Women are consciously opting for mechanical engineering

In June 1921, exactly a century ago, Stanny Koopman was the first woman to graduate from the mechanical engineering programme in Delft. It would take another 40 years before Diny Lammens would replicate that feat, becoming the second woman to graduate in 1959. Nowadays, dozens of women graduate every year from the Mechanical Engineering master’s programme, and that number is rising steadily.

In 1915, Stanny Koopman joined what was then called the Technical Institute of Delft to study mechanical engineering. The idea was that she would subsequently work as a technical expert in her brother-in-law’s patent office, but that never happened. She married civil engineer Wim Swaan in 1921 and left with him for the Dutch East Indies. There she worked in journalism and taught mathematics at a secondary school in Semarang. Later, back in the Netherlands, she continued to teach mathematics and mechanics. In 1959, she was invited to present Diny Lammens, the second female mechanical engineer, with her engineering degree.

Flapping apron

Unfortunately, the education superintendent didn’t want to give Koopman the day off for this, because the final exams were about to start. This can be read in a congratulatory letter Koopman wrote to Lammens. In it, she says that ‘I now know more about my husband’s profession, irrigation, than mechanical engineering’. She describes how she had once worked at Stork: ‘which is to say I walked around there, because I wasn’t allowed to touch anything! I also wore a large blue apron so my skirt wouldn’t get stuck in the machine, even though skirts were tight in those days whereas the apron flapped around.’ She also recalls the commemoration song she wrote for the second anniversary of the DVSV, the Delft student association for women, which merged into DSC in 1976.

Fortunately, female graduates are not such a rare sight these days; in recent years, their number has hovered around 15 per cent of the total. This wasn’t the case in the 1980s. Els van Daalen, alumna from 1987 and still affiliated with TU Delft, was one of three female graduates in her year. This male-female ratio sometimes resulted in strange situations. ‘I became the commissioner of education at study association Leeghwater,’ says Van Daalen, ‘which was great, but beforehand there was a meeting about whether it would be any fun to have a girl on the board. The debating society’s room was called the Gentlemen’s room, and they weren’t willing to change that either.’ When Jolien Kroon graduated 25 years later, the percentage was still below 10 per cent, so she received a special welcome at the student association’s intro weekend: ‘I was fresh out of high school and arrived in Delft by train and bicycle and walked down Mekelweg. There was an endless queue of boys. Then someone shouted through the loudspeaker: that must be Jolien, come up to the front.’

She never saw any of this as a problem. ‘It’s just the way it was, and I was aware of the fact beforehand. It’s because the faculty at Delft was bigger than the one in Enschede and there would be more women that I went there. And I lived in a student house with nine other girls. But it wasn’t long before I met a group of friendly boys with whom I could study well.’

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