Aptitude Aplenty

Abby and Sherri have known each other since fourth grade, when they met in the gifted program at Lucy V. Barnsley Elementary School in Rockville. Even back then, they excelled at math and science.

Abby played with Barbies, but also bought math books for fun. To her, they were wonderful puzzles waiting to be solved. She still remembers the day her father, an electrical engineer in the space unit at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, brought a telescope home from work. When Abby looked through it, she saw Saturn.

"It looks like this tiny skeleton," she says. "You can see the planet, and you can see the rings. I'm actually seeing it with my own eyes from my own back yard. I felt it was my planet." From then on, Abby knew she wanted to be an astronomer.

Sherri was 3 when she came to this country from mainland China. She spoke little English as a preschooler and remained uncomfortable with the language until second grade. At home, her grandmother was trying to teach her algebra by second or third grade. "It's a Chinese thing," says Sherri, whose mother, Jennifer Xie, has a PhD in engineering. "I remember once, probably in third grade, I wanted to go shopping with my mom. My dad said no. He wanted me to do math problems."

At Barnsley, neither child paid much attention to who was better -- girls or boys -- in math and science. "I knew who was good at jump-rope," Sherri says. "I didn't know who was good at math and science."

By the time Abby and Sherri went on to the math and science magnet at Takoma Park Middle School, they were part of a close-knit group of girls adept at solving equations and studying cell structure. "They're so amazing," Abby says of her friends. "In sixth grade, they were saying, 'Let's get straight A's.'" And they did.

Every year in middle school, Abby and Sherri teamed up and won a lunar bridge-building contest sponsored by the Maryland Space Business Roundtable, recalls Abby's mother, Kathy Fraeman. Together, they worked out how to build a model of the strongest, lightest bridge possible. The boys, most of whom entered individually, never picked up on how the two girls won every year: teamwork.

"Science is a very collaborative field," Kathy Fraeman says, "and the ability to work with others is very useful. When you have several minds working on the same problem, you'll get better results."

Fraeman, 49, has discussed Summers and his remarks with Abby. She was an undergraduate at MIT at the same time as Summers, when biology was being taught by Nancy Hopkins, the MIT professor who walked out in anger as the Harvard president explained why women are underrepresented on the science faculties of major universities. Besides wondering if women were innately inferior at math and science, he also cited 80-hour work weeks and the reluctance of many women with children to make that kind of sacrifice.

Fraeman knows just how daunting it can be for women in science to combine work and family. After she got a master's degree from Harvard in public health and environmental science, Fraeman worked as a computer programmer, then took 10 years off to care for Abby and her older sister, Dora, 20. She enjoyed that time immensely, she says, but couldn't command the salary she felt she deserved when she returned to the workforce in 1994. That rankled her. So eight years ago, she went into business with another woman, performing statistical analyses of medical trials from home.

"It's lucrative, it's flexible, and I'm independent," Fraeman says.

Once she got to Blair, Sherri couldn't wait to work in a real-world lab. As a sophomore, she applied to the highly competitive Science and Engineering Apprenticeship Program, sponsored by the Department of Defense, and she got in, assigned to the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. For the next two summers, she would arrive each weekday at 8 a.m., show her badge to get through the gates and walk past soldiers in camouflage to a basement lab -- a summer without sunlight.