Local engineer climbs to top of male-dominated field

Over the tenure of her career as a civil engineer, Amanda Opp has successfully, and rather quickly, climbed to the top of her male-dominated field — a feat she says can be accomplished by any engineer, regardless of gender, so long as they want it bad enough.

The 41-year-old’s journey to a leadership role hasn’t come without its challenges, whether those stemmed simply from the demands of her chosen profession or from colleagues who believe men are better suited for the job.

For Opp, the right-of-way supervisor at Flathead Electric Cooperative, these obstacles first emerged in college.

Eager to fulfill her parents’ expectations that she attend college, she enrolled at Montana Tech University in Butte, a route she thought would pair well with her fondness for math and yearning to understand how things work. She called herself “an imaginer” and had flourishing aspirations to design roller coasters.

But when she walked into her first class during her first semester in the civil engineering program, Opp was surprised to see the women students were outnumbered by men 4-to-1.

The ratio would linger throughout college and into her into her professional career as well, but for Opp, being one of a few women in the engineering field wasn’t so much intimidating as it was motivating.

“I never felt like I had less opportunities than my male counterparts had,” Opp said. “If I can do it, everyone can do it. The only difference between me and you and the smart person in the room is how bad you want to work for it.”

THE VAST majority of her classmates and professors supported her throughout the program, though she said there was an underlying need to prove she could not only be an engineer, but also excel in the field.

She studied late, she forged mentorship-style relationships with advisers and professors who “really invested in her,” she said, and she eventually landed several internships with the U.S. Forest Service. The opportunity brought her to the Bitterroot first and then, when she was only 20, to Flathead County, where she said she fell in love with Glacier National Park and Luke, who would later become her husband and “biggest cheerleader.”

Opp left college confident in her abilities to launch into a civil engineering career — a feeling that would turn out to be relatively short-lived.

She was fresh out of school and had taken a job working in the private sector when her supervisor asked her to write a Planned Unit Development, known commonly as a PUD.

“I had never seen one, so I started winging it,” she recalled.

When she presented it to her supervisor, he started tearing out pages of the document and throwing them onto the floor.

“Unless you have a very good sense of self and self-esteem, the smallest input given at the wrong time will really convince us we are imposters,” Opp said. “When you’re a young lady and you’re getting that input, it’s easy to believe that the other person is right and that you’re not cut out for it.”

So Opp took a step back from engineering and shortly after found herself in Flathead County with her husband, where she took a job at Glacier Bank in Columbia Falls.

She described the job as comfortable, and it allowed her to work with numbers, something that has always come easy to her. It allowed her a chance to restore her confidence, and when the chance to work as a cashier at Flathead Cooperative Electric rolled around, she confidently put her name in the hat.

“My motivation for applying at the time was really because I thought it sounded like a good, stable job,” said Opp, who landed the position easily.

FROM THERE her rise to her current supervisor role came quickly.

Two years into her cashier job she was offered a spot in the geographic information systems (GIS) department after friends in engineering encouraged her to apply.

She turned paper flows for data collection into digital files, among other tasks. During that role, she found a mentor in GIS Supervisor Kelly Spooner, who further restored her confidence in the engineering realm.

“I asked her a million questions and she never made me feel like my pursuit for learning was misplaced or unwelcomed,” Opp said. “That job and Kelly were monumental turning points for me.”

That job evolved into the cooperative’s right-of-way administrator a few years later in 2017, and when the supervisor in that department retired in 2018, she took over.

Today, Opp oversees a group of 16, most of whom are men. She said challenges related to being a woman in a leadership position present themselves everyday, but she strives to be the type of leader that has inspired her throughout her journey.

“Sometimes we can be silenced with people talking over us, or people don’t like the idea that you’re the lead. But you need to be who you are and be comfortable with who you are and communicate confidently, and try to understand where they are coming from” Opp said. “There are ways to communicate with tact and grace to encourage the type of behavior that we want. It’s a brick by brick process.”

She added that she has high hopes for incoming generations of engineers, and encourages young women especially to enter the field.

She represents a small, yet growing, demographic in engineering. Since 2013, the United States’ electric cooperatives have hired 400 female engineers, 50 female general managers and 220 female executives. That’s according to the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), an organization that represents the interests of over 900 electric cooperatives nationwide to various legislatures.

But according to other statistics, the future is ripe for more women to enter the engineering field, particularly in electric cooperative roles like Opp’s. Approximately 20% of the national cooperative workforce will be eligible for retirement in the next five years. According to NRECA statistics, that means 15,000 jobs will become available, and the organization hopes many of the positions will be filled by women.

Reporter Kianna Gardner may be reached at 758-4407 or kgardner@dailyinterlake.com