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Women in engineering:
A faculty roundtable discussion
The first in a series exploring women's issues at the College
and beyond
Moderated by Marguerite Rigoglioso
Photos by Peg Skorpinski
In an era when women are comfortably positioned on the Supreme
Court, hold seats in the Senate, and take leadership roles in
corporate board rooms, it may come as a surprise that women comprise
just nine percent of Berkeley's august engineering faculty. Undergraduate
women's presence in engineering is, not unexpectedly, somewhat
higher at 23.5 percent, a number that has not changed significantly
for the past five years.
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| Jennifer Mankoff (in
background) and Fiona Doyle |
Tallies tracking women in engineering began in 1876, when Elizabeth
Bragg became the first woman to earn an engineering degree. It
took just shy of 100 years from Bragg's graduation, however, for
a woman to be invited into the College's faculty ranks. Computer
science professor Susan Graham bears that distinction. Of 54 academic
appointments in the College, from 1995 to 2000, four were women.
But since July 2001, four of the nine faculty hired in the College
have been women.
For the most part, Berkeley's statistics mirror the national numbers.
In 1998, women made up about 20 percent of all undergraduate engineers
across the nation, up from 12 percent in 1979, according to the
Society of Women Engineers.
While the numbers of women engineers on both sides of the academic
chalkboard are slowly rising at Berkeley and elsewhere, women
remain a relatively small, and sometimes isolated, entity with
the College.
The numbers tell a story all their own, but the full picture is
best revealed by the women faculty themselves. Fiona Doyle, Jasmina
Vujic, and Jennifer Mankoff shared their experiences in a lively
roundtable discussion last January at the Women's Faculty Club.
Excerpts from their discussion follow.
Professor Fiona
Doyle, the Donald H. McLaughlin Professor of Mineral Engineering,
an expert on solution processing of materials and metallic contaminants
in water and soils, joined the materials science and engineering
department in 1983. She teaches courses in the surface properties
and aqueous processing of materials. "I always thought science
and math were so easy and so interesting that I couldn't understand
why anybody would want to do anything else," says British
native Doyle, 45, who has two young children with whom she is
forever doing chemical experiments in her kitchen, as she puts
it.
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Jasmina Vujic
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Nuclear engineering associate professor Jasmina
Vujic, 48, was the first woman to join the nuclear engineering
faculty in 1992. "I decided to pursue nuclear engineering
because people said it was the most difficult field," says
Vujic, whose daughter, Nevena, is a senior in Berkeley's civil
and environmental engineering department. A Yugoslav native, Vujic
came to America to pursue her doctoral studies and decided to
stay when her native country began disintegrating. Her research
includes the development of increasingly advanced computational
tools to design and analyze nuclear reactors, and other radiological
devices to detect and treat aggressive tumors.
Assistant professor Jennifer
Mankoff, one of the College's new hires, joined the computer
sciences faculty last fall. Now 28, Mankoff began her college
career at Oberlin as a double degree student in liberal arts and
viola performance, before focusing solely on computer science.
While a student at Georgia Tech, she played viola with the Emory-Atlanta
symphony, and now plays viola in Berkeley's University Orchestra.
Also an accomplished painter, Mankoff is recovering from a severe
case of repetitive strain injury, a disability that in part drives
her current research in special-needs computing and assistive
technology.
Q: Let's talk about some of the challenges
you faced, first as young girls with an interest in math and science,
and later as professional engineers.
Doyle: I went to a high school where we were taught needlework,
not metal work or engineering drawings. But I was lucky in that
as an undergraduate in the sciences, I attended a women's college
at Cambridge University where there was a lot of support. I went
to graduate school at the University of London's Imperial College,
where I was the first woman they'd ever had in the extractive
metallurgy program, and they regarded me as something of a curiosity,
but were quite gentlemanly about it. Here, I've been the only
woman on the faculty in my department for the past 18 years and
I've definitely felt some marginalization.
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Fiona Doyle
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Vujic: In Yugoslavia, where I grew up, young girls were
encouraged to study and pursue hard fields like engineering and
they weren't afraid of math or physics. Although there were only
a few women in the department of electrical engineering, we had
a lot of respect from our colleagues because we were excellent
students. The problems arose when I came to do my doctorate at
the University of Michigan. I had a young child, so I was stretched
among many different obligations and daycare was nonexistent.
In my country the government runs our daycare centers. But here,
it was very difficult, and sometimes you are treated as if you
don't have family obligations, and you are stretched, particularly
during your pre-tenure years.
Doyle: It's something that's problematic for young men too.
The perception among some senior faculty is that if one is taking
care of one's family, one is not serious about one's job.
Mankoff: Everywhere I interviewed, I asked whether anyone
had had a child before tenure. What kind of support was there
within the department for people having kids? Was there a parents'
room? There are young men in the department with young children,
but I'm the only woman who is pre-tenure right now, so we'll see
what happens. But going back to the original question, I've spent
a lot of time being the only woman interested in math or the only
woman in the computer sciences department. But so far, people
have supported me on women's issues. I think things are a little
different for my generation.
Q: How has the career landscape evolved
for women engineers in academia over the years?
Doyle: When I first came here -- back in the dawn of history
-- there were only three women professors in the College of Engineering.
Women seemed to be regarded as a curiosity, and there was a lot
of skepticism as to whether or not women could really do engineering.
Now I have such amazingly good female colleagues that there is
no question at all about the excellence of women in engineering.
In my mind, there are enough data points, that it is generally
acknowledged that the women work harder than the men.
Vujic: I agree, because in order to become a faculty member,
particularly for women in engineering, you have to really do a
good job.
Mankoff: One thing to remember is that although women
are choosing to continue having careers, they still have different
career paths than men. In general, they will stop to have a family
sometimes, or even if they don't stop, their family has an impact.
A lot of women will go into industry first, then maybe come back
to academia. So even if you increase the numbers through graduate
school, there's such a diversity of ways that women move professionally
at that stage, that it has a big impact on what happens to the
numbers.
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