National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics at Moffett Field, Calif., were still there in 1946. Three women similarly continued with the Civil Aeronautics Administration as aeronautical engineers, having worked up from prewar positions as draftsmen. Their duties included work on the application of regulations to existing design and construction and the examination of blueprints submitted by aircraft manufacturers. A woman aeronautical engineer, hired by the Civil Service Commission to handle wartime recruitments for the Bureau of Aeronautics in the Navy, was ultimately employed in that Bureau as an aeronautical engineer. She and another woman were the only two women with professional status as aeronautical engineers in the Navy Department at the end of 1946. The career of the second one illustrates the type of adjustment women engineers make to changes in demand. As a mathematics major, she inspected gages for airplanes and airplane engines in World War I. Following some evening courses in engineering she worked as an assistant test engineer at an aircraft plant. In 1927, she became associate editor of the Engineering Index of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, becoming contributing editor of Aero Digest in 1930. In 1936, she became a technical editor at the Wright Field Laboratory of the Army Air Forces, where she worked until her transfer to the Navy Department. Meanwhile in 1932 she had obtained a degree in aeronautical engineering (22).

The Navy also used women in related jobs in the WAVES during the war. For example, 146 college women became officers assigned to air navigation. Since engineers were not available, women with science and mathematics backgrounds, preferably with aviation or teaching experience, were trained for this work. One high school teacher of mathematics and science became a multi-engine instructor. Most of the celestial link-trainer instruction was given by women, and a number of authorities reported that women proved superior to men in this field.

The War Department also utilized the skills of women in mechanical engineering. In 1947, five women were employed there as ordnance engineers. Women with science or mathematics background were trained for other mechanical engineering jobs. One woman with a master of architecture degree, for example, ultimately became an associate mechanical engineer, working on the designing of railway hospital cars, writing specifications, making drawings and compiling information on spare parts for locomotives, and preparing patent drawings. In the Army Air Forces just after VJ-day, three women were employed as mechanical engineers in addition to four as safety engineers and four as production engineers. One of the women patent examiners working on mechanical devices in the United States Patent

Office in 1946 had a degree in engineering, and one of the technical librarians there was a woman who had had some work in engineering. One mechanical engineer and one aeronautical engineer were among the women employed in the National Bureau of Standards.

In spite of this evidence of the continued use of women as mechanical engineers in private industry and in Government, the future outlook for women in mechanical and especially in aeronautical engineering is not very favorable. More than one-third of the employment of such engineers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is in plants manufacturing machinery, iron and steel products, aircraft, and automobiles (50). Except in wartime, few women are employed by firms of this type. Moreover, the interest of returning veterans in mechanical and aeronautical engineering has been tremendous. An ex-Army pilot or mechanic who completes an aeronautical engineering course would prove stiff competition for anyone, particularly for a woman, unless she develops a specialty. With this in mind, one woman, who graduated in 1946 in aeronautical engineering, was training to become an attorney, with the idea of doing patent work, especially on aircraft instruments.

Industrial needs for mechanical engineers were expected to be above normal, because of the engineers required to produce an expanding volume and variety of consumer goods and the increasing use of engineers in research. But the supply of mechanical engineers was expected to grow more rapidly than the demand. As early as the fall of 1946 many of the larger companies already had more applications from mechanical engineers than they could accept. Some were beginning to recall the thirties when mechanical engineers, feeling the tremendous slump in production, were less well off than civil engineers, who benefited from public work programs, and chemical engineers, who were developing new products for the chemical industry which declined less than the industries that employ most of the mechanical engineers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1946 predicted that: "Because of the wartime expansion, mechanical engineers will be confronted with keener competition than other major engineering groups" (50). In aeronautical engineering, particularly, difficulty was anticipated, while heating, ventilating, refrigeration, and air conditioning were thought to offer greater promise. In power, industrial machinery, and automotive engineering, where women have been almost unknown, competition is also likely to be keen. Although no women are known to be practicing in textile engineering, this field offers promise to women who combine a flair for design with excellence in mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Alabama Polytechnic Institute (Auburn, Ala.), the Lowell (Massachusetts) Textile Institute, Texas Technological College (Lubbock, Tex.), the Rhode Island School of

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Design (Providence), and North Carolina State College (Raleigh) admit women to their special courses in this field (41).

