C&EN talks with Shyamala Rajender, chemist, lawyer, and memoir author

Abstract

When male faculty and administrators started attacking Shyamala Rajender’s character, she relied on one of chemists’ great weapons to prove them wrong: her detailed lab notebooks. Those notes, along with others the then-postdoctoral fellow kept about her daily activities, helped Rajender rebut claims University of Minnesota Twin Cities faculty and administrators made to justify the Chemistry Department’s decision not to hire her as a tenure-track faculty member—despite initial promises that it would. Those attacks were launched during Rajender’s 1973 lawsuit against the university for sex discrimination, a case that was later expanded into a class action. After almost a decade, she won that case, and the settlement required the university to hire more female faculty, especially in the Chemistry Department. The case also helped dozens of women get restitution for jobs, promotion, or pay raises they did not get. “I haven’t regretted it one bit ever since,” remembers Rajender, who