Montreal Massacre left 'indelible mark' on an engineering community still striving for more women

The Montreal Massacre, when 14 women were killed in an engineering school 27 years ago Tuesday, had a long-lasting effect on engineering across Canada and the world, industry professionals say.

“It’s left an indelible mark on the engineering community in Canada and abroad,” Mary Wells, a professor at the University of Waterloo and chair of the Ontario Network of Women in Engineering, told Yahoo Canada News.

“It caused the engineering community to pause for a moment and consider first of all why there weren’t more women studying engineering, and what it was like for women studying engineering.”

On Dec. 6, 1989, 25-year-old Marc Lépine walked into a mechanical engineering classroom at Montreal’s École Polytechnique armed with a semi-automatic gun and a hunting knife. He ordered the men in the class to leave and shot the remaining women. Telling the women he was “fighting feminism,” Lépine then wandered the halls. He murdered 14 women and injured 10 more, as well as four men, before shooting and killing himself.

A graduate of McGill University, Wells was just two years out of engineering school at the time of the attack. “I feel they’re my contemporaries, in a way,” she said of those killed and injured that day.

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Jeannette Southwood, vice president of strategy and partnerships at Engineers Canada, was also a recent graduate and new to her career in engineering in 1989. “It resonated a great deal with me, as it did with many people in Canada,” Southwood told Yahoo Canada News.

“It had the effect of mobilizing the engineering community in Canada. It was taken as an opportunity to move forward, to create change.”

Lépine’s actions to separate out female students to be shot, and his comments blaming feminists for the attack, came as a shock to many, Wells included.

“I found it so shocking when the gunman targeted women in engineering,” Wells said. “I didn’t view myself as a woman in engineering. We viewed ourselves as engineers.”

At the time, women were underrepresented in engineering classrooms and workplaces across the country. About 5,000 women in Canada graduated from engineering programs in 1989, Wells said, compared to about 15,000 today.

And though work had begun before 1989 to make engineering education and work more welcoming to women, the killings focused those efforts and highlighted their importance, Southwood said.

“It galvanized the engineering profession. It galvanized the partners in the profession. It galvanized the country,” Southwood said. “We, all of us, had the opportunity to reflect on what happened that day. And all of us have the opportunity to look at what can we do to encourage more women to enter the engineering profession and what can we do to reflect on what still needs to be done.”

Engineering communities not just in Canada but around the world have worked together in the time since the attack to share best practices for increasing gender parity in the profession and support women in engineering, Wells said.

One of the outcomes of that is the development of programs that promote engineering to students as young as elementary grades, she said, all the way through high school. “When I started there were no outreach programs to tell you what engineering was like and what engineers did in the world,” she said.

Once those young women reach university campuses like hers, the conversation continues, Wells said.

“In terms of the university experience, I think there’s a lot more things in place now and there’s a lot more awareness in the faculty and students around issues on inclusion,” she said.

One of the positive outcomes of the tragedy of the Montreal Massacre was that it forced these discussions to happen, because women had been so specifically targeted in the attack.

And programs like 30 by 30, which Southwood works with, continue to actively work to increase the number of Canadian women who enter and remain in engineering. The goal of 30 by 30 is to raise the percentage of newly-licensed engineers to 30 per cent women by 2030, she said, compared to 17 per cent in 2015.

That’s higher for some engineering fields than others, Wells pointed out. For biomedical engineering programs the percentage of women in a graduating class can get as high as 50-60 per cent, she said. But in other fields, such as mechanical, computer, and electrical engineering, it’s about 12 per cent — matching the overall percentage of women in the industry.

Female undergraduate enrolment in engineering programs in Canada peaked at 21 per cent in 2001, Southwood said, and is about 20 per cent today — not much change in a decade and a half.

“We believe that the engineering profession has made and continues to make great strides in increasing the number of women in its ranks, but there’s still a lot of work to be done to make engineering a diverse and truly inclusive profession,” Southwood said.

Waterloo’s engineering faculty shows some signs of that progress. Its mechanical engineering program is 27 per cent female, Wells said, and 30 per cent of its newest engineering class were women.

But in a ceremony held at the school on Tuesday, 14 female engineering students who weren’t yet alive in 1989 will light candles in memory of 14 women who were about their age when they were murdered for being women.

“It’s critical that we continue to mark this day,” Wells said. “The 14 women who were murdered were mainly engineering students. Most of them were in their final year of study. As engineers we lost some of our future colleagues as well as the insight, creativity, and passion they would have brought to our profession.”