CHAPTER 24
ELISE
FORMER BIG TEN PROVOST AND UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT
Elizabeth Hoffman-1 and 2
Transcribed by Crystal Trejo
Q-We can do this however you want. It can be on or off the record. You can have a pseudonym if
you like.
You can describe me as the president of a university only if you have other presidents.
Q-Yes we do and they vary in how they feel about things but you can just figure out what you
want to do when we’re done with the interview. And if you want to write anything in or take
anything out after you’ve done the interview, that’s fine you can do whatever you want to do.
So let’s go ahead. The project I’m working on is about gender discrimination in academia and
so I’m wondering if you could just tell me about your own experience of it as you moved through
from being a high school girl to grown woman and a college administrator.
Interestingly I’ve only experienced it in fits and starts so I wouldn’t say it’s been a constant
factor in my life. In fact, I went to a high school that was amazingly devoid of gender
discrimination. That was the case in junior high as well, and I started playing sports in 5th grade
which helped. I was a starting goalie and center on the junior high hockey and basketball teams
and then continued playing into high school. I finally quit sports because I figured I was going to
have to devote more time to my studies if I was going to get into the kind of college I wanted to
go to. I remember my teammates came sobbing to me asking, “How can you desert us?”
Sometimes I wonder how my life would’ve been different if they’d had Title 9 when I was in
high school. I would’ve almost surely been recruited to a Division 1 either for field hockey or
basketball and I probably wouldn’t have ended up at Smith because someone would have paid
for my college education.
Then in 7th grade I tested into a very high intensity program. It was part of the National Defense
Education Act post-Sputnik ramp up in science and math education, and I tested into a special
math and science program. The group was made up of thirty of us who were in the top, and it
was about half girls and half boys. We stayed together pretty much all the way through high
school except for a couple who dropped out because they just didn’t like the intensity of the math
and the science. So that’s why I ended up quitting sports; I wanted to take the tougher math and
science and two languages, and ended up having to do my science labs after school which meant
that I couldn’t do sports.
After high school I ended up going to Smith and I was still incredibly shy then. I don’t think it
had anything to do with gender discrimination though. I think it’s just me, I’m an INTJ. I’m at
the extreme end of I. Most people who know me today don’t believe it but I had to force myself
to overcome extreme shyness. I was never shy in class and I was never shy on the playing field. I
was never shy in the things I was good at. I sang in the choir, I played in the band, and I played
in the orchestra. I was never shy in performance related things. But I was shy in social things.
Still, I don’t think that had anything to do with gender discrimination. I really don’t.
I came from a family of extraordinarily strong women. I mean unbelievably strong women. My
grandmother divorced my grandfather in 1938, an unheard of thing to do at the time, and she
started a bakery. I grew up in this bakery dominated by my mother, my aunt and my
grandmother who all worked together. So again, I had a very unusual upbringing for a young
woman of the 1950s and 60s with the bakery and sports.
I think playing team sports has been crucial to my career, really crucial to my career. Playing
team sports since the time I was in 5th grade means I learned teamwork which a lot of women our
age never learned because they never had that team experience. So then of course I went to
Smith. While some Smith women felt there was gender discrimination because our professors
were mostly male, my first shocking experience of gender discrimination wasn’t until I applied
to graduate school. I was literally asked if I was on the pill. I was asked what my husband was
going to do because I got married to my first husband when we were sophomores in college.
This was also kind of unheard of.
Q-Were you allowed to live in the dorm at Smith then?
No I was not allowed to live in the dorms.
Q-I really hated that policy. I think they thought that the married women would tell us all what
sex was like and we’d all go and want it or something. That’s the only reason I could think of for
it. It’s such an ugly, stupid, isolating experience for somebody. They had to have an apartment
off campus. Did it ever make sense for you? Or did you just trust it?
No it didn’t. And you still had to pay the full comprehensive fee and pay for the apartment. I
was a little mad at Smith about that but I didn’t view it as gender discrimination so much as
marriage discrimination.
Q-Did anyone at Smith ever take you aside and say, “You’re smart. You should be going to
graduate school or law school or something beyond Smith?”
You know, I’ve been trying to remember. I always assumed I’d go to graduate school. Maybe
it’s because I married someone who was a senior at Amherst when I was a freshman at Smith
and he went on to grad school. And I actually started working with his thesis advisor. He had this
big NSF grant to study the demographic transition, which as a sociologist you would understand
what I’m talking about. I started working on this when I was a junior at Smith and so I just got
totally enthralled with academic research and it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t be going to
graduate school.
Q-But you were encouraged in that this man took you into his research?
Oh yeah. If anybody had an impression on me as a scholar, it would be Richard Easterlin. What
an absolutely wonderful man. There were lots of women demographers that he helped over the
years.
Q-So you went off to grad school but you had to have an interview before you went to grad
school?
Right, I applied to Penn which was easy because that’s where Bill was but I also applied to Yale
because a guy named Bill Parker who was an especially well-known economic historian was at
Yale. He was a colleague of Dick Easterlin’s and Dick thought it would be a good idea for me to
work with Parker for a while because I’d been working with him so long.
At the Yale interview they asked me what my husband would do if I came to Yale. I replied that
he had finished all his coursework and was planning to come with me and finish his dissertation
and wanted to work with Bill Parker too. You know at the time I didn’t think of it as gender
discrimination. I thought gender discrimination was being asked if you were on the pill. But I
didn’t get in. So I went to Penn and the one experience I had at Penn that was interesting
regarding gender was that I kept being told that women don’t finish [their degrees]. Well I
observed that they admitted about 2 women and 30 men every year. So I went back through the
list of admitted students over the last 10 years and looked to see who’d graduated and the women
and the men graduated at about the same rate. But of course, they could remember every woman
who ever left.
Q-Because there weren’t very many of them.
There were so few. So I presented them with this data and they were like, oops. You know I
wouldn’t say other than those hick-ups that I had a bad experience at Penn. I had great mentors.
There was Dick Easterlin and John Durand who was another famous demographer and they were
on my dissertation committee. There was also this incredibly generous Italian historian who
frankly had no idea what I was working on because it was a statistical study of the decline of the
mortality in Italy, but he signed off on my dissertation literally because Dick and John said it was
great. He was, in a strange sort of way, really wonderful too even though he had little effect on
what I worked on. So I emerged from Penn again feeling pretty good about myself.
Then I went onto the History job market. Talk about awful. It’s hard to say how much of it was
gender discrimination and how much was discrimination based on the fact that I was not a
traditional historian. I did not have a time and a place and these carefully defined boundaries that
historians usually work within. I was a quantitative historian. There was an article in The
Chronicle this morning about the ebb and flow of cliometrics and I was a founding member of
the Cliometric Society and it really wasn’t until the mid-seventies when cliometrics took off. I
graduated in 1972 and it took me two years to get a job. I was 2nd on more lists that you can
imagine. Departments would get into fights about me between the young faculty and the old
faculty, largely because of my untraditional approach to history.
