The discouragement, she says, started in high school. Her physics teacher ran his class like a "macho boys' club." He belittled Madam Curie. The day Rubin told him she had received a scholarship to Vassar, his response, she says, was: "Well, as long as you stay away from science, you'll be okay."
She plugged on. She chose Vassar in large part because it was an all-girls' school that had an astronomy program. She says her years there, in a nurturing environment, taught her that anything she needed to learn, she could learn.
Astronomer Vera Rubin views the issue of women in science differently from Harvard's Lawrence Summers. "I think the question is, are there women . . . who want to do science . . . but they never really got the opportunity?"
(Nikki Kahn -- The Washington Post)
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She graduated in 1948 and married Robert Rubin, then a graduate student at Cornell. She moved to Ithaca to be with him. Robert Rubin is an expert in cell biology who has held numerous positions and served on several boards; he continues his work at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda. From the beginning, he knew they would be a two-scientist family. She credits his support -- and the early encouragement of her father -- as the cornerstones to her ability to succeed.
"We made joint decisions," Robert Rubin says. "Things ran rather smoothly, but there was always the challenge of arranging schedules so that child care would not be a concern."
Ah, yes, work-life balance. One of the key issues raised by Summers. How did the Rubins handle it?
There were blips. She studied physics at Cornell, but after the couple moved to Washington and had their first child, she found herself outside academia and frequently in tears at the playground with her toddler son. "I wept," she says, "thinking of all those people out there studying science."
So they made adjustments. She enrolled in a graduate program at Georgetown, they juggled babysitters, and family members helped out. She got her doctorate, then started teaching three days a week at Montgomery College. She was hired at Georgetown in a full-time position. Over the next few years, they followed various projects around the country. Eventually, in 1965, she settled at Carnegie. She told the director that she wanted to go home every day by 3 p.m. to take care of her children. He gave her a salary exactly two-thirds of what she had been making at Georgetown. She accepted it, brought her work home each night and spread it out on the dining room table while the kids did homework.
Forty years later, she's still walking to her office every day, working till 3 p.m., advancing her research. Along the way, she raised four children who earned doctorates in science -- David, a geologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz; Karl, a mathematician at the University of California at Irvine; Judith, an astronomer at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst; and Allan, a geophysics professor at Princeton.
Although Summers suggests that women in the upper reaches of science are rare, both Rubin and Singer suggest he look around Washington. Here, home to NIH, NASA and numerous government institutions rooted in the sciences, top-flight women are not the exception; they exist in full force.
"Where the women are is not in academia," Singer says. "The government has been much more open and fair over the years than academia. Not perfect, but better."
Carnegie wasn't perfect either. Rubin can't express strongly enough how happy she has been there and how much encouragement she has received from her colleagues. So much so that she didn't even realize what was missing.
"A few years ago," Rubin says, "we hired two phenomenal young women. There'd always been the graduate students, of course, but this was different. For the first time in my life, I heard women up and down the corridors."
Young is taking a sick day from her classes at Amherst, her voice hoarse from the cold she has been battling.
"There was no uncertainty, no 'what should I do, what should I study?' " the daughter says over the phone. "The fact is both my parents love science and taught that love to us, and they both love working on problems and taught that love to us. We'd do math problems in the car on car trips, and I was good at it. But I would say I was good at it because I loved it and I was encouraged."
