SWE - Spring 2008 - (Page 23) 2007 National Women’s Hall of Fame Inductee BY JILL S. TIETJEN, P.E., SWE Dr. Baum’s “firsts” in the engineering profession are legendary. Her appointment as dean of Pratt Institute in 1984 made her the first female dean of a college of engineering in the United States. In 1995, she became the first female president of the American Society for Engineering Education. A strong advocate for women in the engineering profession, Dr. Baum also has served as president of ABET Inc. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a Fellow of ASEE, and has received numerous honors from IEEE. Dr. Baum attended high school in the 1950s, a time when women engineers were considered an oddity, and girls were not encouraged to enter male-dominated fields. Dr. Baum’s high school teachers and coun- selors strongly discouraged her from going into the engineering profession and urged her to become a math teacher instead. Ignoring their advice, Dr. Baum was determined to pursue an engineering education. Upon hearing of her daughter’s career choice, Dr. Baum’s mother warned that no one would marry her if she went into engineering. This negative reaction propelled her further to become an engineer, a choice that was considered rebellious at the time. The search for a college had its own obstacles. One school rejected Dr. Baum because it didn’t have any women’s restrooms. City College of New York accepted her, and she was the only female in her class. After graduating with her electrical engineering baccalaureate, Dr. Baum worked in Beatrice Hicks (1919-1979), a founding member and the first president of SWE, decided as a young girl that she wanted to be an engineer. She had an aptitude for math and science, and her father was an engineer. When she was 13, she visited the Empire State Building and the George Washington Bridge. Inspired by these engineering masterpieces, Hicks announced to her father that she, too, wanted to become an engineer. She received a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Newark College of Engineering and a master’s degree in physics from Stevens Institute of Technology. She received an honorary doctorate of science from Hobart and William Smith Colleges. In 1965 she became the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate in engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In the early 1940s, she accepted a position with Western Electric. She was the company’s first female engineer and worked on long-distance telephone technology. After her father’s death in 1946, she joined his company, Newark Controls, as vice president and chief engineer. Eventually, she became president of the company, which produced environmental sensing equipment, much of which was used later in the U.S. space program. Hicks was an early innovator in the design, development, and manufacture of pressure and gas density controls for aircraft and missiles. She invented the gas density switch, a key component in systems using artificial atmospheres. In 1950, Hicks became the first president of the Society of Women Engineers. She received SWE’s Achievement Award in 1963. She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2002. Grace Murray Hopper, Ph.D. (19061992), was a mathematician, the first woman rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, and a pioneer in computer programming. Dr. Hopper graduated from Vassar College in 1928 and joined the school’s faculty. While teaching at Vassar, she earned her master’s and doctoral degrees from Yale University, becoming the first woman to graduate from Yale with a Ph.D. in mathematics. She was one of four women in a doctoral program of 10 students. She taught at Vassar as an associate professor until 1943, when she joined the U.S. Navy. She was assigned to work on IBM’s Harvard Mark I Calculator, considered the first largescale automatic digital computer in the United States. Her breakthrough work in computer programming earned her the nickname “Amazing Grace.” At the forefront of the computer revolution, Dr. Hopper believed a major barrier in opening up the world of techcontinued on next page SWE SPRING 2008 23
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