I finally was hired by the University of Florida and I went there with no inkling of what I was
walking into. It turns out the University of Florida was under threat of suit under Title 7 of the
Civil Rights Act because the History Department had never hired a woman. And so I was hired
by the department chair over the objection of the rest of the faculty. I knew none of this going in.
I went in for a formal interview. I gave a job talk, I gave a lecture in Western Civilizations, and I
met with faculty. It seemed like a perfectly regular job interview.
Q-Right and then you got there and?...
I got there and I realized that I was the first woman hired by their History Department, and that I
was hired under threat of suit under Title 7. I was the first quantitative historian as well. Also,
because I’d just gotten a divorce from my first husband, the wives didn’t want me at any of the
parties. You know at this point I was already dating Brian and the thought that I was going to go
after one of their husbands was beyond my comprehension. But you know I was 28 years old and
I was pretty. I was the 1960s braless-shorts-miniskirts-model skinny-type woman. I’m sure I
scared the bejesus out of them. I didn’t even think about these things. I just thought about myself
as a scholar.
Again it’s hard to separate the gender thing from the fact that people didn’t understand a word I
was saying [about cliometrics]. I’d give research talks and get into fights with my colleagues
about whether you could use a model to describe a historical event. We wouldn’t get past the
first page of my paper.
Q- I’m trying to remember, when did Bob Fogel get his Nobel Prize for cliometrics?
It was quite a bit later. But of course Bob Fogel was someone I knew well because I started
going to Cliometrics Society meetings in 1972. Donald, now Deirdre McCloskey, and I were
best friends. But anyway in the middle of the first quarter at Florida I got a call from Lance
Davis, another well-known economic historian, who was one of the founders of the cliometric
movement. He was at Caltech and by this time Brian was a student at Caltech and so I’d visited a
couple of times. It had never occurred to me to study there. Our plan was that he would finish his
PhD and then we’d go out on the job market together again or he’d look for a job in Florida
again.
But I ended up just kind of unloading on Lance and told him, “This [job at Florida] is just
horrible. I’m teaching two sections of Western Civilizations to 200 students and all they want to
hear is funny stories about Henry the VIII’s wives. I give them tests and all they do is spout back
the book. They memorize sections of the book and spout them back to me. I spend hours
planning lectures on the causes of the English Civil War and it goes whoosh, right over their
heads.”
He asked me, “Why don’t you come to Caltech.”
“And do what?” I asked. He told me he was starting this new PhD program. I couldn’t imagine
being a PhD student again. That was crazy. Who would want to be a grad student more than
once? But he told me I wouldn’t have to finish my degree, that I could just come and think of it
as a post doc. He told me they were looking for interesting students. I told him my GRE’s
weren’t that great but he told me math GRE’s were all that mattered and mine were actually
really good. They were 750 or something. I sometimes wonder how I got into a history program
at all with my verbal GRE’s.
Anyway, I took a two year leave of absence from Florida. For years afterwards, the myth was
that the first woman they ever hired left to follow her boyfriend. So I went to Caltech and it was
nirvana. Charlie Plott used to say that we didn’t know we were supposed to discriminate.
Q-Charlie was pretty good with women I think.
Well everyone at Caltech was pretty good. I mean you probably know Linda Cohen?
Q- Yeah, sure.
Well she was in my class of six which was half women. Again there was no gender
discrimination at all. I fell in love with economics there. So I took the classes and did well and
took prelims and passed prelims. At that point I was working on a big NSF project with Roger
Noll and Jim Quirk who were involved in on the allocation of the Colorado River water under
the Colorado Compact and what was going to happen when Arizona got its allocation and I
ended up writing a highly theoretical dissertation on the optimal allocation of water rights and I
finished in three and a half years, again with no intention of getting a degree. And then suddenly
I just had job offers everywhere. And then again, I’d say for the next almost twenty years of my
career, I never experienced, well I almost never experienced gender discrimination.
The only time I did experience gender discrimination was when Gordon Tullock was hired by
the department at Arizona. Gordon and I were hired the same year, both hired as tenured full
professors. I was working in the Economics Science lab with Vernon Smith. I begged them not
to hire Gordon Tullock. I told them, “He’s the worst misogynist in the world!” But the allure of
hiring someone who almost got a Nobel Prize was too great for them. I mean he made it so
unpleasant that I didn’t want to go to lunch with my colleagues.
He was just relentless in saying things like, “You don’t belong here. You’re not smart enough.
Women aren’t smart enough.” Ugh, it was horrible.
Q-What did you say when he would say things like that?
You know my approach has always been to just leave. When I didn’t get a raise I was supposed
to get, when I didn’t get a promotion I was supposed to get, I just left. I came up for my third
year review at Northwestern and it was perfectly legitimate, I hadn’t published anything. I did a
lot of stuff on the pipeline. I was just writing my first NSF grant but I didn’t have anything
published. Dale Mortensen, who just won the Nobel Prize last year, was Department Chair and
he apparently didn’t reflect the ideas of the review committee. What the review committee had
said to tell me was that I needed to get my work published, which was not an unknown fact to
me. What he said to me was that if I kept doing this experimental work I wouldn’t ever get
famous fast enough. “Go back to doing economic history,” he told me. But I wasn’t interested in
going back to that.
The next day I was giving a talk at Purdue and they offered me a job and so I went. Up until
being President of the University of Colorado I experienced some setbacks but most of the time I
don’t think they were gender related. In Dale’s case, I honestly think he just didn’t think
experimental economics was worth anything.
Another time I just left was when I was at Wyoming. In Wyoming we had this horrible dean who
treated everybody awfully. And there was a huge exodus. I mean Bill Schultze left and there
were a whole bunch of really well-known people who left Wyoming in a two-year period. One of
my colleagues told me that they didn’t want to be the last person to turn off the light. This dean
was just so bad. I came back from a year on sabbatical at Arizona and I’d published 6 articles
and a book all with Wyoming. The dean had given all the full professors a $10,000 raise and he
didn’t give one to me. He told me, “You know you weren’t here.” I responded by saying that I
had published six articles and a book last year. And he said, “You know, you’re one of the
biggest troublemakers in the whole college” and threw me out of his office.
The next day again I got a call from Arizona telling me they wanted me to come back
permanently. So I went to Arizona and it was great. I went to Iowa State and it was great. I went
to the University of Illinois Chicago and it was great. I went to the University of Colorado as
President, and again the first two years I was there it was nirvana, despite some battles with the
governor. Once the press got after me about it things got uglier and uglier, and in every genderspecific related way. It was almost as though once I was no longer the fairy princess, I was fair
game for the ugliest things. This sports talk radio talked about ripping my clothes off.
