Pioneers break molds. They challenge the
status quo. They exceed expectations.
They swim upstream. The women in the South Dakota Mines class of 1969
are no exception.
For years the male dominated demographic
at Mines has mirrored the science and engineering professions. The university has had women students since the school’s
founding in 1885, but actual graduates were sporadic prior to the 1960s. History
began to change in 1965 as the largest group of freshman women to date
registered that year. Four years later Mines witnessed the largest cohort of
women graduating when 10 bachelor’s degrees were granted in the sciences,
mathematics, and engineering. Many of the women who attended Mines in the
1960’s lead amazing careers, we caught up with three of them in this article.
“We went there because it was a very good
school and didn’t think about it being a guy’s school even though women were a
big minority,” remembers Kathy (Kutcher) Stechmann (Math 69). “We were there to
get a degree, but also to have fun, and we did both of those things.”
“I found Mines to be very welcoming,” says
Dianne Dorland, Ph.D. (ChE 69 MS ChE 70).
“I worked to get along with my male colleagues and I just enjoyed those
years in college.”
Being at a school with so few other women
was intimidating at first, and not without some challenges.
“I think there weren’t more women at the
time because it had a reputation of being rigorous academically and male-dominated
and perhaps women felt that they couldn’t go through that. However, that wasn’t
accurate and the women in our class did well,” Diane (Gleason) Hammond (Math
69) recalls.
Hammond, Stechmann and Dorland dove
headfirst into the college life, getting involved in extracurriculars (there
were no sororities), tutoring, and working on campus.
“It was a lot cheaper to go to school then,
but I still had to make my own way,” says Dorland. “I ironed shirts and painted for $1.25 per
hour. Then in my sophomore year, I began to work for the Institute of
Atmospheric Sciences. I got to fly around in the airplanes that seeded clouds
and eventually got my master’s degree working on an analysis of liquid water
content in clouds.”
Hammond and Stechmann were also the first
women residence hall advisors. The school didn’t have dormitory space on campus
for women until they were juniors when the top floor of Dake Hall was
converted. They jumped on the opportunity to be advisors and enjoyed taking
part in Mines longstanding traditions.
“Walking into a class with only men
inspired me to work harder,” Stechmann says. “But in the first couple weeks, it
was intimidating. Most of the time, the guys were great and always willing to
help us with finding our classrooms and telling us what the professors were
like and what kind of tests they gave."
However, things were still slow to change
in the business world. At the end of their senior year, when companies came to campus
to interview students, a couple of companies interviewed them for jobs like
‘statistical typists’, while the men were getting more serious, high-paying
offers.
“It was very frustrating,” Stechmann says.
“They weren’t interviewing us for the same level positions that they were
interviewing the guys. I doubt that any men were interviewed to become
typists,” says Stechmann. After complaining to a campus official Stechmann says
the group realized there was little they could do to fix the unfair situation
at the time.
But in following years, this group of
women of the Mines class of 1969 were part of an initial wave creating change.
These women credit their time at Mines as an integral part of the successful
careers they went on to lead.
After graduation, Hammond moved to
Minneapolis and landed a position in market research at General Mills. She got
her MBA at the University of Houston, and then worked at the University of
Denver doing research studies for corporate and government entities, including
socio-economic analyses for some of the largest mines and power plants built
during the 1970s and 80s. She ended her
career as Director of Planning and Public Policy for a major telecom company. Her
time at Mines taught her the enduring values of perseverance, hard work, and
patience. “Not only did I learn math,
but I also learned that if you kept at something, you’d eventually be where you
want to be,” says Hammond.
Stechmann went into education after
finishing her math degree at Mines. She taught in Minneapolis for 34 years and
was widely recognized in her district and by parents as an exceptional math teacher.
She also was highly renowned as a mentor of new teachers beginning their
careers. “I was in a field that had mostly guys in it, and I knew I could do
just as well as they could. I didn’t think about it until, after 20 years of
teaching math, someone asked me ‘is it uncomfortable teaching with only men?’,
because I was one of the only women. I hadn’t really noticed, because I had
worked like that at Mines and in my career otherwise,” Stechmann recalled.
Following completion of her master’s degree
in 1970, Dorland went on to a career that includes work for Union Carbide, Dupont, and the US
Department of Energy. She earned her Ph.D. from West Virginia University in
1985 and moved to
the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Minnesota-Duluth where
she served as Chair of that department from 1990 to 2000. Dorland then served as Dean of the
College of Engineering at Rowan University in Glassboro, NJ., before
retiring. During
her long career she has served as a role model to many women engineers and
scientists. “I think you can teach that you don’t have to settle for less, and
you don’t have to let your goals and the path you’d like to follow become
second best to someone else,” says Dorland.
Today, female students have an abundance
of resources at Mines. Efforts like Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE) and
the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) offer resources including a study space
with snacks, coffee, and homework help, as well as networking and outreach
events. The program also hosts wellness
workshops, a weekly STEMinist study hall, social events, and industry and
alumni talks. WiSE and SWE both seek to inspire and empower a new generation of
female scientists and engineers.
Young women in these industries continue
to be pioneers, overcoming barriers in what are still male-dominated fields,
but they can take heart in the efforts of women who came before them and forged
a path for so many others to follow.