Chief of the CSIRO Division of Horticulture, Adelaide
WISENET Journal No.33, December 1993, pp.3-8
I found this an interesting invitation, but a little bit intimidating because this is the first time I've ever spoken about myself as opposed to my science. When I sat down to write my notes I thought "they won't be interested in all that rot", but then I felt that because we are all interested in each other's careers it might be an interesting experience for me to lay it on the line and for you to listen to me.
I am now in a position which is possibly a first, and I hope there will be lots of you trampling on my heels as quickly as possible - but the way to this particular position has been very tortuous. What I will do is give you a quick summary of the main events that influenced my science and then take a look at some of the frustrations, negative influences or potential negative influences that got in the way or might have got in the way. Then I will compare these with some of the factors generally affecting women's careers in science and suggest how these could perhaps be alleviated. Fnally I'll take a quick look at whether my career was actually accident or design.
I was born an Australian citizen in Hobart, Tasmania, almost half a century ago. I was a child of an academic Scot who came all the way from the University of Edinburgh to open a department in the University of Tasmania and met up with a stray member of the Bjelke-Petersen family on arrival in this country. My mother was actually an art teacher but a very frustrated doctor. At eighteen she'd topped the medical college entrance examinations for the whole of Tasmania but not been allowed to enter medical school because her stepfather believed it was an unsuitable profession for a woman. When I was five, my father was awarded the Chair of Botany at Victoria University in Wellington, so we moved to New Zealand and I had my schooling there.
I did a BSc degree in Botany at Victoria University of Wellington and married very early, at the start of my third undergracluate year. After my honours degree I worked for three years with the New Zealand DSIR as a pasture plant breeder - a cytogeneticist counting chromosomes. Durmg that time I had my first child and moved from full-time to part-time work. Three years later my husband and I both did PhDs at the University of Wisconsin in the US, both pretty much in the same field in plant genetics. Our undergraduate degrees were absolutely unit for unit identical. In fact right up to the end of fourth year everything we did was exactly the same, so you can see there was an intersting study in setting up for future competition. I was at the University of Wisconsin from 1968 to 1972, during the time of all the riots, the bombing and calling out of the National Guard. They were interesting times.
After I retumed to New Zealand I had a second child and was unemployed for about six months before returning to work for DSIR as a cytogeneticist and geneticist. I was working from 9am to 3pm, which proved to be the most compatible possible hours I think that a woman with young children can work, and I was very privileged to be able to get a situation like that. If I hadn't got it, I wouldn't be talking to you today. I continued in this part-time work until 1980. During that time we adopted two other children; so that, by 1980, I had two natural children and two adopted, trans racial adoption. At that time my marriage broke down, probably mostly from job competition. I'll retum to that as a factor later.
I separated from my husband and to do so took a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Melbourne to give me some sort of support. I later took a permanent position, in 1982, at the University of Melbourne and moved permanently back to Australia. I remarried in 1983 and acquired an additional stepson to the Brady Bunch.
In 1986, owing to the vagaries of govemment funding schemes, the cell biology research centre at the University of Melbourne came under the gun. At that point I was the breadwinner for a family of six, including some very hungry teenagers, and the prospect of being out of a job was not very good. So I took the first job offered, which was in the Agronomy Department of the University of Kentucicy in the United States and that caused quite a lot of upheaval. It took nine months to get an immigration visa into the United States, so I had nine months of to-ing and fro-ing, not knowing whether my visa would arrive from one day to the next, a very tense time for all. At the beginning of 1987, I moved to the University of Kentucky with a family of six people.
It proved to be a positive move in some ways and a very negative move in others. The end result was that I decided that it was not a place where I could have a satisfactory long term job, so after I'd been there a couple of years I began to look around for another job.
The next opportunity I had was at the University of Georgia, where I managed to get a position as Head of the Department of Botany. I moved there in 1989 and did a three year term, then moved back to Australia last November to take up my current position as Chief of the CSIRO Division of Horticulture.
You can see that there has been a very tortuous pathway right around the globe. I think that Kentucky is exactly straight through the earth from Melbourne and forty miles west -- so in making some of these moves I went about as far as you could go.
Those are the actual moves in bold terms without dwelling too much on the reasons, although I think you could probably anticipate what a few of them were. Now I'd like to tell you about some of the positive influences that affected me as a person in science. A basic one was the type of parents I had and their skills and attitudes. I had an academic Scot, a professor of Botany, as a father. Obviously I followed in my father's footsteps to some extent, but he also had very great skills in languages and communication and he was a very good teacher, an academic teacher rather than an academic researcher. My mother had great skill as an artist. The combination of those two observational types of skills, I think, really helped me to get into science, science being an observational type of occupation.