I certainly saw this kind of treatment of women in the 2012 election cycle. There’s this thin
veneer of respect for women that when it’s ripped off just a little bit reveals an ugliness
underneath that has not gone away. I see it sometimes in academic colleagues, although
decreasingly so because it has become so socially unacceptable in the academic world that when
it surfaces, it surfaces in very subtle ways. For example, when I was Dean at Iowa State in the
mid-nineties, the Physics Department had only one woman and she wasn’t even a physicist; she
was an astronomer. She’d been hired as a spousal accommodation about twenty years earlier.
She was a very distinguished astronomer but not a physics person.
We had no female physicists. So I basically offered the department a free line to hire a woman.
You would have thought that I was talking about the greatest discriminatory act in history. I got
hate mail from physicists: “How could you do this to us?” they said. It was a goddamn free line!
You want a free line or not? And then I tried to explain it to them. “We don’t discriminate.” they
said. “We only hire the best people.” So I tried to explain statistical discrimination to them. “We
don’t do that,” they insisted. Well, they finally hired a woman. They finally took the money and
hired a woman who’s now a full professor. And they now have five women in the department
and it’s still not enough. The astronomer tells me it’s like a new place there now that they have
five women in the department. She tells me that they can go to lunch and fill a whole table.
Q-There is a critical mass that has a big impact.
And two of them are now full professors and one of them is a superstar. She’s won awards up
and down. I pushed to hire her and her husband. At the height of the great recession they were
available and I just said, “You’ve got to hire this couple. They are so fantastic!” He was at
Harvard Smithsonian and she was at Argon. They had two kids. They were commuting and they
were just desperate to find a place where they could live together and raise their children. We
made this couple the happiest couple in the world. Every time I would see them on campus they
would tell me, “Thank you thank you, thank you for bringing us here.”
Q-And they’ll stay there.
Exactly! But that’s what I mean; my personal experiences with discrimination have been few and
far between, but when they’ve happened, they’ve been intense. Maybe it’s because I don’t expect
it that it hits me so hard when I do get it. It’s like, “Where’d that come from?”
Q-I wonder if an alternate explanation might be that you’re someone who’s typically pretty
easygoing. You don’t have a chip on your shoulder like you’re looking for discrimination and so
it has to be pretty intense before you really get upset by it. You’re not someone with an axe to
grind.
No not at all. For most of my career as an economist, I kinda joked that I was one of the guys.
I’ve always been an athlete. I used to go running with my colleagues. I never drank alcohol but
I’d go out drinking with some of them at night and be the designated driver which they were
always happy to have along. And I could talk sports because I know football and I know
basketball from being involved with sports since fifth grade. I could talk the things that guys
wanted to talk about in a natural way. It wasn’t like it was forced.
Q-Well I think in some ways that was an advantage-your experience with sports. I remember
going on a job interview and these guys took me to a sports bar and everyone was drinking beer
and I was there with my silk pink blouse and my pearls and it really took me a while to realize
they weren’t deliberately being insulting but they thought this was something I’d enjoy. I really
have no interest in sports though and so it just seemed odd.
Let me ask you another question. You’ve been in administration. What are some of the best
things universities can do-kind of the best practices? I mean putting women in higher positions is
obviously one of the things that helps, but what are some of the other policies you’ve found that
university presidents can do to empower women?
Well, let me just reiterate something you just said. Recruiting women to top administrative
positions is key. When I was at Iowa State the senior leadership went from twenty-percent
women and minorities to sixty-percent women and minorities. It’s largely because of the people
who I hired. I hired the first woman of veterinary medicine. I hired the second woman dean of
liberal arts, I being the first. I hired the first Latino dean ever hired by the university to be the
dean of design. I hired a woman to be the dean of human sciences. There was already a woman
dean of agriculture and life sciences which is unusual and I hired two female vice presidents, one
for research and one for extension. There apparently had been one woman vice president for
research in the past and one woman vice president for extension in the past but in both cases,
we’re talking twenty or thirty years ago. That just made a tremendous difference in the way they
hired and the approach they took. One of the women was a microbiologist and one was a
physicist. Two were entomologists. So these were women who were involved in hard fields. It
just made a tremendous difference.
I also hired a dean of engineering who had a wife who was an engineer and a daughter who was
a math genius. He hired four women department chairs in engineering where we probably had
only two women department chairs in the past. We did a lot of other things too. Have you read
Mary Ann Mason’s work? She came and spoke to Iowa State several times and I just learned so
much from her about the policies that make a difference and the kind of choices that women
make. For example, forty-percent of women in STEM don’t have children and that’s purely a
self-selection, a bad self-selection probably. So stopping the tenure track, or allowing people to
extend the tenure clock can help. We talked for a long time about whether it was better to extend
the tenure clock selectively or to extend it generally and Marion cited some very important
statistics and Bernadette Gray Lewis from Kansas talked to us about this too. She’s the
Chancellor from Kansas and was Provost at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and
that was her area of study as well. But extending the tenure clock for everyone like Yale where
the tenure clock is 10 years only ups the ante on what you have to do and increases the stress and
makes it more difficult for women who would choose to have children earlier because they’re so
afraid they’re not going to make the grade later.
So what we did at Iowa was to keep the seven year tenure track but allow for an up to three year
extension. We allowed for this at Iowa State for child rearing, for personal illness, for having to
care for ailing parents, even for setting up your lab if the contractors didn’t get to the
construction on time causing your research to get off to a slow start. Basically, we established a
very liberal policy on a case by case basis. You had to make a case for why your tenure should
be extended but we rarely denied them if there was a legitimate case.
The next step was educating department chairs because some of the worst people about the
tenure clock are your own colleagues. We had to enforce that even if you extended your time,
you wouldn’t have to publish any more than someone who’d done it in the regular time. That
took a lot of education. There were a lot of department chairs who were afraid to put their junior
faculty up for an extension because they were afraid that their colleagues would turn them down.
So it took more than policy. It took widespread education. We had a woman, and now I can’t
remember her name, who specialized in unintended bias and she came and gave a series of
seminars for department chairs and for chairs of P&T committees. We put together an
educational video and a set of readings on unintended bias and basically required every P&T and
hiring committee to go through an exercise of scoring unintended bias which again opened a lot
of people’s minds. I think what I experienced at the University of Florida was unintended bias. I
think that what the physics department went through in hiring that first woman was unintended
bias. They didn’t think they were discriminating but they were.
Q- I did some interviews with men at UCI and one of the people who worked with me on the
project was a woman who is now in medical school at USF. She was doing this as an undergrad.
