Women in Engineering

Luanne
Sun, 01 Mar 2020 13:25:05 +0000

I went to Michigan Tech in the 80s. I had no problems with classmates or professors at all. The only things that stand out that were different as a woman were the bathrooms. The men had bathrooms on every floor of all the engineering buildings and women had them on every other floor. It was not the same (even/odd) per building either. The newer buildings had them on all floors and I don’t know what it is like there today.

As a working engineer, I had a similar problem at my first internship - bathrooms for women were really far away! Other than that, I do not ever recall being treated poorly by other engineers at the companies I worked for. I do remember a meeting with Honda or Hyundai (I do not remember) in the early 90s or so and they kept asking my boss (male) questions and I would give the answer because he didn’t know it, I did. I know it was their culture, and I found it amusing at the time.

Growing up, I never thought I shouldn’t be an engineer. I was always on the math teams that were selected by the teachers, I was the first to take AP Physics in my school, etc. I don’t see a lot of pushing girls out of STEM now either. In fact, it’s almost the opposite. When I was looking for summer coding camps for my son years ago, all I could find was great sounding camps for only girls. It was difficult to find a co-ed camp.