Season 1 |
Episode 6: Breaking the mold Dr Sue Rosser's STEM revolution
[00:00:00] EMILIA: You're listening to Science Wise, the podcast designed to inspire people embarking on a career in science through conversations that will feel like talking with yo ur wisest auntie.
[00:00:09] RORI: Who just so happens to be a badass scientist. I'm Rori.
[00:00:13] EMILIA: And I'm Emilia. We're two scientists on a mission to make the world of science more welcoming and to amplify the contributions of women.
[00:00:22] RORI: For decades, dr. Sue Rosser has been paving the way for women in STEM through her scientific research in zoology, her studies of the experiences of women in STEM, and her advocacy for feminism in STEM as an upper level academic administrator. That means that she was and is a boss. When I was a baby dyke working through undergrad, looking around and wishing that just one of my computer science classes was taught by a woman, Sue Rosser was an out lesbian Dean at Georgia Tech, shifting academic policies and culture there towards feminism.
The programs that she made have literally and broadly changed the landscape of STEM. So thrilled to share our conversation with Sue with each of you listeners.
I am so happy to welcome Dr. Sue Rosser to Science Wise today. I first met Sue when she was provost of San Francisco State University and I was a faculty member there. And as provost, Sue got in touch with me after Emilia and I actually published kind of an impactful article. It was an article where we worked with some spectacular undergrads looking at old papers to see when computer programmers are acknowledged.
We found that it was disproportionately women who were acknowledged instead of being recognized with authorship. And so, Dr. Sue Rosser, as my provost, sent me a message congratulating me on the article and inviting a phone call. And we had this wonderful conversation where Sue told me about a time when someone tried to stick her with an acknowledgement instead of authorship for her statistical analysis work, and we'll chat about that more a little later on.
But I feel like this story is a little bit of a microcosm of Dr. Rosser's contributions to science. She has had the challenging lived experience of a woman in science starting in the 1960s, she's led the field in scholarly research about the experiences of women in science more broadly, like she's written over 150 articles and 14 books, and she's gone on to substantively change and improve life for women in STEM as the director of several women and gender studies programs, as a senior program officer at the National Science Foundation, and as a as a Dean and as a provost.
So we are humbled to have her as a guest today on our little podcast. Dr. Rosser, thank you for joining us.
[00:02:39] SUE: Well, thank you, Rori and Emilia. I'm very happy to be here and I'm looking forward to this conversation.
[00:02:45] EMILIA: Thank you, Sue. I'm so excited and delighted that you are joining us today. I want to go way, way back.
Where did you grow up?
[00:02:52] SUE: So I was born in Springfield, Missouri, but when I was five years old, my parents moved to Madison, Wisconsin, which was a pretty good place to grow up and was actually especially good in terms of STEM and eventually pretty good in terms of women's issues.
[00:03:10] EMILIA: Yeah, I mean, they have a great science program at Madison.
[00:03:13] SUE: Absolutely.
[00:03:14] EMILIA: Why did you want to become a scientist?
[00:03:16] SUE: I didn't originally realize that I wanted to become a scientist. I actually entered college thinking I was going to be an English and French major, but luckily I had done one right thing, which is what I always recommend that people do their education.
I had taken all the courses that were needed for the background in science. And I had taken math, you know, all the way through and everything. And so it wasn't until my first year in college, I took a course that was, well, we called it Genetics and Human Affairs. I got the highest grade in the class and the professor asked me to work in his lab.
I agreed to do that because I wanted a job and thought it would be interesting. He started bugging me. Why don't you become a science major? So I started mostly to please him and get him off my back and to be certain that I retained this job I had. I started taking biology classes and I liked those. I did well.
Fortunately, because of the background I had in French, I could continue and do a double major in French and biology. So actually, at the time when it came time to make a decision to go to graduate school, I was on the borderline. Whether I would go on in Biology, or whether I would go on in French, and I talked to my advisor in French, and she said, well, with your French undergraduate degree, you could become a stewardess.
I thought I wanted to be at the university level, so I decided to go in biology.
[00:04:58] RORI: Very pragmatic decision right there.
[00:05:00] SUE: Yeah.
[00:05:01] EMILIA: Right. What did you like about French? Was it the language or the literature?
[00:05:04] RORI: Emilia also majored in French. She majored in French and Math.
[00:05:07] SUE: Oh, okay. Well, good. I was interested in the culture.
I was interested in the literature. It was always very helpful for food also, which was quite interesting. And I have never regretted that I had the French major. On the other hand, I definitely think I made the right decision. There were many more options available to me having become a scientist, gotten a PhD in science, but also, and I'm sure we'll be coming to this later in the conversation, it was very helpful for me to have the background in the humanities.
[00:05:40] EMILIA: Yeah, I mean, I can see that how having that background would help you appreciate the departments in the humanities for sure. When did you first know you were a feminist?
[00:05:49] SUE: It's a little hard to say. So I was in undergraduate school 65 through 69. And in graduate school someone told me that there was this consciousness raising group that was made up of women scientists and would I be interested in joining.
I was very interested in joining. I didn't know what it would be like. It turned out to be fantastic. As a group of women, we would go to each other's homes and talk, and we began to realize, and we didn't really have words then for some of the experiences we were having as scientists. So, for example, we didn't know the term sexual harassment.
We would be talking, and someone would say, and this actually happened to me, that their major professor had come up and kissed them, or their major professor had wanted to go to bed with them.
[00:06:50] RORI: This was like a common experience.
[00:06:52] SUE: Correct. I mean, we would sit around and tell our stories, you know. And so I actually was also having this happen, not from my major professor, but ironically from that same professor who persuaded me to go into biology.
He would typically walk into the lab and come up behind me and rub against me or sometimes kiss me. So pretty soon we began talking about, well, I've wondered, is my skirt too short? Maybe my blouse was too tight? And pretty soon went. Pretty much everybody in the room had experienced this. It became pretty clear it wasn't us, it was them.
[00:07:31] RORI: Yeah, like the power of sharing your experiences and realizing seeing a bigger system.
[00:07:38] SUE: That's what consciousness raising groups were all about. And at that time abortion was not legal in this country. There was a lot of stuff going on around reproductive rights, women's reproductive rights. There were a lot of illegal abortions occurring. And there was the whole Jane's network.
[00:07:57] RORI: MSA, Jane's Collective.
[00:08:00] SUE: Exactly, in Chicago. And there was information back and forth between Madison and Chicago. Simultaneously, in Boston, the Boston Women's Health Book Collective was writing Our Bodies Ourselves for the first time. So it was a big rebirth of interest in what was going on with women, what was going on with women's bodies. And I had my first child right after I got my master's degree. So she was born in 1971. At that time, and certainly still true, interacting with the medical profession over childbirth.
You've had some very interesting experiences.
[00:08:43] EMILIA: I mean, I don't know what it was like to have a baby back then, but you maybe mentioned like one thing that was different from now, I suppose.
[00:08:51] SUE: In some ways, it was probably less medicalized. There were not as many C-sections given, for example. On the other hand, it was very common to give anesthetic during birth. So, you know, the women's health movement brought all that to the four. But one thing it did for me as a scientist is I realized that even though I had had all these courses and was getting a PhD in, in science, there was a lot about my own body I did not know. And that was the power of what was going on with our bodies ourselves. Fast forward, if I might. So I finished my PhD in four years. So I was in graduate school, 69 to 73. It was a very political time. But then also the roots of some of the feminist movement and so on arose from that, and also civil rights arose at the same time.
