Ghose (née Majumdar) was West Bengal's first woman engineer, graduating as a mechanical engineer from the Bengali Engineering College in 1951. Sudhira Das qualified as the first women engineer in the Indian state of Odisha in the early 1950s. In 1957, Araceli Sánchez Urquijo became the first female civil engineer to work in Spain, having been amongst the first 45 hydropower engineers trained at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute. From 1958, Laurel van der Wal was the project engineer on three MIA (Mouse-in-Able) launches from Cape Canaveral, as head of bioastronautics at Space Technology Laboratories. She was named the Los Angeles Times'''s "1960 Woman of the Year in Science" for her work, going on to be the first woman appointed to the Los Angeles Board of Airport Commissioners, in 1961, and served as a commissioner until 1967. In 1968, she served as Los Angeles International Airport's planner. Premala Sivaprakasapillai Sivasegaram studied engineering at Somerville College, Oxford in the 1960s and became the first female engineer of Sri Lanka. In 1962, Steve Shirley founded software company Freelance Programmers with a capital of £6, (later FI, then Xansa, since acquired by Steria and now part of the Sopra Steria Group). Having experienced sexism in her workplace, "being fondled, being pushed against the wall", she wanted to create job opportunities for women with dependents, and predominantly employed women, with only three male programmers in the first 300 staff, until the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 made that practice illegal. She also adopted the name "Steve" to help her in the male-dominated business world, given that company letters signed using her real name were not responded to. Her team's projects included programming Concorde's black box flight recorder. The first International Conference of Women Engineers and Scientists was held in New York in 1964, organised by the US Society of Women Engineers and attended by 493 women from 35 countries. The second International Conference of Women Engineers and Scientists followed in 1967 in Cambridge, UK, organised by the Women's Engineering Society with 309 attendees from 35 countries. Conferences have been held every three to four years since. Resistance to coeducation in engineering schools, 1950s–1970s The Cold War and the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union created additional demands for trained engineering talent in the 1950s and 1960s. Many engineering schools in the U.S. that had previously admitted only male students began to