Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 31, 1994 TAG: 9408010010
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Staff report
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Jones was the only woman among those students, a pioneer for her sex at the university. Although women were first admitted to Virginia Tech in 1921, the school was not fully co-educational until 1964, university officials said.
"I couldn't ever cut class because they knew I was missing," she said recently, recalling her days as a young woman intent on an engineering career.
She remembers the way her first job interview went.
"No. Absolutely no," the male interviewer said. "Nobody will get any work done. They'll be looking at you."
Jones now is at Atlantic Research Corp. in Northern Virginia, where she is director of programs and support engineering for the advanced materials division.
Getting there has been a struggle.
Jones and the handful of women who are her professional contemporaries were trailblazers, going boldly where few women had gone before - into the male-dominated galaxy of science and technology careers.
Women historically have been all but absent in scientific and technological occupations and related academic fields. For the most part, they still are underrepresented.
What's not known is how that disparity will affect women - their earning power, job opportunities and lifestyle - as the economy spins headlong into a future filled with electronic gizmos, high-tech machinery and cyber-computers.
"People who are perceived to be technologically illiterate suffer much more of a disadvantage than they would have 50 or 60 years ago," says Barbara Burnell, an economics professor at the College of Wooster in Ohio who has studied gender inequities in the workplace.
Back then, stereotypes depicting women as not being able to recognize anything under the hood of a car didn't directly impact women's daily lives or financial well-being, Burnell says. Now, as jobs increasingly require first-hand knowledge of technology, "that stereotype becomes a very different matter."
Burnell studied occupational segregation in more than 100 industries for her book "Technological Change and Women's Work Experience." She found that the more technology involved in an industry, the larger the occupational gender gap.
Other studies have revealed similar patterns.
In 1970, women received fewer than 1 percent of the bachelor's degrees in engineering in the United States. Twenty years later, 18 percent of those degrees went to women, according to a 1992 study by the National Science Foundation.
Young women have made strides, albeit small ones, since Jones's day at Virginia Tech. Now, about 5 percent of the graduate mechanical engineers nationally are women, rather than 1 percent. Women graduate students make up about 15 percent of the total engineering classes, 39 percent of technical agricultural fields and 22 percent of those seeking computer science degrees.
The gender disparity looms just as large in America's workplace, the study found. In 1988, women made up about 45 percent of the U.S. work force, accounting for 4 percent of the engineers. That percentage is estimated to have doubled to 8 percent by 1990.
Anderson & Associates is an engineering consulting firm in Blacksburg, with 25 to 30 engineers in its employ. Two are women.
"It's hard to hire equal numbers when they come out of school" in vastly disproportionate numbers, said owner Ken Anderson.
A quick survey of similar companies in the Roanoke Valley showed percentages of women technical employees ranged from 6 percent to about 40 percent.
"We've had difficulties recruiting women and other minorities," said Howard Noel, president of Hayes, Seay, Mattern and Mattern of Roanoke, where six of 134 technical professionals are women. Noel said he thinks that, although schools such as Virginia Tech focus on recruiting women into those fields, the female graduates move to urban areas where salaries often are higher.
While the number of women scientists and engineers is creeping upward, experts say the demand for such technical workers is moving at a fast clip.
By the year 2005, the U.S. Department of Labor estimates, occupations requiring a scientific or technological degree - professions such as engineering, mathematics, architecture and medicine - will number almost 9.5 million, up from 7 million now. The number of jobs in the computer, mathematical and operations research fields will more than double.
These professions yield some of the fattest paychecks in the country, and should continue to do so as the demand grows.
"There's no question about that," said Betty Vetter, executive director of the New York-based Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology. "More education means more money, and more science means more money."
Where will that leave women? A 1990 survey by the National Science Foundation of recent graduates with bachelor of science degrees found that, overall, women in science and engineering earned 73 cents for every dollar a man earned.
At entry-level jobs, women with bachelor degrees in engineering may equal or surpass male counterparts in some disciplines, according to Vetter. Six years later, though, men pass women on the payroll and never look back.
She said that men are promoted on the expectation that they can do the job, while women still find they have to prove themselves every step of the way
"The woman who doesn't get involved in this kind of thing is going to end up in a traditional, woman's menial task," Vetter said.
