Her childhood was filled with scientific exploration, projects conceived by her parents, impassioned family conversations. Summers were spent escaping the Washington heat for research expeditions to places like La Jolla, Calif., or Los Alamos, N.M. She adored her chemistry teacher at Wilson -- a man -- and still speaks of him with gratitude for making her fall so completely in love with the subject. She was certain she was going to be a chemist.
"Then," Robert Rubin says, "Vera sidetracked her."
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)
|
|
Introduced to black holes by her mother that day at Wilson, Young found her passion. In the early '70s, she was accepted at both Princeton and Radcliffe -- then Harvard's sister school -- and chose Radcliffe, she says, because when she visited Princeton, the tour guide directed all his comments to the young man touring with her. Once in Cambridge, she realized that choosing Radcliffe was choosing Harvard -- the two schools shared all their classes -- and choosing to be in a stark minority on campus. Especially in her science classes.
"I specifically remember my introductory physics class," she says. "There were four women in the class, out of maybe 30."
All four were the children of scientist fathers. It made an impression.
"I don't think women make it," she says, "if they don't have men in their lives -- fathers, brothers, teachers, friends, husbands -- who are supportive of them, so that they are able to overcome those who are not supportive."
Harvard/Radcliffe was difficult, she says, but she learned how to sidestep her detractors. She heard talk, generalizations about women and science, and she'd call back home to get her mother's reactions. It really hit her firsthand her junior year, when her adviser told her the best job she'd ever get would be at a community college. Then he suggested she drop astronomy and get married.
"I switched advisers," she says.
After graduation, she went to the University of Minnesota and earned a doctorate in physics, then a post-doc in astronomy. Along the way, one male professor suggested she should stop at her master's. She made sure the only woman in the department was her thesis adviser.
"I loved teaching," she says, so she never considered a career in government or industry. When she finished her degrees, she applied for several positions and accepted the one in Amherst, where she arrived in 1979.
Twenty-six years later, she has never once been approached by another institution in a faculty search. And, in her 15-person department, she is the only woman.
"I notice it, totally," Young says. "If I go to a talk, I'm the only faculty woman there. If I go to a meeting, I'm usually the only woman there."
There are the female students, of course. But, just as with her mother, the voices Young hears in the corridors are still mostly men.
Two months removed from her family's dinner-table conversation, Young still believes we should dismiss Summers's statements as false and move on. She wants to be optimistic, not dwell on the negative. She's also realistic.
"Most of the young women who are just starting college -- and I was probably the very same way -- come from an environment where they had some male teachers, some women, but in most cases they were an important part of it," she says. "They're present, they're listened to and they don't have -- in the most blatant description you can use -- they don't have any war stories. You have to go through it to realize it's there."
Maybe, she says, progress will erase all of that in a few more generations. Maybe then the idea that biology is connected to an aptitude for science -- and the people who make that assumption -- will be as easily dismissed as she wishes to dismiss Summers now.
Laura Rose Young, daughter of Judith, granddaughter of Vera, is, like her mother, the child of two scientists. She loves being out in nature and has been exposed to science all her life.
When Laura was little, her mother says, she loved to paint: bold, beautiful paintings her mother would hang on the walls.
"I told her when she was 5 that she was going to be an artist one day," Judith Young remembers. "And she turned to me and said, 'I already am.' "
This spring Laura graduates from Vassar -- her grandmother's alma mater. Her passion is the environment, and she dreams of being a writer one day.
