Roberta Banaszak Gleiter, F.SWE, was one of the top students in her class when she graduated with a chemical engineering degree from Purdue in 1960, but faced such openly hostile recruiters that she gave up on her career. Instead, she stayed home and raised a family for nearly two decades, until her husband pointed out an article in the newspaper.
Bonita Campbell, Ph.D., a longtime SWE member and engineering faculty at California State University, Northridge, was looking for participants for a career facilitation project launched in 1978 and funded by the National Science Foundation to update the credentials of women who had underutilized their degrees in STEM. The reentry program revived Gleiter’s professional aspirations and led to a decades-long engineering career and, eventually, her tenure as SWE’s FY99 president.
Over the years, the Society has worked to provide reentry programming, scholarships, and support for women with circuitous pathways into engineering. “What I thought that I had lost, and felt so bad about,” Gleiter recalled during a 2010 SWE oral history interview, “was actually there, ready to be retrieved.”
– Troy Eller English, SWE Archivist