And she came back and she was practically spitting nails. She said, “I’ve done some of these
interviews and the answers are always, ‘there used to be discrimination but there isn’t anymore
and it wasn’t in our department.’” She said, one man even looked at her and said that there was
no discrimination because, you know, women can vote now.
“How old are these people? Women can vote now?” she fumed.
This kind of thing seems kind of blasé for people at our age. We just expect it. But it was
interesting for me to see the reactions of a young twenty-one year old woman who was
appropriately appalled. And I realize that these are nice people who just have never had any
sensitivity to it and one of the things that helps is what you talked about, putting women in
positions of power. I think it’s partly because women understand women and also that they are
networked with other women. I realize I don’t know African Americans and so I wouldn’t have
someone off the top of my head for a position. So one of the things I would have to do in hiring is
to call someone who is a minority and ask them to give me the names of these people. It’s a
network question as well as a question of sensitivity.
Exactly. Well just continuing back on the policy issue, in order to get people to take advantage
of extension of the tenure clock you also have to eliminate the concept of early tenure because a
lot of people will say they’re afraid to take an extension. What if their research progresses fine?
What if they have an easy birth and their child doesn’t keep them up all night and they are able to
get a significant amount of research done and come up on time but because they got this
extension it looks like they came up early? They don’t want to be treated differently. So we
actually changed it. There used to be this rule that to come up for tenure early you had to be
extraordinary. When I got early tenure I was so naïve. It never occurred to me that it was
unusual. But supposedly there was a lot of discussion about whether I was extraordinary enough.
And that’s it, it goes both ways. So we eliminated the concept of early tenure basically with the
idea that if your tenure standards are strict enough and someone meets them in three years, then
the likelihood that that person will fizzle and die later is extraordinarily low. I mean to get that
many publications, to get that kind of teaching record, to get that kind of service record in three
years requires someone with extraordinary dedication. So what’s the downside? The downside is
you’re going to lose this person to some other institution and they’re going to discover how good
they are so we eliminated the concept of early tenure as well. Basically you have to be there long
enough to show that you can teach and that you can have a publication record sufficient for
tenure. If you can get that in three years ,you get tenure and you don’t get treated differently. So
it was important to do both.
As far as mentoring, I have been a formal mentor through the years. There’s a joint program on
the status of women in the economic profession in the National Science Foundation that’s been
going on since 1996. It pairs senior women economists with junior women economists and I’ve
worked with women almost all of whom are now full professors. In fact, in the round that started
in 2006 I believe, they actually did a match sample. There were so many junior women who
applied related to the senior women available as mentors that they were actually able to have a
group of women who did not get into the program matched with a group who did get into the
program and they compared their progress. They were able to show, even though it was only
over a three year period so they couldn’t look at tenure, but they looked at pubs, awards, the
markers of making it to tenure, that the women who took part in the mentoring program had
significantly higher performances.
Q- I’d love to find out more about that program because that’s something the APSA should be
doing. I imagine that if there’s somewhat of an NSF connection that there’s some kind of funding
for people. Is that right?
Yes, it’s funded through the Advance most likely. The person to talk to about it is probably
Rachel Croson who is now Dean of the College of Business at UT Arlington. (Her email is
Croson@UTA.edu). She was one of my original mentees and she’s a superstar. All but one of
my mentees from that era are full professors now. One is chair and one is Editor of the Southern
Economic Journal. One from my younger group just won the Fischer Black Prize.
Q-Yeah, there’s a lot of evidence that mentoring is really critical. It just makes such a difference.
It really does. So we instituted a formal mentoring program at Iowa State and it had several
layers. You have an academic mentor who might not be in your department if your research is
interdisciplinary. Then every department of any size is expected to have a kind formal mentoring
team that meets regularly with the junior faculty and then every college is supposed to have a
mentoring group made up of peers and senior faculty that again has regular events with the junior
faculty. And then the provost often puts on a yearlong series of programs where the mentor, the
mentee and the department chair are expected to come.
Q-How did you get this through? Was it difficult? How many resources do you get for this kind
of thing? Was there release time and stuff like that?
Well it helped to get an ADVANCE Grant. Susan was the first PI and then when she left I
became PI of the ADVANCE Grant so we had money to start with and then the results were so
dramatic that we were able in the provost office to justify slowly increasing the contribution
from the provost office. And then one of the things we added was an equity adviser for every
college and we got every dean to agree to continue to pay for an equity adviser. These advisers
are supposed to monitor the hiring searches, monitor the promotion and tenure process, and
monitor the mentoring process. One of the results of the ADVANCE Grant is that we had nine
focal STEM departments and then self-evaluations and examinations of their internal policies
and the way people were treated. We had a human subjects protocol that allowed for a survey to
be done of all members of the department about the departmental climate and then we would
reflect back to the department. They would go through the data for themselves and they would
have department meetings where they’d go through almost intense therapies.
Well those focal departments, if you look at the promotion to full professor in those departments
compared to the non focal departments, it’s not only statistically significant, it’s dramatic. If you
go to the Iowa State Advance web page you can see graphs. We just submitted our final NSF
report and all the data is in that report posted on our web. The data are just dramatic. These were
departments like physics, mechanical engineering, chemistry, aerospace engineering, really
hardcore departments. I also think it’s important that some other policies were put in place
through this grant like part-time tenure. So you can actually go on part-time for a certain period,
retain your tenure and come back to full-time back on the tenure track without having to go
through a huge rigmarole. It’s a fairly simple application and for the time that you’re on part
time, you double your tenure clock for the time you’re out. If you take a year, you get an extra
year. And so if you’re part-time for your entire tenure period you can have a twelve year tenure
clock. Not many people do this but it’s an option.
Q-I’m struck by how differently you’re doing this. Some of the other people who I’ve talked with
at Penn or Duke said they just made it automatic that anyone who had a baby is entitled to
parental leave and what happens is called the Princeton problem which is that men are taking
the leave but continuing to publish articles and they’re raising the bar for others. You’re doing
something quite different though. You’re saying that you have to apply and you look at it on a
case by case basis.
Men can apply too…
Q-But that would help get around that problem or is likely to anyway.
We have, I would say, slightly more women than men take advantage of it but there are some
men that do. But it’s not automatic. If you’re a man applying for it you have to justify by saying
you’re going to spend this many hours a week taking care of the child and helping your wife get
her work done. There’s an enforcement mechanism in some sense because it’s not automatic.
And because you have to sort of justify taking it. My sense is that the men don’t tend to abuse it.
Q-But also if you had a man who had abused it and he came in for a second one, presumably
people would know that he’d abused it and you would be less likely to approve it. Departments
are small and people know what’s going on so if you have a man who’s back in the office all the
time, it’s easy for people to know that.
