Abstract
This chapter examines the history of higher education for women, as well as the history of careers for women in science and engineering, in the United States. The first section discusses women’s matriculation in college generally from 1900 to the present day. The next section presents a statistical overview of women in science and engineering from the early twentieth century to the present. The third section provides a qualitative analysis of the history of women in science since 1820. The final section provides a qualitative analysis of the history of women in engineering since 1918.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
I am following Goldin et al. (2006) here on the common intent of using college to find a husband. I do not know, for example, if it was any more common for women to seek a husband in college than for a man to seek a wife – not to mention homosexual or other relationships.
- 3.
Also see Rossiter’s earlier research on women scientists in America, e.g. Rossiter (1974).
- 4.
Rossiter (1982, Table 2.1) also considered doctoral education of women. By the year 1900, 228 women had received doctoral degrees in any field in the United States. 56 had received science degrees, with the largest numbers in chemistry (13), math (9), and psychology (9). Bryn Mawr and Yale were tied with the largest number of doctoral degrees awarded to women in scientific fields, at four apiece. By the 1938 edition of American Men of Science the number of doctorates awarded overall and the number to females had increased significantly. The data is not reported in a way to make precise numerical comparisons, but Rossiter (Rossiter 1982, p. 152) infers from the literature that the largest producers of female scientific doctorates at the time were Chicago (strong in botany, mathematics, medical sciences, biochemistry, and nutrition) and Columbia (strong in nutrition, zoology, anthropology, and psychology) – followed distantly by Cornell, Johns Hopkins, and Yale.
- 5.
Mathematics was one route into computer science, especially in the 1950s through the 1970s. Green and LaDuke (1989) describe the production of women receiving doctorates in the mathematical sciences prior to the 1940s. There is a surprisingly large literature on women mathematics through history. For an extensive bibliography, see the webpage entitled “Biographies of Women Mathematicians” created by Larry Riddle and colleagues at Agnes Scott College, https://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/WOMEN/women.htm (accessed 21 March 2016).
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For more information on this topic, see Bix (2002).
- 7.
One of the more strident voices was that of psychology professor Naomi Weisstein , who wrote a satirical piece entitled “How Can a Small Girl Like You Teach a Class Full of Big Men, and Other Things the Chairman Said” (Weisstein 1974, most readily found as a 1977 reprint) as well as “Woman as Nigger, or How Psychology Constructs the Female.” (Weisstein 1969). This latter piece was reprinted in the Congressional Record as part of hearings on discrimination of women in higher education.
- 8.
For an excellent but dated (ending in the mid-1990s) account of women scientists and engineers at American research universities, see Part II of Hornig (2003).
- 9.
There was far from total sympathy for the plight of women scientists. One highly public example was the book published in 1979 by sociologist Jonathan Cole , entitled Fair Science: Women in the Scientific Community. (Cole 1979) Cole argued on the basis of a citation analysis that women deserved their second-tier status in science because of the quality of their work.
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- 11.
For more on why undergraduate women remain in or depart from science majors, see Seymour and Hewitt (1997).
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- 13.
The leading scholar of the history of women in engineering in the United States is Amy Sue Bix . She has consolidated a number of her earlier studies into a book (Bix 2013). For those who want to read an article-length version of the material in her book, see Bix (2004). The account in this section relies heavily on Bix’s writings.
- 14.
See Bix (2013) for additional information about the T-Square Society .
- 15.
More detail about the University of Colorado activities can be found in Bix (2013).
- 16.
The situation for women working during the First World War was similar in Britain and the United States. For an insightful and detailed account of the British situation, see the keynote lecture by Patricia Fara of the University of Cambridge (Fara 2014). Human computers had been used in astronomy research since 1750, when Alexis Claude Clairaut had used Newton’s laws of motion to calculate the return of Halley’s comet in 1759. Most of the “computers” as these human calculators were called were men until the Harvard University astronomer Edward Charles Pickering employed a team of women to do his computations. It is possible that the First World War gave women a chance to serve as computers, taking up jobs that had been by men who had gone off to war. For information about human computers, see Grier (2005).
- 17.
Another organization, the American Society of Women Engineers and Architects, was founded in 1920 as a support network for practicing female engineers. It also encouraged and advised young women who wanted to be engineers. Membership was always small, and the organization had become largely inactive by the entry of the United States into the Second World War in 1941.
- 18.
For more information about admission of women engineering students at Georgia Tech, as well as at Cal Tech, MIT, and RPI, see Bix (2000).
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- 20.
In fact, events had almost gone the other way at MIT: “in 1960, a fundamental change of course had occurred. An MIT faculty committee majority report recently had recommended that MIT cease admitting women, which would have placed MIT on the wrong side of history and counter the changes occurring at other technical universities where women were being admitted to engineering programs for the first time. Happily it was a minority report by Kenneth Wadleigh which won support by President James Killian and his Chancellor Julius Stratton , and the decision was made not only to continue to admit women, bit to actively work to improve the environment and resources available for women students.” (http://1964.alumclass.mit.edu/s/1314/2015/club-class-main.aspx?sid=1314&gid=55&pgid=11879)
- 21.
On the choice by women of an engineering education or career, see Frehill 1997.
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Aspray, W. (2016). Opening STEM Careers to Women. In: Women and Underrepresented Minorities in Computing. History of Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24811-0_2
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