Fort Myers woman who was first female engineer at Ford honored by Time Magazine project

Damyanti Gupta is no stranger to firsts.

First woman to attend her engineering college in India; first in her family to come to the United States; first woman to graduate with a master's degree in engineering at Oklahoma State University; and, most famously, the first female engineer at the Ford Motor Company.

So it is fitting that Time Magazine featured Gupta in its “Time Firsts: Women who are changing the world” project earlier this month. The project, presented by the Ford Motor Company, highlights women who have worked to shatter the glass ceiling. Gupta finds herself among a historic group of women including Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Aretha Franklin, Barbara Walters, Serena Williams, Oprah Winfrey and more.

“I feel very fortunate, and I’m glad they found me,” said Gupta, who retired from Ford in 2001 and lives in Fort Myers. “It’s been a great privilege to be recognized with all these wonderful women. It’ll be a nice thing for my children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren for centuries to see.”

A project editor at The Foundry, which produced Gupta's story for the Time series, called Gupta "a dynamo." 

"In her 70s she’s still mentally sharp and had us all riveted with her story of coming to the U.S. and making her childhood dream a reality by working for Ford Motor Company," the editor, Michele Shapiro, said.

Gupta was 13 when she decided to become an engineer, something that was unheard of for women at that time. She knew it would take hard work and courage, things that she was no stranger to.

In 1947, when Gupta was 5, her family was forced to move from her small village in India. The country had gained independence from Great Britain but was divided into two countries, Pakistan and India. Gupta’s family found itself on the Pakistani side.

“There were riots everywhere,” Gupta recalled. “There was no safe place to hide.”

Her family left on cargo ships in the middle of the night, leaving everything they owned. They headed for Mumbai, India, where they were considered refugees.

“We could not communicate with anybody. We had no money. We had lost everything, but two important things we had with us was our hard work and courage,” she said.

Gupta’s mother, who had a fourth-grade education, hatched a plan to get the family back on its feet. Gupta would get an education, something that no one would ever be able to take from her. She’d use her education to succeed, and she’d take the family along with her.

So she studied hard in school. She made good grades, and then, at 13, the prime minister of India visited her city. She went to see him speak, and he told the group that India needed engineers.

Then he said, “I’m not only talking to you little boys — I’m talking to you little girls. Consider this as your profession.”

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Gupta did more than consider it. She ran home and told her mother she wanted to be an engineer.

“I wanted to do something out of the ordinary,” Gupta said. “Because my parents, they taught me, ‘You can do anything you want.’”

Her mother supported her every step of the way, ignoring the pushback of friends who questioned why they would support their daughter going to engineering college.

In college, Gupta chose to study mechanical engineering, which was “10 times harder” than other engineering fields because of the physical labor involved, she said. The college didn’t even have a women’s restroom. She had to bike 1½ miles to go to the bathroom.

But Gupta persisted. As weeks passed and she showed she was there to stay, the college built a beautiful women’s bathroom.

She kept succeeding and dreaming. At 19 she read a book about Henry Ford and became obsessed with assembly lines and Ford’s dream of bringing the car to the average person. She started dreaming of coming to the United States and working at Ford.

“I told my mother, and she started saving every penny for my dream, and I’m so thankful to her that she did not want me to just get married and start a life like other women did in those days,” she said. “She gave me all that money to come here. She even told my dad one day, ‘Have you seen me ever gambling? ... Today I’m ready to gamble.’”

Though it took time, her mother got a return on her investment. After working, again as the first female engineer, at a company in Germany, the family gave all of their money to Gupta so she could move to the United States. She obtained her master’s degree from Oklahoma State and took the train straight to Detroit. She arrived to the cold, snow-covered city in January 1967 with no car and no snow boots. All she had was her dream.

The first time she interviewed at Ford for a position in the safety department, she was turned away. The manager didn’t want a woman working under such dangerous conditions.

Gupta was running short on money. She would wake up at 4 each morning to search the paper for engineering jobs. She found a job as an engineer at a circuit breaker company, where she worked for six months, enabling her to buy a car and to sponsor one of her two sisters’ moves to the states. Eventually she would bring her whole family — two sisters, a brother and both parents — to America.

Then the circuit company moved south. Her boss invited her to relocate with them, but Gupta chose to stay in Detroit. She hadn’t forgotten her Ford dream.

She applied to Ford once again and received an interview. Her interviewer told her they had never had a female engineer at Ford.

“I looked at him, and I said, ‘If you don’t give me a chance, you will never have one.’”

They hired Gupta — under one condition. That she choose a nickname. Damyanti was too hard for her American boss to pronounce. She chose the name Rani, which means queen, and it has stuck with her since then.

Though she had landed her dream job, it wasn’t all smooth sailing. One of her male co-workers asked her to type something up when a secretary missed work one day; another told her all of the numbers in one of her reports was wrong.

She made a bet with the colleague: for every number wrong in the report, she would give him a dollar; for every right number, he would have to give her a penny.

“He just left in a hurry, and he went and told everyone in the department, ‘Don’t mess with her,’” she said.

When Gupta was pregnant with her first son, Sanjay, who is now a neurosurgeon who serves as CNN’s chief medical correspondent, her boss told her to stop coming to work once she started showing. He told her not to come back after the baby was born.

Discouraged, but still not one to quit, Gupta returned to Ford after her son was born. She was moved to a different department, and within three months she was promoted.

Ten years later her younger son Suneel, who is now a lawyer running for U.S. Congress from Michigan, was born. Her boss told her she could decide when she wanted to take maternity leave and that she was welcome back anytime she wanted.

“That’s how much the industry changed in 10 years,” she said. “And of course in my 10 years of work they knew how dedicated I really was to my work.”

Gupta would work 34 years at Ford before retiring in 2001. She worked on everything from engines to emissions, reliability to sensors. As cars became increasingly electrical, she learned electrical engineering as well by taking classes, reading books and learning on the job.

Now Gupta, 76, is a doting grandmother to five granddaughters. She and her husband, Subhash, who worked as an electrical engineer at Ford, have retired to Fort Myers, which is where her Time video was shot.

"When I asked why she decided to retire in Fort Myers, she responded that, after visiting a friend and seeing how beautiful the area is, it made sense to retire in the same place where Henry Ford had his winter estate," Shapiro said.

Subhash Gupta said his wife continues to surprise him, even after over 50 years of marriage.

“She’s a very talented woman. ... I’m finding out more about her as the time passes by,” he said. “I’m very excited about (her inclusion in the Time project) and what she has been able to do and accomplish. I’m proud of her.”

Damyanti Gupta credits her success to the support of her mother and her husband, as well as her courage and hard work, for which there is no substitute, she said.

“If a refugee girl can come from India in the '60s and work for Ford as an engineer, anyone can do anything,” she said.