So all these things were actually going on. We stayed in Madison to go to graduate school because I got married before my senior year in college, and I was stupid enough to think that being married would show I was serious about wanting to be a scientist.
[00:10:08] RORI: Oh my gosh. Like, if you didn't get married, then you would have been interpreted in some other dismissive way.
[00:10:14] SUE: Exactly. So what happened is we applied to four places. We applied to Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, and Wisconsin. He got a fellowship at Stanford and I didn't get money out. So I called up Stanford and I said, I don't understand this. Why did he get a fellowship? And I didn't get any money at all. And they said, you're lucky we let you in as a married woman.We assume you are going to have children and, you know, make no use of your degree. See, this was 1969.
[00:10:48] RORI: So, and your application didn't matter at all. It was just, you're a married woman, and therefore
[00:10:53] SUE: That's right. They said, you're lucky we let you in at all. It's only because your scores were so high and your grades were so high.
Your scores on the GRE were so high. And there was nobody really to get advice from. Nobody said it's not a good idea to go to the same graduate school where you got your undergraduate degree. The positive thing about that was that although my PhD was in vertebrate paleontology, then I did postdocs in immunogenetics and actually also in geology and so I had this broad background in biology.
[00:11:27] EMILIA: You mentioned that it was not a good idea to stay in the same place, and I think a lot of people struggle with that decision of moving away or staying in the same place. What were the things that you think would have been better if you had left?
[00:11:39] SUE: Well, it's very hard to always determine, I think, the road not taken.
But of course, the classic reason given for why it's important to go to a different institution is that you make new contacts, learn perhaps new methods, different ways of doing things, different theoretical approaches, so wider exposure in essence.
[00:12:03] RORI: And people kind of look for that on CVs, right? They want to see that you have affiliations with several different places. And that can be a complicated thing, but it's practical too.
[00:12:11] SUE: Right, exactly.
[00:12:12] RORI: Well, you were At Wisconsin Madison, you were in these consciousness raising groups, you were learning to recognize sexual harassment as a norm, like realizing that it was not something that you had caused, that it was a norm of the culture, you were like learning about your own body, you were becoming empowered in all of these ways, and you, you started to help create one of the first women's studies programs. I think that was the language at the time. And that's a huge undertaking at a pretty early point in your career.
[00:12:41] SUE: Someone approached me and said, we hear that you're in a consciousness raising group, that you have a PhD in biology, and that you might be interested in these matters. Would you be willing to teach this course?
So I said, yes. I would. I quit my postdoc because the guy was actually sexually harassing me. Of course, when I said that I was going to go do this instead, he was like, what? No, let me give you some more classes to do and you're ruining your career as a scientist and women's studies. This will be awful.
And truth, at that time, Women's Studies was totally unknown. Well, it was wonderful. It opened up a whole new world for me, because I realized that even though by then I had had two babies, there was still so much about my body I didn't know. We started digging into literature. There was new information coming out. It was, that's really the birth of that phase of the women's health movement.
[00:13:42] RORI: So you were teaching the class and you were like in a major moment of like self development and discovery and a bigger broader movement.
[00:13:50] SUE: Well and also the formation of the women's studies program. I was in all the meetings where that was going on and working out the whole governance structure and how that would go.
So it, it was excellent. However, by 1976, I realized I was three years past my PhD and then I needed to get a job. I looked around and I saw an AD in science or something for this job at women's college, Mary Baldwin college in Virginia,
[00:14:20] RORI: in Virginia. Yeah.
[00:14:21] SUE: And I told my husband, I'm going to do this. I'm going to take the kids and go there.
You can come or not. He said, wait, wait, wait, I'm coming. He still hadn't finished his PhD. So, when I went there to that for the interview and everything, and as we were negotiating the offer, I made a deal with the Dean that I would be in the biology department, but I wanted to start a women's studies program.
She agreed to that.
[00:14:47] EMILIA: How did you convince them that you wanted to do this? Because it was a new thing.
[00:14:50] SUE: Well, the Dean, she was, it was a woman, they really wanted me to come there, and she said, yeah, I think that would be a good idea. My colleagues in biology at first were quite skeptical, as were other faculty across the campus.
Some of them said things like, well, this is a women's college, why would we need women's studies?
[00:15:09] RORI: Interesting.
[00:15:10] SUE: Or, we think of everything we do as women centered, so why would we need a particular program? However, when I taught biology of women and they saw how fantastically popular it was with the students, they changed their tune.
Because what happened is that many students would take the course and then they would decide they were interested in biology and they became biology majors. And so it really increased the enrollment in the biology major.
[00:15:40] RORI: These courses are so important to, like, give people a chance to consider something that they might not have imagined themselves pursuing.
[00:15:46] SUE: Exactly. And then I developed another course, Women and Their Bodies in Health and Disease. And I also started to get into the administrative stuff because one thing about a small college is that, you know, the department is not as important. I mean, the department is important, but you can't just live in your department the way faculty do in very large institutions.
And then I was pretty active in Faculty Senate and all of that kind of thing. And then as soon as I got tenure, I was asked to be Division Chair of Theoretical and Natural Sciences. I was the faculty representative also to the Board of Trustees and so on. So I began to see a bit how the whole institution worked.
I think it's very hard for assistant professors at a large institution to really understand what's going on with the rest of the institution.
[00:16:36] RORI: Oh yeah.
[00:16:37] EMILIA: Yeah, they're a big mystery for sure. So when Rori and I published that paper about the Acknowledged Programmers, she told me that you had a similar experience and could you tell us about a bit that experience and how somebody wanted to just give you an acknowledgement?
[00:16:53] SUE: Yes, so this was when I was a postdoc, and one of the postdocs that I did was actually with the geology department, an individual who had been my minor professor for my PhD, but he was a conodont paleontologist. So there was a new technique at the time, it will sound amusing these days, multivariate statistical analysis.
That was brand new at the time. I had taken courses and knew how to do this. So he didn't know how to do multivariate analysis, but he had recognized or someone had told him that it would be useful for one of his conodont studies. So he asked me if I would do this, run it for him, and do the analysis and write up the part of the data that he had. Then, when it came time, he had written the other parts of the paper. I guess I had written the methodology section for the standards, at least, and perhaps part of one other portion of the paper. He was getting ready to send it to the journal, and he asked me if I would read it. So, I looked at it. And I saw that he had been the sole author and that he had put me in the acknowledgements along with the woman who had typed the paper.
[00:18:22] RORI: Wow. And this is after you literally wrote the paper.
[00:18:26] SUE: I didn't write the whole thing, but you know, so I actually think I discussed it with my consciousness raising group and what I should do.
And actually, as I recall, people had rather mixed feelings about what I maybe should do.
[00:18:41] RORI: Oh, interesting.
[00:18:42] SUE: So I said, maybe better let it pass. He was chair of the department at the time.
[00:18:46] RORI: The people who were thinking let it pass, they were like worried that if you, basically, you would cause trouble with somebody in a job.
[00:18:53] SUE: Yeah. But some said, hey, you got to go for it you can't let this pass. This is your work and so on and so forth. So, I did. Screw up my courage and I went in and I talked to him and I said, were you unhappy with what I did? No, no, very happy. I couldn't have done the paper without you. I said, Well, I was a little surprised that I was just found in the acknowledgements along with the secretary. And he said, Oh, well, what did you expect? And I said, well, I thought maybe I should be a co author since I'd done it. He said, Oh, well, I could do that. So then he changed it to his cred.
[00:19:32] RORI: Okay, so he didn't even think of it. It didn't even cross
his mind.
[00:19:35] SUE: Oh, absolutely. And there were no women in the geology department.
