Whereas Sullivan may have felt she got attention in part because she was female, others did not. Chen-Gessner, who came to the University in 1948 from China to pursue a M.S. in chemical engineering, attributed her feelings of isolation as much to the fact that she didn't speak English very well as to her gender. It would have been easy for Chen-Gessner to feel isolated for either reason because she said she was one of only two women in her department during that time, the other one also being from China. But she also mentioned that when classes were over, the graduate students rarely socialized anyway. The percentage of women in engineering increased from 1 or 2 percent of engineering students in early decades of IT to 12 or 13 percent in the late '70s and early '80s, said Kohlstedt, who was responsible for building a program for women during her time as IT associate dean from 1989 until 1995.
Some unusual programs designed for women stand out.
The Curtis-Wright Cadette program, for instance, sent women in 1943 to the University and six other institutions around the nation. The 102 participants in the program at the University lived in Shevlin Hall. The program's purpose was to boost the number of engineers working at the Curtis-Wright Corporation, an aircraft company, because the war was taking a toll on the workforce. It is clear that there were some opportunities that opened up for women under the duress of war demands. However, Kohlstedt also emphasized that she believes the war's impact on women in science and engineering may have been small since veterans usually got their jobs back when they returned from war.