Different Disciplines, Shared Commitment

Barbara J. Grosz and Cynthia M. Friend would likely never have met if they were men.

Grosz, McKay professor of computer science, and Friend, professor of chemistry, come from different disciplines, different office buildings and different ends of the country.

But what the two women share is a strong awareness of difficulties facing women in the sciences and a determination to change them.

Grosz, former chair of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women, wrote the 1991 Report on the Status of Women in the Sciences. Friend succeeded her as chair and recently penned an update to the 1991 report. But the two senior professors came to their activism by very different paths.

Grosz says her interest in mathematics was sparked at an early age, when teachers in fifth and seventh grade encouraged her talents.

She maintained her determination through high school, despite a 10th grade teacher who told her class, "now girls, I know girls all fail geometry, but I don't want you to do that." And while a college student, Grosz says she often heard comments such as "you're too pretty to be a math major."

Such experiences, and her later feelings of isolation as a woman in science, prompted her to work toward ensuring that future generations of women wouldn't experience what she had.

"Many things I'd found problematic in my own experience were still true," she says. "I decided it had to change."

Friend, on the other hand, says her experience in graduate school was positive.

She too was interested in a scientific career from an early age, she says. Though people did think her interest in chemistry unusual, she says, it was not necessarily because of her gender.

"I think people think it's weird you're involved in chemistry at all, independent of gender," she says.

In fact, Friend says she rarely noticed any condescension directed her way as she worked toward a Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley.

"To be successful at the time I went through the system, you had to focus on research," she says. "I didn't think more broadly about these problems until I saw some of these issues being important for young women."

She feels that senior faculty members have an obligation to work to help their junior colleagues and students.

"It's the responsibility of women in the senior positions to make positive changes," she says.

Grosz agrees, citing the commitment to others that her family taught her growing up: "When called upon to serve," she says, "you serve."