Last month, I started Women’s History Month with an event at our Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science that featured an actual Rosie from the World War II-era Rosie the Riveters movement.
Doreen Kilen, who was a machinist and lathe operator in Portland during the war making parts for Liberty Ships, Zoomed into the excellent winter term Maseeh Exchange event on Resilience and Infrastructure to tell her inspirational story.
She gave a firsthand account of attending high school on the Park Blocks — in what is now Lincoln Hall — before working her swing shift in the machine shop. Doreen was followed by rapid-fire Ignite-style talks by three Maseeh faculty members, who talked about the research “their Rosies” were engaged in.
I walked away feeling optimistic about the future of engineering and getting more women into what has traditionally been a male dominated field.
After that uplifting start to Women’s History Month, I got to wrap it up with an exciting conversation about Portland’s new professional Women’s basketball team, the WNBA Portland Fire, taking up temporary residence on the Park Blocks at Viking Pavilion.
This month, the team moved into temporary office space and now, with players arriving, they will share our wonderful Viking Pavilion at the Peter W. Stott Center facilities with our student athletes, as the team announced today.
Training camp will now get into full swing as they prepare for their first pre-season game in Seattle on April 29. The Fire plan to continue to use Viking Pavilion facilities until their new Performance Center is completed in late July.
Having the Portland Fire on campus is exciting for Portland State and for women’s sports overall. Portland is cementing its reputation as a hub for women’s sports and I get excited about what this can mean for Portland State, our student athletes, and all of our graduates who might build careers around this momentum.
It’s also exciting to welcome the Fire to Viking Pavilion following the WNBA players approving a new collective bargaining agreement with the league last month that for the first time puts women basketball players on track to earn seven-figure salaries and participate in a comprehensive revenue-sharing model that’s similar to the NBA.
That kind of progress deserves to be celebrated, especially when the gender pay gap in the U.S. widened over the last year — across the board women earned 82 cents for every dollar earned by men, down from 83 cents in 2026.
A new report by the Portland Metro Chamber on the State of Women in the Portland Metro Economy shows that our regional pay gap varies dramatically, with the most significant gap experienced by Hispanic women who in 2023 made just 61 cents for every dollar earned by all men.
That study also showed that participation by women in the regional workforce is on the rise and that educational attainment is a leading driver for that increase. And PSU’s women are graduating at higher rates than they were ten years ago.
From engineering to basketball and everything in between, PSU is a proud partner in helping women achieve the career of their dreams.