Alice Goldberg: First Woman In A Man’s Field

Alice Goldberg, BE ‘49, was voted “most courageous for surviving as the only woman in the class of ’49.” She was part of the G.I. boom of 1946, transferring to USC from Stanford University with one year of undergraduate work already completed. Three years later, she became the first woman to graduate from USC with a bachelor of engineering degree in chemical engineering.

Raised in a family of chemical engineers — both Goldberg’s father and brother were practicing chemical engineers — Goldberg thought nothing of entering the field herself. She excelled in the sciences in high school

and declared a chemistry major at Stanford her first year because the university did not have a chemical engineering program. After her first year at Stanford, she took a year off to get married, then accepted her mother’s offer to continue her undergraduate studies at USC on her mother’s dime. Her husband, Jack, also enrolled in the chemical engineering program.

She remembers the campus was spacious, “with a lot of land and a lot of bungalows,” she says. “They didn’t have the buildings to accommodate all the returning vets, who were coming back on the G.I. bill, so the place was loaded with students.”

Goldberg had “a wonderful time” being one of only two women in engineering.

“The classes were interesting and being the only woman was kind of fun,” she says. “But I was married to another engineering student, so I had it easy. I was in a nice social circle. We made a lot of good friends here. I think if I had come in as a single woman, I would have been out of luck.”

Goldberg lived a charmed life at USC until she began to job hunt.

“Then I hit the discrimination,” she says. “USC brought companies on campus to interview the students, but I found that nobody wanted to talk to me. I had a better grade-point average than my husband, but no one would hire a woman in engineering. That’s just the way it was.”

She persisted and finally landed a job testing aluminum specimens at Harvey Aluminum, with the help of some personal contacts.

She left Harvey Aluminum years later to raise a family. By 1982, when she reentered the job market, women had broken through the gender barrier in engineering.

“I got a job at Hughes Aircraft teaching new, incoming engineers computer-aided design, because that was when they first started using computers for design and drafting,” she says. “So I finally did get a job as an engineer.”

Her advice to young women engineers today is to “go for it.”

“I don’t think women face any discrimination today,” she says. “They are on an equal footing with men. So if they want to become engineers, it’s really a matter of going for it and sticking with it.”