How engineers of a Montreal Massacre era are changing a world

On Dec. 6, 1989, a gunman walked into École Polytechnique de Montréal and killed 14 women. During a rampage, a man, who had unsuccessful to benefit acknowledgment to a university, shouted, “You’re all a garland of feminists and we hatred feminists!”

Most of those women were investigate to be engineers. The brutal, targeted mass sharpened strike tighten to home for other womanlike engineering students of a same generation.

Among them was Mary Wells, who had graduated dual years progressing from McGill University, not distant from École Polytechnique, and was operative for a Hamilton, Ont., steel company.

“It repelled me so much,” pronounced Wells. It finished her wakeful of her gender as an operative in a proceed she hadn’t been before.

Wells went on to do connoisseur work in materials engineering, and is now Dean of Engineering and Physical Science during a University of Guelph.

One of her stream projects is an online reverence to a victims of a Montreal Massacre called 30 Years Later. Created in partnership with Engineers Canada and the deans of engineering schools conflicting a country, it profiles 30 women who graduated in engineering within 3 years of a massacre.

Their accomplishments embody conceptualizing aircraft and formulating record to earthquake-proof buildings, yet also go over engineering, as these women went on to pursue careers trimming from wanderer and administrator ubiquitous (like Julie Payette) to vice-president of a vital Canadian bank.

It’s a sign of what Canadian women minister as engineers and what a victims of a Montreal Massacre never had a possibility to do.

Wells hopes to showcase a extensive work that women engineers have finished and enthuse a subsequent era — “not usually for a immature women, yet also a immature men.”

She pronounced it’s also a daring proof that in a end, a murderer, Marc Lépine, ended adult doing a conflicting of what he intended.

“You know, that chairman wanted to get absolved of women in engineering … In fact, a conflicting occurred. It unequivocally galvanized some people to do some unequivocally active things around ensuring that women would be welcomed — not usually included, yet welcomed — into a engineering profession.”

CBC News spoke to 6 other achieved women engineers of that cohort, including a survivor of a attack, about their adore of engineering, their careers and a durability impact of a massacre.

Josée Boudreau

• Senior engineering specialist, Bombardier
• B.Sc., Mechanical Engineering, University of Moncton, 1992
• M.Eng., École Polytechnique de Montréal, 1995

When Josée Boudreau was a teen in Moncton, N.B., she saw a journal ad featuring a vast print of a Canadair CL-415 H2O bomber. The company was looking for engineers to work on a plane, and it prisoner her attention. 

“I told my parents, ‘That’s where we wish to work,'” removed Boudreau, who was good during math and production and had already motionless she wanted to be an engineer, like her father.

The Montreal Massacre happened during her third year investigate engineering during a University of Moncton. She was deeply jarred by it, as École Polytechnique was a other francophone engineering propagandize she competence have left to. “I would have been in that propagandize that day.”

Boudreau went on to earn a master’s grade during École Polytechnique. As partial of a program, she did an internship during Bombardier (which acquired Canadair in 1986), and has worked there ever since.

Over her career, she has worked on a aerodynamic pattern of half a dozen aircraft, including a Challenger business jets, a CRJ aircraft used in lots of short-haul informal flights and a C Series jets that Bombardier sole to Airbus in 2017. She’s had a possibility to do mechanism programming, emanate designs regulating engineering software and transport to do breeze hovel tests all over a world. While she loves conceptualizing things and elucidate problems, what she loves many about engineering is a teamwork.

“Engineering is not something we do alone,” she said. “The organisation suggestion is something that is unequivocally critical in a bland life of an engineer, given we can't know everything, and it’s a organisation that brings a best out of you.”

Boudreau acknowledges that for many of her career, she has been a usually lady on her team, and that’s not always easy: “It’s still a man’s world. You need to be clever and we need to be gentle with men. You need to be confident.”

She hopes that on a anniversary of a Montreal Massacre, people cruise initial and inaugural of a families that have had to live yet their daughters, sisters and spouses, and a women who never got a possibility to pursue their goals.

“I had a dream to work in engineering and to work for Bombardier. Maybe some of these women [did] also.”

Boudreau hopes meditative about a eventuality will inspire people to speak to their children in a some-more gender-neutral way, “so that they don’t extent their girls and do not extent their boys in what they can grasp in life. And give them a certainty to grasp their goals.”

