Freeing Athena

ASEE Prism, Dec 2000 by Sanoff, Alvin P

Some of the National Academy members tell of the difficulties of balancing careers with family and how that sometimes worked against them, especially in an academic setting. Judith Klinman, who in 1978 became the first female member of the chemistry department at the University of California at Berkeley, says that she chose to focus on her research and her family. "That was all the energy I had," she recalls. Looking back, she says that it is important for women in the academy to join women's support groups, especially those composed of women who are in the same field, and to exchange information.

The women interviewed for journeys are a more heterogeneous group. While some pursued and earned a doctorate and entered the academy or government, others stopped their formal education after earning a bachelor's degree and today work in the private sector. Their stories demonstrate that there are a number of options available to female scientists other than academia.

Deborah Lynn Grubbe, for example, found satisfaction and fulfillment working as an engineer in the private sector. Grubbe, who held the position of director of engineering at E. I. DuPont de Nemours and Company at the time of the interview for the book, says that she views herself as "a businessperson first who happens to be an engineer and happens to be a woman." A graduate of Purdue University with a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering, Grubbe says that at DuPont she has had a number of mentors, mostly men, who placed her in "environments where there were always one or two key people who really wanted to help me grow and learn."

It would seem that mentorship is a lot harder to come by in the supposedly enlightened precincts of the academy than in industry or government. In fact, Elga Wasserman, author of The Door in the Dream and holder of a doctorate in organic chemistry, found that several of the National Academy members she interviewed said that "women tend to do better in governnent laboratories than in universities." One interviewee, who has worked in both government and in research universities, said that government laboratories give women more freedom to move ahead and there is no "tight academic promotion time frame" to worry about.

The last of the four books, History of Women in the Sciences: Readings from Isis (The University of Chicago Press, $20), consists of a collection of essays from a highly regarded journal that is devoted to the history of science and its cultural influences. The essays deal with such topics as women's exclusion from science and the general lack of recognition for the contributions women have made, providing some context for the issues of today. But the essays are likely to be of greatest interest to specialists.

The books, taken as a whole, provide some grounds for encouragement. Women clearly have made substantial strides over the past 30 years. But while they have come a long way, there is still much that needs to be done to truly level the playing field in science and engineering. This is especially true of America's research universities, institutions to which change comes exceedingly slowly.