Challenges, opportunities for women in technology the focus of Thursday event in Roanoke

Growing up, Bevlee Watford didn’t have any engineers in her family. But a friend’s dad was one, and she developed a fascination with the profession through chats with him.

Watford’s 32 years at Virginia Tech have centered on recruiting and retaining a diverse group of engineering students. Among the things she has learned is that most women in engineering programs learn about the profession through family members who do it. 

Much of her job — Watford is the College of Engineering’s associate dean for equity and engagement and is executive director of the Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Diversity — is about adding to the ways that young people can discover the profession.

“What we try to do here is expose as many pre-college students as we can to what a fascinating field engineering is and how much fun it is and how you can really make a difference in the lives of humans and animals and plants — take your pick,” Watford said.

Watford will join a panel Thursday with Zenith Barrett, Goodwill Industries’ vice president of business and community engagement, in Roanoke on Thursday at a Blacks in Technology Southwest Virginia Chapter event called Invest in Women: Accelerate Progress. The organization scheduled the event to celebrate women’s contributions to technology and explore ways to foster more of the same.

That description fits squarely into Watford’s world. The Long Island, New York, native came to Virginia Tech as a co-op student in the 1970s, when school was in session for quarters. As she pursued a mining engineering degree, she would go to school for a quarter and go to work for a quarter at Consolidation Coal Co. (now called Consol Energy) in Pittsburgh.

“They allowed me to look at different areas of operation,” she said. “I worked in underground mine planning. I worked in surface mine planning. I worked in a geologic office and one summer I worked underground as part of a coal mining operation just south of Pittsburgh. I used to tell people, you know, instead of taking an elevator and going up, you just get in an elevator and go down. It’s not really different.”

She stayed at Virginia Tech to get a master of science, then a doctoral degree in industrial engineering and operations research in 1985. A tenure-track job took Watford to Clemson University, and she got tenure, but by 1992 she had returned to Blacksburg, where she has been ever since.

“Serendipity,” she called it. “I was not fulfilled in my job. … We have an engineering publication called Prism that is for engineering education, and I’ve been a member of that society for a long time. I literally opened it up, and here is this ad for Virginia Tech, for this position that I’m still in.

… And [applications] closed within a week of when I saw it. So I applied and was very fortunate to be interviewed and hired.”

Watford remembered her elementary school years and the placement test she took back then. 

“It was supposed to tell you what you were good at, and mine always came back with some crap called, like, actuary,” she said. “I was good at math. I don’t ever remember seeing anything about engineering in there, ever.”

Her office at Tech runs a lot of outreach activities, summer camps and academic year programs to let young people know about engineering and its many facets. 

“Engineering is one of the least understood fields,” she said. “I truly believe that. People just don’t know what we do. A lot of times they hear about the big things, you know, the Hubble telescope … the recent moon landing, and they think of things like that. They think of building roads and construction and houses, but they don’t think about additive manufacturing, where we’re creating prototypes out of raw materials.

“When I was younger, I was fortunate in that my best friend’s father was an engineer. That’s how I learned about engineering. Nobody in my family was an engineer. I knew no engineers anywhere else except for Mr. Klug. And, you know, I used to sit and talk to him, and I was just fascinated by it. It was such a cool job.”

It’s been a male-occupied one, historically, and within that fraternity, one of the prevailing attitudes was a snootiness born from the assumption that women couldn’t do it, she said. That has changed a lot over the last 20 years, with more in the field realizing that it needs more diversity of thought, knowledge and experience, which leads to better solutions. 

Statistics provided by the Tech College of Engineering show that in fall 2011, the college’s undergraduate enrollment was 6,649 — 5,584 were men, and 1,062 were women (three were unreported). By fall 2023, the 9,783 enrollment included 2,119 women and 7,647 men (17 unreported). The percentage of women undergraduates grew from 16% to 21% by the end of that period.

Of the college’s 2,048 graduate students in fall 2011, about 21% were women, but about 27% of the 3,005 grad students were women in 2023.

“I can go back to when I was a student, and then I can look at when I started working here, and I can look at now, and I see vast changes in the student population here at this institution across all demographics, almost, and across all disciplines, not just engineering,” Watford said. “So I think Tech has done a good job. I think we in the College of Engineering have worked really hard to encourage students from all starting points to consider engineering as a career.”

Correction, 2 p.m. March 14: Zenith Barrett’s last name and job title were incorrect in an earlier version of this story.