Gina Parveneh Cody

• Retired, formerly boss and principal shareholder of CCI Group Inc.
• B.Eng., Aryamehr University of Technology, Tehran, 1978
• M.Eng., Concordia University, 1981
• PhD, Building Engineering, Concordia University, 1989

Gina Parveneh Cody grew adult in Iran, and her father always emphasized that organisation and women should be equal, 

“From childhood,” she recalled, “I unequivocally favourite regulating adult things if something was broken.”

She was a one who remade a family’s TV, radio or broken furniture. When she got older, Cody motionless to investigate polite engineering. Eventually, her studies took her to Canada, where she became a initial lady to connoisseur with a PhD in building engineering from Concordia University in Montreal.

Her doctoral investigate was desirous by all of a deaths in Iran from buildings collapsing during earthquakes. She worked on a growth of attrition dampers to strengthen steel and petrify buildings from earthquakes. Such inclination are now used all over a world.

The Montreal Massacre happened the same year that she graduated, not distant from where she studied. She still gets romantic when she thinks of it. 

“I wish those women to be remembered for who they were, who they wanted to be,” Cody said. “They were shot given they were women and they wanted to be engineers. Even today, people speak about women not belonging. That creates me angry.”

After graduating, Cody worked on building codes for a Ontario government, afterwards became a appurtenance inspector. That work led her to become the initial lady to stand Toronto construction cranes.

Being a usually lady had pros and cons, she said. On a upside, “they all remembered me. They all knew who we was.”

The downside was she felt she indispensable to work additional tough to infer herself. “I always believed as a woman, we had to be better. we couldn’t means creation mistakes,” she added. “I felt that pressure.”

Cody went on to turn boss and principal shareholder of a construction engineering organisation CCI Group Inc. She late after offered a organisation in 2016.

In 2018, Concordia renamed a engineering school after her. The Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science is a initial university engineering expertise in Canada to be named after a woman.

Cody pronounced that has given her a height to disciple for women in grant and engineering: “That’s unequivocally my new career.”

Deepa Kundur

• Professor and Chair, Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto
• B.ASc., Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, 1993
• M.ASc., Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, 1995
• PhD, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, 1999

As a girl, Deepa Kundur always enjoyed math and science. 

“For me, it was unequivocally logical,” she recalled. Her father, who was an engineer, suggested she investigate electrical engineering given it was mathematical, yet could also be used to build systems and solve real-life problems.

At that time, she recalled, immature women were told they should glow for a stars, and even yet there were few women in her class, she felt she was like everybody else. She was 3 months into her undergraduate grade during a University of Toronto when a electrocute happened.

“This was utterly disorienting,” Kundur recalled. “It unequivocally renowned people by their gender.”

She pronounced it was a support of purpose models and mentors that helped get her and other immature women investigate engineering by a tragedy.

Kundur went on to do dual some-more engineering degrees and turn a professor, doing investigate in a area of cybersecurity. She was one of a pioneers of a record called digital watermarking, that identifies bootleg duplicates of examination copies of films common with critics before their release. She has also worked on methods to detect intruders or neglected activity on mechanism networks. Currently, she’s operative on ways to make electrical intelligent grids some-more volatile opposite cyberattacks by investigate how flocks of birds understanding with obstacles or predators.

“I adore to learn new interrelationships and new analogies between healthy and synthetic systems,” she said.

As a professor, she also takes her pursuit as a coach to immature women unequivocally seriously.

“I cruise we need unequivocally many purpose models who are women … to be means to, we know, denote to other women what’s probable if they select a technical career,” Kundur said, adding that engineers are good versed to foster equity and diversity. “We’re prepared to solve problems … we can cruise this to be another problem — a governmental problem — and we can use a skills in problem elucidate to residence these issues.”

Colette Lepage

• Founder and owner, Lepage Consulting
• Diploma, Chemical Engineering Technology, Cambrian College, 1994
• B.Sc., Chemical Engineering, Lakehead University, 1999

Colette Lepage is a integrate of years younger than a youngest victims of a massacre, that happened when she was in high propagandize in Sudbury. She said she doesn’t remember that many about it solely a shock, unhappiness and fear of it. 

As a girl, she was a self-described “sci-fi nerd” who desired looking adult during a stars, yet wasn’t a quite means student. She favourite science, yet didn’t wish a table job. So she warranted a chemical engineering record diploma, that she suspicion would assistance her get a pursuit in a internal forestry or mining industries, and went on to get a degree.

After relocating to a U.S. with her beloved during a time, Lepage saw an ad for an entry-level pursuit during NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. When she got a job, she recalled, “I was so excited, like, ‘Oh my god, it’s my dream come true.'”