That’s right. We’ve done a fairly lengthy study of getting tenure as a man or woman and it
doesn’t look as though the chances of getting tenure are any different at this point although what
we started two years ago is a longitudinal study where we started with the cohort of people who
entered as assistant professors and didn’t have any time on their tenure clock. We’re going to
follow them through their careers because that’s the only way you can really tell why people
drop out.
The other thing we did was institute a very strict third year review process. My view has been
that keeping people around for six years and then turning them down for tenure is cruel and
unusual punishment. Usually you can tell after three years. Have they published anything? Have
they submitted grants in a field that requires grants? How is their teaching record? You can tell
in three years whether you have someone with the ability to delay gratification and the mental
discipline to be an academic. We actually have a much higher turn down rate at the third year
review than we do at tenure. One year that I was provost, we turned no one down for tenure. And
we were very worried that the board would start asking questions but they didn’t. That was very
unusual. But I think that six people withdrew in the six months before they came up for tenure
that year because they knew they wouldn’t get it. That’s another thing. I think that there should
be ways in place that you can help people avoid the stigma of not getting tenure by helping them
to realize that this is not the life for them and to look elsewhere without the stigma of not getting
tenure.
Q-I wanted to talk about leadership and how key you think it is. I’m just so impressed with your
leadership and your ability to scientifically test the productivity of these policies to show people
that x leads to y. Not many people are going to argue with that. It’s not something that a lot of
people in charge of ADVANCE programs do.
I think it’s absolutely essential and we actually had a professional statistician who works on
institutional research come to design the kind of experiment we’re talking about and to analyze
the data. For example, she did a salary equity study for us and we actually did not have a salary
equity program which was quite extreme. I was very surprised by the data, in fact. After what
MIT went through for example, we wondered if that would be the case. That’s another thing. If
you look through our finance report, it’s just stuffed with data on women who are hired, the
progress of women.
One other thing regarding the policies you talked about is parental leave; I think it’s really
important. We were not able to get an official parental leave policy other than taking all your
sick leave through the Board of Regents. Right as the economy was collapsing, the board of
regents was afraid of getting a policy that would overtly cost money. I mean extending the tenure
clock doesn’t really cost money. Most departments were large enough to move things around a
bit and modify duty policies. Someone who has just had a baby would benefit from the policy
but so would someone caring for an aged parent. You know a lot of people in their thirties get
caught; they’ve got young children and aged parents they’re taking care of. And they could have
leave for a period of time, although not too long because it puts a lot of burden on their
department who has to deal with a reduced teaching load or a little less help in their lab.
I think another thing is changing the culture in the lab sciences. It’s a culture that says you have
to be there from 7AM to midnight. It’s so discriminatory towards women in particular but
against anyone who’s trying to bring up children. That’s going to take some time. Another thing
is graduate students and post-docs. Mary Ann Mason stated it very clearly that we lose most of
our STEM faculty not as faculty but as graduate students and post docs, young women who want
to have children. They look at the situation and there’s no chance of time to be off and still get
paid. The NSF and NIA are starting very slowly to allow PI’s to give maternity leave to their
system but if we’re really going to build gender equity in the STEM force, we’ve got to be able
to keep the graduate students and post docs in the pipeline and that means we have to let them
have children.
Q-Okay Betsy, that’s going to be the end of it. Thank you so much.
Interview 2:
Q-So last time we talked, you were talking about the literature on unintended bias and one of the
things I found interesting was the idea that it’s not enough for women to just put themselves
forward but it has to be a two-way street and schools need to let it be known that they are
particularly interested in hiring women and minorities. I just wondered if you wanted to
elaborate on that a little.
Absolutely. I think that it’s really important that everybody be on the same page, that it’s really
important to hire women and minorities, and that when you do searches that you make sure that
there are women and minorities in the pool and that they are as good as other candidates. In other
words it is important that they are not just token people that you just put on the list. You should
go out looking and recruit really top women and minorities into the pool. That becomes a
requirement of the search process so much so that if you don’t find them, it’s because they’re not
there. For example, when I did a search for the dean of engineering 5 years ago, we could not get
enough women to apply. Finally we got one woman to apply and we interviewed her at the
airport and she clearly wasn’t interested in the job. So we hired a man who now has my job and
he succeeded at hiring the first woman dean. In fact, he took a college that had no women
department chairs, and by the time he became Provost there were four out of eight.
Q-That’s terrific. You know one of the things they’ve done here at Harvard is to have Radcliffe
professorships so that if they go after somebody, and they often are high profile people, they will
promise them that they will have two of their first five years here without any teaching or
administrative duties so that they can have time for research. What they find is that there is a
pool of superstars and everyone wants the same superstar. So they try to make it so that Harvard
is competitive in getting them because they’re afraid they’ll lose them to somewhere else.
They’ve been very successful because people really value the time, and they have the money to
do it.
That’s right, you have to have the money to do it. My problem is, I’ve never been at a place
where we could afford to have anybody who wasn’t willing to teach.
Q-Well, I always liked teaching. There was a story at the University of Chicago. Some guy was
in his seventies and they finally asked him, “Well aren’t you thinking about retiring soon?”
He said, “Well I retired 8 years ago.” They were shocked because he was teaching a full course
load but he just said he liked teaching. I think that’s what I’ll do, just keep on teaching, I really
like it.
You were talking about this need for this sensitivity and making people aware that they’re really
interested in having good women apply and that that needs to permeate through awards, jobs,
not just the top positions. I know in the American Political Science Association, they did a study
and found that all the committees that gave out the book prizes were heavily dominated by men
and they tended to have bias towards male scholars because of the bias they talk about with role
congruence theory and how men and women tend to evaluate male work differently than they
evaluate female work.
Exactly. So I started first of all with hiring. There needs to be a commitment every time you do a
search for an assistant professor, associate professor, chair, assistant chair, dean, summer school
dean, vice president, whatever. You have to actively recruit a diverse pool because the evidence
is so clear that the only way that you get the end result of hiring a diverse set of people is if you
recruit a diverse pool. If you just sort of wait for people to apply, you’ll never get a diverse pool.
Therefore, you’ll never hire a diverse set of people. I’m not in favor of affirmative action in the
sense of hiring people that are less qualified. I think it’s extremely important that people be
equally qualified. But I also think it’s important that we respect different styles, different
research agendas, and different approaches to the job by equally qualified people.
Also we need to hire people based on more than whether they got their degree from Harvard. I
can think of several very distinguished economists who got their degrees at very unusual places,
did wonderful work, and just rose to the top. So that’s also an important aspect.
