Shifting the Agenda: From the Needs of Women to the Needs of Science

Abstract

For more than 50 years I have enjoyed the profound pleasure and privilege of working in and around science and with students, teachers, and scientists. Developing different perspectives on women’s participation and leadership year by year, my activism has varied from bottom-up counseling, mentoring, and teaching to top-down designing and promoting pedagogic and structural academic reforms. During my hands on science years (1950s) as a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) graduate student and then a molecular biologist at the SloanKettering Institute and Cornell Medical College, I was happy just to be doing “what the boys were doing” and lucked into friendly, bias-free laboratories and research I loved. I assumed that other women would follow easily through the doors that our predecessors, my female colleagues, and I had opened. The attitude I had then seems sexist now: That it was my job to behave and work in ways that would encourage my male colleagues to keep the doors open for other women! But the doors turned out to be not so open. So, there was work to be done. In the 1960s, after leaving the laboratory to manage K-12 formal and informal educational institutions, I learned from college girls of the outright discrimination and career discouragement they experienced in science departments. Finding comparable sexism in K-12 classrooms, I decided that part of the problem lay in misperceptions of what science is and what scientists do. I decided to work on replacing the prevalent cold, rigid, and exclusive image of science with a more inclusive and humancentered one: that scientific inquiry is accessible to all, is a partner (not a relative) of technology, and can enrich and assist daily life as well as provide fulfilling careers of exploration and discovery. The good news is that this message is now quite well accepted and overt discrimination is now rare. In the 1990s, while serving as a resident tutor at Harvard’s Leverett House (their first grandma tutor!) and working with Paula Rayman and Harvard faculty at the Radcliffe Public Policy Center, I was thrilled to find vastly increased undergraduate female enrolments and achievement in the sciences at Harvard and MIT. One of the goals of those laboring in equity vineyards had been reached: Gender is no longer a predictor of top grades in school or college science classes. There is a new belief abroad in the land that girls and women can be equal to boys and men in science skill and achievement. However, a widespread belief that women can and should be equal to men in power and control is not yet evident. This is the work to focus on now. Successful female scientists are leaving academe at a higher rate than men, and their representation among senior faculty is scarcely increasing. Secondary and college teaching and testing, and peer and tenure reviews currently weed out rather than cultivate diverse talents, interests, and values. The lack of gender (and other) diversity among university department chairs and deans, Members of the National Academy of Sciences, and corporate and entrepreneurial (biotech) leaders illuminates the distance left to go. To move this distance, I am now convinced that we need to make clear to men and women, nonscientists and scientists, conservatives and liberals, boys and girls alike that the advancement and leadership of women in science is more than a women’s issue. It is an issue of good science. To promote women in power and control, we should be able to shift attention now from the needs and rights of women to the needs and rights of science. We need a public will that science and society needs women’s leadership, not just their labor. To build this argument I believe we must again (as I did to attract more teachers and girls in the 1970s)