Fostering ‘Gender-Blind’ Excellence in Engineering

If you think wielding a hoe to mix a load of lumpy concrete is rugged work, try it while wearing a skirt, hosiery and heels.

“It’s one of my favorite images of myself,” said the indefatigable Bonita Campbell, recalling herself as a young Colorado college coed—the only woman in her school’s materials testing lab—mixing and testing the goopy stuff in spite of the skirt and heels that then were mandatory for women. “No wonder people thought I was nuts.”

After college, Campbell went on to help break the gender barrier as an engineer for Kaiser Steel, later signed on as the first tenure-track woman in a CSUN engineering program, and in 2001 became the founding chair of Cal State Northridge’s Manufacturing Systems Engineering and Management Department.

The department reflects Campbell’s gender-blind vision of the future for engineering. “We wanted to create a welcoming environment, one that would encourage students to excel, whoever and whatever they were,” she said of the program she helped build. The only one of its kind in the region, it prepares systems and production specialists who quickly are snapped up by employers in Los Angeles’ vast system of manufacturing production companies.

So great is Campbell’s commitment to CSUN’s engineering management program that she created an endowment in 2004 to ensure its financial security into the future. The next year, she doubled the endowment.

“Academe is the gateway to the engineering profession,” said Campbell. “If you can’t influence the makeup of the student engineering classes, you can’t influence the industry.”