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2. Starting Careers: Plus Ça Change, Plus C’est la Meme Chose
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24 2 Starting Careers Plus Ça Change, Plus C’est la Même Chose Biologist Martine Ryeson completed her PhD at age 24 in Britain; unfortunately, this coincided with Thatcher’s reforms of the British educational system. She became part of the brain drain and took a postdoc at a Canadian university. After 3 1/2 years as a postdoc, she decided to stay in North America, obtaining a tenure-track position at a large, public university in the Southeast. Although I did not marry until after I achieved tenure, one of my colleagues asked me if one child wasn’t enough when I became pregnant again, this time with twins. Unlike the young male colleague whose record of achievement was less than mine, the department did not put me up for early promotion, although I still did make professor within 10 years of being hired. I felt that the chair and dean did not support women. I left the institution to become a dean at a public institution in the Midwest. Now I’m the provost at a research institution in the mid-Atlantic region. Her colleagues’ negative reaction to her pregnancy impacted Martine ’s decision to leave the institution. The security of tenure permitted her the luxury to choose the timing so that she could move up in the profession. Women who lack the seniority and job stability to have such options when biological issues of pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing arise, often are forced into less career-enhancing moves and choices. The differences in the experiences of women and men scientists and engineers are undoubtedly extensive and well documented, but it can Starting Careers 25 often be difficult to sort out origin and impact. How much is due to the individual’s scientific discipline? How much results from the era in which the woman received her education and training? How much do mentors impact women’s experience? What effect does family, including family of origin, have? In short, what contextual surroundings help us understand these experiences? Fortunately, scholarship in women’s studies helps provide some of the context to understand the experiences of women in science. Context to Understand Experiences of Women in Science During the past 30 years, the women’s movement and its academic arm of women’s studies have had an impact on higher education research and teaching, as well as institutional policies and practices. Women’s studies and feminist perspectives have transformed theoretical approaches to knowledge and mandated inclusion of women and a focus on research subjects of interest to women, also leading to more inclusive pedagogy in the classroom and curricular content and increases in hiring, promotion, and tenure of women faculty in humanities and social sciences. Although to date women’s studies has made less powerful inroads in the sciences, it provides the perspectives to understand that the comments made by Larry Summers, and echoed by the support of others, simply represent old arguments rehashed and presented in new language. As one of the individuals (Rosser 2000, 2004) who contributed to the new body of research on women and science that evolved as part of the burgeoning new scholarship on women during the last quarter-century, I’ll briefly summarize my perspective on the development of women and science and feminist science studies to place these experiences and interviews in that broader context of evolution from individual to institutional solutions. Although women’s health concerns became one of the forces motivating the women’s movement in the 1960s, women scientists and engineers tended not to be very heavily represented in the leadership for women’s issues on campus. Directors of women’s studies and much of the scholarship on women emerged initially from the humanities (Boxer 2000), followed by the social sciences, and only more recently from the sciences (Fausto-Sterling 1992b; Rosser 1988, 2000). This dearth of scientists resulted partially from the very small numbers of tenure-track faculty women in senior and leadership positions in sci- [18.232.88.17] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:18 GMT) 26 Starting Careers ence, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Strong cultural traditions of masculinity and objectivity in science threatened to keep women’s studies separate from the theories of cultural and social construction of knowledge production acceptable in the humanities and social sciences. In many ways, the scholarship on women and science mirrors the categories of scholarship in women’s studies as a whole and the emerging development...