IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2018 - 15

both men and women felt about
women's place on college campuses. Male students often worried,
unnecessarily, that the introduction
of women to classrooms and campuses would both diminish the standards set for their education and
distract them from their work. At
the same time, they held a double
standard against female students
for being both "distracting" and yet
undateable. On the other hand,
women felt isolated and alone. They
were often singled out and treated
inappropriately - with preferential
treatment, harassed by classmates
and faculty, or ignored or spoken
over in meetings or group settings.
One of the lessons of this text is
that women's entrance and engagement with engineering was not a
linear progression. Some engineering programs, like those at RPI, Purdue, and Columbia, expanded their
programs and allowed women to
enter engineering programs or universities at various points in time
before World War II. At the same
time, these universities also guided
women toward gendered course
structures, offering courses in subjects such as "domestic arts," which
they assumed women wanted and
needed. University administrations'
motivations for admitting and educating women students remained
firmly entrenched in gendered notions of women's and men's places
in society, and even college educated women were assumed to be in
need of domestic skills only. The few
women who did enter and graduate,
however, were often still met with
the same "masculine" mentality that
they experienced while at university.
During World War II, a rush of
women entered into engineering
programs across the United States,
compared to previous years. Though
many of the women who had en tered wartime programs such as
the Curtiss-Wright Cadettes, did not
june 2018

stick with engineering after the war
ended, they created a more hospitable climate for women seeking
engineering degrees. Engineering
programs during World War II helped
to blur the strict gender lines that
previously kept women from easily
pursuing engineering degrees, but
did not allow women full access
to the same education system that
their male engineering counterparts
experienced. The double standard
of engineering education continued
when programs were specifically
designed for women.
Bix devotes three chapters to
specific case study institutions and
their varied reactions to coeducation. Chapter 4, "Coeducation via
Lawsuit: Georgia Tech," and Chapter 5, "Coeducation for Social Life:
Caltech," approach coeducation
from the students' point of view.
Male students recognized the need
for coeducation to create a better
social world at Caltech. However, the
male students and faculty treated
the incoming women as outsiders
and objectified them based on their
appearance and perceived abilities.
The third case study institution in
Chapter 6, "A Special Case: Women
at M.I.T.," was coeducational in the
nineteenth century, though women's
large-scale enrollment did not occur
until the mid-twentieth century. However, while other institutions were
debating whether to allow women
in, M.I.T. debated whether to begin
excluding women. In the mid-1950s,
M.I.T. commissioned a committee
on coeducation, and many on the
committee argued for making M.I.T.
male-only as they saw some women
students in their courses struggling
to succeed. But the larger problems
that women dealt with at M.I.T.,
such as lack of adequate housing,
added to their difficult experiences
and continued to aid the cause that
women did not belong in the masculine technical world of M.I.T..
∕

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

In all three cases, the women
at tech schools faced double standards. They were welcomed through
new admissions initiatives targeting them, but upon entering were
often treated as sexual objects or
intellectually inferior by their male
peers and faculty and provided with
inferior services like housing, making their transition to university
life more difficult. They hoped that
once they reached a "critical mass"
of women students, the invasion
rhetoric and resistance to their presence would fade as women gained
more respect.
Beyond the three major case studies found in Chapters 4, 5, and 6, Bix
provides multiple examples from
universities across the United States,
including of schools like Cornell,
University of Michigan, University of
Minnesota, and University of Colorado. Her book is well-researched and
her conclusions reverberate beyond
the university and into the role that
women play in the workplace, especially in technical positions, and in
the ways that science, math, and
engineering are taught to girls at
young ages. This book is more than
a history of women's struggles in
gaining a university-level engineering
education, it is also a history of the
changing societal notions of what
technical education is and should be
and how that education should be
accessed, taught, and used.

Reviewer Information
Renée Blackburn is a Ph.D. candidate in the History, Anthropology,
and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS) program at M.I.T.. Her
dissertation work focuses on traffic
safety and technology policy in the
second half of the twentieth century, exploring changing ideas of gender, freedom, and responsibility in
American culture. Email: rmblack@
mit.edu.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2018