Lois Aileen Bey

Lois Aileen Bey (born May 8, 1929) is an American chemical engineer who was the first woman to graduate from the chemical engineering program at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). She was also the first woman engineer hired by Underwriters Laboratory. During this time it was unusual to be a woman engineer and those who worked in the field encountered sexism and other obstacles.

Early life

Bey did not come from an engineering background, though she believes that she inherited her unusually good long-term memory from her father. Neither of Bey's parents attended college. Bey experienced sexism since the day she was born; her mother made it clear to her that she had wanted a boy, in case the health problems in Lois Bey's older brother Roy prevented him from growing to adulthood.

Bey's parents had traditional gender roles. At the age of twenty-one, Bey's mother set out to marry to avoid becoming a spinster. She composed a list of qualifications that she required in a husband, which included the ability to entertain. Bey's father Leroy Karl Bey was a pianist for Sophie Tucker and Ethel Merman at the time. Her mother persuaded him to propose within six months. She was the only girl in a group of eleven high school graduates to take the exam. The other ten boys found out that they had failed, but they all knew that one fellow had been accepted into the scholarship. IIT had not sent her her score because of a "Clerical error”. Later, she learned that "... IIT was not going to give scholarship money to a woman who selected engineering because they knew she would never finish engineering, and she was only probably going to school to find a husband." By the time the IIT accepted her, she did not have the money to attend.

Career

"I just hope that today’s young ladies don’t face the discrimination I faced before college, during college and after college."– Lois Bey

She started her career at Edwal Laboratories, and moved on to Underwriters Laboratories and the Armour Research Institute (now IIT Research Institute). In 1956, Bey became a sales engineer for F.M. De Beers, Assoc. where she sold and troubleshooted equipment.

Societies Bey is a life member of the Society of Women Engineers having joined the Society in 1953. SWE endowed the Lois Aileen Bey Memorial Scholarship in 2017, which is open to U.S. citizens entering their freshman year of undergraduate studies in chemical engineering.

She was also a member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and the American Society of Information Science. Patricia Brown, one of the past presidents of SWE, acknowledged Bey as a pioneer for all women engineers.