MADISON, Wisconsin — The electrical and computer engineering department at the University of Wisconsin at Madison had a lackluster record on gender equality for many years.
In the late 1980s, a curmudgeonly male colleague locked the department’s only female professor out of her lab, and no one in the department intervened until she appealed to senior campus administrators. Over the next dozen years, the department of 40 to 50 people hired only four more women, and two of them left before tenure.