History of women in engineering
In the United States at the University of California, Berkeley, however, both Elizabeth Bragg (1876) and Julia Morgan (1894) already had received their bachelor's degree in that field.
[2] In the early years of the 20th century, a few women were admitted to engineering programs, but they were generally looked upon as curiosities by their male counterparts.
Alice Perry (1906), Cécile Butticaz (1907), and Elisa Leonida Zamfirescu (1912) and Nina Cameron Graham (1912) were some of the first European to graduate with a degree in engineering.
The entry of the United States into World War II created a serious shortage of engineering talent in America as men were drafted into the armed forces.
[5] Members of the team, aged 12 to 18, overcame war and other hardships in the quest for national pride and as a symbol of a more Progressive Afghanistan.
[7] On 21 August 2021 it was reported that nine Afghan girl robotics team members were safe in Qatar, having made it out of Kabul.
Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), Lord Byron's daughter, was privately schooled in mathematics before beginning the collaboration with Charles Babbage on his analytical engine that would earn her the designation of the "first computer programmer".
Hertha Marks Ayrton (1854–1923), a British engineer and inventor who helped develop electric arc lighting, studied mathematics at Cambridge in 1880, but was denied a degree, as women were only granted certificates of completion at the time.
Similarly, Mary Engle Pennington (1872–1952), an American chemist and refrigeration engineer, completed the requirements for a BS degree in chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania in 1892, but was given a certificate of proficiency instead.
[21] In the early years of the twentieth century, a few women were admitted to engineering programs, but they were generally looked upon as curiosities by their male counterparts.
[29] Elisa Leonida Zamfirescu (1887–1973), due to prejudices against women in the sciences, was rejected by the School of Bridges and Roads in Bucharest, Romania.
[36] Edith Clarke, the inventor of the graphical calculator, was the first woman to earn a degree in MIT's electrical engineering department in 1918.
She was the only woman to attend for 50 years as the rules were changed after her entry due to concerns of the suitability of women undertaking mining internships.
[45][46] In 1921, Sébastienne Guyot (1894–1941) graduated in mechanics and engineering from the Central School of Paris in the first year group to allow women as students.
She later set up a successful foundry business in Ghent and introduced a desalinisation project and early solar panels in the first hotel on Sal Island in Cape Verde.
[50] On 30 June 1923, Marie Schneiderová-Zubaníková became the first woman in Czechoslovakia to graduate in civil engineering, from the Czech Technical University in Prague.
[53][54] Li Fu Lee was the first Chinese woman to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), starting in 1925, and graduating in electrical engineering in 1929.
[57] Greta Woxén (née Westberg) became Sweden's first female civil engineer when she graduated from the Kungliga Tekniska högskolan (the Royal Institute of Technology) in 1928.
[61] Yun Hao “Ruth” Feng studied chemical engineering at Ohio State University in the late 1920s, graduating with a PhD in 1931.
[67] Sonja Lapajne Oblak came the first Slovenian woman to graduate as a civil engineer from the Faculty of Technology in Ljubljana in 1932, calculating the world's first corridor-free, reinforced concrete school building in 1936, before becoming Slovenia' first urban planner.
[68][69] Isabel Ebel earned her degree in aeronautical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1932, the first woman to graduate there in the subject.
[75] The entry of the United States into World War II created a serious shortage of engineering talent in that country as men were drafted into the armed forces at the same time that industry ramped up production of armaments, battleships, and airplanes.
McNulty, Holberton, and Jennings would later work on the UNIVAC, the first commercial computer developed by the Remington Rand Corporation in the early 1950s.
[89] In 1952, Polish electrical engineer Maria Wanda Jastrzębska earned a master's degree in electronics and went on to set up early computer labs and influence university teaching.
[97] From 1958, Laurel van der Wal was the project engineer on three MIA (Mouse-in-Able) launches from Cape Canaveral, as head of bioastronautics at Space Technology Laboratories.
[105] The Cold War and the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union created additional demands for trained engineering talent in the 1950s and 1960s.
Influenced in part by the second wave feminism movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, female faculty members at MIT, including Mildred Dresselhaus and Sheila Widnall, began to actively promote the cause of women's engineering education.
[108] In 1964, Nicole Laroche became the first female Gadzarts (engineering student) at the French École nationale supérieure d'arts et métiers (ENSAM).
Hamilton, the director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory at the time, is famous for her work in writing the on-board guidance code for the Apollo 11 mission.
This phenomenon became known as "The incredible shrinking pipeline", from the title of a 1997 paper on the subject by Tracy Camp, a professor in the Department of Mathematical and Computer Sciences at the Colorado School of Mines.
