Georgia Tech is known for its engineering field for more than a century. It is home for so
many famous alumnus, such as former President Jimmy Carter and the head of Wal-Mart Mike
Duke. Georgia Tech’s strong engineering and computer science field has attracted many
students from around the world. However, another reputation that Georgia Tech is known for is
the ratio. Students around me, especially male students, have always complained how horrible
the ratio here at Tech. So if we have it pretty bad now, I was curious of how horrible it must
have been in the past. This led me to go to Georgia Tech’s Archive and looked for The
Blueprint, Georgia Tech’s annual yearbook. I thought that the Blueprint would be a great
evidence of the horrible ratio. I was flipping pages and the results did not surprise me. I found
out that the engineering pages had been filled out with all males doing engineering activities,
while females only made their appearances on the Beauty page.
Historical Context
Georgia Institute of Technology, or it was called The Georgia School of Technology in
that era, first was opened in the fall of 1888. The first class of students at Georgia Tech was in
fact small and homogeneous. What more fascinating is that the educational options were very
limited. The only degree offered at that time was a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical
Engineering and no elective classes were available to the students. Only eighty-five students
signed up on the first registration day and the number of students enrolled only increased to a
total of 129 by next year. The first student to register was William H. Glenn, later his name was
used to name after one of the student dorms at Tech.
The school had its first females student enrolling in the School of Commerce in 1917,
after twenty-nine years the school first opened its doors. This was a surprise to everyone
because the state legislature did not official authorize that women are allowed to attend schools
until 1920. Anna Teitebaum Wise became the first female to graduate from Tech in 1919. She
then went on to become the school’s first female faculty in 1920. Unfortunately, the School of
Commerce came to an end in 1931. This was sad news because women did not get an
opportunity to enroll at Georgia Tech until 1952. But the lacking of females period at Tech lasted
about eighteen years when the Board of Regents voted to allow women back to enroll at Tech.
And from that time on, the number of females enrolling at Tech slowly increased every year.
(Wikipedia)
To help us better understand the context of Georgia Tech’s lack of females at the early
times, It’s important to look at the history of women in the United States. In the beginning of the
20th century, most colleges took the right approach and had became coeducational. However,
coeducational did not mean equal opportunity in education at that time. In 1918, the
Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education created a two track system:
primarily males toward college preparatory course works and other track provided vocational
training. Girls were encouraged to take the vocational track. In fact, girls with strong academic
background were required to take domestic science or home economics. Therefore, despite the
increasing power of women in society, girls were limited into four categories when it comes to
choosing their occupations: secretarial, nursing, teaching, or motherhood. Then in 1974, the
passage of the Women’s Educational Equity Act (WEEA) provided the support for assisting
schools in the recruitment of girls for math, science, and athletic programs. (Madigan).
Theoretical frameworks
We can see that there was gender inequality in the 1954 Georgia Tech’s Blueprint. This
went along with the early theory which focused on female underachievement in the formal
education system. Dr.Catherine Hill wrote in her book “Why So Few” that girls’ achievements
and interests in math and science are shaped by the environment around them. There is an
issue of how we view our own abilities, an area of cultural factors, that limit girl’s interests in
engineering. Some blame in on their intelligence. Early theorists suggested that female students
were not as intelligent as male students. Of course, this theory was opposed by so many
people. The belief about intelligence has changed Carol Dweck who is a social and
developmental psychologist at Stanford University had an interview with Dr.Hill to discuss the
topic. She said during an interview that
“So often, when something comes quickly to a student, we say, “Oh, you’re really
good at this.” The message there is, “I think you’re smart when you do something
that doesn’t require any effort or you haven’t challenged yourself.” Someone said
to me recently, “In your culture, struggle is a bad word,” and I thought “That’s
right.” We talk about it as an unfortunate thing, but when you think about a career
in science or math or anything, of course you struggle. That’s the name of the
game! If you’re going to discover something new or invent something new, it’s a
struggle. So I encourage educators to celebrate that, to say: “Who had a fantastic
struggle? Tell me about your struggle!” (Hill)
What we can learn from Dweck’s research findings is that individuals with a fixed
mindset are “susceptible to a loss confidence when they encounter challenges, because they
believe that if they are truly smart, things will come easily to them.If they have to work hard at
something, they tend to question their abilities and lose confidence, and they are likely to give
up because they believe they are “not good” at the task and, because their intelligence is fixed,
will never be good at it.” (Hill) As I mentioned above from the historical context section that the
women were not allowed back at Tech until 1951. After they came back, there must have been
certain challenges that they have to face as females. I have looked at the 1954 Blueprint and
found out that none of the female students were on the engineering or academic-related pages.
Those female students, according to Dweck, must have had fixed mindset that they were not
ready or they were not good enough to be in the engineering field. They probably viewed
engineering as a born-to-be field.
