Electrical engineer Kei May Lau and daughter Clara.
To those of us who use them but don't give a second thought to how they work, such electronic items as cellular phones, digital clocks, and video games are the epitome of nerd-logic, the product of the special mentalities of those brilliant but deadly square "brains" known as engineers.
For electrical engineer Kei May Lau, these technologies originate from the same deep well of creativity that Beethoven drew upon to compose his Kreutzer Sonatas, or Van Gogh called upon to paint the blue irises in the poster on her office wall.
"When my niece was going to college, I asked her if she had considered engineering. She said, `I want to study things that are more creative.' I said, `What do you mean? Engineering is the most creative field!'"
Lau's ability to conceive of her field as an endless frontier has not gone unnoticed. In 1993 she became first woman promoted to full professor in the College of Engineering -- a status shared by only about 25 women nationwide. She's won numerous National Science Foundation grants for her work with high-speed electronic circuits; a current three- year, $290,000 grant is furthering her experiments with crystal-growing techniques. The sharp blue light refracted by Lau's crystals is brighter than neon but uses less electricity. In Japan, where "go" lights are blue rather than green, her research may soon have an additional application.
Lau's passion for crystals, circuits, and lasers is matched only by her passion for attracting women to her field. While almost half of law and medical school graduates are now female, women account for only 15 percent of engineering graduates, and five percent of doctoral students: the same or fewer, says Lau, as when she came to Amherst in 1982. The numbers are even worse in industry: only about eight percent of American electrical engineers are women.
"That really worries those of us in engineering," said Lau. She thinks the predominance of men in the field makes it seem inhospitable to women, especially those with families. "Perhaps they don't find their work fulfilling because they don't find the environment friendly to them. They feel isolated, lonely. So when they have a family, they drop out for good."
The Hong Kong-born Lau has had her own cultural and gender barriers to overcome. Her mother remains somewhat disconcerted by the fact that her daughter is a professor, let alone a professor of engineering. (The daughter often pulls her mother's leg by assuring her that she wears a mustache and bow-tie into the classroom. No need: the double-breasted blazer, button-down shirt and straight-forward demeanor let students know there is nothing frivolous about her.)
At the University of Minnesota in the `70s, the young Kei May found herself captivated by literature as well by physics. Nearing graduation, however, she discovered that physics was not a growth field -- "I heard of Ph.D.s driving Yellow Cabs and post-docs going from one government lab to another, like gypsies" -- and she went on to graduate studies in engineering.
In her first job out of graduate school -- her Ph.D. is from Rice University -- Lau worked for a defense contractor near Boston on semi-conductors for "smart" missiles. Though she still keeps on her desk a dish of the tiny gold screws she engineered -- no bigger than the pin in a pair of eyeglasses -- she has "mixed feelings" about that work. "But I'm a practical person," she adds. "If I didn't make them, someone else would."
Then came a classic dilemma in the life of a married woman. Wanting more freedom to do research, Lau began sending out resumes, and received several job offers from across the country. But her husband, chemical engineer Ng M. Ka, was prospecting too, and when he was offered a job at UMass the couple decided to move together to Amherst rather than face the strains of a commuter marriage.
She did manage to find a job a building away from him, Lau says. And she notes with pride that Ka is equally involved with her in raising their six-year-old Clara. "I give my female students the advice that it's very important, when they are looking for a partner, that he has the attitude that your career is as important as his, that he will share responsibility for the family and be willing to make sacrifices."
As it turned out, the then-small electrical engineering program at UMass was looking to get into the embryonic field of microwave semi-conductors. Lau was given an empty room in Marcus Hall and $100,000 in start-up funds. (If that sounds like a lot, consider the $2 billion lab just built by Samsung in Korea, says Lau.) Lau viewed the empty space as a blank slate and got to work: using student labor, her own knowledge, and materials she convinced manufacturers to give her for free, she built most of the equipment she needed from scratch.
Having made it this far, it would be easy for Lau to rest on her laurels, quietly concentrating on getting grants and growing her crystals. But her ongoing campaign is to open up the field for her younger sisters.
"We're not pushing just to make a statement," says Lau. "We want women to know this is not a forbidden area, that it's as open to them as any other field." She knows from experience that this is only partly true; she discovered early in her own career that it was no easier to prove herself to resentful male technicians than it is, even now, to get an unbiased evaluation from some of her male students. Yet Lau is puzzled by her female students' reluctance to aspire to the top ranks of engineering, opting for the life sciences instead. It's with dismay that she observes that most young women have less confidence than young men.
"I'll have a 4.0 student who's intelligent, hardworking, who comes to me and says, `Do you really think I can make this Ph.D. program, oh, I'm not sure,' and a boy with a B average with all the confidence in the world."
Still Lau continues to beat the drum for women in engineering, reminding them that hers is a well-paying field where jobs still outnumber applicants, that opportunities abound in industry, academia, consulting, business -- even on Wall Street, where a grasp of electronics is as good as gold. Despite the barriers she knows exist, she is optimistic.
"If you ask is it still harder for women to get the same acceptance as men, I think that's true," reflects Lau. "We have to work harder to achieve the same recognition. But one characteristic shared by all the women in this field is a personality of `I'm going to make it.'"-Ali Crolius
photograph by Ben Barnhart
