Judith Cohen

In junior high school, when Judith Love Cohen showed up for the first day of her intermediate algebra class, she looked around the room and made a quick discovery: she was the only girl. This didn’t daunt her — after all, in fifth grade, kids had already started to pay her to do their math homework.

In high school, her guidance counselor recommended she find “a nice finishing school” and encouraged her to “learn to be a lady.” But growing up in Brooklyn in the 1940s, Cohen had different plans: she would trek to California to earn her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering at USC, seduced in part by the sunny Rose Bowl images she had long seen on television.

At USC, Cohen found her calling almost by accident.“My boyfriend was studying engineering and I was studying math,” she recalls. “We used to do each other’s homework since I liked the applications of math and he liked the abstractions. I was solving real problems while he was dealing with letters and dots.When he decided to change his major, I was devastated. So he suggested I change my major.”

Cohen went on to spend a solid 30 years working for aerospace companies on a number of high-profile NASA projects, including the Hubble Space Telescope, for which she was a system engineer for the Science Operations Ground System, and the Lunar Excursion Module, for which she was a sub-project manager on the Abort Guidance System.

But becoming a woman engineer in the 1950s was no easy task. As an undergraduate, Cohen recalls hearing criticism from fellow students, barbs from those who believed she should pursue a husband more ardently than a degree. These memories surely stuck with her.

But things brightened in graduate school. “My experience there was wonderful because the faculty was heavy with professionals who worked in industry and provided real world perspectives on such things as guidance system design and electronics.”

Cohen’s time at USC set her up for a stellar career. As she completed her undergraduate classes, she worked as a junior engineer for North American Aviation. In 1957, she graduated from USC and joined Space Technology Laboratories, where she worked from 1959 to 1990. (The company later became TRW and is now Northrop Grumman).

“During that time I went back to graduate school at USC, got my Professional Engineer license, and joined the Society of Women Engineers, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers professional societies. I briefly left TRW for three years and went to work at Western Union on the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite.”

In 1990, Cohen left TRW for a position at Command Systems Group, but in 1993, the company lost its contract, and she ventured out on her own as JLC Engineering.

Despite her own glittering resume, Cohen believes the field continues to embrace men more warmly than women. “Even though there appeared to be a narrowing of the gap (between women and men) in the 1980s, the dotcom companies seemed to be heavily male. Girls are still avoiding computer science careers even though they use computers earlier and better than ever.”

She adds, “I recently read a study that there are fewer women science teachers and professors. This robs students of important role models.”

Not surprisingly, Cohen doesn’t just notice these disturbing trends — she does something to change them. For more than 14 years, she and her husband, illustrator David Katz, have created a series of children’s books for 3rd to 6th grade girls, encouraging them to pursue nontraditional careers. Cohen penned the first — You Can Be a Woman Engineer — and partnered with highly accomplished women in other fields to produce 16 more You Can Be a Woman… books, ranging from architecture to zoology. Cascade Pass, Inc., which Cohen and Katz co-founded, publishes the series.

“Life is funny,” she writes in the 1991 series debut. “When I was a little girl, I looked through a very small telescope. Little did I know that years later I would lead the team in the ground system design for a huge, powerful new telescope that was sent into space.” This was the Hubble Space Telescope.

Last November, Cohen and Katz published You Can Be a Woman Movie Maker, which seems particularly fitting for Cohen. Now in her early 70s, she co-produced a feature length documentary, Sixty Spins Around the Sun: the Randy Credico Story with Will and Grace writer Laura Kightlinger, and an animation short, Cartoon Sea, which aired on more than 100 PBS stations.

Apparently, Cohen has a knack for choosing professions traditionally dominated by men. But today she stands as a role model for young women. “Girls have to believe that they can do anything they want,” she says, “and no one can tell them otherwise.”