American Women Engineers from the Baby Boom Generation

Clarkson University, Potsdam NY

Investigators

Abstract

This project will investigate the careers and lives of a varied group of American women engineers who graduated from college in the 1970s. It will explain why women engineers have made the choices they have and how their choices have been constrained structurally and culturally. It will contribute to our understanding of how individual women might negotiate the constraints and how institutions might work to eliminate them. The results of this research will be published in engineering and science, technology, and society journals and eventually a book. They will also contribute to achieving the goal of encouraging girls and women to become engineers and to persist in engineering careers. The investigator will use her research to create three-minute videos featuring pioneering women engineers to be disseminated through the American Society of Engineering Education, Society of Women Engineers (SWE), and National Academy of Engineering Engineer Girl websites. She will create several instructional modules for SWE chapters to use with Girl Scouts and for free adoption by middle school STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) educators. By providing historical context, this project advances our understanding of why women are less likely than men to become engineers and the social and institutional biases that keep girls and women away from engineering. The 1970s was a crucial decade for women in engineering and yet, the stories of their careers and lives, including the important lessons they have learned about career persistence, have never been adequately studied. The project will use a survey, along with in-depth oral history interviews and follow-up questionnaires, with pioneering women engineers to answer three questions: 1) How did pioneering women engineers perceive themselves as navigating the gender stereotypes imposed upon them by society? That is, what individual and social mechanisms did pioneering women engineers use to negotiate work in a male-dominated field? 2) What advice do the pioneering women engineers have for girls and women today? 3) What can the pioneering women engineers' life experiences, and their perspectives on their life experiences, tell us about the structures that still need to be put in place or reinforced to encourage women to go into and persist in engineering careers? Those answers will produce new knowledge and understanding 1) to help individual girls and women learn strategies from the pioneering women engineers about how to navigate their careers and lives, and 2) to help educational institutions, particularly STEM and engineering educators at all levels, as well as government, industry, and engineering professional societies, to eliminate barriers for girls and women to enter and persist in following engineering careers.