Some of the more than 257 women undergraduate students in mechanical engineering in the fall of 1946 (see table 7, p. 5–26) who survive the course will undoubtedly find work of their choice. But, it is possible that some, at least, barring unforeseen developments, will probably have to seek jobs in engineering writing, editing, library, or secretarial work rather than in plant engineering.

WOMEN IN ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

Of the 53,267 electrical engineers reported as employed in the United States in 1940, only 164 or 0.3 percent were women. More than half of them were employed in the Northeastern States (43).

Ninety percent of all electrical engineers are employed in private industry, according to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (49), and most of the remaining are in Government service. Some, of course, are in teaching. The number of self-employed is negligible. Principal private employers are utilities, such as electric power companies and electric railways. These employ more than one-fourth of all the electrical engineers. Manufacturers of electrical machinery and equipment, as well as of electrical supplies of all kinds, commercial and household, employ about one-fifth; radio and other communication systems employ over one-sixth.

Of the dozen women listed in the 1941 Who's Who in Engineering, only one was an electrical engineer (11). After college graduation, she taught mathematics, then worked for 6 years on computations for a communications company, being placed in charge of calculations for the transmission and protection department. At the end of World War I, she entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she secured her master's degree in electrical engineering. After further computing experience and 2 years as a professor of physics at Istanbul Women's College in Turkey, she has since been employed as an electrical engineer by a large electrical machinery manufacturing company working on special problems in power transmission. She has invented a calculator and is responsible for another patent in electrical power transmission.

Only three other women had received degrees in electrical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology before World War II. One became an electrical engineer with a radio manufacturer; another was a college professor of physics and mathematics; another worked as a technical librarian.

One woman electrical engineer who graduated before the war from Ohio State University was employed with a radio manufac

turer; another from the University of Missouri was reported on drafting work in the East.

A 1925 Stanford graduate in electrical engineering worked as a consulting engineer with her husband, also an electrical engineer, then became plant electrical engineer with an aircraft company in 1938; at the outbreak of World War II she was supervising more than 20 research engineers on production work (22). Another woman, formerly employed as an electrical engineer by a western power company, during the war became the first woman faculty member of Cooper Union School of Engineering. A woman who was graduated in engineering by a Midwest school in 1929 was employed by Army

Ordnance during the war, after experience as an engineer with a lighting company, as a sales engineer, and as a draftsman on a municipal job. Several women wartime graduates of Massachusetts Institute of Technology were employed by electrical manufacturing companies. and one became an illuminating engineer with an electrical utility. A number of Chinese women trained in the United States have returned to China to contribute to their country's progress in electrification.

Although very few women have received degrees in electrical engineering, a number have entered the field through experience, usually coupled with college training in mathematics and physics. A Hunter College graduate in statistics, with a minor in physics, in 1946 was preparing pamphlets explaining the use of radar equipment, as a technical assistant in an engineering laboratory. Another 1941 graduate with a major in chemistry and a minor in physics took a job as laboratory assistant in an instrument manufacturing company upon graduation. Four years later she became the first woman to hold the title of engineer in that company, because of her design work in optics which increased the accuracy of a gunsight used during the war (1).

In the WAVES, 121 women officers with a background in science or mathematics were trained for work in radio, radar, or electronics, although none of them had engineering degrees. However, most of them were trained only as aids to engineers, examining and testing vacuum tubes. (See p. 5-52.)

In 1946, the Navy employed 13 women as engineers in its Bureau of Ships, a reduction from the 31 employed just before VJ-day. Most of them were radio or electrical engineers. Some of these had received degrees in engineering, like the men used on this work before the war; others with science degrees were trained on the job. Four women radio engineers were also employed in December 1946 in the Naval Research Laboratory, 1 at the third professional level. One was also employed at the Boston field station of the Laboratory. Two women radio engineers were working for the Bureau of Standards in 1947.

Although during the war period, electronics engineering (the science of the vacuum tube), in which some 10,000 engineers were then estimated to be employed, was described as a field in which women should be equally as successful as men (24), the tremendous interest of returning servicemen in this specialty and the large number of technicians developed in the armed forces will make the competition unusually keen for future openings, although this field is expanding. However, the first woman to receive an electrical engineering degree from Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1947 is a specialist in this field.

The first woman engineer graduated by the University of Delaware, with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1946, was placed in the aircraft industry, in which competition with men is also likely to