I think I absorbed a lot of that by osmosis right from the start. Both of my parents were extremely encouraging of inquiry. For example, I remember one of the landmarks at about four or five years old when I wanted to know what those two doggies were doing playing piggyback with each other. My mother drew me an anatomical cut away sketch of copulation in animals so that I would know exactly what was going on and that kind of set the scene. If I asked a question it was always answered in full. There was never an attempt to hedge it or tell me that I should not be asking such questions at that age. Inquiry ahvays seemed to be a very natural part of our lives. I think that they expected me always to do my best in whatever area I chose to be interested in.
Also absolutely fundamental, and you'll see this if you think about what I have just told you about the tortuous pathway to get here, was that they taught me to expect change. They taught me that the world as they knew it would cease to exist, that we were in for enormous changes in society, that women's role was going to change tremendously, and that I must be prepared to cope with any eventuality in my life. I think that was probably the greatest gift of all because I don't really know of too many other people in my age group whose parents knew that enormous changes were coming in our society. It may have been a function of their perception of the war years or the depression, but certainly I find it quite unusual that people of their generation had anticipated such changes ahead of time.
I was lucky with my primary schooling in that I just happened to be in the right place at the rit time, to go to a school which was attached to a teacher training college. It singled out the best teachers in order to have them on tap for demonstrating to young teachers in training. There were always about six teachers in training in the room with us as pupils, plenty of adultS who were interested in contributing to the lessons, plenty of individual attention and superb teachers in charge of the classroom. Because the teachers were teaching young teachers as well as pupils, we were taught in a slightly different way with a great deal of independence. We were taught by projects, so we could be working independently while the teacher taught the young teacher trainees. It was a different style from the way my children have been taught at school, but I think in retrospect it was very beneficial.
I learned very early on that you did research; you went to the library and looked things up and you went out into the community and interviewed people to get facts, and I think I was just very lucky to be in a place like that at the right time. For one year we learned exclusively by running the school newspaper; we learned our letters, our mathematics; our geography, history, everything from running the school newspaper. That was a lot of fun and very exciting. In another year I was in a composite class with different age groups because it was a model country school for instructing teachers who were going into the country. That was also an interesting experience because it taught me how to work in a muIti-age group environment.
Again in secondary schooling, I think I was lucky to go to a very traditional single sex girls' school in which the pupils were very strongly streamed on their aspirations and abilities. Being streamed into a languages, literature and mathematics class did me a big favour in that the emphasis was on communication and computation skills. There were no social distractions at all and the emphasis was on excellence throughout. I've seen my two daughters go through mixed sex high schools and I feel they've had far more social pressures on them than I was ever subjected to at that time.
Another positive factor that I've found is what you would call constructive anger, where I have met with frustrations standing in the way of my life as a woman in science. The first time it happened to me, I was using it to say "well, I'll show the buggers", but as a result I did much better than I might have without that blast of anger behind me. So you might say constructive anger has been a positive influence in doing well in science.
I was also lucky enough to have two good bosses to whom I related during my career. One in my early career was a scientist who treated me with great respect and as an intellectual equal when I was quite a young scientist. He asked my opinion of things and treated my various contributions really seriously. I also have to pay tribute to Professor Bruce Knox at the University of Melboume, my mid-career boss, who taught me a great deal about how to progress in an academic situation, how to work the system in other words. There is a certain amount that you just have to know in an academic situation about how to get yourself promoted, how to get noticed by promotion committees and so on.
When it comes to frustrations, setbacks and potential setbacks, I think some of them would be familiar to you, but you have to bear in mind that, when I began in my career, attitudes were really rather different from the way they are now. I see enormous improvement, but we've still got a long way to go.
So, yes, I did meet with some frustrations and they started very early. I was at bigh school and just becoming socially aware that the boys in my age group regarded brains as a contagious disease - you know; "don't go out with her, she's got brains". It is really a quite depressing thing for someone who's just coming into puberty and trying to wrestle with the idea of attracting the other sex. It really made you want to hide the fact that you could perform academically; in order to get along socially. That was quite a conflict at high school.
I did have some problems, as you may have guessed from what I said earlier, about being in competition with my first husband. We ended up sitting the same exams at various times and I deliberately did less than my best; and felt extremely bad afterwards because in trying to avoid a domestic conflict I had been less than true to myself. I did it once and never again; but it did cause a great deal of conflict. I tended to be good at taking tests and to score better than he did at such things and that caused a great deal of domestic disharmony. He had an expectation that my work in academia was secondary to his and also very temporary, and that too made for problems.
