ABSTRACT
In the 1964 Greek movie Miss Director, the female protagonist temporarily replaces her former mentor and engineering professor as manager of a large construction company. Falling in love with her handsome male assistant, she believes that, as a civil engineer, she cannot court him until she has recovered the femininity she sacrificed to her technical studies. He is in love with her too, but his respect for her and the engineering profession paralyzes him to act on his tender feelings. The comedy’s scenario explores the dilemmas faced by a young Greek woman engineer questioning the loss of her femininity.2 If in the 1920s, educated women’s burden had been to prove their ability to be competent and qualified in education and on the job, in the 1960s the onus shifted to their ability to be attractive as well. Being both female and a manager of a private construction company was considered to be a contradiction in terms. In the period between 1890 and 1964 when the movie was made only 4.1 per cent of all engineering and architectural graduates were women many of whom sought refuge in the public sector, where work was more steady and secure, rather than in the private sector.3 The Greek film marked a moment when a woman engineer on the construction site was eccentric enough as a comic stage set to explore some enduring gender stereotypes. Since the making of Miss Director the position of women engineers has changed dramatically. Today women engineers represent twenty per cent of all engineers in Greece, and this percentage is increasing. Women are still more likely to work in the public sector than their male counterparts, but today a great number of women also are employed in the kind of private-sector work portrayed in the 1964 film.
