The lead headline in the March 1961 issue of the SWE Newsletter proclaimed: “81% of Male Bosses Won’t Hire Gal Engineers: Remainder Take Dim View of Middle Management Spots.” Reprinted from Industrial Relations News, the article outlined what managers believed to be women’s deficiencies as technical employees: higher rates of absenteeism and turnover, sensitivity to criticism, disloyalty to their employers, and disinterest in their work.
The eye-catching headline wasn’t an abstract statistic to members of the Society of Women Engineers; it was the reality of their job searches.
Women engineers experienced a rapid reversal of fortunes in the 1970s, however. A series of presidential executive orders and laws in the 1960s and 1970s under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon compelled American government agencies and contractors to engage in affirmative action, trying to hire women, people from historically underrepresented groups, and people with disabilities. Likewise, the nascent Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, created by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, had increasing authority to investigate employment discrimination.
The results of these government interventions were visible within SWE. An increasing number of companies placed paid recruiting ads in the SWE Newsletter throughout the 1970s, a rare feature in earlier decades. Even more sent job postings to headquarters, which members of SWE’s Career Information Center committee sent to individual members who requested help finding employment.
While the job market did improve for women engineers, affirmative action and the EEOC were not a panacea. “There is a great demand for women engineers, so the letters (from employers) say,” noted CIC Chair Darlyne Fuller in a November 1973 letter to SWE President Naomi McAfee. But, she lamented, the content of reports from some women applicants “makes me wonder if some letters may be token.” The 1977 CIC chairman, Helen Grenga, echoed the concern in her annual report, positing: “It is quite possible that many are simply meeting some EEO requirement by sending us their listings.”
Beyond the questionable sincerity of companies, women engineers faced opposition from men amid challenging economic conditions and rising unemployment in the 1970s. Expecting to be the only woman in the room during a forthcoming class seminar on women in engineering, SWE student member Kathy Kessel asked the Society for talking points to counter expected pushback from the men in her class about government-mandated diversity hiring quotas, among other things.
“The consequences of affirmative action are twofold: one, inequities of the past are being corrected; and two, some degree of ‘backlash’ is beginning to build. The white male is no happier today about someone else receiving preferential treatment than we women have been in the past,” replied SWE Vice President Arminta Harness in an Oct. 5, 1975, letter. “I can add with certainty that those of us who were told repeatedly by employers in the past that ‘We don’t hire women as long as a man needs a job,’ have no pangs of conscience about taking advantage of today’s affirmative action environment.”