And in fact, there were certain faculty who would not take women as graduate students.
[00:19:47] RORI: But he was just like, oh, women, they help with typing. They help with statistics, like, why would I think of authorship for one of these pieces?
[00:19:56] SUE: Well, I think once it was called to his attention, yes, he was okay with that, and he did it.
He was a nice person and a decent person.
[00:20:04] EMILIA: I'm glad that he recognized that. you contributed. It must have been scary though because I'm sure that you had a lot of mixed feelings and were thinking about it a lot and then you met with him and then he said okay, so.
[00:20:17] SUE: Yeah, it was scary. I will admit it was scary.
[00:20:21] RORI: You know, I myself am a femme dyke in science and I find it invaluable to hear from our queer elders. And I'm so grateful to know you, and I would love to know more about your story. So you were coming out in Virginia. You were still an assistant professor at that time?
[00:20:39] SUE: Yes. Yes, I was.
[00:20:41] RORI: What was it like to come out then?
[00:20:43] SUE: Well, it was very difficult. So what happened was I had no idea that I was a lesbian that whole time. The marriage had not gone well. My husband was cheating on me, but there were a lot of issues. And in women's studies, I had some friends who were lesbians. So when I got to marry Baldwin, many people kept saying to me, you have got to meet this woman, Charlotte Huxley.
She was on sabbatical that year at Yale. I think you two will really click. She's also a big feminist. She was a French professor. Well, sure enough, when she came back the next year, suddenly, I think, Oh, the lights went on. And then I realized. So, it was very difficult, not fortunately, as I mentioned, my ex-husband had messed around and everything and I had some concrete proof of that.
[00:21:35] RORI: Because you needed that to get a legal divorce, actually.
[00:21:38] SUE: Correct. So, I went up to D. C. What was, uh, now known as, but it was just being formed, the National Center for Lesbian Rights. Got a few particulars down, and then I read the law, and I did the divorce pro se.
[00:21:55] RORI: What's that mean?
[00:21:56] SUE: Pro se is in Latin, for yourself.
[00:21:59] RORI: I see.
[00:21:59] SUE: I represented myself, and I did, wrote the papers, did everything. Yeah, I took a tremendous risk.
[00:22:09] RORI: You like got a whole another expertise to do it yourself and you took a risk.
[00:22:13] SUE: Yes.
[00:22:14] RORI: That's a lot of strength.
[00:22:16] SUE: Yeah, I was young. I'll put it that way. I was like 29.
[00:22:22] RORI: You were young and you were kind of like got your divorce and moved in with your partner like that.
[00:22:28] SUE: Shortly there, well, a few months. She moved in, you know, we were trying to sort of work it out and kind of let colleagues know. I mean, they were beginning to figure it out. Because she was also a faculty member at Mary Baldwin. So we had, right. And on the whole, you know, colleagues who are very supportive.
And I remember that one time, my partner and I, and, um, the two kids were in the airport in the town getting ready to fly out and the president was there and she said something like, I'm okay with this, but if push comes to shove with the board, you know, I won't be able to support it in front of them.
[00:23:07] RORI: Wow.
Wow, right there.
[00:23:10] SUE: Yeah.
[00:23:11] RORI: Oh my god. You were gone from being like, you're lucky to be accepted by Stanford because you're a married heterosexual woman to like tolerate you lesbians on our faculty. But if things get hard, we don't have your back.
[00:23:24] SUE: It becomes public. Yeah, we can't.
[00:23:26] RORI: Wow. What was it like to be a lesbian in Southern Virginia back then.
[00:23:32] SUE: Well, so one of the things that was very interesting was unbelievably in the math department, there was a lesbian couple that also had kids who were the same age as ours. And so that was great right there in our school. They loved to play with their kids and so on and so forth. And then at the other women's colleges in Virginia, there were lesbians.
And so we got to know them. And actually there was a lot of lesbian activity because people like Rita Mae Brown lived over in Charlottesville, still does. So they did a lot to bring women's music to the area.
[00:24:06] RORI: Okay.
[00:24:07] SUE: So of course then everyone would go to the events. Of course, there were a few, um, lesbian, um, bars in D.C. we would go to and then there was a place called Parkside and they would always host something called the Spring Fling which was a big dance.
[00:24:22] RORI: Uh huh.
[00:24:23] SUE: That we would all go to and yeah, so actually it was pretty good situation.
[00:24:28] RORI: Yeah, and there were folks with kids too.
[00:24:31] SUE: There were some. Yeah. There were some.
There were a few of us who were coming out and that was a fear of that I would be isolated as a woman with kids.
[00:24:40] RORI: Yeah, of course, because it's not always, not necessarily a norm in the queer communities that I've been in. And maybe not, especially where I wasn't. I feel like I could hear so much more about this, but I'll just say, I mean, to work at a women's college and to be in a network of women's college academics seems like it was very
important.
[00:24:59] SUE: It was extremely important. On the other hand, Mary Baldwin was a great place to start. I could not see spending my whole career at a women's college. in this relatively small town in this one college. I began looking around. I was offered three jobs, Ohio State, Virginia Commonwealth, and University of South Carolina.
[00:25:20] RORI: Why did you decide to pursue that?
[00:25:22] SUE: Well, I had gotten into women's studies more and more.
[00:25:26] RORI: Uh huh.
[00:25:26] SUE: And more into that than doing biological research. And I was publishing in women's studies. I was not publishing much more in vertebrate paleontology. So I was going that direction. So I decided to go the women's studies route.
[00:25:40] RORI: Okay.
[00:25:40] SUE: So then people said, well, you should probably go to, for Ohio state. It's the, has the best reputation of those three institutions. But I looked at the program there and they were very advanced and they were well known. So there was that. Virginia Commonwealth seemed fine, but South Carolina intrigued me because it was not only Director of Women's Studies for the Columbia campus, but for the whole system. So although I would be located in Columbia, and my tenure and rank were in Columbia, and I ended up having those in the medical school, it was working with all of the campuses to try to unify them, bring them together, and that was very interesting to me from the perspective also of my research,
[00:26:27] RORI: So going to University of South Carolina, it was a huge step for Mary Baldwin, which is, you know, a fairly small liberal arts school.
And then all of a sudden you were actually having an impact across campuses. So it's like, I mean, I can see why that would be motivating and you could just make sense of it. It's a much huger impact in that system.
[00:26:45] SUE: Absolutely. And of course I was considered to be the founding director and it was very nice to see what has happened there over the years.
[00:26:54] EMILIA: I mean, I think you've done a lot of work on showing and demonstrating what are some of the micro inequalities that women face in academia. You talked about work and life balance and how that was a big issue. And so like we have come a long way, you know, you probably didn't have any time off.
[00:27:13] SUE: No. In fact, I had my first baby on Monday and I was back in class on Wednesday.
[00:27:20] EMILIA: What? Well, thank you for being generous and having sympathy for the rest of us in generations, because we, I feel like we complain about not having enough time, but, but yeah, that sounds terrible.
[00:27:31] SUE: Just one other thing along those lines, at that time, the University of Wisconsin had what they thought was a very liberal policy.
Which is, men got a week off when their wives had a baby, because the assumption was there would be no women, right?
[00:27:43] RORI: Whoa. They didn't even conceptualize that a woman faculty could exist and have a child, like,
[00:27:50] SUE: correct.
[00:27:50] EMILIA: I feel like there's still some subtle inequalities in academia, and I'll share a story really quickly, which is, it's not terrible by any means, especially compared to what you have experienced.
