Edith Clarke: An Engineer No One Would Hire

Posted by by Female Obscura

MIT made her an electrical engineer. Every American employer made her a human computer instead.

In 1919 she became the first woman to earn an electrical engineering degree from MIT. Then she went looking for a job as an engineer, and no one in the country would give her one.

So she took the only work they would give a woman with an engineering degree. She sat in a room full of other women and did the men’s arithmetic.

Her name was Edith Clarke.

She would end her career as the first female professor of electrical engineering in the United States, having helped build the power grid the country still runs on. She spent the first years of it being told there was no such thing as a job for her.

The long way in

Edith Clarke was born in Howard County, Maryland, on 10 February 1883, one of nine children, and orphaned at about twelve. She used her small inheritance to put herself through Vassar, where she studied mathematics and astronomy and graduated in 1908. She taught, then tried civil engineering at Wisconsin, then left to take a job at AT&T as a “computer,” one of the human calculators, almost always women, who did the arithmetic that engineers, almost always men, then took credit for. She studied electrical engineering at Columbia at night.

In 1918 she enrolled at MIT, and in 1919 she became the first woman it had ever granted a master’s in electrical engineering. She had the best training in the country for the work she wanted.

It bought her nothing. Unable to find work as an engineer anywhere, she went back to being a computer, this time at General Electric, supervising a room of women who calculated the stresses in turbines. The degree hung there while she did the arithmetic.

She left the country to be allowed to work

In 1921 she gave up and left the United States. She took a post teaching physics at the Constantinople Women’s College in Turkey, for a plain reason: at GE she was not allowed to do engineering work, was paid less than the men, and was held at a lower professional rank for the same job. It was easier to be trusted as an engineer on the other side of the world than in the company that employed her.

The absurdity of that is the whole case. There was no argument that she could not do the work. She had the MIT degree, and while she was still classed as a computer she had already invented the device that made her name: the Clarke calculator, a graphical instrument that solved the equations for long transmission lines ten times faster than the methods engineers were using by hand. She filed the patent in 1921 and it was granted in 1925.

When she came back in 1922, GE finally gave her a salaried engineer’s job. That made her the first woman professionally employed as an electrical engineer in the United States. She had needed a degree from MIT, an invention with her name on the patent, and a year in exile to be allowed to do what she was trained to do.

The grid runs on her mathematics

Once she was in the room, the record is a straight line of firsts. On 8 February 1926 she became the first woman to present a paper at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, on how to calculate the maximum power a line could carry before it went unstable, exactly the problem the growing grid was running into. The New York Times reported it as a novelty: the only woman to read a paper at the engineers’ meeting.

Her work held the expanding power system together as lines got longer and loads got heavier. She helped design the electrical systems for the hydroelectric dams going up across the West, including Hoover Dam. In 1943 she published Circuit Analysis of A-C Power Systems, the textbook that trained power engineers for decades. The Department of Energy has since called her the foundation of what became the smart grid.

In 1947, two years after retiring from GE, she joined the University of Texas at Austin and became the first female professor of electrical engineering in the country. In 1948 she was the first woman elected a Fellow of the AIEE.

What she was up against, in her own words

Clarke did not frame her life as a grievance, and neither will this. She named the barrier plainly and then out-worked it. Asked about her career in 1948, she said there was no demand for women engineers as such, the way there was for women doctors, but there was always a demand for anyone who could do a good piece of work.

That is the sentence of someone who had to be undeniable to be employed at all. The men she trained beside needed a degree. She needed a degree, a patent, a stint abroad, and a decade of proving that the woman doing the calculations could be trusted to be the engineer. The grid got her mathematics either way. The profession made her pay for the privilege of giving it.

Restoring the record, one woman at a time. The archive grows. The silence shrinks. Enter the archive.

Sources: