The first graduate from the engineering department received his degree in 1874. It would take 48 years for the first woman to graduate with an engineering degree in 1922. I have not been able to find any evidence that any other woman might have tried her hand at engineering at Swarthmore but just did not finish with a degree in the field. Therefore, Elsa Palmer Jenkins is the first woman to graduate with an engineering degree from Swarthmore. Currently, a total of 148 women have graduated up through year 2001 with engineering degrees from Swarthmore.

     Some of the earliest women engineers were very successful in their jobs, like Ruth Kern and Eleanor Allen. In some ways, their successful careers might have happened faster than expected because soon after entering the workplace WWII started and men were drafted and sent to fight the war. These women might have benefited from these job openings and it helped in their earning respect from their colleagues. It also seems that Swarthmore was respectful and supportive of their choices of the usual major for females by what I read in yearbook captions. In many cases, it seemed to these women were honored in a small way for being the only woman in the engineering department and sticking with it.

Higher Education

• 4 women received a M.S. in engineering, 2 of these women received a Ph.D. in engineering
• 3 women had some other advanced education in engineering
• Many women got degrees in other fields but I did not calculate how many

Employment

• 23 women out of the 33 (70%) from the 1922 to 1979 period had at some point held a engineering job
  

• Starting in 1977, there has been at least one women engineer in each graduating class.
• The most women engineering graduates was 11 in 1984.
• The highest percentage of women graduates was in 2000 with 48%.

"It is becoming more and more widely recognized that there is a place for women in engineering; a field which has until recently been the almost exclusive province of men. One would guess, moreover, that the time is not far off, if it has not already arrived, when women engineers will be held in the same regard by their colleagues and the public as are women in the practice of medicine."

     However, in year 2002, the number of women graduating with engineering degrees is still much lower than women entering medicine. I believe that the numbers of men and women are about equal now in medicine.
The article continues,

"We asked these eleven women to tell us something about their activities since graduation, and although the sample is small, we can draw some conclusions. The majority of them worked in engineering for an average of about 2 ½ years after graduation. Two have been continuously involved in engineering since receiving their degree. Four have pursued advanced studies, but none has earned an advanced degree. Those who gave up engineering after a few years appear to have done so in order to raise families and those who married have, on the average, about two children. Half of them meet their husbands at Swarthmore."

I disagree with this article because from my data is seems that six women were involved in engineering after getting their degree, these include: Ruth Kern, Eleanor Allen, Olive Hendricks Mayer, Janet Carpenter Deckert, Lisabeth Cromwell Lieberman, and Tobe Weinshenker Alterman.

     In addition to this article, there was a picture of the five women currently (being 1961) majoring in engineering. Only 2 of the five women ended up graduating with an engineering degree. What field did these three women change to? I have not been able to research this yet.

     Some of my last thoughts for this project include: If the data was all compiled from the second half of women engineers, it would be interesting to see how the overall trend of higher education and employment has changed. Also, it would be interesting to compare how many women remained in engineering in the first half of the group compared to how many in the second half. If there is a difference, to see what the reasons were for these women not continuing their employment in engineering. Is it because they stopped to raise children, did they lose interest in engineering, or found a better paying field?

     Through this project we might not be able to get the whole story of these women engineers but it helps us to get a glimpse to what they might have overcome to get to where they were. We can appreciate how far we have come, even if enrollment in the engineering department is not 50/50.