As a rookie engineer in the late 1980s, Gina Parvaneh Cody attended a conference in Toronto that she will never forget.

The conference was about tower cranes, but that’s not what made it memorable. The moment that has now crystallized in her memory is when the MC opened his mouth to greet the crowd of 700 people: “Lady and gentleman,” he began, “good evening.”

“There was one woman. It was me,” Cody recently recalled, speaking from her North York home. “I still remember that.”

Since moving to Canada from Iran in 1979 to pursue her master’s degree, Cody has been a trailblazer in the male-dominated field of engineering: she was the first woman to earn a PhD in building engineering from Concordia University and the first to scale Toronto’s construction cranes as a machine inspector. She enjoyed a successful career spanning three decades that saw her collect accolades and ascend to the executive chair position at her engineering firm, which Profit magazine once named one of Canada’s most profitable woman-owned companies.

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Now, two years after her retirement, Cody is making her mark on the industry once again. On Monday, Concordia University announced that it will be renaming its engineering faculty the Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science — making it the first engineering school in Canada (and one of the few worldwide) to be named after a woman.

The announcement comes on the heels of a $15-million donation Cody made to the engineering faculty to promote equity, diversity and inclusion — funds that will be matched in part by Concordia to create programming dedicated to these issues.

The gift will also support student scholarships, research on smart cities, and the creation of three academic chairs: in data analytics and artificial intelligence, the “internet of things,” and Industry 4.0 and advanced manufacturing.

“The name change is a reflection of our desire to achieve equity, diversity and inclusion with a particular emphasis on gender balance,” said Amir Asif, dean of the engineering faculty, in a press release. “Gina will be a perfect role model for young women and inspire them to join this exciting profession.”

Throughout her career, Cody has yearned to see more women thriving in the professional field she loves. Across Canada, only 20 per cent of university engineering students are women, according to Engineers Canada. (At Concordia, 23 per cent of engineering and computer science students in the last academic year were women.)

By the time these students enter the job market, the numbers grow even bleaker: currently, women make up only 12.8 per cent of the country’s working engineers, according to Statistics Canada.

Many barriers are systemic but Cody also believes girls need more women role models in the field. That’s why she agreed to lend her name to Concordia’s engineering school and insisted it always include the “Gina” and never be shortened to “Cody” — an uncharacteristic decision for a person whom friends describe as understated.

“I’m trying to send a message,” Cody said. “I think it will break that fear that engineering and computer science is for boys. I’m hoping kids at school, when they hear it, will say, ‘Oh, it’s a woman’s name!’ and it will matter.”

Growing up in Tehran, Cody was always handy as a child and often wound up fixing the broken furniture and televisions in her home. Engineering is something of a calling in her family: her father ran a private school for boys but also worked in construction, and all three of her brothers grew up to become engineers, leaving only her sister, who became a dentist instead. (One of Cody’s two daughters is now studying engineering, while the other is in law school.)

Cody never thought of engineering as a dream beyond her reach. In fact, both of her parents encouraged her to pursue her education in whatever field she desired — especially her mother, whose own education ended at Grade 11. “She used to tell me that the only way for a woman to have independence is to have an education,” Cody said. “That (stayed) in my brain.”

Cody got her degree in structural engineering at Iran’s top university and in 1979 she moved to Canada to pursue her master’s at McGill University.

But when she landed in Montreal, clutching $2,000 in traveller’s cheques, she was met by her brother, who was then studying at Concordia. He convinced her to meet with one of his engineering professors, Cedric Marsh, and Cody agreed.

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After a lengthy meeting, which clearly left Marsh impressed, the professor suggested to Cody that she change her plans. Why don’t you come to Concordia instead? he asked, also throwing in a scholarship to cover her $4,000 tuition. “It was a dream come true,” she said.

Her encounter with Marsh changed the course of her life and career. At Concordia, Cody learned the skills that became the foundation for a successful 30-year career in engineering; she also met her future husband and the father of her two daughters, Thomas Cody, who is now retired from his position as senior vice-president with the Bank of America Canada.

At Concordia, Cody’s initial focus was on earthquake engineering and this work brought her to Peru, where she collaborated with Marsh on a Canadian government-funded project to improve housing for people in earthquake-prone areas.

After graduating, she moved to Toronto, where the booming job market lured several of her engineering classmates. Cody spent a year working for Ontario’s Ministry of Housing, where she helped shape the province’s building codes.

Her first private sector job was with an engineering consulting company called Construction Control, where she was trained to perform crane inspections — an often harrowing job that involved climbing the sky-high machines to inspect every nut and bolt.

Cody says she was the only woman in Toronto doing this type of work at the time. She remembers climbing down a crane one day in the middle of winter, only to be confronted by an astonished construction worker. “He said, ‘Why don’t you learn to type? You don’t have to do this hard work at -30 degrees,” she said. “I don’t think he meant it in the wrong way. He was genuine, but that was the view and vision. That women are weak.”

Before long, Cody was scaling the ranks at her company, which was renamed CCI Group in 2013 (after a 2016 merger, the company now operates under McIntosh Perry Consulting Engineers). She eventually became its president and CEO, retiring in 2016 as executive chair and principal shareholder.

Throughout her career, Cody was also a prolific volunteer, serving on various boards, associations and organizations, including Professional Engineers Ontario, the industry’s regulatory and licensing body. “She’s a trailblazer,” said Johnny Zuccon, the organization’s interim registrar. “Whatever she took on, she’d go beyond what was required and always delivered on deadline.”

Under her watch, CCI was recognized by the Financial Post as one of Canada’s best-managed companies and in 2010, Profit magazine — which called Cody one of the country’s top women entrepreneurs — listed it as the ninth most profitable Canadian company owned by a woman.

Cody said she has always tried to support women in her industry, where dismissive and discriminatory attitudes continue to lurk. She thinks back to times when people would mistake her as someone’s assistant, or to the older men who clearly resented seeing a woman at the front of the room.

During her time at the helm of CCI, female representation on staff grew to between 20 and 25 per cent, she noted in a 2013 interview with Concordia University Magazine — a relatively high number in an industry where less than 13 per cent are currently women.

Cody now hopes to continue supporting women engineers through her donation to Concordia. She said she’s always wanted to give back to the university because she’s grateful for the opportunities it gave her when she first arrived in Canada. She hopes, in part, that her donation will also change some of the negative attitudes she now sees towards immigrants. “We cherish Canada. We want to give back.”

But more than anything, she wants the Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science to send a message to young girls and women — that they, too, belong in these professions, should they choose to pursue them.

“I don’t want to be the only woman in the room,” she said. “My mission is having more women in this field. That’s what I want to see.”