disciplines have changed considerably.
Pioneering women entering IT in 1918 and 1921 were respected for their academic achievements but also warned. "When I registered, they told me it was fine to register, but I'd never have a job when I got out," said Betty Sullivan, who graduated from IT in 1922 with a B.S. in chemistry. She added that she may have been one of the first three women in chemistry and chemical engineering at the University.
Sullivan, age 16 at the time, entered IT in 1918 because she had enjoyed math and science in high school and had received support from her family and her high school chemistry teacher. Contrary to predictions made by registration personnel when she entered the University, Sullivan had no trouble finding a job after graduation. She said she believes World War I created opportunities for women in the workforce.
In 1921, Ursulla Quinn and Esther Knutsen entered the civil engineering program at the University. The men at the civil engineering summer field camp were apprehensive about the women's presence at camp, a 1924 issue of the Technolog reported. The men's fears were allayed when the women "proved themselves to be mighty good sports, shirking no duties and performing their work with an accuracy and speed which made the rest of us feel like freshmen [sic] S.L.A.'s." (CLA was formerly SLA, the School of Liberal Arts.)
Later, an article in the May 1925 Technolog, titled "Co-ed Engineers-Man's Domains Are Again Invaded," praised Quinn and Knutsen for outstanding academic achievement. The article also said, "And it is safe to predict that through their efforts, and their success, succeeding classes of engineering will have larger and larger quotas of girl students in the ranks."
However, as Professor Sally Gregory Kohlstedt of the Department of the History of Science pointed out, "There is, to some degree, a distortion in looking at these very unusual women who were successful in an environment where they were an absolute minority-less than one percent-because what we're seeing is women with incredible drive and perseverance.
"They are really exceptional and, therefore, they don't necessarily reveal the experiences of women who may have started in these programs and never finished," said Kohlstedt, who teaches a course on women in science at the University.
Past issues of the Technolog "are probably reflective of the social norms of the time," said Kohlstedt. In this respect, the Technolog offers insight into the larger issue of the way society viewed women. Sometimes the Technolog's portrayal of women directly contradicted the intellectual progress made by pioneering women in science and engineering.
For example, the same May 1925 issue of the Technolog that praised Quinn and Knutsen for their academic achievement also contained jokes about women in a humor section called "Drippings from the Oil Can," which appeared every month in the Technolog. In that issue, this was one of the jokes:
When a woman is bored: exciter
If she gets too excited: controller
If she won't come when you want her to: coaxer
If she is willing to come halfway: meter
If she is willing to come all the way: receiver
When she gets there: osculater
If she was too fast to stop: dispatcher
If she is an angel: transformer
If she is a devil: converter
If she tries to double cross you: detector
If she proves your fears are wrong: compensater
If your fears are right: arrester
If she goes to pieces: coherer
If she goes up in the air: condenser
If she is hungry: feeder
If she sings foully: tuner
If she gets cold: heater
If she gets too hot: cooler
If she is a "nice" girl: shaker
If you have one just like her: alternator
If she is too fast: reducer
If she fumes and sputters: insulator
If she becomes upset: reverser
And when you get tired of her: electrocuter
By the 1940s, "Drippings from the Oil Can" had been replaced by the Technolog pinup girl of the month. Pinup girls appeared in the Technolog until the early 1970s and usually were University students from SLA or some branch of the University other than IT. The pinup girl's height and weight were often listed, and each woman usually appeared in her bathing suit somewhere in the spread.
During the month of IT Week, the pinup girl of the month made way for Queen Colleen. Queen Colleen was often an IT female student representing the college, and the two-page spread about her looked much different. For example, each year's Queen Colleen didn't necessarily appear in her bathing suit in the Technolog.
One woman who appeared as a pinup girl of the month declined to comment on the two-page spread about herself, saying it may have been the social norm of the time since she didn't remember it.
"[There were] no pinup girls in the '20s, I can tell you!" said Sullivan, who worked on the Technolog while at the University. Sullivan, who began college one year before women in Minnesota earned the right to vote in state elections in 1919, also said of her college experience, "I never felt any prejudice or anything like that . . . If anything, [men] were more inclined to help a woman than they would a man."
Whereas Sullivan may have felt she got attention in part because she was female, others did not. Another IT graduate, Alice Chen-Gessner, said, "At that time I felt very isolated from my classmates." Chen-Gessner, who came to the University in 1948 from China to pursue a M.S. in chemical engineering, attributed her feelings of isolation as much to the fact that she didn't speak English very well as to her gender.
It would have been easy for Chen-Gessner to feel isolated for either reason because she said she was one of only two women in her department during that time, the other one also being from China. But she also mentioned that when classes were over, the graduate students rarely socialized anyway.
IT Dean Ted Davis, who was on the faculty of the chemical engineering and materials science department at the University before becoming IT dean in 1995, commented, " . . . Women have only entered science and engineering in halfway reasonable numbers in the past few years."
"Halfway reasonable numbers" translate into double-digit percentages of female students in the college. The percentage of women in engineering increased from 1 or 2 percent of engineering students in early decades of IT to 12 or 13 percent in the late '70s and early '80s, said Kohlstedt, who was responsible for building a program for women during her time as IT associate dean from 1989 until 1995.
Some unusual programs designed for women stand out. The Curtis-Wright Cadette program, for instance, sent women in 1943 to the University and six other institutions around the nation. The 102 participants in the program at the University lived in Shevlin Hall.
