Though women have traditionally faced discrimination, female engineers at Penn and other institutions are making a breakthrough.
Nevertheless, this was not always the case.
Tuesday, in honor of former Penn professor Rear Adm. Grace Hopper, approximately 50 students, faculty and School of Engineering alumni gathered to hear about the struggle that women faced in trying to enter the engineering field.
Ruth Schwartz Cowan, chairwoman of the Department of History and Sociology of Science, gave a lecture entitled "Women Engineers: The Past is Always Present," which traced the story of two iconoclastic females who broke the gender barrier and entered the world of engineering.
The lecture showed that "females in academia [and beyond] is an important topic to the University," said Sandra Rathman, director of special projects and communications for the Engineering School.
The unique topic attracted many female Engineering students to the lecture.
"Not often do we get women engineers to speak on any topic," Engineering sophomore Laura Sadow said.
Not only were students enthusiastic about Cowan's speech, but Engineering Dean Eduardo Glandt also expressed his support.
"We were lucky when we attracted Cowan [to Penn] in 2002," Glandt said.
He added that Cowan, like Hopper, is another remarkable woman. She has shown how to break the mold that says "every technology is a genie out of a bottle" and instead has shown how to make technology the result of female actions, Glandt said.
To explain the progression of females entering the engineering field, Cowan began her lecture by talking about Ellen Swallow Richards.
She "founded environmental engineering, was the first woman to graduate and teach at [the Massachussetts Institute of Technology and helped] found the field of home economics," Cowan said.
Cowan added that the creation of home economics "provided jobs for women trained in scientific subjects [and] created a field men didn't want jobs in."
The path to success began when Richards was 24 years old. She put herself through Vassar College in 1866 and then "put the board of [male] governors [at MIT] into a tizzy" when she applied to their institution and earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry, Cowan said.
Forty years after Richards' death came the arrival of another remarkable female engineer, Nora Stanton Blatch, the granddaughter of suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
"She discovered ... that she loved math, she loved science [and] that she loved working with metals," Cowan said.
As a result, Blatch used her family connections to apply to Cornell University where she earned a degree in civil engineering in 1905.
After being denied an associate membership at the American Society of Civil Engineers, "Blatch became a builder and developer for homes of the wealthy" until the early 1960s, Cowan said.
Cowan ended her lecture by asking the audience what they could learn about the lives of these two women in terms of why there are so few female engineers.
She explained that "gates have been closed for women" for centuries and that it was not until three years ago that women's colleges offered a bachelor of arts in engineering.
Still, despite this bleak past, Cowan and other female engineers are looking forward to a successful future and are glad that women like Cowan "are articulating women's roles in engineering," Engineering senior Lindsey Karpowich said.