Ever since, she has worked in decay control for apparatus unfailing to launch into space during servicing missions for NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and a successor, a James Webb Telescope, now set to launch in 2021.

Lepage was during one time a manager of a purify room that housed a hardware for a Hubble servicing missions, one of a largest in a world. 

One of a projects she worked on was Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, that upgraded a telescope to be means to counterpart deeper into space than ever before. She recalls examination a launch with her team.

“It dawned on me, oh my goodness, this isn’t usually about me and this tiny organisation of people,” she said. “We’re partial of a organisation that’s, we know, moulding how we perspective a universe. Everything we learn is fundamentally going to be new believe and for a whole whole star — for all of humanity.”

Now, she’s a consultant in a same field, travelling around North America. “I’ve always felt very, unequivocally beholden for a event we had,” she said.

Sandra Odendahl

• Vice boss of Social Impact and Sustainability, Scotiabank
• B.Sc, Chemical Engineering, University of Ottawa, 1987
• M.Sc., Chemical Engineering, University of Toronto, 1990

When Sandra Odendahl finished a mandate for her master’s grade in chemical engineering, she changed to Montreal to work for healthy resources organisation Noranda. The electrocute happened on her third day of work.

“It unequivocally felt tighten to home,” she recalled. “I wasn’t even finished my engineering grade and [had] usually started my initial pursuit down a highway from where this thing happened.”

Odendahl had been hired to run environmental projects in forestry and pap and paper, following adult on her investigate on contaminants that come from splotch pulp. As she progressed in her career, her concentration on environmental impact assessments for healthy resources projects, including mines, brought her in strike with investment bankers.

She finished adult being hired by RBC as an attention researcher for a healthy resources zone 16 years ago, and has been in banking ever since, operative in environmental risk management, corporate sustainability, amicable financial and impact investing.

“I cruise there’s dual things that engineers can move to banking or substantially a lot of sectors,” she said. “One is unequivocally a comfort with math. we cruise a other one is a unequivocally structured proceed to elucidate problems.”

Odendahl concurred that like engineering, pockets of a financial sector such as investment banking remain male-dominated. But she thinks a attention recognizes a significance of creation and diversity: “It’s a elemental fact that we can’t get creation from a organisation of people who all cruise a same.”

While a Montreal Massacre is an impassioned example, she pronounced it’s a sign that even today, not everybody is gentle saying women in places traditionally dominated by men.

“It’s critical that we don’t forget that this happened and that it binds a feet to a glow to make certain that we usually don’t accept people … who are pulling behind opposite gender farrago and other kinds of diversity.”
 

Nathalie Provost

• Regional Director of Analysis and Expertise for Estrie-Montérégie, Quebec Ministry of a Environment and Climate Change
• B.Eng., Mechanical Engineering, École Polytechnique de Montréal, 1990
• M.Eng., Industrial Engineering, École Polytechnique de Montréal, 1993

Nathalie Provost is a survivor of a massacre. She was strike with 4 bullets during a attack, including one that grazed her front and another that lodged in her foot. When Lépine accused a women he pounded of being feminists, she responded that they weren’t. “Listen, we are usually women who are investigate engineering,” she recalled from her sanatorium bed dual days after a attack.

Provost returned to propagandize reduction than a month after a sharpened and warranted a initial of dual engineering degrees months later. She was awarded a Governor General’s Medal of Bravery in 1992.

In high school, Provost was good during science, yet wanted to do something applied. Boys in her category were going into engineering. “So because not me?” she recalled.

She graduated amid a retrogression of a early ’90s and managed to find a pursuit with a tiny consulting organisation operative to urge peculiarity and potency on projects for organizations such as Hydro-Québec. 

Eventually, she found her proceed into a Quebec open service, holding government roles in a accumulation of departments on projects such as transforming a IT systems.

“You learn as an operative to solve problems,” she said. “That’s because I’ve always felt that we worked as an operative even if we was operative for Curateur open du Québec [the bureau of a province’s open trustee] or a immigration department.”

Outside work, she has advocated for gun control and been a believer of immature women training to be engineers by her purpose as “godmother” of a Order of a White Rose, an annual grant open to students conflicting Canada that pays reverence to a victims of a massacre. 

On this anniversary of a massacre, Provost worries that a star has turn a worse place, with some-more loneliness and unhappiness than 30 years ago.

“We can accommodate disharmony unequivocally quickly,” she said. “I cruise remembering what happened in Polytechnique is to be wakeful that what we have is frail and we contingency take caring of any other.”

Article source: https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/montreal-massacre-women-engineer-profiles-1.5385088?cmp=rss