Lectures will bring women engineers

In the upcoming year, seven distinguished and decorated lecturers from all fields of engineering will address flocks of Penn Engineering students and faculty members about their achievements. And all seven will be women. The lectures -- the first of which took place yesterday -- are part of the new Grace Hopper Lecture Series initiated by School of Engineering and Applied Science Dean Eduardo Glandt. The series was designed to highlight women representing each of the Engineering School's seven departments. The inaugural lecture of the series took place yesterday and featured Harvard Computer Science Professor Barbara Grosz, who spoke about her current research in "Getting Computer Systems to Function as Team Players." Glandt said that the Hopper series was developed as part of a school-wide initiative to address issues of gender inequity. Penn and nine other research universities agreed at a conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in January to lessen the disparity between men and women in faculty and student bodies. "We are painfully aware of how far behind we are in general in diversity in engineering," Glandt said. While enrollment by women students in the Engineering School is nearing one-third of the student population, Glandt said that the school still lags in women faculty, who can often act as role models or mentors. "So we decided that we cannot wait. We have to have women role models -- women faces -- in the building," he said. Each year seven speakers will be invited not only to give a lecture in their area of expertise, but also to spend several days at Penn interacting with Engineering students and faculty. "The idea is that it will foster conversations with women students and all students -- women faculty and all faculty," Glandt said. At yesterday's inaugural lecture by Grosz, Heilmeier Hall was packed with mostly male engineering students and faculty members. Grosz -- well known in the field of computer science for her achievements in human-computer interfaces -- spoke about methods for involving computers as collaborative members of a team rather than inflexible tools. "We tend to think of the human-computer interface as screen deep," Grosz said. "But [computers] can participate with us in dialogues about the things we are trying to do." Grosz has been active at Harvard in issues of gender equity. In 1990, she chaired a committee that reported on women in science at Harvard. After the report came out, Grosz said, many advances were made among female faculty members and students. "Barbara Grosz is an exceptionally beautiful example for women," Penn Computer Science Professor Val Tannen said. "She obviously has thrived in computer science," he added. Grosz said that while she is happy to be a role model for women in computer science, she was somewhat forced into the job. "If there's lots of men in a department, not every one has to be a role model," Grosz said. "But if you're the only tenured woman in a department, you're a role model."