I have two colleagues, and we have a grant together, and we are an all women team. And so we got this grant just before COVID, then COVID happened. And so that really destroyed or stalled a lot of the progress that we could have done. And we, we got an extension, but we recently asked for another one. And the arguments I was trying to make was that we were an old women.
And so, especially in science, it would have been difficult. I imagine that we're one or one of two of teams that are like this. During this time, two of the people had babies, had to take time off, and I think we didn't anticipate the amount of time it was going to take us to recover from COVID. And by that, I mean like getting back into the research, the research projects, hiring people and so on.
And so we were trying to make this argument that was going to take us to go back to normal was going to be more because, because we were an all women team and we have to birth babies and, and all of these extra burdens that other teams wouldn't have. What is your insight on like where we are with respect to micro inequalities in academia?
[00:29:11] SUE: I thought we would be a great deal further along than we are. When we were starting women's studies and the women's movement was happening, we had envisioned that things would be much, much further along than they are. In fact, of course, as was revealed when Roe v. Wade was overturned, various other things have been rolled back.
Things are going, I feel, backwards. I saw both of my own daughters struggle with child care in not very different ways than I struggled for theirs. It's not adequate. It is not readily available. All of the things that we assumed would be in place are just not there. And there are still many of the micro inequities and some of the policies that we tried to put in place that we felt would facilitate things such as stop the tenure clock year.
So you know, we expect more papers, even though we've tried to now institute training to make the realization about unconscious bias and what goes in I think there's still a great deal of that that prevails. So I think it's very complicated and whether you try to make it opt out rather than opt in.
Still, not perfect, and I was on a couple of the committees that were looking at what happened to women during COVID, and it's pretty clear that women were experiencing much more of the child care and perhaps delays on the whole than men. And of course, a similar thing emerged for people of color in terms of care. Things I think have not been where we would like them to be.
[00:30:58] RORI: Why not? What do you think blocked it?
[00:31:01] SUE: I don't know. People don't want to give up what they perceive as power. A lot of people thought they would lose power if this happened. But it seems to me like, in fact, we're right now going backwards instead of forward.
So that's very disturbing. And then to the extent that academia may be a little better than some areas. I don't want to minimize. I mean, there are some real concrete changes compared to what I experienced. For example, that there is parental leave, which we did not have, and that there are options for stopping the tenure, which could be used.
And there is, you know, bias training, and there's at least recognition of bias. There wasn't even such a word.
[00:31:42] EMILIA: You, yourself, experience so much, but somehow you managed to be an exception. Do you still manage to thrive? What made it so that you could progress? Was it ambition? Was it, what was it?
[00:31:55] SUE: Well, I don't know.
I mean, first of all, I felt I had to, I was the major bread winner. So there was kind of like, I think there's that.
[00:32:05] RORI: Yeah, you had two kids.
[00:32:06] SUE: I had two kids, right. And sometimes, you know, things that on the surface might appear more work actually end up having a positive impact. So, for example, when my younger daughter decided that she wanted to go to Harvard, I was determined that my daughters were going to go wherever they wanted to go, even though that would not have been my choice for her.
But, so the tuition at that time was 40, 000 a year. So I did 40 out of state talks at 1, 000 a pop.
[00:32:36] RORI: Oh my god.
[00:32:37] SUE: Now, that was a little rough. On the other hand, my reputation grew because they were all over the country at universities and I got to know more people and so it had its positive benefits. I mean, obviously I was not without ambition.
But that was never the main reason for it doing things, but I was interested in doing it. So it's very hard to say, but a lot of it, I felt like I had to do.
[00:33:05] EMILIA: How do you use maybe your power to influence different things that would make things better for women?
[00:33:11] SUE: Perhaps a good example was going to Georgia Tech, I was the first woman dean they had ever had, and I was going to be dean of the Liberal Arts College, which Georgia Tech of course was then and still is dominated by engineering.
So I had a conversation with the provost, who of course would be my boss, and said, you do understand this is who I am. And they said, yes, that's actually why we're interested in you. We want to increase the number of women that we have at Georgia Tech. And they did believe in what I was doing. They did actually want that.
And they wanted that to happen, and they wanted liberal arts to become more prominent, which I worked on. Having happened, they were able to listen to me and accept me because they knew I had a PhD in science. The other Deans that they had of that college had not come from a scientific background, and I've since been able to successfully talk with the engineers and scientists. To be truthful, I have many times served on panels speaking with philosophers and other people. I can say the same thing they say and the scientists will listen to it from me and they won't listen to it. Exactly the same words. Yeah. Are historical.
[00:34:33] EMILIA: It's interesting how much that matters.
Training really matters to some people. You've been Dean, And you've gone all the way to provost, so you've been in many positions of leadership. You have a different perspective than, say, what Rori and I have since we're, we're still, I guess we're mid career now. How do you advocate for yourself? Often people say, like, get another job so that you can negotiate.
That seems to be the answer that I get the most.
[00:34:57] SUE: Yeah, that is a sad fact, and you'll notice I have been quite a few different places. And the truth is, if you stay at the same place, it's very hard to move up in administration. And it's very hard to get an increased salary. The other thing I would say is it's extremely important for women to do their homework and sort of know what they're doing what is realistic and possible. So you had some people who are at way too little for startup packages, wouldn't be enough to actually do their work and would ultimately result in failure. And they may be asking for high enough salaries either. On the other hand, you would have individual women who are asking for the sun, the moon, the stars, which could not be funded by the institute.
[00:35:46] RORI: More information about what to expect and what to ask for. Right. Like, do your homework and get the mentorship. Like, find the connection so that somebody can tell you this.
[00:35:57] SUE: Right, right.
[00:35:57] RORI: On this note of thinking about, you know, the differential networks and power between women and men in science, I want to introduce a new segment that we're trying out here called Revise and Resubmit, where we talk about parts of science culture or our guests own careers that they would like to change.
Revise and resubmit in air quotes here. So, Sue, I understand that there might be something that you would be happy to go back and revise and resubmit from your personal career. Could you tell us about it?
[00:36:28] SUE: Well, I think the one, there are a few things, but the one I would choose is going to the same institution for undergraduate, graduate, and postdoc.
[00:36:38] RORI: Okay.
[00:36:38] SUE: That I feel, and I know from the research, that is not considered to be a wise idea. As I mentioned, it's always hard to know the road not taken. I'm an example of somebody who can do almost everything against what's advised and still turn out semi okay. Because, uh, true. I would never advise anybody to do all that.
[00:37:07] EMILIA: You're pretty successful, I would say.
[00:37:09] SUE: Yeah. I would never advise someone as an untenured assistant professor to start a women's studies program. Or I would never even advise somebody as a new associate professor to become the chair of the division. And, you know, I wouldn't necessarily advise somebody to go to a system level position while still only an associate professor.
It's all turned out okay. So I think it's possible to make things work. You have to kind of look at what your situation is and see what you can do. And then try to make either lemons out of lemonade or some people say grow where you're planted.
[00:37:50] RORI: Yeah.
Yeah. I think that's so important to think about because you are this exception in some ways.
Sue, I am so grateful that you've been on the show with us. It's been a delight to speak with you today. Thank you so much for joining us.
[00:38:04] SUE: Well, thank you. I've enjoyed it very much.
[00:38:07] EMILIA: Thank you for listening to this episode. If you like what you heard, share it with your friends, students, and colleagues.
[00:38:13] RORI: You can support this program by writing a review, if your listening platform allows it.
[00:38:18] EMILIA: This episode was produced and edited by Maribel Quezada-Smith. Sound engineering by Keegan Stromberg. Special thanks to Dr. Sue Rosser. The hosts of Science Wise are Rori Rolfhs and me, Emilia Huerta Sánchez.