One thing I noticed when I got to Iowa State was that most of the distinguished professors were
men. And I said, “We need to start nominating women for distinguished professor.” I looked
around and could see about ten women who were of the quality to be distinguished professors. I
challenged the Deans to find out who their best faculty were and make sure that women got
nominated, and that women were nominated for awards. Also, you mentioned the major
professional organizations. It’s important to recruit women into the executive committees
because that’s how you eventually become secretary, president, or vice president of a major
organization. Do you know Claudia Golden?
Q-You know I knew her in graduate school. She’s done some really interesting work.
She’s at Harvard now and she’s president of the American Economic Association.
Q-That’s really interesting, I didn’t know that. Well we worked really hard when I chaired the
Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession. We got the APA to encourage the
nominating committee, not a requirement but an encouragement, to vary the presidents so it’s no
more than two years of a person of the same gender and that has really opened things up a lot.
Once women get in, they know other women who are socially networked and so you end up
having more women.
We have enough women psychologists to do that.
Q-Yeah, we still struggle to get enough women political scientists.
Political science (gah). I really believe that Iowa’s Department of Political Science is sexist. The
department chair is a really sweet guy and his wife is a distinguished professor in linguistics but
he will not listen to me. He now has a woman dean though. There aren’t that many women but
there are certainly enough women to be better represented in the department. And the junior
women don’t seem to survive.
Q-A lot of the Midwestern schools tend to be very behavioral. I’ve stopped going to the Midwest
meetings because they’re like a locker room. I’m afraid someone’s going to slap a towel at me.
I’ve been VP of it but it’s kind of a jock place with a lot of behavioral political science and
number crunching. I don’t think they’ve even heard that the behavioral revolution has passed.
They’re just kind of living in that glory and it’s very interesting how insular that is and that tends
to go through the whole Midwest.
Well let me ask you a little more. You were talking about some of the expectations that women
have for themselves, that women don’t put themselves up for things, and you said this needs to
be a two way street. You mentioned the Advance Program at Iowa state had, I think four women
in the STEM fields and that there was an increase of 120% in these focal departments versus
20% in the school as a whole.
E-Let me get you the exact data; I just got it in. There are nine focal departments, 3 each in
engineering, liberal arts, and sciences, and agriculture and life sciences. I can remember most of
the departments: chemistry, physics, materials science and engineering, aerospace engineering,
animal science. I can find them all…
Q-No worries. What I really took away from your comments was the fact that there was a
phenomenal increase in these departments when you increased the sensitivity of the people who
were in the department. I think one of the things that happens is it isn’t that men are malevolent;
it’s simply that they don’t understand the experience. In the same way that I don’t totally
understand what it’s like to be a person of color, or a lesbian or gay scholar. I think that has a
slightly different orientation to it and it’s only when you bring people like that into the actual
network that you start to broaden the base of people who are hired and increase sensitivity to
different types of work.
I agree. The data are: the increase of professors in the focal departments was 120%. In the rest of
the university, it was about 35%. The increase in women faculty, and you have to understand this
is a really tough budget time when the number of faculty was going down because we weren’t
filling positions, the increase in women faculty in the 9 focal departments was about 23% and in
the non focal departments was about 3%-5%. And then the percentage increases in assistant
professor hires was 40% women in the focal departments and probably about 30% in the non
focal departments. So in a time when we weren’t hiring very many female faculty at all and the
attrition was greater than the hiring, those were the percentages in women assistant professor
hires.
But if you look at the chairs in the STEM fields, they first went down a little bit from 20062007, and went up to about 17% of the STEM chairs at the end of the NSF grant period, and
about 26% of the non-STEM chairs were women.
Q-So the NSF grant made a big difference there?
I think it made a huge difference. The biggest difference was in the senior leadership because in
the deans I hired, the women’s senior leadership went from about 20% to 60% women and
minorities.
Q-Let me just read off a couple things we’re finding in terms of institutional policies that can
affect things. Most of the people were saying that the most important thing to do is to increase
the number of women in positions of power. And then one of the other things they say after that is
to have affordable daycare onsite. I think there’s a whole series of family friendly measures that
can be taken from daycare onsite to spousal hiring policies, having childcare support while
they’re at conferences to having an alternative tenure clock
I think the alternative tenure clock is very important. What I don’t think is important is to
increase the tenure clock for everyone because all that does is increase what everyone has to get
done. It increases the expectations and increases the anxiety level for everybody. But if you have
a liberal tenure clock extension policy but keep the standards the same, then you allow for time
off for childbearing.
In fact, we took a pretty extensive look at that. We brought in Mary Ann Mason and Bernadette
Gray Little, who is now Chancellor of the University of Kansas, but was at the time the Provost
at North Carolina Chapel Hill, and we talked about places like Yale and Harvard which have
long tenure clocks but that haven’t helped women at all.
Q-Yeah, I think that’s right, What about merely tracking the numbers and posting them on a
website? That’s the thing that’s interesting to me. They post the number of women but they don’t
post the percentage of overall salaries that people make. I think the numbers for the country are
that women make about 85-87% of what men make as full professors. But then you have to
break it down into individual fields. How much trouble is it for universities to do that?
Well we did a very extensive salary equity study and we came to the conclusion that there was
only one department that had a salary equity problem and that was sociology but it turned out
that if you standardized for publications it went away. So we had a lot of women full professors
in sociology that weren’t publishing.
Q-How important is sexual harassment training for people?
Oh, it’s incredibly important. I think it’s part of all of this. I think sexual harassment is part of the
syndrome of problems in achieving equality because if women don’t feel that they can adjudicate
sexual harassment and men as well. You have to remember that while women are sexually
harassed at a higher rate than men, men are sexually harassed as well. I have fired more people
for sexual misconduct than for any other issue.
Q-Really? What do they say? I mean, what’s the typical scenario? Do they not recognize it as
sexual harassment? Do they just blow it off as a joke? When they come in and you tell them that
they’re actually being fired, what do they? What’s the response that you get?
We actually go through a peer reviewed due process so it’s not me telling them, it’s their peers
telling them.
Q-I was on the shadow committee for privilege and tenure, which are the really serious cases,
and there was some guy who’d had an affair with someone who was his graduate student and
was married to somebody else. That didn’t go well and then he’d had another fallout with
somebody else, and he ended up not getting tenure and this was part of the reason. So he called
me and wanted to know what he should do. He’d already gone through all the privilege and
tenure things and I thought, “This guy’s got to be one of the stupidest people in the university!” I
mean he’d had an affair with a student and she’s reported him. Then she wanted to work with
him and he said yes, and she complained again about his sexual harassment. And I don’t know
what to say. There was so much evidence that he was too stupid to be a faculty member. But he
just didn’t get it. He didn’t have any clue about what was happening.
