The percentage of EE grads who are female moved up a few clicks in 2002.

That’s not to say women are plentiful in the field. According to data from the engineering workforce commission of the American Association of Engineering Societies, less than 2,000 of the more than 13,000 BSEE degrees awarded last year went to women – just over 15 percent. Still, that’s the highest number of female EE grads since the peak year of 1997.

Next question, of course, is the shape of opportunities for EEs, women among them. There’s been a downturn in telecom but also a visible increase of EE hiring in the automotive and consumer appliances industries.

Opportunities in consumer products
At General Motors, Grace Lieblein, executive director for external materials and fastening and a GM recruiter for more than a decade, has seen a boom in EE opportunities. Products like the OnStar navigation system, she says, have driven a demand for both new grads and experienced EEs with the critical skills needed for vehicle telematics.

Lieblein feels that the relative scarcity of women in EE can be an advantage to the individual job-seeker. “Many corporations are trying to increase their numbers of women,” she says.

Alice Ford.

At Whirlpool (Benton Harbor, MI), “We want more women in our workforce because our target customers worldwide are women,” says Alice Ford, manager of human resources for corporate technology. New-generation appliances like Whirlpool’s Polara range/refrigerator/oven combination, and the Personal Valet that refreshes clothes at home, require more electrical engineering attention than ever before.

At Nissan’s North American Technical Center (Farmington Hills, MI), human resources analyst Sally Davis sees opportunities for EEs expanding with every enhancement the auto industry contemplates. Consumers are always eager for the latest and greatest high-tech improvements, she notes, and the things that excite them most, like navigation and entertainment systems, are rooted in EE. Davis estimates that Nissan’s complement of engineers of every discipline is roughly 10 percent female.

EE Nada Jamoua does validation work at Nissan
Nada Jamoua, who moved to the U.S. from Iraq as a teenager, had earned an associates degree in liberal arts, but it didn’t satisfy her. She decided to follow her love of math and science and the example of her engineer husband. When the youngest of her four children set off for kindergarten, she entered the EE program at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.

“I did most of my studying late at night when everyone was asleep and the house was quiet,” she says. “I was determined to get my degree.” And, in 2000, she did.

Her BSEE, plus organizational skills and the ability to juggle responsibilities, made her very attractive to Nissan (Farmington Hills, MI). The wide responsibilities she’s been given have been a primary source of job satisfaction.

Jamoua has been working on a prototype test vehicle, developing electronic enhancements for Nissan’s new Quest minivan. She works in a subgroup of the component-design team, doing validation work on the car’s controller area network and traveling to plants as necessary.

“Developing a whole test vehicle at the beginning of the program really helped me understand how the various systems interact,” she says. “I’ve been so involved in my project I really haven’t thought about my next move, but I might like to get into design.”

Her sons are amazed by what she now knows about cars, she adds with a smile.

EE Angela Schanding is a chip design team leader at Lexmark. “These days you can fit more and more on one piece of silicon,” she says.

EE Angela Schanding designs chips for Lexmark
Angela Schanding entered the University of Kentucky expecting to major in ChE. But after a co-op stint testing transistors at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Oak Ridge, TN), she decided her true interest was EE. She completed a BSEE in 1995 after working a summer at Bell Labs (Allentown, PA) and another co-op semester at Oak Ridge. “I fell in love with chip design,” she recalls.

Excited about the opportunities offered by a young company, she went to work at Lexmark (Lexington, KY) as a chip design engineer for inkjet printers. Lexmark was launched in 1991 as an IBM spin-off to make a variety of printers. After three years she was promoted to team leader, her current position. She enjoys the mix of technology and management her job demands.

Some of her most interesting technical challenges come from the scheduling of the chip design and release process. The chip is one of the earliest designs to be completed, often a year before a new printer goes into production. That can make late-cycle debugging and changes difficult. But even when the process is challenging, it’s gratifying to see a design working out, either in the lab or as part of a product, she says.