[00:00:09] RORI: Who just so happens to be a badass scientist. I'm Rori.
[00:00:13] EMILIA: And I'm Emilia. We're two scientists on a mission to make the world of science more welcoming and to amplify the contributions of women.
[00:00:22] RORI: For decades, dr. Sue Rosser has been paving the way for women in STEM through her scientific research in zoology, her studies of the experiences of women in STEM, and her advocacy for feminism in STEM as an upper level academic administrator. That means that she was and is a boss. When I was a baby dyke working through undergrad, looking around and wishing that just one of my computer science classes was taught by a woman, Sue Rosser was an out lesbian Dean at Georgia Tech, shifting academic policies and culture there towards feminism.
The programs that she made have literally and broadly changed the landscape of STEM. So thrilled to share our conversation with Sue with each of you listeners.
I am so happy to welcome Dr. Sue Rosser to Science Wise today. I first met Sue when she was provost of San Francisco State University and I was a faculty member there. And as provost, Sue got in touch with me after Emilia and I actually published kind of an impactful article. It was an article where we worked with some spectacular undergrads looking at old papers to see when computer programmers are acknowledged.
We found that it was disproportionately women who were acknowledged instead of being recognized with authorship. And so, Dr. Sue Rosser, as my provost, sent me a message congratulating me on the article and inviting a phone call. And we had this wonderful conversation where Sue told me about a time when someone tried to stick her with an acknowledgement instead of authorship for her statistical analysis work, and we'll chat about that more a little later on.
But I feel like this story is a little bit of a microcosm of Dr. Rosser's contributions to science. She has had the challenging lived experience of a woman in science starting in the 1960s, she's led the field in scholarly research about the experiences of women in science more broadly, like she's written over 150 articles and 14 books, and she's gone on to substantively change and improve life for women in STEM as the director of several women and gender studies programs, as a senior program officer at the National Science Foundation, and as a as a Dean and as a provost.
So we are humbled to have her as a guest today on our little podcast. Dr. Rosser, thank you for joining us.
[00:02:39] SUE: Well, thank you, Rori and Emilia. I'm very happy to be here and I'm looking forward to this conversation.
[00:02:45] EMILIA: Thank you, Sue. I'm so excited and delighted that you are joining us today. I want to go way, way back.
Where did you grow up?
[00:02:52] SUE: So I was born in Springfield, Missouri, but when I was five years old, my parents moved to Madison, Wisconsin, which was a pretty good place to grow up and was actually especially good in terms of STEM and eventually pretty good in terms of women's issues.
[00:03:10] EMILIA: Yeah, I mean, they have a great science program at Madison.
[00:03:13] SUE: Absolutely.
[00:03:14] EMILIA: Why did you want to become a scientist?
[00:03:16] SUE: I didn't originally realize that I wanted to become a scientist. I actually entered college thinking I was going to be an English and French major, but luckily I had done one right thing, which is what I always recommend that people do their education.
I had taken all the courses that were needed for the background in science. And I had taken math, you know, all the way through and everything. And so it wasn't until my first year in college, I took a course that was, well, we called it Genetics and Human Affairs. I got the highest grade in the class and the professor asked me to work in his lab.
I agreed to do that because I wanted a job and thought it would be interesting. He started bugging me. Why don't you become a science major? So I started mostly to please him and get him off my back and to be certain that I retained this job I had. I started taking biology classes and I liked those. I did well.
Fortunately, because of the background I had in French, I could continue and do a double major in French and biology. So actually, at the time when it came time to make a decision to go to graduate school, I was on the borderline. Whether I would go on in Biology, or whether I would go on in French, and I talked to my advisor in French, and she said, well, with your French undergraduate degree, you could become a stewardess.
I thought I wanted to be at the university level, so I decided to go in biology.
[00:04:58] RORI: Very pragmatic decision right there.
[00:05:00] SUE: Yeah.
[00:05:01] EMILIA: Right. What did you like about French? Was it the language or the literature?
[00:05:04] RORI: Emilia also majored in French. She majored in French and Math.
[00:05:07] SUE: Oh, okay. Well, good. I was interested in the culture.
I was interested in the literature. It was always very helpful for food also, which was quite interesting. And I have never regretted that I had the French major. On the other hand, I definitely think I made the right decision. There were many more options available to me having become a scientist, gotten a PhD in science, but also, and I'm sure we'll be coming to this later in the conversation, it was very helpful for me to have the background in the humanities.
[00:05:40] EMILIA: Yeah, I mean, I can see that how having that background would help you appreciate the departments in the humanities for sure. When did you first know you were a feminist?
[00:05:49] SUE: It's a little hard to say. So I was in undergraduate school 65 through 69. And in graduate school someone told me that there was this consciousness raising group that was made up of women scientists and would I be interested in joining.
I was very interested in joining. I didn't know what it would be like. It turned out to be fantastic. As a group of women, we would go to each other's homes and talk, and we began to realize, and we didn't really have words then for some of the experiences we were having as scientists. So, for example, we didn't know the term sexual harassment.
We would be talking, and someone would say, and this actually happened to me, that their major professor had come up and kissed them, or their major professor had wanted to go to bed with them.
[00:06:50] RORI: This was like a common experience.
[00:06:52] SUE: Correct. I mean, we would sit around and tell our stories, you know. And so I actually was also having this happen, not from my major professor, but ironically from that same professor who persuaded me to go into biology.
He would typically walk into the lab and come up behind me and rub against me or sometimes kiss me. So pretty soon we began talking about, well, I've wondered, is my skirt too short? Maybe my blouse was too tight? And pretty soon went. Pretty much everybody in the room had experienced this. It became pretty clear it wasn't us, it was them.
[00:07:31] RORI: Yeah, like the power of sharing your experiences and realizing seeing a bigger system.
[00:07:38] SUE: That's what consciousness raising groups were all about. And at that time abortion was not legal in this country. There was a lot of stuff going on around reproductive rights, women's reproductive rights. There were a lot of illegal abortions occurring. And there was the whole Jane's network.
[00:07:57] RORI: MSA, Jane's Collective.
[00:08:00] SUE: Exactly, in Chicago. And there was information back and forth between Madison and Chicago. Simultaneously, in Boston, the Boston Women's Health Book Collective was writing Our Bodies Ourselves for the first time. So it was a big rebirth of interest in what was going on with women, what was going on with women's bodies. And I had my first child right after I got my master's degree. So she was born in 1971. At that time, and certainly still true, interacting with the medical profession over childbirth.
You've had some very interesting experiences.
[00:08:43] EMILIA: I mean, I don't know what it was like to have a baby back then, but you maybe mentioned like one thing that was different from now, I suppose.
[00:08:51] SUE: In some ways, it was probably less medicalized. There were not as many C-sections given, for example. On the other hand, it was very common to give anesthetic during birth. So, you know, the women's health movement brought all that to the four. But one thing it did for me as a scientist is I realized that even though I had had all these courses and was getting a PhD in, in science, there was a lot about my own body I did not know. And that was the power of what was going on with our bodies ourselves. Fast forward, if I might. So I finished my PhD in four years. So I was in graduate school, 69 to 73. It was a very political time. But then also the roots of some of the feminist movement and so on arose from that, and also civil rights arose at the same time.
So all these things were actually going on. We stayed in Madison to go to graduate school because I got married before my senior year in college, and I was stupid enough to think that being married would show I was serious about wanting to be a scientist.