One of the sources of what I've called my constructive anger was the attitude of colleagues at the DSIR in New Zealand when I began work. For example, when I had my first child I tried to work flexi-time because I was on a schedule where I had to nurse the baby frequently during the day. I would go home, only 10 minutes away, and nurse the baby when my baby sitter called and come back again and then in the hours after work to try and make up my eight hour day. My male colleagues responded by sending around a petition that I be forced to work regular hours. Of course that seems unimaginable to us today. What they should have been doing was sending around a petition so everybody could work flexi-time, which has since happened, but you can understand that as a source of what I call constructive anger. So I was forced to go to half-time so that I could fit in a half-time day between two feeds of the baby. That was one sort of attitude that I was facing.
Another one was the attitude of the Divisional Director when I told him I'd been invited to do a PhD in the United States and asked for leae either without pay or on quarter pay or something of that type to go and do it. They gave my husband leave on full pay to do a PhD but I was forced to resign, because a woman with a baby did not need a PhD, she only needed a cook book.
Naturally having to resign put an enormous chip on my shoulder. It also meant that I had to work half-time while I was doing my degrea to support the state fees, while my husband's were paid for him - he could work and do his degree full-time.
Family responsibilities could have been a negative influence, but in retrospect I don't really see them that way. The interesting thing about family responsibilities is that they teach you to be super efficient. In many ways, they actually help you to do science better than male colleagues because they teach you to organise, to do parallel processing in your brain and to run multi-tasks at once.
I found that once I got the hang of it I was far more productive than people in my own age group who had never had to cope with that sort of thing. I really think it does us good in some ways. It's very hard going through it, and it doesn't feel as if it's doing us good, but when you come out at the end of it you realise 'you know I really did well there, I can do this'. So, although you could say the family slowed me down because I worked part-time, from nine until three, I was equally as productive as my male colleagues who were working from eight until five.
When I married for the second time, I married somebody much older who had very traditional ideas about what women should do and, for many years, I did two full-time jobs. I feel that possibly was a disadvantage in not having somebody who was really prepared to help in the house, but again you would have to say that I got myself into it. I think you sometimes get into personal relationships without examining all the pros and cons.
There are also some internal factors, and maybe some of you wlll identify with these. For example, in many ways I am too trusting that people I am working with will deliver their highest standard of excellence all the time. I know that I'm going to deliver my best shot, but I think I've learned the hard way that you can't always assume the same of other people. I see that some of my women colleagues, who always deliver the best they can, are also too trusting. I suspect there have been times when I have not been aggressive enough, particularly in meetings where you have to cut people off and jump into conversation in a microsecond gap. This is something which other women often have a bit of a problem with too. Sitting in a meeting with about 25 men and they're all jumping in with loud voices, it is really quite difficult to get in there and be heard and that's something where, maybe I have an intemal factor that has disadvantaged me.
I hope that gives you a feel for what I see as the advantages and disadvantages in my life. Now I'd like to generalise a little bit before I come back to specifics. Let's look at the factors that actually make women in science less numerous and also less productive, in general, than some of their male colleagues. It has been shown, by quite a number of studies, that women are a little less productive in terms of publications produced, seminars given, students supervised, and so on, than their male colleagues. 7his appears to be independent of family situation; it applies to women who are single withut children, married without children, married with children, divorced and so on. It's a gender-related thing which does not appear to be related specifically to family, and I found that very interesting.
There has been quite a number of studies that have tried to solve the puzzle of what it is that affects all women in those ways, regardless of their family responsibilities. I'd like to draw your attention to an article called 'Cumulative Disadvantages in the Careers of Women Ecologists' by Richard B: Primack and Virginia O'Leary, which appeared in the March 1993 issue of Bioscience (Volume 43, number 3, pages 158-165). What they did was look at the lesser productivity of women scientists for a restricted group of male and female ecologists. They found that, yes, it held true for this group of ecologists who were quite homogeneous, and they tried to identify where women differed from men. One suggestion is that there is not any one particular reason, that what happens is the cumulative effect of a succession of small disadvantages to women at various times throughout their career.
For any one woman the spectrum of little disadvantages may be different but the sum total may affect her overall productivity slightly relative to her male colleagues. All of us may have suffered a slightly different spectrum of these disadvantages but we do finish up to some degree suffering some sort of disadvantage. Here are some of the disadvantages:
I think that last point is a critical factor, and I know I can feel this working in my life. I often feel I am not good enough to do a particular thing, whereas a male at my particular stage of career may feel he can conquer the world. I don't know whether that is inbuilt or trained into us from the beginning, but I see it in many of my female colleagues. We have a harder time coming to grips with our own success.
