Group honors memory of Hawaii’s first female engineer

The story goes that when she showed up for her first day of class at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the professor looked at the only girl sitting in his all-male class of engineering majors and told her she must be in the wrong building; home economics was next door.

This was the late 1940s, even before the women whose stories were told in the film “Hidden Figures” struggled to claim their rightful place among the sharpest mathematical minds.

Mae Nakatani Nishioka stood her ground in that classroom and told the professor that she was there because she was supposed to be. She persisted that day and through all that followed and, in 1950, at the age of 21, became the first woman to graduate with a degree in engineering from the University of Hawaii. Five years later she became the first female licensed engineer in Hawaii.

Nishioka’s humble tenacity and her distinguished career still inspire Hawaii women studying engineering, as well as those who have years in the profession.

“Even though she’s gone, we still talk about her all the time,” said Pearl Yamaguchi, an electrical engineer and member of the Society of Women Engineers. Engineers who are working mothers, engineers who find themselves the only woman on a team, still look to Nishioka’s example for inspiration. “She did it first, and having someone come before you makes it seem doable,” Yamaguchi said.

Nishioka’s interest in engineering began in high school when she worked summers for James Glover Ltd. Her uncle, an engineer, would let her do calculations and then take her in the field to get a sense of the work. At UH she was among a large all-male class of engineering students, many of whom had returned to college after the war and were preparing for the postwar building boom.

She got a job offer even before graduating, and when she was called out of class to receive the good news, all her male classmates knew she had been chosen over them.

“She struggled, but she wouldn’t call it a struggle,” Yamaguchi said. “She was so humble.”

During her career Nishi­oka worked for the Territory of Hawaii Highway Planning Office, the Hawaii Irrigation Authority, the Public Works Department and the Department of Transportation. She did early planning work for the H-1 freeway. She married a fellow engineer and had three children, but went back to work when her kids were young, managing to engineer a work/life balance that still left time for volunteering in the community and, dear to her heart, mentoring other women in the profession.

For many years Nishioka worked for UH, and was director of the Facilities Planning Office when she retired in 1983.

In 2017 she was to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Hawaii Council of Engineering Societies, but two days before the ceremony, she died at age 88.

“I’m just so glad that we got to tell her that she was getting an award,” Yamaguchi said. “Her whole family was there for the ceremony.”

The Society of Women Engineers’ Hawaiian Islands section wants to establish a scholarship in Nishioka’s name. The scholarship will be awarded every year to female engineering students in Hawaii. When approached about the scholarship idea, Nishi­oka’s family offered to match donations up to $15,000. Yamaguchi said the scholarship is a way to continue Nishioka’s support of women in the field.

“She was so proud of the things other people were doing,” Yamaguchi said. “She was more proud of us and what we were doing than what she did herself.”

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.