[00:10:08] RORI: Oh my gosh. Like, if you didn't get married, then you would have been interpreted in some other dismissive way.
[00:10:14] SUE: Exactly. So what happened is we applied to four places. We applied to Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, and Wisconsin. He got a fellowship at Stanford and I didn't get money out. So I called up Stanford and I said, I don't understand this. Why did he get a fellowship? And I didn't get any money at all. And they said, you're lucky we let you in as a married woman.We assume you are going to have children and, you know, make no use of your degree. See, this was 1969.
[00:10:48] RORI: So, and your application didn't matter at all. It was just, you're a married woman, and therefore
[00:10:53] SUE: That's right. They said, you're lucky we let you in at all. It's only because your scores were so high and your grades were so high.
Your scores on the GRE were so high. And there was nobody really to get advice from. Nobody said it's not a good idea to go to the same graduate school where you got your undergraduate degree. The positive thing about that was that although my PhD was in vertebrate paleontology, then I did postdocs in immunogenetics and actually also in geology and so I had this broad background in biology.
[00:11:27] EMILIA: You mentioned that it was not a good idea to stay in the same place, and I think a lot of people struggle with that decision of moving away or staying in the same place. What were the things that you think would have been better if you had left?
[00:11:39] SUE: Well, it's very hard to always determine, I think, the road not taken.
But of course, the classic reason given for why it's important to go to a different institution is that you make new contacts, learn perhaps new methods, different ways of doing things, different theoretical approaches, so wider exposure in essence.
[00:12:03] RORI: And people kind of look for that on CVs, right? They want to see that you have affiliations with several different places. And that can be a complicated thing, but it's practical too.
[00:12:11] SUE: Right, exactly.
[00:12:12] RORI: Well, you were At Wisconsin Madison, you were in these consciousness raising groups, you were learning to recognize sexual harassment as a norm, like realizing that it was not something that you had caused, that it was a norm of the culture, you were like learning about your own body, you were becoming empowered in all of these ways, and you, you started to help create one of the first women's studies programs. I think that was the language at the time. And that's a huge undertaking at a pretty early point in your career.
[00:12:41] SUE: Someone approached me and said, we hear that you're in a consciousness raising group, that you have a PhD in biology, and that you might be interested in these matters. Would you be willing to teach this course?
So I said, yes. I would. I quit my postdoc because the guy was actually sexually harassing me. Of course, when I said that I was going to go do this instead, he was like, what? No, let me give you some more classes to do and you're ruining your career as a scientist and women's studies. This will be awful.
And truth, at that time, Women's Studies was totally unknown. Well, it was wonderful. It opened up a whole new world for me, because I realized that even though by then I had had two babies, there was still so much about my body I didn't know. We started digging into literature. There was new information coming out. It was, that's really the birth of that phase of the women's health movement.
[00:13:42] RORI: So you were teaching the class and you were like in a major moment of like self development and discovery and a bigger broader movement.
[00:13:50] SUE: Well and also the formation of the women's studies program. I was in all the meetings where that was going on and working out the whole governance structure and how that would go.
So it, it was excellent. However, by 1976, I realized I was three years past my PhD and then I needed to get a job. I looked around and I saw an AD in science or something for this job at women's college, Mary Baldwin college in Virginia,
[00:14:20] RORI: in Virginia. Yeah.
[00:14:21] SUE: And I told my husband, I'm going to do this. I'm going to take the kids and go there.
You can come or not. He said, wait, wait, wait, I'm coming. He still hadn't finished his PhD. So, when I went there to that for the interview and everything, and as we were negotiating the offer, I made a deal with the Dean that I would be in the biology department, but I wanted to start a women's studies program.
She agreed to that.
[00:14:47] EMILIA: How did you convince them that you wanted to do this? Because it was a new thing.
[00:14:50] SUE: Well, the Dean, she was, it was a woman, they really wanted me to come there, and she said, yeah, I think that would be a good idea. My colleagues in biology at first were quite skeptical, as were other faculty across the campus.
Some of them said things like, well, this is a women's college, why would we need women's studies?
[00:15:09] RORI: Interesting.
[00:15:10] SUE: Or, we think of everything we do as women centered, so why would we need a particular program? However, when I taught biology of women and they saw how fantastically popular it was with the students, they changed their tune.
Because what happened is that many students would take the course and then they would decide they were interested in biology and they became biology majors. And so it really increased the enrollment in the biology major.
[00:15:40] RORI: These courses are so important to, like, give people a chance to consider something that they might not have imagined themselves pursuing.
[00:15:46] SUE: Exactly. And then I developed another course, Women and Their Bodies in Health and Disease. And I also started to get into the administrative stuff because one thing about a small college is that, you know, the department is not as important. I mean, the department is important, but you can't just live in your department the way faculty do in very large institutions.
And then I was pretty active in Faculty Senate and all of that kind of thing. And then as soon as I got tenure, I was asked to be Division Chair of Theoretical and Natural Sciences. I was the faculty representative also to the Board of Trustees and so on. So I began to see a bit how the whole institution worked.
I think it's very hard for assistant professors at a large institution to really understand what's going on with the rest of the institution.
[00:16:36] RORI: Oh yeah.
[00:16:37] EMILIA: Yeah, they're a big mystery for sure. So when Rori and I published that paper about the Acknowledged Programmers, she told me that you had a similar experience and could you tell us about a bit that experience and how somebody wanted to just give you an acknowledgement?
[00:16:53] SUE: Yes, so this was when I was a postdoc, and one of the postdocs that I did was actually with the geology department, an individual who had been my minor professor for my PhD, but he was a conodont paleontologist. So there was a new technique at the time, it will sound amusing these days, multivariate statistical analysis.
That was brand new at the time. I had taken courses and knew how to do this. So he didn't know how to do multivariate analysis, but he had recognized or someone had told him that it would be useful for one of his conodont studies. So he asked me if I would do this, run it for him, and do the analysis and write up the part of the data that he had. Then, when it came time, he had written the other parts of the paper. I guess I had written the methodology section for the standards, at least, and perhaps part of one other portion of the paper. He was getting ready to send it to the journal, and he asked me if I would read it. So, I looked at it. And I saw that he had been the sole author and that he had put me in the acknowledgements along with the woman who had typed the paper.
[00:18:22] RORI: Wow. And this is after you literally wrote the paper.
[00:18:26] SUE: I didn't write the whole thing, but you know, so I actually think I discussed it with my consciousness raising group and what I should do.
And actually, as I recall, people had rather mixed feelings about what I maybe should do.
[00:18:41] RORI: Oh, interesting.
[00:18:42] SUE: So I said, maybe better let it pass. He was chair of the department at the time.
[00:18:46] RORI: The people who were thinking let it pass, they were like worried that if you, basically, you would cause trouble with somebody in a job.
[00:18:53] SUE: Yeah. But some said, hey, you got to go for it you can't let this pass. This is your work and so on and so forth. So, I did. Screw up my courage and I went in and I talked to him and I said, were you unhappy with what I did? No, no, very happy. I couldn't have done the paper without you. I said, Well, I was a little surprised that I was just found in the acknowledgements along with the secretary. And he said, Oh, well, what did you expect? And I said, well, I thought maybe I should be a co author since I'd done it. He said, Oh, well, I could do that. So then he changed it to his cred.
[00:19:32] RORI: Okay, so he didn't even think of it. It didn't even cross
his mind.
[00:19:35] SUE: Oh, absolutely. And there were no women in the geology department.
And in fact, there were certain faculty who would not take women as graduate students.