Stereotype threat is also another interesting framework. Stereotype threat is “a negative
stereotype affects women’s and girls’ performance and aspirations in math and science through
a phenomenon.” Dr. Hill also claimed that we use stereotypes as “cognitive crutches” in
situations in which we do not know how to judge performance. Research shows that “even
individuals who do not personally endorse beliefs that men are better than women at math are
likely to be aware that these beliefs exist in the culture and expect that others will treat them
according to these beliefs.” In 1954 men were not necessary better than women but the
stereotypes posted a threat that prevented women from entering the engineering field. Some
women might not personally believe that men are better than women at math and science were
likely aware that these beliefs were valid in the culture and therefore “expect that others will
treat them according to these beliefs” (Hill)
Female students were found under the section called Beauty in the 1954 Blueprint. Yes,
there was a separate section for just female students in the yearbook. In the book Practices of
Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Cartwright and Sturken wrote, “[g]ender has been a
crucial aspect of concepts of the gaze. In this history of art, the fact that paintings were for the
most part gear toward male viewers, as art historian Griselda Pollock has noted in her work on
modernity and the spaces of femininity, had as much to do with the commerce of art as it did
with the social roles and sexual stereotypes of men and women. (Sturken and Cartwright,
p.123) In the 1954 yearbook the pictures of women in the Beauty section were taken as a
beauty portrait shot. It had a glamorous Hollywood feel to the picture. Most female students did
not look right through the camera in their shots. Almost all of them looked to the side as if they
were looking at themselves in the mirrors. Cartwright and Sturken explained, “[t]here has been
throughout the history of art a convention of depicting women gazing at themselves in mirrors,
with their bodies turned toward the presumed spectator of the painting. The use of the mirror as
a prop serves two functions. Mirrors were used by painters such as Titian to offer another view
in the image, to create multiple planes within a painting that could be seen by the stationary
spectator. The mirror is also a code for femininity.” (Sturken and Cartwright, p.124)
Another major influence of the Beauty section is the representation of film and television
at that time. Popular culture was a big part of why most female students thought that they did
not belong in the engineering field. For example, the gendered nature of toys told us that girls
liked to play with dolls and boys like to play with action figures.Women on tv and movie in 50s70s were presented in the following ways: dumb blondes, dangerously flirty brunettes, tarts,
nuns or mothers.(Mulvey) Laura Mulvey explained in her book Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema that women often played the emotional roles in movies. They cared, emphasized,
supported and eventually fell in love. Even a successful career women irrationally fell in love
with men and gave it all up for them. At that time, you would not see a whole lot of ordinary,
sensible, clever, strong or ambitious women. (Mulvey) Mulvey then claimed that this sort of
stereotyping might arise from the obvious biases or the interests of the men who was in charge
of the media. But if we look deeper, Mulvey stated that the stereotyping lied deeper in our
culture, so that “a pretty blonde woman with a large bosom has become a convenient and
powerful sign for “sexual threat”, and showing one adds immediate layers of meaning that just
do not have to be spelled out in words.” (Mulvey)
According to Mulvey, narratives of women in movies and television were also important
for how women think of themselves. Mulvey explained that the stories that are commonly
narrated in films and TV shows usually had women as objects in narratives and only rarely
subjects, “[t]hey are there to be looked at, to be the object of the male gaze, while all the central
characters, and the point of view of the film itself, very often, are male.” (Mulvey) People who
worked on the Blueprint probably had the similar ideas that women were there to be looked at.
Mulvey concluded that “narratives can have the power to convey values (or ideologies) to
audiences in particularly sneaky ways, by pretending to be ‘neutral’ or ‘realistic’ while quietly
privileging one dominant view.” (Mulvey)
Conclusion
We have come so far from the era where female students were not allowed on Georgia
Tech’s campus. Now female students at Tech are strong, smart, and independent. If you look at
the 2013 edition Blueprint, you can see that there are numerous female students who are
actively involved in the engineering field. In fact, the yearbook displays the equal number of
female and male students in the academic section. We even have a program called Women in
Engineering dedicated to recruiting smart female students into engineering majors. Once
enrolled, the program fosters an environment that encourages curiosity, creativity, and
intellectual and personal growth. We are starting to see that the smart female engineering
students received some attention from the media. For example, there is a Barbie Engineer
where she is dressed in a binary code pattern and carries a smartphone and a Bluetooth
headset. Therefore, I am hopeful that in the future we will see more strong females who are
smart and have successful engineering career in the media.
Reference
Wikipedia. “History of Georgia Tech.” Wikipedia. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia., 13 April.
2014.
Madigan, Jennifer. “The Education of Girls and Women in the United States: A Historical
Perspective.” Mcrcad. Mcrcad Website., 13 Nov. 2013. Web. 13 April. 2014.
Hill Catherine. “Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.”
AAUW. AAUW Empowering Women Since 1881., Feb 2010. Web. 13 April. 2014.
Cartwright Lisa and Sturken Marita. “Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture.”
Oxford University Press. 2009. Book. 13 April. 2014.
Mulvey Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Terpconnect. Umd.edu., 1999. Web. 13
April. 2014.