Women Scientists in America by Margaret W. Rossiter

Author:Margaret W. Rossiter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Senior Women: Contented or Discontented?

Although little was written about the success of academic women in any of the sciences, a few senior women, especially bioscientists, emerged in the 1970s and after as major laboratory directors and grantswomen. (A few of these were involved with or spoke out upon women-in-science issues.) Among this group were Charlotte Friend, Ruth Sager, Margaret Bryan Davis, Neena Schwartz, Shirley Tilghman, and Joan Steitz, as well as the sociologist Judith Blake, in demography. There were also a few in the physical sciences, such as Mildred Dresselhaus and Judith Klinman. In the years after 1972 they were chairing departments, running big NIH- and NSF-supported research and training grants with numerous graduate students and postdocs, establishing centers, serving on review panels, and attending and occasionally running Gordon conferences (on which see chapter 12). Aside from the stresses of building a research unit based on temporary grants, they enjoyed the experience enormously, or as Ruth Sager wrote to her mentor when she returned to her laboratory after an absence, “It seems to be the same old rat race but I must admit I love every moment of it.”25

Of course they liked it even more when they did not have to apply for grants. Some female bioscientists benefited from the decision in 1985 by the newly reorganized Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) to award about one hundred (later increased to about three hundred) multiyear investigatorships to outstanding individuals at major biomedical institutions and thus free them from writing grant proposals for five years. These highly coveted super-professorships were initially limited to four (later five) sub-areas: cell biology and regulation, genetics, immunology, neuroscience, and structural biology. Although these were relatively feminized specialties, there seem to have been very few women among the initial investigators. But turnover was significant, as renewal was dependent on a rigorous review by the HHMI’s scientific review panels. By 2007, when there were about three hundred HHMI investigators at universities worldwide, about sixty, or 20 percent, were probably women, to judge from their first names, a percentage that could have been higher. Among the best-known Americans women were Shirley Tilghman, of Princeton; Susan Lindquist, at the University of Chicago; Joan Steitz, at Yale; Elaine Fuchs, at the Rockefeller University; and Susan Taylor, at the University of California at San Diego.26

These top women offered few public hints until the 1990s that not all was well at the top of the academic ladder. When Berkeley’s first tenured woman chemist, Judith Klinman, a very busy single parent, arrived in the late 1970s, she tried at first to go it alone, but in 1981 she joined a select off-campus group of Bay Area women science faculty (and one department administrator), saw what communal wisdom she had been missing, and became a faithful participant thereafter. At biweekly evening meetings in the members’ homes, seven women exchange experiences and sought and shared advice on how to cope with the difficulties and stresses of the unknown personal and professional terrain they were encountering. Started

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