Women in the Chemical Workforce A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable (2000) / Chapter Skim
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1970-2000: A Less Than Golden Age for Women in Chemistry?
1970-2000: A Less Than Golden Age for Women in Chemistry?
Pages 6-23
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From page 6... ...
a chemistry major, thanks to a very enjoyable course and textbook by Professor Harry Sister, who made chemistry seem beautiful. But then in sophomore year Professor Louis Fieser made organic chemistry seem monotonous I could not stay interested in all those ways you can turn an aldehyde into a ketone.
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From page 7... ...
presidents Carter, Reagan, and Clinton.5 Coming along behind her would be Marye Anne Fox, who served in the l990s in what may be a seat for Southern women on the National Science Board and who is now, after many years at the University of Texas, the chancellor of North Carolina State University.6 So by now the year 2000—there have been a few women chemists in top and highly visible and responsible places in the United States. An internationally renowned achievement for women was the winning of the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 1988 by Gertrude Elion of Glaxo Wellcome in North Carolina.7 No woman chemist had done this since biochemist Gerty T
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From page 8... ...
10. She tells her own vivid tale of an unhappy career at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Molly Gleiser, "The Glass Wall," in Anna Pattatucci, ea., Women in Science, Meeting Career Challenges (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998)
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From page 9... ...
But what is of interest here is the distribution of scientific disciplines of these women as well as their number. Of the 138 women elected since 1970, 79, or by far the majority, have been in biological fields, including biochemistry.
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From page 10... ...
In addition, there are several women chemists and chemical engineers who are (or were) members of other engineering sections, such as Edith Flanigen, Mary Good, Elsa Reichmanis, Della Roy, Maxine Savitz, Kathleen Taylor, Nancy Fitzroy, and the deceased Judith Schwan.~4 Thus what might be called the premier "reward structure" for American scientists and engineers, academic or otherwise, does not seem to be working very well for women chemists and chemical engineers.
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From page 11... ...
SOURCE: Commission on Scientific and Technical Personnel Tables, 2-16 and 6-1; data derived from National Science Foundation, Science and Engineering Degrees, 1966-96, and Science and Engineering Doctorate Awards: 1998.
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From page 12... ...
"Other" includes agricultural and food chemistry; "physical" includes nuclear and theoretical chemistry. SOURCE: Commission on Scientific and Technical Personnel, Table 6-1 1; data derived from National Science Foundation, Survey of Earned Doctorates 1960-1998.
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From page 13... ...
SOURCE: Commission on Scientific and Technical Personnel, Tables 7-1, 7-04, and 7-05; data derived from National Science Foundation, Survey of Earned Doctorates, 1998. in the number of men majoring in chemistry.
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From page 14... ...
(That distinction was introduced about then; before then, all assistant professorships were assumed to be what is now called tenure track.) She sued, sought, and got class-action status when she showed the pattern was industrywide, and finally in 1980 the university settled out of court with a special master appointed to introduce new practices and oversee some rectification of claims.~7 One can't help but speculate that Rajendar's consciousness grew in her years in the remarkable chemistry department at Wyoming, where Sara Jane Rhoads and N
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From page 15... ...
Since 1970 the number of graduate chemistry departments with no women faculty has dropped to fewer than ten institutions. Some, especially private and Roman Catholic ones, have been helped in the last decade with grants from the Clare Booth Luce Foundation that was established in the mid-1980s.
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From page 16... ...
In particular, management is challenging, could be improved at most places, and is wellpaying, as every salary survey shows. Maybe in 20 years or preferably sooner, the Chemical Sciences Roundtable will run another conference on the stresses and strains faced by women holding prominent and powerful positions as presidents of organizations, full professors at major universities, department chairs, deans, and major prizewinners, including more members of the National Academies.
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From page 17... ...
Joseph College: I think one of the problems in academia is the fact that department chairs and deans and vice presidents and presidents very often were men, and so the woman probably didn't have much of a chance or much of a voice at the decision-making level. I think it is only more recently that you have somewhat honest search committees, if most places could even say that at this point in time.
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From page 18... ...
The ACS Directory of Graduate Research is computer searchable, so you can assemble these numbers very easily compared to the heroic efforts that were required decades ago. If you look at women in organic chemistry, women in physical chemistry, etc., there are fascinating and quite striking differences.
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From page 19... ...
I also taught residents, faculty members, and medical students who needed to learn bioanalytical techniques to pursue their research. I was the chemist in the department, we had a center grant, and I was part of the investigators in the center grant as the director of the Core Facility for Analytical Chemistry.
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From page 20... ...
One of the things I have noted over the past year in the position I have now is that search committees are often constituted entirely of men, and they don't put any women on the schedule to meet with a female candidate. So the woman is there all day being interviewed by men and never meets any other women.
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From page 21... ...
Babich, Florida Tech: We had a faculty search this year in organic chemistry, and our search committee was composed entirely of women. I thought we had the whole problem solved.
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From page 22... ...
Marion Thurnauer: That is what I question. When we discuss ways to increase the number of women in the chemical workforce, how do we factor in the issues of the economy the current job market and how it affects the chemical job market?
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From page 23... ...
So we pulled her aside and said, "You probably need to look at doing a postdoc." We find this across the board, but I just thought I would throw out that statistic. Maria Spinu, DuPont: I was personally involved in hiring and interviewing people for CR&D, and I can testify that we looked really, really hard and tried very, very hard to find qualified women and African-Americans.
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