This week brings an end to Women’s History Month, which led me to think about one of Rochester’s most famous daughters, Susan B. Anthony. Anthony once famously said, “Every woman should have a purse of her own.” By which (purses for sale in her name aside) she did not actually mean, “Every woman should go buy a purse,” but rather that women should have their own source of income, their own pocket books.
Research shows that the degree pathways most likely to lead women to having purses of their own are to be found in the STEM disciplines. Yet, we also know that these are the very same degrees that are least likely to be earned by women. According to a recent study by the National Student Data Clearinghouse, across all science disciplines, the percent of bachelor degrees earned by women declined from 2004 to 2014. The only traditional STEM fields in which more bachelor degrees went to women were in biology and agriculture. In high workforce demand areas like engineering and computer science, less than 20% of the degrees were earned by women. And this pattern continues all the way through graduate school: in 2014, 21% of women earning doctorates were in STEM compared to 48% of men.
A few years ago, Eileen Pollack asked, “Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?” In the article, she describes her journey as an undergraduate physics major at Yale where she was one of only two women to earn a bachelor in physics in 1978. She writes of her experience: “I graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with honors in [physics], having excelled in the department’s three-term sequence in quantum mechanics and a graduate course in gravitational physics, all while teaching myself to program Yale’s mainframe computer. But I didn’t go into physics as a career … because not a single professor — not even the adviser who supervised my senior thesis — encouraged me to go to graduate school. Certain this meant I wasn’t talented enough to succeed in physics, I left the rough draft of my senior thesis outside my adviser’s door and slunk away in shame.” Following up on her decision decades later by researching women in STEM, Pollack concludes, “The most powerful determinant of whether a woman goes on in science might be whether anyone encourages her to go on.” As a recent GE ad suggests, if we were to have more celebrated role models of women in science, this might help, too.
I was reminded of this article and ad when reading a recent profile of MCC Endowed Chair, Dr. Alexis Vogt, whose doctorate is in Optics. Her experience was the mirror image of Pollack’s: “the origin of her career can be traced to her freshman year at the University of Rochester. Heeding the advice of friends who spoke highly of a professor who taught an introductory course in optics, she signed up for his class. ‘I took the course and the professor did turn out to be fantastic. … As a matter of fact, he became a very close mentor of mine throughout my career.’” Part of Professor Vogt’s mission at MCC is “to interest girls in the sciences while they are still young and to educate those struggling with poverty that ‘optics can be a clear pathway to financial stability and success.’” In other words, that a degree in science will help them have purses of their own.
My thanks go out to Professor Vogt and all of the amazing women and men who teach in the sciences at MCC for encouraging women to pursue STEM degrees. Whether by mentoring our students in their scholarship, encouraging their leadership through groups like the Society of Women Engineers, or offering them extraordinary role models of women in the sciences in and out of our classrooms, you are working to change history one degree at a time. Susan B. Anthony would be proud.
Please feel free to share your thoughts in the blog.
Anne M. Kress
president
03/29/2017 |