NORTHAMPTON, Mass. -- Hunched over their oscilloscopes and diode circuits on
the third floor of McConnell Hall at Smith College on a wet, gray morning, all 12 students
in Professor Nalini Easwar's electronics class say they hope to pursue careers in physics
or engineering.
Nothing all that unusual there -- Smith, a women's college, has long
had a contingent of hard-science majors. Moreover, many male-dominated professions have
filled so rapidly with women over the past two decades that today nearly equal numbers of
men and women are graduating from the nation's schools of law and medicine.
But engineering is different. Five out of six engineering students
across the country are male, as are 96 percent of engineering faculty members.
In an effort to help alter the imbalance and to change its lingering
white- glove image, Smith, one of the nation's premier private schools, is planning to
become the first women's college to open an engineering department. Its trustees are
expected to approve the $12.5 million plan on Saturday, with the first course to be
offered in the fall.
"There will be people who will say, 'This can't be serious,'
since it's for women," Ruth J. Simmons, the president of Smith, said. "There
needs to be a critical mass of women moving through engineering together so that guys
don't ever again say, 'Dearie, let me show you how it's done."'
Beyond an effort to bring more women into engineering, Smith's plans
are part of an effort by a largely white, historically elite institution to attract more
immigrants, foreigners and first-generation students -- the groups that are most drawn to
engineering.
More broadly, it is a sign of how women's colleges are seeking ways
to reinvent themselves. While all universities face difficult identity choices -- whether
to emphasize training or learning, research or teaching -- women's colleges have a bigger
challenge than most. Application rates, up in recent years, are much lower than at
academically comparable coeducational institutions, and even many of the students here
insist that they see no particular need to segregate themselves from men in college.
Dr. Simmons, an African-American Harvard graduate who is the 12th
child of a Texas sharecropper, is keenly aware of the need for her college to reach out to
a more diverse group of high school students, "the kind of students we won't get
enough of," as she put it.
John M. Connolly, Smith's provost, noted in his proposal for the
engineering department that in California last year, 70 percent of high school seniors who
expressed an interest in engineering were members of minority groups. "We assume that
this group currently ignores places like Smith, since we do not offer what they want to
study," he added.
Of Smith's 2,655 students, 99 are black, 82 are Hispanic, 232 are
Asian-American, 24 are American Indian and 183 are foreigners.
Smith, the nation's largest women's college and one of the first,
has undergone many changes since it opened in 1875 with 14 students and six professors.
While it has had a franchise in producing alumnae famous for whom
they married -- including Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush -- it has also encouraged a
certain feminine boldness. It played the first game of women's collegiate basketball in
1892, ended mandatory lights-out in dormitories in 1922, acquired an "atom
smasher" in 1940 and educated both Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem.
So engineering offers an opportunity for Smith to demonstrate anew
its significance in the coming decades. Only a tiny number of liberal arts colleges have
engineering departments -- Swarthmore in Pennsylvania and Trinity in Hartford are the best
known -- and men still far outnumber women in those departments.
Until now, for Smith students who had wanted to study engineering,
the main option has been to do so at the nearby University of Massachusetts, through an
exchange program involving five institutions in the region. Heather White, a 21-year-old
junior from Hollywood, Calif., who was building semiconductor circuits in class Thursday
morning, has done just that and found herself, as she put it, "one of 3 women among
80 frat boys."
Ms. White said she was accustomed to studying among men and had no
problem with it. On the other hand, she recalled that in her advanced placement biology
class in high school, she and another girl received grades that Ms. White felt were lower
than they deserved and that she suspected were a reflection of the teacher's lower
expectations of girls.
"We've all been there; we've all dealt with it," Ms. White
said, referring to the small, unquantifiable slights that some women in science say they
have suffered. They are what Mary P. Rowe, an ombudswoman at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, has called "micro-inequities" for women in study and work.
Mary Grace Duffy, a partner in Charles River Consulting Inc., an
organizational consulting firm in Cambridge, who has assessed the climate in science and
engineering departments at various universities, said that while much had changed, things
were still difficult.
"I would say it is still a chilly climate, although it used to
be freezing," Ms. Duffy said. "Vicki Schultz in the April 1998 Yale Law Review
said sexual harassment today is not the blatant kind of an earlier era, but a kind of
competency undermining. I think that's a useful way to think about it."
Connolly, the Smith provost, said there seems to be more reverting
to sexual stereotypes in a field like engineering than in other fields, for reasons that
are unclear.
William B. Streett, a former dean of engineering at Cornell
University, spoke about women and engineering at a conference of the American Society of
Civil Engineering last July in Boston and said many aspects of engineering and its
training could be traced to the field's military origins.
Streett said the nation's first engineering program was offered at
the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1817 and drew on the French system from the
Ecole Polytechnique, which educated a largely homogeneous male-only student body drawn
from the lower nobility and upper middle class.
Mary J. Sansalone, a professor of engineering at Cornell and a vice
provost there, says the best way to right the balance of sexes in engineering is to
restructure its curriculum to include more nonscience courses at the undergraduate level,
leaving full professional training for graduate school, a move she considers vital anyway
to broaden the base for all engineers.
"Diversity is a concept that humanists have the words to
debate, but engineers cannot even begin the discussion," Ms. Sansalone said.
"Engineers, particularly engineering faculty, are nearly a homogenous group in
thinking and attitudes. Smith has a unique opportunity to create a really forward-looking
engineering experience, avoiding the stereotypes and attitudes of the past and
incorporating language and cultural studies, ethics and so on."
Doreen A. Weinberger, a physics professor at Smith, agrees, saying
that engineering today is in flux because of the growth of nanotechnology -- very tiny
mechanisms often used in medicine -- and information technology, making its borders with
computer science and biology more blurry.
"At a liberal arts school, we can use knowledge of other
things," Ms. Weinberger said. "Industry tells us that it needs broadly educated
graduates who can think critically across a spectrum. And at Smith, women get the support
to pursue fields they might not otherwise try. That's why we think there is such potential
here."
The initial money for the new engineering department is coming from
a $5 million gift by Harvey Picker, chairman of Wayfarer Marine Corp., and dean emeritus
of the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. Picker's late wife,
Jean Sovatkin Picker, was a Smith graduate and a former U.N. official. Two other gifts add
another $1 million; the rest of the $12.5 million still has to be raised, Smith officials
said.
The plan includes hiring four professors and graduating the first
class of engineering majors in 2004. The hope is that 25 majors will graduate each year.
All are likely to face fine career prospects. The National Science
Foundation anticipates growth in engineering-related jobs in the coming decade at a rate
three times higher than that for jobs generally.