Today, Samuel Florman at Smith College. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Samuel Florman's book
Blaming Technology came out some time ago,
in 1981. Florman is a noted engineer and writer. In
the book, he tells about joining a seminar at Smith
College on the role of technology in modern
society. And I weigh his experience with the women
at Smith, against our world, a quarter of a century
later.
He wrote of sipping sherry with these bright young
upper-crust women. They were, he said, "not vapid
in the way of country gentry. Far from it. They
were alert and sensible, well-trained in
mathematics and the sciences." These women were
superbly equipped to become important players in
the field of engineering.
But he also saw that it would be a hopeless cause
to draw these women into engineering. They weren't
about to take engineering seriously. He explained
that conviction by telling a story about the great
scholar, public servant, and US President, Herbert
Hoover. Hoover became acquainted with a lady on a
voyage across the Atlantic. Late in the trip, he
mentioned that he was a mining engineer. "Why,"
said the lady, "I thought you were a gentleman."
However, Florman was not so simplistic as to think
the Smith students' lack of interest in engineering
was simple snobbery. It dawned on him that their
real interest lay in gaining their own access to
the some of the power controlled by a male
establishment. They did not see engineering as a
career that would make them powerful.
The women's movement, he opined, was "more
concerned about battering on closed doors than
[with] walking through those that are open." And
bright women truly were battering down the walls
that'd once limited their access to law, medicine,
and business.
So where has all this led? Smith College has come
to recognize the wisdom of walking through the door
already open. It now offers a degree in engineering
science -- with a web page showing young women in
hard hats smiling at the camera. Smith also does
something quite rare. It offers its students a
minor in engineering as well -- an
opportunity to better complete a liberal arts
education.
Yet the Smith program is a small one. Indeed, women
make up only twenty percent of engineering students
across the US, even today. In law schools, on the
other hand, that number has reached parity at
around fifty percent.
And I go back to Florman's not-so-outdated
analysis. He finishes with a stinging sentence. He
says that the dream of equality "will never be
realized as long as women would rather supervise
the world than help build it." I like that, not so
much as it applies to women, but as it applies to
us all.
"Leadership" has become the new buzzword -- a few
more years of overuse and we'll all be
shrinking from it. Maybe then we'll catch on to the
fact (as Smith College has) that the world truly is
built from the bottom up -- that being part of that
creative under-world is how any of us carve our
presence upon history.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
S. C. Florman, Blaming Technology: The Irrational
Search for Scapegoats. New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1981. Chapter 11.
Electrical Engineering Student Divya Gangumalla
with a Fluorescence microscope in the UH
Environmental Engineering lab. (photo by Jeff
Shaw.)
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-2003 by John H.
Lienhard.
