By Tracy F. Lightfoot
“The first time I came to Speed, I felt a little out of place,” Amanda Eicher said. Of course, that’s probably true for many University of Louisville students when they cross Eastern Parkway.
But Eicher was supposed to be there. One of several hundred female students out of 2,000 students enrolled in the Speed School for Engineering, Eicher sometimes felt alienated.
When she walked into class, she often asked herself where there was a girl that she could talk to. Spread out among six departments and among undergraduate and graduate programs, the approximately 300 females enrolled in Speed each year don’t seem to add up to much. And many of those women wonder where the other 299 are.
But for most Speed School women, the gender disparity is not a deterrent. Female companionship is comforting sometimes, and for that, many of them join organizations such as the Society of Women Engineers.
SWE was formed on the national level in the 1950s; U of L’s chapter has been around for at least 30 years. Membership varies, president Stephanie Sharp said, because different students attend various SWE events. Events include a “girls’ night out,” panel discussions, outreach to high school students and an annual sleepover for incoming freshmen.
“We provide women with an opportunity to interact and network with professionals and engineering companies,” she said.
Eicher, a second-year student in the Civil Engineering program, said high school friends at U of L and campus organizations, including SWE, were what saved her from those feelings of displacement. But Angela Wethington, who is finishing her bachelor’s degree this spring, was apprehensive about entering Speed School.
“I had always heard that Speed School students were ‘different,’ so I didn’t know how well I would fit in,” she said. The former cheerleading coach was worried that the “dumb blonde” stereotype would prevail when she entered Speed.
“I was afraid that everyone would judge me before getting to know me,” Wethington said. “But that’s what pushed me further.” Self-described as “headstrong,” she was determined to pursue engineering. Despite family and friends suggesting other courses of study, she stuck with her plan and entered the Industrial Engineering program.
And Sharp said that there are plusses to being part of Speed’s female population. Since she’s a minority in her classes, people pay more attention to her. When she answers a question in class, she said, she knows everyone will be listening to her.
For many female Speed engineering students who have trouble adjusting, the comforts of home aren’t far away. But Pauline Otieno doesn’t have her friends or family to run home to when her week gets tough — they’re thousands of miles away.
Otieno is an international student from Kenya, a junior majoring in Chemical Engineering. Her fear, she said, does not concern entering a male-dominated field — but how she will get through Speed in general. “It is a demanding field, and therefore one has to work hard,” she said.
Other women agreed. Self-doubt, said several female Speed students, doesn’t usually arise from a classroom full of men. It simply arises because Speed is hard. Otieno said when she encounters what she calls a “stumble-block” in her studies, she uses it to her advantage.
“I re-evaluate myself and find out if I still believe in the same things as I did before I begun this journey,” she said of her engineering career. Massive loads of homework and projects that lead to sleepless nights and stress are what usually bring on these questions, she said.
Then again, homework and stress are staples of a Speed student’s diet. Female engineering students are undaunted by the Y-chromosomes surrounding them; many are proving a point by graduating.
“It’s fun and a challenge,” Bonnie Anne Briggs said. Briggs is a Civil Engineering major from Livingston, Ky. She enjoyed math in school, along with “fixing things,” both which led her to engineering.
Otieno agreed. Aside from loving science and math, she said, entering engineering was a personal challenge and a way to prove engineering isn’t just a man’s field.
An interest in math and science inspired many women to pursue engineering, but a surprising number got the bug from their families.
“I decided to become a civil engineer when I was 11,” said Mandy Moore, a fourth-year Civil Engineering student. “I thought it seemed cool.” Her father, grandfather and uncle were all civil engineers, she said; she initially wanted to work for Walt Disney as an “imagineer” — the engineers who design Walt Disney rides.
Eicher, too, was influenced by the father-grandfather-uncle trio. The daughter of an electrical engineer, Eicher said she grew up with engineering, but she wasn’t forced into it.
Speed professor Ellen Brehob entered the field the same way: her grandfather and father were both mechanical engineers, then her two older sisters entered the ME field as well. “I was just following the path,” she said. In Brehob’s family, five of the six children are mechanical engineers. (The other is a computer science major.) She also noted that almost all six children married engineers.
Brehob, who has been at Speed for 10 years as a professor, echoed current students’ challenges when reflecting on her own education.
“I questioned my choice of majors based more on the difficulty of the curriculum than situations involving being a minority in the program,” she said.
The Bioengineering program, new to Speed this year, will hopefully attract more female students to Speed. According to Dr. Brenda Hart, Speed’s director of Student Services, the program is popular among female students on a national level. Several new female professors have been hired for the program, including Bertocci and Andrea Goblin.
Nineteen female students enrolled in the Bioengineering program for its inaugural semester this fall. Compared to enrollment in other departments, it’s not a bad start. Mechanical Engineering has the most females, with 60 enrolled in fall 2004. But percentage-wise, the award goes to Chemical Engineering, with about 27 percent, according to Hart. Industrial and Civil Engineering both have over 20 percent female enrollment as well.
Female enrollment has remained fairly steady in Speed School for several decades — total enrollment has averaged between 1,500 and 1,900 students since 1979; female enrollment has remained between 300 and 500 during that period.
Because of recruiting, outreach and the new Bioengineering department, Hart predicts female enrollment will increase in the future. And those new students will come to a welcoming place, enrolled females say.
“I think the majority of Speed teachers and staff are very supportive, helpful and unbiased,” Moore said. “It is the ignorant students that create divides based on gender or ethnicity.”
