Elizabeth "Elsie" MacGill (ECE 2T7) spent much of her professional life excelling at firsts: she was the first woman to receive an Electrical Engineering degree in Canada, the first woman in North America to earn a degree in Aeronautical Engineering (University of Michigan, 1929), and the world’s first female aircraft designer.

“I would have loved to have met Elsie. She must have been a remarkable woman who was self-confident and had a strong sense of who she was,” said Sonia De Buglio, ChemE 9T4, Associate Director - Alumni Relations. “In those times, Engineering was viewed as a profession that was 'man's work.' Many years ago, the profession involved more traditional Engineering ... It was a profession that required physical [and] emotional strength. Engineers would have needed to direct and have authority over working men. To be undeterred with this knowledge in hand, she was a woman beyond her time.”

MacGill may have inherited her soaring spirit from her mother, Helen Gregory MacGill, who was Trinity College’s first female graduate and one of Canada’s first woman judges. (The elder MacGill was Trinity’s first female student in 1883, but not the first woman to try. Before MacGill, Emma Stanton Mellish tried to gain admission by passing herself off as a man, but was refused when her real gender was discovered.)

For more than 50 years MacGill built aircrafts. She helped design and supervised production of the Hawker Hurricane, and her Maple Leaf II trainer is likely the only plane completely designed by a woman. Sadly, as a result of polio, she couldn’t fly her creations, but she always joined the pilots on test flights.

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