Looking for role models
When she was a child, Sally Ramey would play with the rocks she cleared out of her parent's garden in rural Pittsylvania County. The milky white quartz and crystalline garnet captured her imagination. She remembers smashing the rocks to see if gemstones were inside.
"I wanted to be a geologist since I was 10 years old," Ramey said.
Then she got to high school.
A girl doing science? Her classmates taunted her, and her teachers sneered and discouraged her. "I actually liked physics class. I actually liked biology. Therefore, I was weird," said Ramey, now a public relations specialist at Roanoke Memorial Hospital.
Her story is not unusual. Numerous studies have documented a gender bias in math and science beginning in grammar school and continuing through high school.
One study , by the American Association of University Women, has been credited with drawing widespread attention to the problem. Among other things, the study found little or no difference between the ability of young girls and boys to solve math problems. As they got older, however, a gap developed.
That disparity, the study found, paralleled the girls' decreasing confidence that they could perform the math. Further research showed that the girls' drop in confidence preceded declining achievement.
"You'll hear people say, 'Oh, I was never good at math,'" says Catherine Didion, director for the Association of Women in Science, a national organization based in Washington, D.C. "It's almost like we believe there's a math gene."
Just like football or flute, you get good at math if you practice, Didion says. But girls are subtly - and sometimes not so subtly - discouraged from pursuing math, she says, recalling the incident last year in which women's groups criticized Mattel for putting out a Barbie doll programmed to say "Math class is tough."
Perhaps more damaging is the fact that girls and young women have few, if any, female role models in science and technology.
Carol Gilbert was given a stethoscope to play with when she was 5. From then on, she wanted to be a doctor.
Gilbert, now a surgeon and head of the trauma unit at Roanoke Memorial Hospital, had one advantage most girls don't. The daughter of a nuclear chemist, she grew up in Berkeley, Calif., surrounded by her father's colleagues.
She took nuclear science classes in the fourth grade because everybody took nuclear science classes in Berkeley. Her classmates also were children of nuclear physicists, aerospace scientists and university professors.
It never occurred to her that science was something beyond her reach. "When I got to physics, I realized that was something I could master," she said.
That attitude helped her through medical school, a hospital residency and subsequent jobs, where she was often the first - and only - woman. She excelled, but laments not having had women to talk to who had gone before her.
"There was no active discrimination," she said. "But sometimes you felt like you had to set an example."
Now, Gilbert, 42, is the role model. She feels strongly that girls should be taught early on that they are capable of figuring things out, whether it's chemistry classes or how to fit together an Erector Set.
She speaks at her hometown school when she visits family, and she sent her 10-year-old niece to space camp - an experience the girl didn't particularly care for - simply because Gilbert wanted to show her that nothing was out of her reach.
Lacking the advantage of strong role models, girls need a certain mind-set to achieve their goals, Gilbert said. "You have to have an image of yourself as a surgeon. You have to see that as a possibility," Gilbert said.
A test by the National Science Teachers Association illustrates the problem. Boys were asked to describe a scientist, and almost all drew a balding white man in a lab coat.
The girls drew the same picture.
Educators want that to change.
Some have used bicycles or other gender-neutral machines, said Carol Burger, director of the Women's Research Institute at Virginia Tech, to interest more girls and boys.
A statewide program is trying to retrain science and math teachers to eliminate the gender biases. Tech and Radford University are helping to put together the program, called the Virginia Quality Education in Sciences and Technology plan, or V-Quest. Area secondary school teachers are preparing to learn new teaching methods.
In Roanoke, a program was started in 1987 to steer more girls toward math and science careers. In "PRAISE for Girls," seventh-grade girls shadow women doctors, veterinarians, computer scientists, biochemists and others in technology-related fields.
Woodrow Wilson Middle School student Leigh Morris went to Carilion Health System this past school year. Morris said she learned a lot about Carilion while she "played on the computers." More importantly, she said, "I learned that girls can do the same jobs that boys can and it doesn't matter what sex you are."
Morris has two computers at home, knows how to drive on the information superhighway and loves to talk with her friends on e-mail. After her visit to Carilion, she said she might consider computer science for a career, but leans more toward marine biology or paleontology.
The program, called Project Roanoke's Awareness in Scientific Education, is too new to gauge its ultimate success. Director Gay Carpenter said a survey of the first group of PRAISE students - now finishing their freshmen year of colleges - showed only three or four girls majoring in technology or science.
