ABSTRACT
For more than a decade we have been engaged, as educationalists, in trying to improve the opportunities for women in engineering, technology and related, nontraditional fields. We reached a point where we felt we could not continue without knowing more about what it is like to be a woman working as a professional engineer. Excellent research had been done on the working lives of blue-collar women (Cockburn, 1985; Coyle, 1984; Walshok, 1981) and on the lives of women in other professions (Kanter, 1977; Marshall, 1984), but there was nothing specifically on professional engineers.