If we think about how we can help women in science relative to that particular list of things, we all know the answers - you know the answers, I know the answers - and we simply have to keep pushing to get some of these things into being at a significant level.
First of all, we need more of us. That's the most important thing because it's synergistic. As we have more women in science, more of our women students will see it as an acceptable option. And we need more female mentors at all stages of our careers. I need female mentors at my stage of my career. I feel a great lack of collegiate support at the point where I am now, and it applies strongly to our young students as they are making the choice to go into science.
We need career re-entry and late entry schemes. There is no reason why women can't enter a career in science relatively late compared to our male colleagues. They've still got what it takes up here, and then some, especially if they have raised a family and done all that parallel processing in the meantime. We hear a lot about re-entry schemes, but not so much about late entry schemes although they are vitally important. I hope that some of you saw the material in the WISENET Journal that I sent in about the Jeanette Rankine Foundation in the United States.
We need scholarships for women, for training and development so that women who have been in positions which are not entirely satisfactory, or have taken time out to raise a family, can get into a group and get back into their intellectual life again.
We desperately need better part-time and non-traditional work options. We keep asking for it, we keep arguing for it, we keep getting some lip service about it, but we still need more non-traditional work options. I would not be here without my 9 to 3 working day that wsnt on for maybe eight or nine years. That was e really good compromise. My eldest daughter, who is now the mother of four herself, said to me last year 'Mum, I didn't know that you were a working mother until I was about 14", because I was there when she went to school, and I was there when she came home from school. I might have been flying around like crazy while she was at school, but I was in all senses of the word a traditional parent at the times when the children were at home. For me that worked superbly and I think that may be the answer for many of us in this particular career area - those 9 to 3 working hours are really a very good idea.
We need worryfree child-care as close to work as possible, otherwise we're not going to give the women who go into science the mental serenity that they need for quality thought. This is a thinking business. You have to be able to empty your brain, except for the problems you're working on. If you're having to panic about your baby sitting arrangement all day, you can't do quality science.
So those are some practical things. Everybody knows about them. We just have to keep pushing them. We also need better professional understanding from our male colleagues. It's improving greatly, especially for people in their 20s and 30s. I see a great deal more understanding from the younger men in science than I saw when I started out, but I think it still needs to go further.
It's true that scientists do often marry scientists simply because they're going through graduate school together at the age when they tend to form partnerships. So I think there is more understanding needed by men in science. They need to be able to understand and nurture the ambitions and the talents of the women who are their partriers. It will pay enormous dividends for them later in life because I think a woman who is fulfilled both at home and at work makes a much better partner than someone who is frustrated in one department or the other.
Another need, which is perhaps less publicised, is the need for very different ways of measuring success in science. This is a less tangible one, but first of all we need more emphasis on quality of thought rather than quantity. We must come out of this era where publications are counted or weighed in kilos. We have to develop a measure of quality of thought. Women have just as high a quality of thought, even though by the traditional measures of productivity they might not have quite as many publications. And the more we can do to bring in better part-time work, child-care and so on, the higher that quality of thought is going to get.
We need less emphasis in science on the desirability of being the big boss of the big labs because this doesn't really suit the style of very many women. I think women tend to work better in smaller, less structured, less hierarchical groups when it comes to thinking and exchanging ideas. I don't see very many women who want to be the big boss of the big lab with a whole string of post-docs to do the work while they write the papers. I think they tend to be more interested in the thought processes, and the individual day to day work.
And, finally, we need science to encourage a somewhat less competitive and a more nurturing environment. It's highly competitive at the moment, right from when you first go to high school and university. You're subjected to intense competition for numbers of publications, for the size of the grant pot that you can bring in, for the grades that you get when you're a student. All of that intense competition is, in general, less attractive to girls than it is to boys. I think that if we want an atmosphere that is more attractive to women, we need one where we've got more of a win-win situation, where people can be glad about each other's success. That's one thing that is really needed and I don't know how we can achieve it. It's very difficult to contemplate when we're stuck with a system which is so intensely competitive for students, funding and status. If you talk to girls who are contemplating going into science, you often hear that they just don't want to get into that rat race.
