Women Hispanic Civil Engineers’ Experience

Walking through the Engineering Department at Texas A & I University in Kingsville (now Texas A & M at Kingsville) for the first time, I had no idea that as a Hispanic woman civil engineer I would be any different from my peers. It took some time to realize that only a small percentage of my peers would be Hispanic women engineers. Perhaps because I live in Texas, the large Hispanic population gave me a skewed image of the world. Having worked now over $20\text{years}$ in the field, I realize that only 10% of civil engineers are women, and out of that percentage, only a small part are Hispanic women working as civil engineers.

I set out to talk to my peers who were willing to discuss this issue. I had a friend in school who was also Hispanic but left Texas A & I University to marry another engineer before she finished her degree. This caused her to move to North Texas, but she finished her civil engineering degree at another university. Her story was what I once considered the best situation in that her parents were very supportive of her getting her civil engineering degree. It was funny to talk to her as she told me it was only because her parents thought it would be a good backup plan. Her parents pictured her as the housewife of a successful engineer. Many years later, her backup plan turned out to be a primary plan as she continued to work but did not have a family: She is a successful engineer working on projects for a large city in Texas.

I talked to a second peer who chose a different route in life in becoming a civil engineer. Because of the pressures of some of the engineering classes, she sought a degree in math, only to work in the civil engineering field for a utility company. Her mother was very supportive but could not give her advice as she took classes, and the pressure on her was such that she sought another path. She worked in another state only to find herself raising a family by herself. Moving back to Texas, she did not have much choice in jobs and took a job in the utility company working in the capacity of an engineer. Over the years, I have seen her grow more frustrated at some of the other engineers’ attitudes toward her education or lack of an engineering degree. In my eyes, I see her as no different from a male counterpart with technical ability. I wonder why her male peers cannot see that.

My story is that my parents were not too happy at first with my chosen career, not really understanding why bridges interested me or why I was interested in walking through muddy areas after a flood to smell like fish for some time after. I was always told that Hispanics traditionally were not engineers, and it would be much better for me to become a teacher. As a result of my interest in Texas engineering history, I found a lost history of engineers who came to the state to help build dams and irrigation canals, map areas, build missions, and help build towns. Really, I was not much different, except that I was a woman. Eventually, after I had worked for years, my parents still did not understand what I did for a living very well, but they were fine with my chosen profession.

I looked to another handful of peers and discovered that many other women in the sciences had the same story: Their parents were kind of supportive or not at all. I looked to the Hispanic culture to see if that somewhat influenced deterring female children from becoming engineers, but I found that maybe it’s more of an old-fashioned way of thinking and not cultural. I found that many women had been discouraged, regardless of their ethnicity. In talking to peers, I realized that our stories were the same.

I have found, however, that most young women today are not being discouraged from going into the civil engineering profession and that there has been a good increase in women in civil engineering. In discussing what advice my peers and I would give to young versions of ourselves, we agreed on the following:My peers and I also agreed on the following advice for men working with women:

I found that putting this down on paper was quite hard, but I have realized, and maybe even helped my women civil engineering peers realize, that we have pretty much the same story. Hispanic is a broad term, and regardless whether you are a several-generation American or a more recent immigrant, if you have the willingness to succeed, you can, and there are many people out there who can help. You just need to ask for their help.