[00:19:47] RORI: But he was just like, oh, women, they help with typing. They help with statistics, like, why would I think of authorship for one of these pieces?
[00:19:56] SUE: Well, I think once it was called to his attention, yes, he was okay with that, and he did it.
He was a nice person and a decent person.
[00:20:04] EMILIA: I'm glad that he recognized that. you contributed. It must have been scary though because I'm sure that you had a lot of mixed feelings and were thinking about it a lot and then you met with him and then he said okay, so.
[00:20:17] SUE: Yeah, it was scary. I will admit it was scary.
[00:20:21] RORI: You know, I myself am a femme dyke in science and I find it invaluable to hear from our queer elders. And I'm so grateful to know you, and I would love to know more about your story. So you were coming out in Virginia. You were still an assistant professor at that time?
[00:20:39] SUE: Yes. Yes, I was.
[00:20:41] RORI: What was it like to come out then?
[00:20:43] SUE: Well, it was very difficult. So what happened was I had no idea that I was a lesbian that whole time. The marriage had not gone well. My husband was cheating on me, but there were a lot of issues. And in women's studies, I had some friends who were lesbians. So when I got to marry Baldwin, many people kept saying to me, you have got to meet this woman, Charlotte Huxley.
She was on sabbatical that year at Yale. I think you two will really click. She's also a big feminist. She was a French professor. Well, sure enough, when she came back the next year, suddenly, I think, Oh, the lights went on. And then I realized. So, it was very difficult, not fortunately, as I mentioned, my ex-husband had messed around and everything and I had some concrete proof of that.
[00:21:35] RORI: Because you needed that to get a legal divorce, actually.
[00:21:38] SUE: Correct. So, I went up to D. C. What was, uh, now known as, but it was just being formed, the National Center for Lesbian Rights. Got a few particulars down, and then I read the law, and I did the divorce pro se.
[00:21:55] RORI: What's that mean?
[00:21:56] SUE: Pro se is in Latin, for yourself.
[00:21:59] RORI: I see.
[00:21:59] SUE: I represented myself, and I did, wrote the papers, did everything. Yeah, I took a tremendous risk.
[00:22:09] RORI: You like got a whole another expertise to do it yourself and you took a risk.
[00:22:13] SUE: Yes.
[00:22:14] RORI: That's a lot of strength.
[00:22:16] SUE: Yeah, I was young. I'll put it that way. I was like 29.
[00:22:22] RORI: You were young and you were kind of like got your divorce and moved in with your partner like that.
[00:22:28] SUE: Shortly there, well, a few months. She moved in, you know, we were trying to sort of work it out and kind of let colleagues know. I mean, they were beginning to figure it out. Because she was also a faculty member at Mary Baldwin. So we had, right. And on the whole, you know, colleagues who are very supportive.
And I remember that one time, my partner and I, and, um, the two kids were in the airport in the town getting ready to fly out and the president was there and she said something like, I'm okay with this, but if push comes to shove with the board, you know, I won't be able to support it in front of them.
[00:23:07] RORI: Wow.
Wow, right there.
[00:23:10] SUE: Yeah.
[00:23:11] RORI: Oh my god. You were gone from being like, you're lucky to be accepted by Stanford because you're a married heterosexual woman to like tolerate you lesbians on our faculty. But if things get hard, we don't have your back.
[00:23:24] SUE: It becomes public. Yeah, we can't.
[00:23:26] RORI: Wow. What was it like to be a lesbian in Southern Virginia back then.
[00:23:32] SUE: Well, so one of the things that was very interesting was unbelievably in the math department, there was a lesbian couple that also had kids who were the same age as ours. And so that was great right there in our school. They loved to play with their kids and so on and so forth. And then at the other women's colleges in Virginia, there were lesbians.
And so we got to know them. And actually there was a lot of lesbian activity because people like Rita Mae Brown lived over in Charlottesville, still does. So they did a lot to bring women's music to the area.
[00:24:06] RORI: Okay.
[00:24:07] SUE: So of course then everyone would go to the events. Of course, there were a few, um, lesbian, um, bars in D.C. we would go to and then there was a place called Parkside and they would always host something called the Spring Fling which was a big dance.
[00:24:22] RORI: Uh huh.
[00:24:23] SUE: That we would all go to and yeah, so actually it was pretty good situation.
[00:24:28] RORI: Yeah, and there were folks with kids too.
[00:24:31] SUE: There were some. Yeah. There were some.
There were a few of us who were coming out and that was a fear of that I would be isolated as a woman with kids.
[00:24:40] RORI: Yeah, of course, because it's not always, not necessarily a norm in the queer communities that I've been in. And maybe not, especially where I wasn't. I feel like I could hear so much more about this, but I'll just say, I mean, to work at a women's college and to be in a network of women's college academics seems like it was very
important.
[00:24:59] SUE: It was extremely important. On the other hand, Mary Baldwin was a great place to start. I could not see spending my whole career at a women's college. in this relatively small town in this one college. I began looking around. I was offered three jobs, Ohio State, Virginia Commonwealth, and University of South Carolina.
[00:25:20] RORI: Why did you decide to pursue that?
[00:25:22] SUE: Well, I had gotten into women's studies more and more.
[00:25:26] RORI: Uh huh.
[00:25:26] SUE: And more into that than doing biological research. And I was publishing in women's studies. I was not publishing much more in vertebrate paleontology. So I was going that direction. So I decided to go the women's studies route.
[00:25:40] RORI: Okay.
[00:25:40] SUE: So then people said, well, you should probably go to, for Ohio state. It's the, has the best reputation of those three institutions. But I looked at the program there and they were very advanced and they were well known. So there was that. Virginia Commonwealth seemed fine, but South Carolina intrigued me because it was not only Director of Women's Studies for the Columbia campus, but for the whole system. So although I would be located in Columbia, and my tenure and rank were in Columbia, and I ended up having those in the medical school, it was working with all of the campuses to try to unify them, bring them together, and that was very interesting to me from the perspective also of my research,
[00:26:27] RORI: So going to University of South Carolina, it was a huge step for Mary Baldwin, which is, you know, a fairly small liberal arts school.
And then all of a sudden you were actually having an impact across campuses. So it's like, I mean, I can see why that would be motivating and you could just make sense of it. It's a much huger impact in that system.
[00:26:45] SUE: Absolutely. And of course I was considered to be the founding director and it was very nice to see what has happened there over the years.
[00:26:54] EMILIA: I mean, I think you've done a lot of work on showing and demonstrating what are some of the micro inequalities that women face in academia. You talked about work and life balance and how that was a big issue. And so like we have come a long way, you know, you probably didn't have any time off.
[00:27:13] SUE: No. In fact, I had my first baby on Monday and I was back in class on Wednesday.
[00:27:20] EMILIA: What? Well, thank you for being generous and having sympathy for the rest of us in generations, because we, I feel like we complain about not having enough time, but, but yeah, that sounds terrible.
[00:27:31] SUE: Just one other thing along those lines, at that time, the University of Wisconsin had what they thought was a very liberal policy.
Which is, men got a week off when their wives had a baby, because the assumption was there would be no women, right?
[00:27:43] RORI: Whoa. They didn't even conceptualize that a woman faculty could exist and have a child, like,
[00:27:50] SUE: correct.
[00:27:50] EMILIA: I feel like there's still some subtle inequalities in academia, and I'll share a story really quickly, which is, it's not terrible by any means, especially compared to what you have experienced.
I have two colleagues, and we have a grant together, and we are an all women team. And so we got this grant just before COVID, then COVID happened. And so that really destroyed or stalled a lot of the progress that we could have done. And we, we got an extension, but we recently asked for another one. And the arguments I was trying to make was that we were an old women.
