"Engineering education in the United States has had a gendered history, one that until relatively recently prevented women from finding a place in the predominantly male technical world. For decades, Americans treated the professional study of technology as men's territory (Bix 2000b; Ogilvie 1986l Rossiter 1982, 1995). Until World War II and beyond, many leading engineering schools, including Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Georgia Institute of Technology, and California Institute of Technology, remained closed to women. The few women admitted to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) struggled against a hostile intellectual and social environment. Women studying or working in engineering were popularly perceived as oddities at best, outcasts at worst, defying traditional gender norms. As late as the 1960s, women still made up less than 1 percent of students studying engineering in the United States, and critics either dismissed or ridiculed interest in the profession. Throughout the last half of the 20th century, activists fought to change that situation, to win acknowledgment of women's ability to become engineers."