“These days you can fit more and more on one piece of silicon,” she says. “The challenge is to see how much we can add in that space with cost as a driving factor.”

She also likes to help the members of her team, which right now happens to be all male, grow in ability. Her job keeps her on top of new developments in chip design which is right where she wants to be, leading her team into the future.

EE Laura Steffek focuses on power supplies as a product design manager at TI.

EE Laura Steffek designs power supplies at TI
“I like understanding how things work,” says Laura Steffek. “I get secret pleasure from knowing things other people don’t,” she adds with a smile.

With encouragement from her EE dad, Steffek earned a BSEE from the University of Illinois in 1985. In search of adventure she relocated to Maine to work as a project engineer for Fairchild Semiconductor (South Portland, ME). While there she earned an MS in EE and computer engineering by distance learning from the University of Massachusetts (Amherst, MA).

After five years she returned to the Midwest. She joined Best Power Technology (Necedah, WI), where she designed uninterruptible power supplies for everything from desktop computers to large industrial applications.

But Best closed in 1997 and Steffek moved to the Warrensville, IL ops of Texas Instruments (TI, Dallas, TX). As a product design manager, she has continued to do power supply design. There have been “remarkable developments” in the field, she says.

Accustomed to functioning in a male-dominated environment, Steffek says she’s usually one woman among 100 men at conferences. She’d been working for ten years before she met a female engineer who wasn’t also the daughter of an engineer. “For a long time that was about the only way women got into this profession,” she says.

Of course things are better these days. “I’m delighted when I talk with young women engineers now. My story of coming into the field as one of just a few women seems so quaint to them.”

Steffek regards her career as one element in a life where family and friends are equally important. Because her husband stays home with the couple’s two boys and a girl, she’s able to cope with the sometimes unpredictable demands of her job.

“I’d love for at least one of my children to become an engineer,” she says.

EE Muna Acosta, National Semiconductor application manager: “Having worked on chips I wanted to learn the applications side.”

EE Muna Acosta: application manager at National Semi
Muna Acosta once dreamed of being an astronaut, and earned a 1988 BSEE from San Francisco State University (San Francisco, CA) with that idea in mind. But when she started work at National Semiconductor (Santa Clara, CA), she liked it so well that she decided to stay ground-based.

After some co-op experience working with City of San Francisco engineers, she joined National right out of school. She began as a product engineer, working on custom ASICs for a hard disk drive. Combining work and school, she earned her MSEE from San Jose State University (San Jose, CA) in 1992.

In 1993 she joined National’s amplifier group and the next year moved into applications engineering. “I enjoy working with customers,” she says. “Having worked on chips I wanted to learn the applications side.”

She was promoted to application manager after two years and thinks she has the best of both worlds. Because her team is only three people, she has remained immersed in hands-on technology.

Acosta likes National’s campus location and amenities, and its flexibility that lets her work from home when she needs to. As the mother of two, she finds this helpful. “My kids are too young to know what engineering is, but when I open my cell phone and tell them Mommy made a chip that makes it work, they understand that,” she says.

EE Tricia Inamine is a quality engineer at NSC, troubleshooting for customers and investigating product failures.

EE Tricia Inamine is a quality engineer at National
Tricia Inamine traveled all the way from Honolulu, HI to attend the University of Illinois, where she received her BSEE in 2001. She was meant for EE because she’s inquisitive, she says with a smile, “always wondering why things happen and how things work.”

Her interest in math and science was encouraged all along, she says, and by high school she was conditioned to compete. Other than one chauvinistic male lab partner in college, being a woman has never been much of an issue, she reports. She was attracted to National Semiconductor by seeing female engineers as part of the company’s recruiting team, and she particularly liked the people she met from the quality assurance and reliability engineering group.

Today she’s a quality engineer in that group, dividing her time between troubleshooting for customers and investigating product failures. It means she spends a lot of time in the lab, and she likes that, too.

