Numbers indicate steady growth for women in engineering at CU

Cornell engineering women: Krishna Athreya, left, director of Women's Programs in Engineering, poses with Nana Sam, center, a graduate student in electrical and computer engineering, and Professor Paulette Clancy, director of the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Frank DiMeo/University Photography

By Susan Lang

As instruction is beginning at Cornell, the 734-strong incoming freshman class in the university's College of Engineering is 28 percent women. In just five years, the percentage of undergraduate women in the college has risen from 19 percent to more than 25 percent. Nationally, engineering schools average 20 percent women undergraduates.

Cornell's leadership also extends to women graduate engineering students (21 percent of the college's total for graduate students). And women engineering faculty members (about 13 percent of the school's total) places Cornell's engineering college close to the top among its peer institutions. Women professors head up two engineering departments: Paulette Clancy is director of the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Teresa Jordan is chair of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

"We may be leaders in terms of statistics, and we have made progress," said Krishna S. Athreya, director of Women's Programs in Engineering. But, she warned, "We still have a long way to go. When the numbers of women students and faculty reach parity with the general population, we will declare success."

Athreya envisions a learning, teaching and research environment at Cornell that actively attracts and retains nontraditional students, that effectively recruits women faculty members and that provides a community that few will want to leave.

Change has been slow in coming. It wasn't until 1979 that Christine Shoemaker, now the Joseph P. Ripley Professor of Engineering in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, became the first woman in the college to be given tenure. In 1985 she became the first woman to be named a full professor of engineering. For several years, she was a lone voice in pressing the college to take action to increase the numbers of women students and faculty.

High school students in Cornell's CURIE Academy summer program, including Ashley Wessendorf from Homewood Flossmoor High School in Flossmoor, Ill., center, listen to a lecture July 18 in Cornell's Hollister Hall by Cornell assistant professor of engineering Hod Lipson. Nicola Kountoupes/University Photography

"The events that discourage women from entering or staying in engineering occur at many stages in the lives of girls and women," said Shoemaker. "Positive experiences in grades K-12 can influence girls to become interested in and take the necessary math and science courses to enter an engineering program. Outreach programs for pre-college girls and the presence and support of increasing numbers of women faculty and graduate students in engineering contribute greatly by providing role models of women who find engineering to be a very rewarding career."

Examples of jobs landed by Cornell's latest crop of female graduates range from a chemical engineer for pharmaceutical giant Merck and a satellite systems engineer with Lockheed Martin to a field engineer with Turner Communications and a software developer with Amazon.com.

In the past few years, the engineering college also has appointed a number of outstanding women to faculty positions: Alyssa Apsel is an expert in optoelectronic interconnects; Sally McKee, a computer architect, specializes in the design of high performance computing systems and the software that runs on them; Antje Berndt, in operations research and industrial engineering (OR/IE), is a statistician with expertise in the pricing of callable corporate bonds; and Xin Guo, formerly with IBM and also in OR/IE, is an expert on regime switching-based models, which have had significant impact in areas ranging from speech recognition and Web traffic data analysis to mathematical finance.

Athreya, who has a Ph.D. in physics from Iowa State University, points to a variety of Cornell programs targeting or of special appeal to women:

• The CURIE (Cornell University Research in Engineering) Academy is a weeklong summer program for high school girls who excel in math and science and are considering a technical career.

• Engineers Without Frontiers (EWF), a national service organization with a global perspective, was founded at Cornell just a year ago. It is rooted in the social-service aspect of engineering ethics and allows students to become involved in the practice of creative problem solving from their first year in college. "The numbers of women involved in EWF are disproportionately high," Athreya said. "We believe this is because the concept of service to society is an ethic that especially appeals to women as well as to under-represented minority students in engineering."

• The Cornell section of the Society of Women Engineers is the largest and most active student organization in the college, with more than 150 dues-paying members each year. They offer leadership and professional development opportunities, networking with faculty and corporate representatives and providing outreach to elementary and middle school girls.

• MentorNet, of which Cornell is a founding member, is a national electronic mentoring network for undergraduate and graduate women students in engineering and the sciences. The organization links students, via e-mail, with industry and research professionals.

• The Cornell Culture and Diversity Speaker Series is a lecture program that brings speakers to campus to address diversity issues in engineering.

Athreya's office recently moved from Undergraduate Student Services to a newly created office, Associate Dean for Diversity and Faculty Recruitment, held by Zellman Warhaft, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. The move indicates how the initiatives aimed at recruiting women are taking a higher priority, said Athreya. The focus is no longer only on recruiting more undergraduate women to engineering but has expanded to embrace all levels, from pre-college to the faculty.