What books, biographies or survival guides are helpful for women in engineering in academia?
About a month ago, MIT published their most recent Report on the Status of Women Faculty in Science and Engineering, following up on previous reports from 1999 and 2002.  It's not exactly a "survival guide"—it's written for existing faculty and administrators more than for prospective academics—but it does clearly describe several barriers to gender inequality, both past and present.  The National Academies published a similar report in 2006.

Even more recently, Nancy Hopkins (one of the authors of the MIT reports) gave a fascinating talk about MIT's efforts to attract and retain female faculty.

(Hopefully someone else will suggest something more useful for prospective academics.) 



Update: One of my female colleagues sent me the following reply, which I'm posting with her permission.  (I'll delete this update if she decides to post an answer herself.)


  My more recent reading has focused more on survival with children in
  academia, which is not quite the same thing.  However, some of the
  issues might be the same.  Two good books are Mama,
  PhD and Motherhood: the Elephant in the
  Library,
  both of which are essay-based, with women sharing their stories.  Both
  are available on Amazon, and are quite good.
  
  Some of the best survival guides these days are the blogs - there are
  a bunch of good ones which provided sanity and good advice along the
  way.  My two favorite aren't active anymore, but their archives are
  nice, and there are plenty of good ones still active:
  
  
  http://scienceblogs.com/sciencewoman/
  http://scienceblogs.com/seejanecompute/
  http://science-professor.blogspot.com/
  
  
  There are tons of research papers on the issue, but to be honest, at
  least for me, those tend to be more depressing than helpful.  For
  example, an interesting (but outdated) one:
  http://people.mills.edu/spertus/Gender/EKNU.html There was a recent
  article that retention is going better among faculty (except in math,
  which surprised me):
  http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6070/864.abstract