The group’s rotation program gave her exposure to QA, manufacturing and failure analysis, all valuable to her in her present job. “Doing failure analysis and seeing real products convinced me I was where I should be and made me want to learn more. It makes you realize how much you don’t know.”

EE Lan Han, a senior analyst with Convergys, adapts to different business models as she supports customers around the world.

EE Lan Han circles the globe for Convergys
Lan Han left China to join her husband in the U.S. in 1993. But her work takes her back to her homeland, at least periodically.

Han is a senior analyst with Convergys (Cincinnati, OH), which offers a variety of billing and customer care software, systems and services to customers around the world. Han travels to support those customers, including some in China. Dealing with international customers, she’s constantly adapting to different business models.

She came to the U.S. with a BSEE from Zhejiang University (Hang Zhow, China). After taking time to learn English and adjust to the new culture, she started school again at the University of Cincinnati. She completed her MSEE in 1998, concentrating on digital imaging processes and new technology.

On graduation she joined Convergys as a systems analyst, working on requirement design and system implementation. She moved to the company’s Asia Pacific business unit in August 2002, as tech lead and onsite project manager for the first Convergys project in China. She does requirements gathering, system design, installation and configuration. She’s also training new hires in Beijing and coordinating projects.

She says her job continues to develop her technical skills and keeps her comfortable with new technology. “As we upgrade our products we upgrade ourselves,” she says. “The company always provides new training.”

Han has found Convergys a friendly and supportive place to work. About a third of her group is female, she says. A mentor has been helpful and she sees growth opportunities. Her husband is willing to care for their young sons when she’s traveling, making her job that much less stressful.

Ana Gale-Orellana of Entergy.

EE Ana Gale-Orellana: transmission engineer at Entergy
Being a transmission engineer for Entergy (New Orleans, LA) is so interesting that Ana Gale-Orellana can’t imagine doing anything else. Gale-Orellana moved to New Orleans from Honduras when she was in junior high. She’s been with the company since she received her BSEE from the University of New Orleans (New Orleans, LA) in 1998.

Her choice of a career was influenced by her interest in science and math. The relative lack of women in her field hasn’t really mattered, she says. “In school you get used to being in the minority and when you start working you don’t think about it.”

At first Gale-Orellana worked in the transmission-relay design group. Then she moved into a substation support role, advising field personnel across Entergy’s four-state service area.

“A lot of people in our group travel to lend support on site but I enjoy doing it by phone,” she says. “It’s challenging to visualize the problem, but it’s really satisfying to help fix it.”

Gale-Orellana moved from design to support to get more experience with how transmission systems work. She’s enjoyed learning more about the practice and principles of supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) technology.

“I’m feeling my way,” she says. “I’m trying to get experience in as many areas of the transmission business as I can.”

Patty Hoppe: at Entergy, a career with engineers
Patricia Hoppe is not an EE, but her career at Entergy has put her in contact with so many technical people that some has rubbed off, she says with a laugh. In fact, this past January her team awarded her an “honorary EE” when she left her position as director of business operations, safety and environment to become the company’s director of corporate safety.

Hoppe joined Entergy in 1974. She first met up with EEs while working in the customer service center of what was then Louisiana Power & Light (Thibodaux, LA). A subsequent 1981 BA in business and 1987 MBA helped propel her into semi-technical management positions. She became a right-of-way agent, then a district manager, then the overseer for operations and maintenance services across four states, before moving into the environmental and safety areas.

“I’ve been successful because brilliant engineers taught me everything I needed to know,” she says. “I was able to make decisions about transformers without being able to build one.”

Her personal management style has contributed to her success as well, she says. “People know they’ll get respect from me and they feel at ease around me. My core value is fairness: I don’t take credit for anything that wasn’t me.”

Whether focused on design, development, testing or manufacturing, these women are finding challenging and rewarding careers in the EE field. Accustomed since their college days to being in the minority in a field dominated by men, nearly all say that gender simply isn’t an issue in their work.

D/C

– Lisa Furlong is a freelance writer and editor in Center Harbor, NH.