Well, that’s a problem among some of the older faculty because they grew up in a different era,
and psychology was one of the worst offenders. You consider yourself a political scientist right?
Or a psychologist?
Q-Well both.
Ok, well psychology, my sense is that it used to be a rite of passage to sleep with your
dissertation supervisor. I remember when I went to Purdue, I was just appalled. I don’t know if
you know Laura McClosky; she tried to clean up the Arizona department and they just shunned
her.
Q- My sense is that if you’re not interested in that kind of thing, you don’t give off the vibes and
people catch on and you can wander innocently through the halls. The only place I’ve really had
people come on to me was at Public Choice Society meetings.
Well that’s interesting. That would have been the last place I expected it.
Q-It was so bad I just stopped going. I remember I was in some room in a discussion on the
politics of Guinea Bissau, and I was obviously in the wrong room. But when I walked out some
guy came chasing after me and said, “You know we should go out and get dinner. We obviously
have so much in common.”And I thought, what do we have in common?
Other people did really weird things. They’d ask me out for dinner and if I wanted to include
someone else they started pouting. It was just kind of strange.
I’m surprised we never ran into each other at a Public Choice Meeting.
Q-We did actually. Bernie introduced us once. But I stopped going to them because I found them
kind of narrow intellectually. They were not interested in looking at things from as broad a
perspective as I would have liked to look at them. I thought they were very bright but I just
thought they were, well, you know a lot of economists just don’t have any understanding of the
philosophical foundations of their discipline. I remember having a discussion with Ami Glazer,
who can be very cute and very arrogant, and we were talking about this seriously, about what
you need to understand about the history, about the history of science, and the philosophical
foundations of something. And he said, “You don’t need to know any philosophy or history to do
social science. All you need to know is calculus.”
I just kind of lost it and said, “Dumb, stupid and arrogant-bad combination” and then walked
out. I guess that dumb and stupid were probably the same thing but there tended to be too much
of that in the department at Irvine anyway. I mean I like a lot of the economists. I’m very fond of
some of them: Tom Schilling and Ken Arrow are just sweethearts but a lot of people tend to be
really technocratic.
I guess the other thing I was going to ask you was about equity advisers with real power. I think
at a lot of places they have one person in the University who kind of looks to try and recruit a
diverse pool, and how do you handle that? Is that best handled at the department level, the
school level, or one person at the top? How do you deal with that?
Well it’s sort of all of the above. Through the Advance Grant we started hiring an equity adviser
in every college and the focal departments each had an advance professor responsible for making
sure that all the searches in the department were done properly. Some of the advanced professors
conducting the searches were men; in fact some of the best of them were men. I was just talking
with a friend of mine who is the head of one of the departments at Iowa State (Carolyn Cutrona),
and she had to give somebody a negative third year review this year and she said the college
equity adviser was in the meeting with them. It was a woman who had multiple sclerosis, so she
has a disability, and Carolyn felt awful about it but she just hadn’t published anything, you know
this is all confidential, and her teaching wasn’t very good but she said Lisa Larson, the equity
adviser, was so helpful to her in thinking through how to do this in a fair and equitable way that
was not against women or people with disabilities. The equity adviser is a half-time job; half
your pay goes to do this and you have a half reduced teaching load and research load for the
time that you have it, so it’s a real administrative position with an administrative stipend and
you’re responsible for going to at least the first couple of search meetings in department
committees and attending P&T meetings. Basically, you’re responsible for just making sure that
everything is conducted in a way that not only respects difference but recruits and encourages
difference.
Q-Well, I think would relate back to what you were saying before, that you don’t just want to pull
drag some woman off the street for this position and the equity advisers can play a very critical
role in this. As in the case of the woman with multiple sclerosis who hadn’t published anything, it
becomes very difficult, and how do you deal with these things?
Exactly and all the equity advisers are full professors and one of them is a distinguished
professor, so again it’s important to have people in these positions who are highly respected and
have made it in their position. You know I tell a lot of young women, my mentees in particular,
to not under any circumstance accept an administrative job until they have reached a professor
position. And I’m a little upset with one woman who took an administrative position before
getting professor, and consequently she hasn’t been promoted.
Q-There was one woman who wanted to be department chair and I told her I thought it was a
mistake. She was a black woman who was divorced with two children and I said I didn’t think
this was the right time for her. She has two little kids and I didn’t think it was fair to put her in
there. Everyone else said, “Oh no no no, she wants to do it.” It was a disaster; she ended up
resigning. It didn’t go at all well, but that’s another story. I agree with you though that women
have to protect themselves.
Yeah, clearly. I think that they get recruited to these higher administrative positions but they get
stuck and so when a young person asks me, I always think it’s hilarious, “How do I become a
university president?” I tell them, focus on building your research record, your teaching record,
get to be a full professor, and then move up the ranks (dean, chair, provost). And they look at me
like, “you mean I’m going to be 50.” And I’m like; yes you’re going to be 50. You’re not going
to be ready for a university president until 50. I think one of the reasons it’s taken so long to
develop a group of female CEOs and professors is that really our class is the first class of women
around the country who had careers that were equal to men and it takes a large pool in order to
get a few people to have leadership positions. For instance, you don’t want to be an
administrator, you want to be a researcher, and the vast majority of academics don’t want to be
administrators. So it takes a long time to get a large enough pool of people who have the record
and the desire to do it. I actually never thought I wanted to be an administrator. It was the last
thing on my mind.
Q-Do you think there’s any (ageism) now that’s going on that women are particularly
susceptible to?
I’m trying to figure that out. I do see my male colleagues the same age as me getting jobs. I
actually think I suffer from looking younger than I am. I think they expect a woman my age to
have gray hair and a lined face. I’ve never done anything, never had a facelift, and never dyed
my hair.
Q-Right, that’s interesting isn’t it. Well I think that’s another thing that I’m going to try to watch
if it changes because I think people are staying younger for longer. There’s a wider variations o
you can have someone whose 66, which I think we both are, and acts like they’re 46 in terms of
their physical activity, the way they walk, the way they think, the way they have energy to put
into things. Then you can have someone who’s 66 and thinks of themselves as a retired person
and they’re going to sit back and enjoy the grandchildren. I think because people’s health, not
just a state of mind, but people’s health vary tremendously. I had lunch with a guy I’d gone out
with in college and he looks like an old man. He’s overweight and has gray hair and he walks
like an old man. I thought, I can’t believe we’re the same age! It was weird. That’s a weird thing
that is happening and I hope that it won’t hurt women, that they won’t change the standards.
Q-Well listen, is there anything I didn’t ask you that I should have asked you?
Did you get all of your questions answered about how I made career decisions?