Similar programs are emerging all over the country. The New Jersey Institute of Technology enrolls fourth- and fifth-grade girls who show a love for science and math.
"If we don't get them this young, many times it's too late," said Rosa Cano, a co-director of the program. "By the time many of them are teen-agers, they start forming opinions on what boys do and what girls do. They form this notion that boys are naturally good in math and sciences, and girls aren't."
More stereotypes?
Despite the good intentions of these programs, some educators argue that special treatment for female science students may enforce stereotypes.
By segregating women, society is in "a backhand way telling them they can't compete with everyone, that we have to change the rules to help them succeed," Laura Vosejpka, a chemistry professor at Alma College in Michigan. She was quoted recently by The Washington Post.
Vosejpka was one of five women among 60 students in her University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate school class, and recalls no special treatment or discrimination.
"They were just as mean to me as they were to the guys," she said.
Burger, the director of the Women's Research Institute at Tech, sees another facet of the problem. She wonders how technological the much-heralded technology age will be for the majority of people. "Are these really high-tech jobs, or are they data-inputting jobs?" she asks.
As computers become more sophisticated, and user-friendly, workers may not necessarily be required to possess advanced math and science skills, she said. "I just got this Mac computer that's got more memory than God," she said with a laugh, adding that the instruction manual is entitled "Mac for Dummies."
Coupled with that notion is what Burger called the feminization of technology, citing two examples. A century ago, almost all bank tellers were men. It was believed women "didn't have the head for numbers," Burger said. As more women became tellers, the pay and status of the occupation plummeted.
The same thing happened in veterinary medicine, Burger said, where women make up about 65 percent of the work force.
"Even if women become predominant in high-status, high-paying fields, is that same thing going to happen?" she asked.
Some have touted the mass-marketing of personal computers as a liberating force for working mothers. This may prove to be a myth, says Toni Calasanti, a sociology professor at Tech.
Women in professional jobs, such as college teachers, architects and other occupations, may find that home-computing liberates them from having to punch the clock, so they have time for parenting. But without a some degree of higher education, women may still be locked into low-paying, data-entry jobs, even though they may be using computers at home.
Most of these home jobs are piece-rate, Calasanti said, where pay is based on quantity.
"If they've got kids at home, they just can't get the work done," Calasanti said. A home computer doesn't always allow a woman to work - it merely adds to the pressure of her domestic role, she said.
The mom myth
In addition to battling social stereotypes, workplace discrimination and pay inequities, women have yet another factor to put in the career equation - babies.
"The big issue for young women is how to have a family and a career," said Jones, the Northern Virginia aerospace engineer. While opportunities are opening up, and pay scales are better than before, many women might choose not to sacrifice the time and effort to compete with men to get to the top, she said.
Jones made the decision, early in her career, not to have children. "As life went on, I made the decision 10 times over," she said. And she has no regrets.
Debbie Hartsfield opted for motherhood. One of the two women engineers at Anderson & Associates in Blacksburg, Hartsfield gave birth to a daughter in January. "This is one of the bummers of having women engineers," she told her boss. "It's a factor that has to be considered. Women are going to get pregnant."
Hartsfield and the firm are trying to figure out a schedule that will allow her to work from home part-time. But her opportunities are limited to projects that one person can handle.
Betty Vetter, the executive director of the New York-based Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology, said the notion that most women will quit their jobs to get married and have babies is poppycock.
"It's statistically proven it's a myth," she said. Studies have shown women engineers stay with their first employer on average five to six years, while men leave in their fourth year, she said. The reason why, she doesn't know.
Technological advances may help some women, like Hartsfield, solve this dilemma. With her computer and modem, she can communicate with her co-workers and send information from home to work at lightning speed - almost like she were in the next cubicle - all the while keeping an eye on her daughter.
Hartsfield, by her own description no women's libber, believes strongly in equal pay for equal work, and in individual ability. Her daughter may well look to her as a role model, when she graduates from high school in 2012, from college in 2016, from graduate school in 2020, and enters a job market where half the workers still will be women.
As Vetter said: "We've got to stop wasting that half of our brainpower."
Staff writers Allison Blake, Steve Foster, Cathryn McCue and Laura Williamson contributed information to this report. The story was written by McCue.
by CNB