I'd now like to finish off by trying to analyse whether 'my brilliant career' was actually accident or design. This is a question that can be quite intriguing in retrospect. First of all we'll ask: what did I want whert I got married at age 20? In fact I met my husband when I was only 17. He was the first boy I ever went out with; it was more or less a teenage romance. What did I think I wanted when I got married? I wanted a happy marriage. I wanted probably two children. I wanted to finish my Bachelor of Science degree because at that stage I thought that helped you to be a better mother when it came to educating your children. Perhaps the key was that I had instilled in me from my parents that a degree was actually an insurance policy, a meal ticket, and that if anything happened to the ability of your husband to earn money, then you could do your bit and support the family. At the age of 20 those were my fairly naive concepts of what I wanted out of my life.
So what went wrong with my plan? I think that one of the first things that went wrong was that l loved learning far too much. I went on to another degree, then another degree, because I was absolutely fascinated by the subject I was in, and perhaps I was thinking more of the fascination of learning than a career in that sense. I just didn't want to stop. I enjoyed going to classes and learning new things. I think one of the main features of my career is the lack of significant missed opportunities. We've been talking about the tendencies of those small cumulative disadvantages to mean that people miss their opportunities. I think that I have not missed my opportunities, but the reasons that I've not missed them have really not been career-related.
I'll elaborate on that. I have actually used my scientific career to bail me out of uncomfortable persohal situations. Right throughout you could say that I've been using my career as an insurance policy and safety net for my personal life. I'm sure that snme men would be mortified to learn that your career can be a safety net for your personal life, but that is the case. For example, my first job was created for me by my husband's request to his boss: please can you employ my wife, she has a degree too. That doesn't happen any more and it wasn't a planned career move, but what it did was put me into a scientific institution and start the battle. That was an interesting experience because the scientific institution had about 200 professional men and I was the first professional woman to go in there, but it doesn't alter the fact that the job was created for me, by request.
I was activety recruited to my overseas PhD by a visiting American professor. I would not otherwise have done a PhD; I hadn't even thought of doing one at that stage. Then, when I got back from doing the PhD, I had a new baby. I was unemployed and was intending to stay that way until my second child started school, but I was recruited again by someone literally banging on my back door and saying 'Hey we've got a job for you. You know you can more or less name your own working hours", and I said "Fine, nine till three".
The other interesting one is that it was marriage dissatisfaction and an attempt to move myself into a separation situation that made me take a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Melbourne. I used the post-doc to solve a family problem and that put me in the right place at the right time for a very good career move.
The funding uncertainty at the University of Melbourne forced me to make what people might say was a brilliant career move to the University of Kentucky because I acquired a full professorship and tenure in the move. But they did not realise that I was so bloody-minded about it that, when I went for my interview and they offered me an Asspciate Professorship without tenure, I said 'I'm not shifting right around the world unless you give me a full professorship and tenure", and I didn't care. I didn't care one bit for going to America. What I didn't know was that all of their other candidates had pulled out and I had them over a barrel. So the sheer bloody-mindedness of not wanting to shift that far without some security enabled me to push the promotion ladder and get promotion and tenure almost through the back door.
Dissatisfaction with the University of Kentucky situation led to me doing what I imagined to be totally over-reaching my ambitions and going for a departmental headship. It was the only thing I could find to apply for and I was desperate to get out of there. What had happened was that when I arrived at the University of Kentucky the previous incumbent of the job, who had gone into administration, had decided to come back, and the department head in his wisdom said 'Well, you two can share a lab can't you?' Can you imagine sharing a lab with someone who had been running that lab for 22 years, when you were trying to establish yourself? What I did arose from desperation, trying to get out of an uncomfortable situation. I would probably never have dreamed of applying for a department headship without the force of an absolutely horrible situation behind me. I think we tend to get comfortable and we tend to sit, and it's amazing what some real discomfort can do for your ambitions.
Just to finish off, I think that my move back to Australia was in a certain sense a little bit similar. I really wanted to get back to Australia, and I'd been watching for jobs in Australia ever since I left the country. I never wanted to leave in the first plece. My family are all here; my grandchildren are here, my affinities are definitely with this country and I was very alarmed living in American society and being told by the police, 'We cannot protect you, lady. You should get yourself a gun and learn to use it. Living near Atlanta, Georgia makes you realise that the society over there is in some places crumbling from within, in ters of crime and social structure. I desperately wanted to come back to Australia, and with that desperation came the willingness to do what might have seemed like over-reaching myself in applying for this particular job.
Finally I'd say that the main factor in this career is not design per se, but rather a certain sort of tenacity which prevented me from resigning myself to uncomfortable situations, either in personal life or professional life, and knowing there is an alternative. If you're in such a situation, particularly professionally, there is an altemative, there is a way out, and you never, never, never, never give up. ·