There will be no Ms. Engineer in 2012. After promoting the event at the beginning of the school year, the Engineering Student Council (ESC) decided to end the event a month ago. This would have been in its third year. The event, instead, will be replaced by a talent competition.
The council decided to cancel the event because some members considered it to be a pageant, ESC member Silvia Aguilar wrote in an email.
“The biggest controversy is the typical stereotype that a pageant has a negative connotation or a meaning that you have to be beautiful to enter it,” Aguilar wrote. “It’s a judgment on looks based on the word ‘pageant’ in the normal day-to-day use of what people think of when they hear it.”
But in the past, the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) has not called Ms. Engineer a pageant. Instead, it referred to the event as a contest to promote women in engineering and other technical fields.
On a College of Engineering Web page, still online last week, the college referred to the Ms. Engineer event as one in which SWE members would be “battling it out” to prove who is the best and brightest.
SWE president Morgan Miller said she agreed with the description.
“Over the past three years of Ms. Engineer, the event has grown to be perceived as a beauty pageant — though it was neither scored as one, or viewed as one by the participants,” Miller wrote.
Few people in the College of Engineering were interested in talking about canceling Ms. Engineer. New engineering dean Debra Larson declined to comment.
“Since the dean is new to campus, she does not know about this event, so (she) doesn’t have an opinion,” assistant to the dean Laurie Hartwell wrote in an email.
But civil engineering senior Ashley Brooks said the decision took away a chance for women in the college to show their abilities.
“The talent show emphasizes that you should be proud of your talents,” Brooks said. “It also stinks because Ms. Engineer was an opportunity for the women to strut their stuff in a male-dominated field.”
Tatiana Prestininzi contributed to this article.