Women in Engineering
Accepting your differences Leslie Langnau • Senior Contributing Editor
One issue that frequently comes up for women who are educated as engineers is dealing with the idea that you are different; different from other women, different from male engineers, different from society’s expectations of you. Jill Tietjen, an electrical engineer with more than 40 years of experience in the electric utility industry, long ago accepted her differences, and, sort of revels in them. “I think it was very helpful that I was a girl scout, played the violin in an orchestra, and that I was always different growing up. I was doing jigsaw puzzles when I was two years old, and I was the shortest kid in class all the way through. I didn’t live in the right neighborhood. I was Jewish—in Virginia. And Jewish in Virginia, by the way, in the ‘50s and ‘60s meant that you couldn’t use the yacht club. I’m the oldest of four and the only one that is not a trained sailor because that rule was still in place when I was old enough to start sailing classes. But my sister and two younger brothers are champion sailors. I was always different. I was always the smart kid. I was always weird.” But being different never stopped her. She served as the national president of the Society of Women Engineers, has been involved with IEEE women in engineering, and is currently writing about women in history who have made scientific and engineering discoveries. Tietjen also sits on two boards, one an electric utility in Georgia that recently appointed a woman as CEO, and the other one an engineering firm in Denver. An engineering beginning Tietjen’s dad was a PhD engineer, working at NASA at the Langley Research Center (where the events covered in the movie Hidden Figures took place).
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October 2021 www.designworldonline.com
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10/19/21 8:35 AM
