IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - June 2012 - 17

and is credited with saving countless lives
in the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
Siegel was, of course, influenced by
his parents, but he cautions that just how
they influenced him is not a story of two
engineers "targeting" their son to become
one as well. On the contrary, Siegel was
encouraged to-as his mother herself
did-find his passions in life and make
the most of them.

Ashtrays and Box Scores
As a young girl, Cohen would sit in the
living room pushing ashtrays around
the coffee table with her father. She was
eight or nine, with wide brown eyes,
delicate features, shoulder-length brown
hair that she wore sometimes in two
braids. She didn't understand what was
happening yet, but her father, an intellectual who had given up his ambitions
of becoming an architect or an engineer
to take on the family soda business, was
teaching her mathematical algorithms.
Looking back, Cohen jokes that she
was lucky to have had a sister but no brothers because her father taught her and her
sister "all the important things you need
to know if you're a little boy," like keeping score in football and baseball. Still, she
didn't consider engineering right away.
She enrolled in Brooklyn College with the
idea of majoring in math and planned to
become a math teacher simply because, as
she says, "I had a woman math teacher and
so I knew that was possible." It was 1950-
there were only so many professions a
young woman was encouraged to enter.
She was thin and muscular, a ballet
dancer with the Met, her features drawing
comparisons to Audrey Hepburn's. She
dated an engineer, a boy named Al she had
been seeing since high school. He was a
smart boy with glasses who looked a bit
like Woody Allen. They worked in Cohen's
living room, their problem sets spread
before them on the floor. Soon they realized they liked each other's homework
better than their own. They swapped assignments. For Cohen, math was "all abstraction and dots and letters" but in the

engineering department she discovered it
was about real things-like "a boat going
down a river at a certain rate of speed,"
and she couldn't get enough.
It was an acceptable arrangement, but
then the boyfriend changed his major. A
panicked Cohen asked him what she was
going to do, and he, the answer so obvious,
told her to change her major. "So," she
says, "I went to the guidance counselor,
and he said, why don't you take mechanical drawing and see if you like it, and so I
did, and I loved it."

degree at the University of Southern
California (USC). In addition, in 1954, she
and Bernard started their family.
As an undergraduate, Cohen was one of
eight women engineers in an engineering
class of 800. She never ran into the seven
other women, but the men who were her
classmates liked to tease her. She was
unflappable. "I'd be in a surveying class,
out there working with instruments," she
says, "and they'd say to me, 'You should be
getting married,' and I'd say, 'I am married.' They'd say, 'You should have a baby,'
and I'd say, 'I have two of them. Now can
we get on with this?' "
Rosie the Riveter's California
In 1957, Cohen graduated from USC
It was because of another boyfriend-Berand took a job at Space Technology Labonard Siegel, the man who would become
ratories, which would become TRW before,
her first husband-that after two years of
finally, becoming Northrup Grumman.
college, Cohen left Brooklyn for the west
Her first large project was a communicacoast. North American Aviation (NAA)
tion satellite to soft-land
wanted Bernard, and so
on the moon. Although
they offered Cohen a posithis innovative satellite did
tion, too, even though she
not succeed-it blew up
hadn't completed her unat launch-she continued
dergraduate degree.
to work on such projects.
She had the hope that
A decade later, she worked
California would be more
on the proposal for NASA's
supportive of a female
abort guidance system
engineer than New York
(AGS), designed to perform
City. A summer job at a
a critical job-if the prilocal engineering firm
mary computer should fail,
had proven that gender
the AGS had to return the
presented a barrier in New
Cohen as a young girl.
lunar module and its twoYork: despite being an enperson crew to the command module.
gineering major, she was assigned to be
Over the years, Cohen worked on a
secretary to the chief engineer. Cohen,
number of different projects in a variher voice still incredulous all these years
ety of technical and management roles,
later, remembers how she told her supeencountering both resistance and enriors, "But I don't take shorthand and I
couragement along the way. In an early
don't know how to type." It didn't matter.
position reviewing missile systems, a
Post-World War II California, though,
coworker told her repeatedly that she
was the home of Rosie the Riveter, and
was "a Girl Scout trying to earn a merit
there were still plenty of women working
badge at their expense." In 1969, while
in aircraft plants. Many of these women
working on antiballistic missiles to be
now had years of seniority and strong metest launched in the Pacific, her excellent
chanical drawing skills and weren't being
systems engineering work earned her
asked to be secretaries. Cohen accepted
a promotion to manager even after she
the job at NAA as a junior engineer. With
disclosed that she was pregnant. Then,
NAA's tuition reimbursement program,
in the late 1970s, Cohen went to work as
she was able to continue working nights
a system engineer on the Hubble Space
toward both a bachelor's and a master's

JUNE 2012

IEEE WOMEN IN ENGINEERING MAGAZINE

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - June 2012