Technikatörténeti szemle 23. (1997-98)

TANULMÁNYOK - Vámos Éva Katalin: Women’s Opportunities of Studying and Practising Engineering in Hungary from 1895 to 1968 (On the example of Budapest Technical University and its women students)

These figures are in striking contrast with those found for women. The highest number of women graduated from the Faculty of Chemistry, exactly half that number from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, and about 2/3 from the Faculty of Electric Engineering. These ratios bear out the fact that women's interest in chemistry had been traditionally great in Hungary. Among the regular students they made up more than half (52%) of the total number of students graduated from the Faculty of Chemistry, and their participation was not much less among those graduated from evening courses. The number of freshly graduated electric engineers was somewhat higher, both in absolute figures as in percentage, than that of mechanical engineers. Most of those graduated from regular courses had been studying at the section of instrumental and control technology as well as at the section of telecommunication (22 and 20, respectively, out of 54).

77 Much lower (11 ) was the number of those that had attended the sections of heavy current technologies.

78 For all the three faculties, the highest number of students graduated from regular courses and the least from correspondence courses. These ratios also apply to women. In Chemical Engineering there were no correspondence courses, owing to the fact that students had to gain laboratory skills. Instead, there was a course of economic engineering, which taught knowledge of management and organisational skills for the chemical industry. However, women did not seem to be much interested in this discipline. Table 6 shows that the highest number of postgraduate students attended the courses of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and the lowest those of Electric Engineering (about 1/4 of the sudents of Mechanical Engineering). Women's attendance was not significant, the highest number (19 out of 85) could again be found among the students of the Faculty of Chemistry. Most of them were interested in instrumental analysis. This is easy to understand as women chemical engineers usually took jobs in laboratories. It is also easily conceivable, why women showed relatively little interest in postgraduate Studies, if we consider that bringing up children and running the household traditionally was, and is till today considered as women's task, and all these, together with professional work are difficult to cope with. Women at the Technical University for Building and Transport Engineering, Budapest Our description of women's situation at Budapest Technical University would not be complete without dealing in a similar way with the Technical University for Building and Transport Engineering, which was brought into being as a result of the trend to create highly specialised institutions of higher edu-