SWE members and other attendees from across the globe joined the Society of Women Engineers’ Founders Day event on May 6 in-person or via livestream on SWE’s YouTube channel. The event, held in honor of SWE’s 75th anniversary, took place at the university at which the Society was founded — The Cooper Union in New York City.
In-person attendees met at The Great Hall, which was the site of early workers’ rights campaigns and served as a venue for the NAACP, the women’s suffrage movement, and the American Red Cross. The evening featured a keynote from astronaut and social media influencer Kellie Gerardi, followed by a panel of SWE leaders who discussed the Society’s past, present, and future.
Gerardi, a bioastronautics researcher, science communicator, payload specialist, and author, is the director of human spaceflight operations for the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences (IIAS). In 2023, she completed a space flight aboard a Virgin Galactic rocket ship as the first woman to fly on a commercial mission to space. “My personal path to space was unconventional. Which is to say, the path did not exist,” she said. There was “no option for a civilian researcher to be sent to space on a dedicated science mission on a commercial spacecraft until my research institute sent me.”
Gerardi emphasized that her astronautics career required a delicate balance between an unassuming nature and a belief in her abilities. “There was never the ego of ‘Oh, of course I’ll go to space, I deserve it.’ But there was the quiet confidence of, ‘Well, if I work hard enough, for long enough, why not me?’ And that mindset — that combination of humility and confidence — makes all the difference in the world,” she said.
Her research during her spaceflight focused on determining how free fluids behave in zero gravity, how space flights affect women’s bodies using a bio-monitor called Astroskin, and how long-duration space flight affects the functioning of insulin monitors. Gerardi explained that doctors often tell diabetes patients that they can be anything they want except an astronaut. “You can probably tell by now that the minute I heard the ‘can’t be done’ part of that doctors’ script, I dedicated myself to ensuring that it becomes out-of-date for the next generation, and that they know not even the sky is a limit on their dreams.”
She also drew inspiration from her 7-year-old daughter, Delta. “When I flew, we’d had fewer than 100 female astronauts, but in Delta’s mind, flying to space was just another thing girls do. And that’s pretty profound because if you tell me to close my eyes and picture an astronaut right now, I’m still not picturing someone who looks like me. But if you ask my daughter, she’s drawing a girl. Actually, she’s most likely drawing herself.”
In 2026, Gerardi will return to space on a new spacecraft, leading an all-woman research team. “Because what do you do when someone says you can’t do something?” she asked. “You do it twice and take pictures.”
Looking back
FY25 SWE President Karen Roth moderated a panel discussion following the keynote. Panelists included Jill Tietjen, P.E, F.SWE, past president of SWE (1991-92); Inaas Darrat, SWE president-elect (2025-26); Troy Eller English, SWE archivist; and Lizelle Ocfemia, SWE Cooper Union Section president.
Members can watch the entire event for a limited time at the SWE Advance Learning Center.
Tietjen made an impassioned plea for women engineers and scientists to continue sharing their stories and promoting women’s accomplishments in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. “Women are not written into history,” she said. “They are invisible and marginalized, and their contributions are minimized. It’s important to acknowledge the accomplishments of these amazing women on whose shoulders we stand.”
Eller English delivered a brief history of SWE, from its founding by a few dozen women and a handful of allied men to a robust organization with more than 50,000 members, a milestone reached this year. She said in 1961, when SWE had fewer than 700 members and women earned only 0.4% of engineering bachelor’s degrees, SWE established its first headquarters at the United Engineering Building in New York City after being invited to do so by the Founder Engineering Societies: the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Institute of Mining Engineers, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and the predecessor of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. “They were invited to come,” Eller English said. “That was a sign that SWE was going to survive.” SWE hosted its first national conference in 1964, attracting more than 500 attendees.
By the 1970s, SWE’s membership had grown to more than 1,100. By the end of the decade, 9.7% of all bachelor’s degrees in engineering were earned by women. SWE initiated corporate partnerships and professional development courses and advocated for the Equal Rights Amendment during the decade.
Growth in the 1980s and 1990s came primarily from student members, and this brought financial challenges. “They paid less in dues but needed a lot of support from SWE,” Eller English said. Yet this was the time when SWE completed its first major research project on women in engineering and began reaching out to a more diverse audience. Members testified on Capitol Hill for the first time.
“In the early 2000s, SWE started thinking even bigger,” Eller English said. The Society hired Betty Shanahan, F.SWE, a longtime member and a life member, as its first executive director. Under her leadership, SWE launched its Corporate Partnership Council, stepped up its advocacy efforts, and increased its corporate-sponsored scholarships so more women could study engineering.
And the 2020s are another transformative period for SWE, Eller English said, with more than 15% of SWE’s membership now coming from outside the United States and more members and program offerings than ever had before.
Moving forward
President-elect Darrat focused on the future, specifically noting that women engineers will be needed to fill the gap between the number of engineers graduating and the number needed globally. And those engineers will be working with transformative technologies. “Our next space race is AI and sustainability,” Darrat said. Both artificial intelligence and ecological sustainability cut across all disciplines of engineering, she said, creating many new opportunities for women in engineering and technology.
Ocfemia told the audience that as a Cooper Union student, she had studied a variety of innovations. In her first year, she joined a team working on self-driving cars, focusing on the vehicles’ sensors. She then spent a summer in Iceland using autonomous drones to study active volcanoes. As a junior, she used signal processing and machine learning to detect Alzheimer’s disease from audio recordings of patients talking to their doctors. For her senior showcase, she researched how to use brain waves to control a mechanical arm.
She recently defended her master’s thesis about using machine learning to classify little-known symptoms of cancer called cachexia, or involuntary weight loss and muscle degeneration. Ocfemia is graduating with a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree that she earned in four years.
SWE Executive Director and CEO Karen Horting, CAE, concluded the evening, saying, “The message I am leaving with tonight is: Yes, you can.”