Q-I think I got quite a bit. But I might call you if I have any more questions. But hey, if you get
the chance in your spare time walking the dog, if you can think of any women who would be
especially interesting for me to contact, let me know. You mentioned the woman at the University
of Kansas, just shoot me an email and let me know because I’m still just getting going with the
interviews and I think the Presidents and Provosts have an interesting perspective because they
have to look at the whole picture. Whereas people like me sometimes look so much within their
discipline so I think it’s very helpful for me to have a chance to talk with people like you and if
you have other people and could let me know about them, that would be great.
Do you have the list of AAU and APLU women?
Q-No, I’ll check that out.
The AAU is like a club and the APLU is all of the big public research universities and then
NAIC, is an association of private colleges and universities. There’s also the AASCU which is
the smaller regional public universities. Anyway, there’s a bunch of them. I’ll tell you who to
contact.
ACE is the American Council on Education which is all colleges and universities in the country,
public private, small and large are potentially members, and the president is Molly Broad who
would be immensely interesting to interview. She’s been president of the North Carolina system,
chief officer of the Cal State system. Her VP for academic affairs, Gretchen Bataille is also
amazing. She was President of the University of North Texas, Vice President of the North
Carolina system under Molly Broad, she was provost at Washington State and I think at UCSB,
and I think she was dean at ASU. She started the American Indian Studies Program at Iowa
State. Both of those two women first of all will have so many interesting things to say and can
also put you in touch with every female president and provost in the nation.
You can use my name when you contact them. They’re both friends and you can tell them that
that we wereclassmates at Smith, that we’ve been friends for a long time, and that I
recommended that you talk to them.
Q-Well thanks so much. You’re going to be at reunion right?
Yeah. (chatter)
You know it was encouraging to hear how many jobs Mike applied for before getting one. Up
until graduate school, we never really applied for jobs.
Q-I know, we were in a wonderful time era. I look at these kids and think, we had so many jobs
we didn’t know what to do.
Me too and every administrative job I had up to the University of Colorado, they came looking
for me, they recruited me. I never felt like I was on the market. Every academic job I had was
because someone recruited me to go somewhere else, so this going through multiple applications
and interviews is wearing. And it’s encouraging to know that other people that just got jobs went
through this.
Q-This is what I heard about Mike. He wanted the Chancellors job at Irvine and was a prime
contender for it. They went through a whole search and had a list and the president of the system
said, “How about this name?” and Drake was popped in. I think they wanted an African
American. And he was put in and had not been on anybody’s list at all. A couple people who are
very close to Mike said he was really upset and thought about resigning, but he stayed in and did
a really good job at running the place. I think he was interviewing for four years and wanted to
be a chancellor or a provost and felt he’d been overlooked and treated badly and I think he
actually had been. It wasn’t a fair system. I’d been on the committee that put together the list of
potential hires and I felt bad that I’d asked people to do this because it’s a lot of work for faculty
members to go through and do these things and if someone’s going to just drop a name in at the
end, you wonder why you did that.
So the whole system is highly political and you can’t become jaded or take it personally. There’s
a fix-on and people want certain things so you have to know what they want and try to find
someone who wants you.
Okay, it’s been great. You let me know what happens with this Oregon thing. If you ever see
something you’re interested in, let me know and I can nominate you. Women have to stick
together.
That brings up one thing I forgot to mention: mentoring. Mentoring is very important. I was
thinking last night about what I’d say and I thought mentoring and just remembered now. It’s so
important. I do a lot of mentoring. People approach me all the time and I sort of consider it
almost as a sacred duty.
Q-Yes, mentoring is crucial. Here at Radcliffe, I have partners who are Harvard students and
we’re keeping journals to see if simply being exposed to women who have made it, who have had
successful careers, influences them in increasing their gumption, their backbone, their
expectations for things that can be done. And I think that’s really been really helpful.
There was a project at Wisconsin that did this over a longer period with 30 faculty, so we’re just
doing a mini project. But so far it seems to be having a pretty big effect. My daughter of course is
working on the project during a gap year. She told me she didn’t want to have her journal
included which is fine. But I asked her if I could say that one of the people who worked on the
project decided within 6 months of to turn down admission to a large prestigious university and
decided instead to go to a small women’s college. And she said yes, so that’s pretty strong
evidence in my own family from just being aware that there are problems for women. I think
women’s colleges have a very strong impact for empowering women. She got that right away.
For me, the project has affected someone in my own family and I think that she’ll be affected for
the better by going to Bryn Mawr. I think she would have gotten a good education at Berkeley,
it’s a wonderful school, but I think she’ll have a different experience by going to a small liberal
arts college.
Absolutely! I know that I wouldn’t be the woman I am today if I hadn’t gone to Smith.
Q-The one thing I was thinking about what Smith really did for me was to show me that you
could be pretty and smart. Before, all the women I’d known who had successful careers and such
weren’t very feminine women in terms of how I thought. I don’t know if that makes any sense to
you but they tended to be very serious and had glasses. I was trying to figure out a way around
it. I wanted to be both. And I remember going to Smith and seeing some women that weren’t
hard and weren’t aggressive; they were just very smart.
And they were very feminine in my perspective of what a woman should look like and this was
still coming out of the early 60s. I wasn’t born into a highly intellectual environment. I was from
small town Illinois.
For me it was slightly different because I didn’t think of myself as being pretty.
Q-I didn’t either but I wanted to be pretty.
My mother used to always say, “You’ll be a late bloomer.” You know when you’re 6 ft tall and
kind of gangly it’s hard to see yourself as being pretty. But it was the lack of hardness, I think
that I appreciated.
Q-That’s more what I meant. Softness. I wanted to be a woman who was softer. I didn’t want to
be a female juggernaut and those were the people I seemed to see. And Smith gave me a model
for that. I think that spilled over into thinking that I could be a mother and have a professional
career and that was important to me. I wasn’t sure because I didn’t know any women growing up
that had a family and a career and the kind of marriage I would want to have. I knew some that
had good marriages but they didn’t have anything outside of that. So the idea that you could
have both and kind of combine that was really important for me.
E-I had great role models in my mother and my aunt and my grandmother, with their business.
K-Well that’s good. I didn’t have that. My mother was very smart but it was very clear that my
father was the star in the family. She had not gone on and worked but she went back and taught
high school so I could go to Smith and then got a graduate degree after I got my graduate
degree.
Well that’s great.
Q-That was after my dad died. So when I was growing up it was very much that the man has the
exciting career and the woman takes care of the home. It was really hard to break away. I think
a lot of the women I talk to here, like the woman we interviewed last night said that having a
husband who’s mother was a doctor made it easier for her, and her mother was a lawyer or
something. But having a mother with a profession made it easier. I don’t know about that, I have
no idea because that’s not what I grew up with.