In a recent Barbie ad, young girls step into professional roles such as neuroscience professor, veterinarian, and businesswoman. Titled “Imagine the Possibilities,” the commercial ends by telling girls “You Can Be Anything.” This may be a novel concept for Barbie, but it’s a decades-old message for the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), founded more than sixty years ago.

During the 1970s, the second-wave feminist movement in the U.S. began to hit its stride. Gloria Steinem launched Ms. Magazine in 1971, Title IX was passed in 1972, and women suddenly had opportunities to pursue professional fields that were previously off-limits. SWE members seized the cultural momentum to increase their outreach to girls of all ages.

High school was a natural starting point, and to reach the teenagers SWE created a sheet, “Have You Considered the Possibility of Becoming a Woman Engineer? Some Questions and Answers.” It’s easy to picture the authors, each accustomed to being the only woman engineer in the room, gathered together and reveling in the energy as they tossed around ideas and shared experiences. You can imagine them laughing over superficial injustices and commiserating over more serious ones, sympathetic to each other’s struggles in a way no one else could be.

As they began brainstorming, each question a high school girl might ask flowed logically into the next: “What is the challenge for me as a woman in engineering? How many engineers today are women? How do women perform in engineering educational programs as compared to men?” One question (“Suppose I wish to combine a family with professional engineering practice. Can this be done?”) is still asked by women today. Each carefully crafted answer balanced honesty about the profession with a strong message that girls can be anything, including engineers.

MIT’s chapter of SWE must have felt a surge of pride in 1980 when they updated the sheet with new statistics about women in engineering. Tiny correction strips painstakingly trimmed with scissors and glued onto the page represented SWE’s hard-won progress. They now told girls that the number of female engineers in every hundred had jumped from one to three, and instead of being the lone female in an engineering class, ten percent of their classmates were women.

But the Boston section of SWE was concerned that by high school, career prejudices had already developed. Sarah Simon, MIT ’72, who was working as a civil engineer at the Environmental Protection Agency, organized a committee in 1978 to address the issue. “We knew that the youngest kids needed to start with the idea that women could be engineers, because they never would have run into any,” she explains today.

The six committee members, all young professionals in their twenties, decided to design a coloring book for second and third grade girls. As they developed the content during countless potluck dinners, each offered a different area of expertise. Simon recalls that Sally Osborn, a chapter president at the time, contributed information on mechanical engineering. “I remember distinctly that [she] said ‘I like being a mechanical engineer because if I don’t like what I make, I can pick it up and throw it against the wall and start again.’”

The coloring book, titled “Terry’s Trip,” sends nine year old Terry to visit her aunt, an engineer at a toy factory. Along the way, the young girl asks questions about power lines, escalators, and bridges, and meets different kinds of engineers. “Maybe someday I’ll be an engineer like Aunt Jennifer and her friends at the factory,” Terry decides at the end of her trip. SWE-Boston members hoped that young girls felt the same.

Publishing the book hit a roadblock, until a SWE-Boston member came to the rescue. Working at Stoneham-Webster, an engineering firm that designed nuclear power plants, she managed to sneak the first round of publication through the company’s printing outlet, Boston’s largest at the time. Their final product was presented at the 1979 SWE Convention. Simon, who still works as a civil engineer, went on to serve as president of SWE-Boston.

Current MIT SWE president Margaret Guo explains that the MIT chapter is still heavily involved in outreach. In fact, their work space is piled high with cardboard boxes of engineering-themed t-shirts for girls. Yet, progress remains slow. Today only twenty percent of engineering graduates and eleven percent of practicing engineers are women, something Guo has experienced firsthand. “Last summer I was doing a software engineering internship, and I was the only female on my team of twenty people,” she recounts. For her, the value of SWE is obvious. “You are surrounded by women who are going to be future leaders in whatever field they pick.”

Even though women are still underrepresented in engineering, growth since the 1970s is due in large part to the determined efforts of SWE. Its members were ahead of their time, and today we continue their conversations about work-family balance and the need to encourage girls to “be anything.”

The first question on their sheet for high school girls said it best: “Why should I as a woman consider engineering as a possible profession?”

SWE’s response: “Why not?”