And so, especially in science, it would have been difficult. I imagine that we're one or one of two of teams that are like this. During this time, two of the people had babies, had to take time off, and I think we didn't anticipate the amount of time it was going to take us to recover from COVID. And by that, I mean like getting back into the research, the research projects, hiring people and so on.
And so we were trying to make this argument that was going to take us to go back to normal was going to be more because, because we were an all women team and we have to birth babies and, and all of these extra burdens that other teams wouldn't have. What is your insight on like where we are with respect to micro inequalities in academia?
[00:29:11] SUE: I thought we would be a great deal further along than we are. When we were starting women's studies and the women's movement was happening, we had envisioned that things would be much, much further along than they are. In fact, of course, as was revealed when Roe v. Wade was overturned, various other things have been rolled back.
Things are going, I feel, backwards. I saw both of my own daughters struggle with child care in not very different ways than I struggled for theirs. It's not adequate. It is not readily available. All of the things that we assumed would be in place are just not there. And there are still many of the micro inequities and some of the policies that we tried to put in place that we felt would facilitate things such as stop the tenure clock year.
So you know, we expect more papers, even though we've tried to now institute training to make the realization about unconscious bias and what goes in I think there's still a great deal of that that prevails. So I think it's very complicated and whether you try to make it opt out rather than opt in.
Still, not perfect, and I was on a couple of the committees that were looking at what happened to women during COVID, and it's pretty clear that women were experiencing much more of the child care and perhaps delays on the whole than men. And of course, a similar thing emerged for people of color in terms of care. Things I think have not been where we would like them to be.
[00:30:58] RORI: Why not? What do you think blocked it?
[00:31:01] SUE: I don't know. People don't want to give up what they perceive as power. A lot of people thought they would lose power if this happened. But it seems to me like, in fact, we're right now going backwards instead of forward.
So that's very disturbing. And then to the extent that academia may be a little better than some areas. I don't want to minimize. I mean, there are some real concrete changes compared to what I experienced. For example, that there is parental leave, which we did not have, and that there are options for stopping the tenure, which could be used.
And there is, you know, bias training, and there's at least recognition of bias. There wasn't even such a word.
[00:31:42] EMILIA: You, yourself, experience so much, but somehow you managed to be an exception. Do you still manage to thrive? What made it so that you could progress? Was it ambition? Was it, what was it?
[00:31:55] SUE: Well, I don't know.
I mean, first of all, I felt I had to, I was the major bread winner. So there was kind of like, I think there's that.
[00:32:05] RORI: Yeah, you had two kids.
[00:32:06] SUE: I had two kids, right. And sometimes, you know, things that on the surface might appear more work actually end up having a positive impact. So, for example, when my younger daughter decided that she wanted to go to Harvard, I was determined that my daughters were going to go wherever they wanted to go, even though that would not have been my choice for her.
But, so the tuition at that time was 40, 000 a year. So I did 40 out of state talks at 1, 000 a pop.
[00:32:36] RORI: Oh my god.
[00:32:37] SUE: Now, that was a little rough. On the other hand, my reputation grew because they were all over the country at universities and I got to know more people and so it had its positive benefits. I mean, obviously I was not without ambition.
But that was never the main reason for it doing things, but I was interested in doing it. So it's very hard to say, but a lot of it, I felt like I had to do.
[00:33:05] EMILIA: How do you use maybe your power to influence different things that would make things better for women?
[00:33:11] SUE: Perhaps a good example was going to Georgia Tech, I was the first woman dean they had ever had, and I was going to be dean of the Liberal Arts College, which Georgia Tech of course was then and still is dominated by engineering.
So I had a conversation with the provost, who of course would be my boss, and said, you do understand this is who I am. And they said, yes, that's actually why we're interested in you. We want to increase the number of women that we have at Georgia Tech. And they did believe in what I was doing. They did actually want that.
And they wanted that to happen, and they wanted liberal arts to become more prominent, which I worked on. Having happened, they were able to listen to me and accept me because they knew I had a PhD in science. The other Deans that they had of that college had not come from a scientific background, and I've since been able to successfully talk with the engineers and scientists. To be truthful, I have many times served on panels speaking with philosophers and other people. I can say the same thing they say and the scientists will listen to it from me and they won't listen to it. Exactly the same words. Yeah. Are historical.
[00:34:33] EMILIA: It's interesting how much that matters.
Training really matters to some people. You've been Dean, And you've gone all the way to provost, so you've been in many positions of leadership. You have a different perspective than, say, what Rori and I have since we're, we're still, I guess we're mid career now. How do you advocate for yourself? Often people say, like, get another job so that you can negotiate.
That seems to be the answer that I get the most.
[00:34:57] SUE: Yeah, that is a sad fact, and you'll notice I have been quite a few different places. And the truth is, if you stay at the same place, it's very hard to move up in administration. And it's very hard to get an increased salary. The other thing I would say is it's extremely important for women to do their homework and sort of know what they're doing what is realistic and possible. So you had some people who are at way too little for startup packages, wouldn't be enough to actually do their work and would ultimately result in failure. And they may be asking for high enough salaries either. On the other hand, you would have individual women who are asking for the sun, the moon, the stars, which could not be funded by the institute.
[00:35:46] RORI: More information about what to expect and what to ask for. Right. Like, do your homework and get the mentorship. Like, find the connection so that somebody can tell you this.
[00:35:57] SUE: Right, right.
[00:35:57] RORI: On this note of thinking about, you know, the differential networks and power between women and men in science, I want to introduce a new segment that we're trying out here called Revise and Resubmit, where we talk about parts of science culture or our guests own careers that they would like to change.
Revise and resubmit in air quotes here. So, Sue, I understand that there might be something that you would be happy to go back and revise and resubmit from your personal career. Could you tell us about it?
[00:36:28] SUE: Well, I think the one, there are a few things, but the one I would choose is going to the same institution for undergraduate, graduate, and postdoc.
[00:36:38] RORI: Okay.
[00:36:38] SUE: That I feel, and I know from the research, that is not considered to be a wise idea. As I mentioned, it's always hard to know the road not taken. I'm an example of somebody who can do almost everything against what's advised and still turn out semi okay. Because, uh, true. I would never advise anybody to do all that.
[00:37:07] EMILIA: You're pretty successful, I would say.
[00:37:09] SUE: Yeah. I would never advise someone as an untenured assistant professor to start a women's studies program. Or I would never even advise somebody as a new associate professor to become the chair of the division. And, you know, I wouldn't necessarily advise somebody to go to a system level position while still only an associate professor.
It's all turned out okay. So I think it's possible to make things work. You have to kind of look at what your situation is and see what you can do. And then try to make either lemons out of lemonade or some people say grow where you're planted.
[00:37:50] RORI: Yeah.
Yeah. I think that's so important to think about because you are this exception in some ways.
Sue, I am so grateful that you've been on the show with us. It's been a delight to speak with you today. Thank you so much for joining us.
[00:38:04] SUE: Well, thank you. I've enjoyed it very much.
[00:38:07] EMILIA: Thank you for listening to this episode. If you like what you heard, share it with your friends, students, and colleagues.
[00:38:13] RORI: You can support this program by writing a review, if your listening platform allows it.
[00:38:18] EMILIA: This episode was produced and edited by Maribel Quezada-Smith. Sound engineering by Keegan Stromberg. Special thanks to Dr. Sue Rosser. The hosts of Science Wise are Rori Rolfhs and me, Emilia Huerta Sánchez.