The program's purpose was to boost the number of engineers working at the Curtis-Wright Corporation, an aircraft company, because the war was taking a toll on the workforce. The women graduates of the 10-month course pledged to work for the Curtis-Wright Corporation in aeronautical engineering and other technical areas in return for room, board, and a stipend.
"By many accounts, they got very close to what was an engineering degree," said Kohlstedt about the cadettes, who earned the equivalent of two-and-a-half years of credits in engineering disciplines in 10 months. "It is clear that there were some opportunities that opened up for women under the duress of war demands." However, Kohlstedt also emphasized that she believes the war's impact on women in science and engineering may have been small since veterans usually got their jobs back when they returned from war.
University enrollment records from the decades prior to the middle of this century are scarce, but past experiences of IT alumni and faculty and past issues of the Technolog reflect the trends in the percentage of women in IT.
"The number of women receiving Ph.D.s in the sciences reached a peak in the 1920s that was not reached again until the 1980s," said Kohlstedt, who co-edited a book in 1996 on gender and scientific authority.
A 1975 issue of the Technolog stated that 9.4 percent of IT students that year were women. Also that year, the number of freshman women in IT doubled from the past year so that by fall of 1974, female IT freshmen comprised 11.7 percent of their class.
"The percentages of females in the engineering departments and, I think, the physical science departments rose fairly rapidly in the late '70s and early '80s. But in the last several years, the percentages seem to have leveled off somewhere around 20 percent . . . and we don't really know why that leveling off has occurred, but we are concerned about it," said Davis.
The undergraduate enrollment statistics from the dean's office show that IT women comprised 19.9 percent of the total IT undergraduate student body in fall 1996. Similar statistics from the same office show that women made up 26 percent of the freshmen admitted for fall 1997 as of November 1996.
Other scholars believe early warning signals in some branches of the sciences could indicate an erosion of the gains in representation that women have experienced in the past two decades, said Kohlstedt. "One indication, for example, is that the proportion of women to men going into computer science seems to be declining, especially those taking advanced degrees," she said.
Another concern at the University is the dearth of female IT faculty members. In 1975, the faculty was 2 percent female. Statistics for fall 1996 show that 24 of 387 faculty members in IT are female, which translates into roughly 6 percent.
Susan Marino, director of the Program for Women in IT, said that small numbers of female faculty members limit available role models for female IT students.
Recognizing the lack of female faculty in IT, Davis said, "In addition to trying hard to recruit women on the faculty, we are grappling with the problem of increasing the number available in the workplace by increasing our graduate student and undergraduate student enrollment." Some of the programs in effect in IT, said Davis, include high school programs aimed at encouraging women to pursue science and engineering careers, recruiting programs for graduate students, and affirmative action for faculty.
Marino and Davis both identified nepotism rules of the past and the current societal norm of women raising the children in a family as possible reasons for the low percentage of female faculty members in IT. A nepotism rule which, according to a 1975 issue of the Technolog, ended in IT in 1969 prevented the University from hiring a second member of the same family for a position of equal importance.
Today, conflicts with family life create significant challenges for professional women, said Marino, who holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience and served on the research faculty at Yale Medical School before coming to Minnesota. These challenges extend beyond academia, Marino pointed out. "We're still finding that a lot of women, even if they become engineers, have to give it up because they just can't do it all."
Chen-Gessner, a graduate mentioned earlier in this article, managed to balance her full-time job as an engineer with family life by spending time with her children on weekends. She said, "If industry can give some encouragement and consideration for the mothers, it would be very helpful."
A 1976 IT graduate in mechanical engineering, Joanne Kleinhenz balances family life and work differently. She said she is very glad her boss is supportive of women's needs in the workplace. "I've worked part-time now for 10 years since I had my first child," said Kleinhenz, who does finite element analysis and acoustical modeling for a living.
Not all fields are so accommodating. Marino noted that getting grants is highly competitive, and if a grant company sees a hiatus of a year in publishing from a laboratory, the amount of time a woman might take off to have a child, it can become an obstacle to getting funding.
Offering a more positive slant on the career outlook for women, Sharon Kurtt, director of IT Career Services, said, "Companies began to realize that the more their workforce represents the people they're trying to sell a product or service to, the more successful they'll be in designing a product that people will buy."
Kim Tran, a senior in mechanical engineering and president of the University chapter of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), said that her organization does outreach to area schools and helps organize the IT career fair. National businesses give tours and presentations through SWE, an organization open to both women and men who have an interest in science or engineering.
Although women have not yet achieved parity, issues regarding women in the workplace and education are receiving attention. The Program for Women in IT is trying to increase the number of women pursuing engineering and science careers, and student organizations like the Society of Women Engineers, which has 50 or 60 members, are supporting women in IT.
And as Betty Sullivan, one of the pioneering women in IT, said, "There is a much better understanding of how much women can do."
For more information on women in engineering or to become involved, contact the organizations listed below.
Society of Women Engineers (SWE)
U of M / 25A Lind Hall
(612) 626-0093 / http://www.swe.org
Women in Science and Engineering (WISE)
U of M / 120 Lind Hall
(612) 626-9238 / kate@itdean.umn.edu
Program for Women in IT
U of M / 120 Lind Hall
(612) 624-1317 / marino@fs1.itdean.umn.edu
Sigma Delta Epsilon
Graduate Women in Science / Local Chapter
(612) 624-2244 / khanna@biosci.cbs.umn.edu
Alpha Sigma Kappa-Women in Technical Studies / Minnesota Alpha Active
Chapter
1011 4th Street S.E.
Minneapolis, MN 55414
(612) 378-4759
