Engineering Education Blog: Opening of the First Medical School for Women
by Alice Agogino
closeAuthor: Alice Agogino
Name: Alice Agogino
Email: agogino@berkeley.edu
Site: http://www.me.berkeley.edu/faculty/agogino/
About: Alice M. Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and is affiliated faculty at the Haas School of Business in their Operations and Information Technology Management Group. Her research interests include: community-based design; sustainable engineering; intelligent learning systems; information retrieval and data mining; multiobjective and strategic product design; nonlinear optimization; probabilistic modeling; intelligent control and manufacturing; sensor validation, fusion and diagnostics; wireless sensor networks; multimedia and computer-aided design; design databases; design theory and methods; MEMS/NEMS synthesis and computer-aided design; artificial intelligence and decision and expert systems; and gender/ethnic equity.
She has served in a number of administrative positions at UC Berkeley, including Chair of the Faculty Senate, Associate Dean of Engineering and Faculty Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost in Educational Development and Technology. Prof. Agogino also served as Director for Synthesis, an NSF-sponsored coalition of eight universities with the goal of reforming undergraduate engineering education, and continues as PI for the NEEDS (www.needs.org) and SMETE.ORG digital libraries of courseware in science, mathematics, engineering and technology.
Prof. Agogino received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Mexico (1975), M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering (1978) from the University of California at Berkeley and Ph.D. from the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford University (1984). Prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she worked in industry for Dow Chemical, General Electric and SRI International. She has authored over 150 scholarly publications; has won numerous teaching, best paper and research awards; and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). At NAE she served on the Committee on Engineering Education, working on the Technologically Speaking and the Engineer 2020 projects. She is currently a member of the National Research Council's Board on Education and the Women in Academic Science Engineering Committee. She has supervised 66 MS projects/theses, 26 doctoral dissertations and numerous undergraduate researchers.See Authors Posts (232) · November 1st, 2007 · Add a Comment
Today in History - November 1, 1848 - opening of the Boston Female Medical College, the first medical school for women in the world. Twelve women enroll in the first class and graduate in 1850. The Boston medical establishment’s reaction was immediately condemnatory, claiming women had insufficient stamina to deal with the tension of medical practice. A total of 98 women earned their degrees from the college over the next two decades, along with a larger number of midwives and other allied professionals. Today, women make up over 50% of the medical school students and women students are reaching parity in bioengineering and biomedical engineering as well - yet they are still less than 10% of the medical and engineering faculty.
A recent study of the National Academies titled Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering found unintentional biases were a major contributor to the low number of women on our science and engineering faculties. Women face barriers to hiring and promotion in research universities in many fields of science and engineering — a situation that deprives the United States of an important source of talent as the country faces increasingly stiff global competition in higher education, science and technology, and the marketplace. Eliminating gender bias in universities requires immediate, overarching reform and decisive action by university administrators, professional societies, government agencies, and Congress. The report was motivated by former Harvard President Larry Summers’ speculation that the low numbers of women in science and engineering are because women don’t want to work hard enough and that there may be a biological basis. His discounted discrimination as a tertiary factor. Seems a bit like “back to the future” when considering the medical community’s response to the opening of the first medical school for women. The National Academy report emphasized that both men and women need to be educated as how to achieve gender equity in science and engineering. See the Engineering Pathway’s Engineering Diversity site and our resources on gender equity.
Also on this date, Edison files to patent his electric lamp in 1879, the U.S. detonates first H-bomb in 1952, the Mackinac Bridge opens as world’s largest suspension bridge of its day in 1957, and the Arecibo Observatory opens in 1963.
Tags: BioEngineering and Biomedical Engineering · Broadening Participation · Gender Equity · General Engineering, Engineering Science
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