Subject: 'Hillary Effect' Cited for Increase in Female Ambassadors to U.S.
'Hillary effect' cited for increase in female ambassadors to U.S.
By Mary Jordan
In the gated Oman Embassy off Massachusetts Avenue, Washington's first female ambassador from an Arab country, Hunaina Sultan Al-Mughairy, sat at her desk looking over a speech aimed at erasing misconceptions about her Muslim nation.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/10/AR2010011002731.html?referrer=emailarticle
A quote from the article
"Cathy Tinsley, executive director of Georgetown University's Women's Leadership Initiative, said gender diversity at the top of any organization leads to better decisions. When all the decision-makers have a similar background and mind-set, they can 'amplify the error.' "
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Subject: One Answer to "What's the best time to have kids?"
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/02/05/triplets
Responsibilities: A College and Triplets February 5, 2010
When Carmen Twillie Ambar tells people about her job, they're impressed. When she tells them about her kids, they're impressed, too. So when they put the two together -- that she's a college president and the mother of triplets who aren't quite three years old -- they're in awe.
"I get a lot of 'wow's," says Ambar, 40, who's been president of Cedar Crest College, in Allentown, Pa., since August 2008. "People just can't believe that I'm the president of a college, the mother of young triplets and somehow put on shoes that match each other."
What makes Ambar notable isn't just the toughness of the two responsibilities she juggles, but the rarity of her circumstances. In a field that's predominantly male and gray, it's uncommon enough to find a female college president who's only 40, but to find one who's raising young children -- let alone multiples -- is all the rarer.
"I don't think you would pay hardly any attention to a male president with triplets," Ambar says. "Someone might ask, 'Well, how is your significant other managing it?' but I think it would just be assumed that the mother is taking on most responsibilities of raising the kids. Part of it's biology and part of it's gender roles in society."
Rather than trying to build a family before a career or both at once, Ambar chose to establish a professional reputation before having children. She practiced law for a few years after earning a master's in public affairs from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and a J.D. from Columbia University, and then became an assistant dean of graduate education at the Wilson School.
In 2002, at age 33, Ambar became the youngest-ever dean of Douglass College, Rutgers University's women's college. Triplets Gabrielle, Luke and Daniel were born in April 2007 and Ambar started work at Cedar Crest when they were 16 months old.
By waiting until her late 30s to have children with her husband, Saladin Ambar, whom she met while both were undergraduates at Georgetown University, the two knew each other so well that they "were an old married couple in a lot of ways," says Saladin, a visiting assistant professor of political science at Lehigh University. "Having so many years together before we became parents was critical to the understanding we have that there are no roles, per se, in our relationship."
Building a career and marriage before having kids, Ambar says, helped her find the grounding she needed. It also means she's at a point where she can have three assistants working for her, as well as a nanny and student helpers.
Though her job is demanding, being president gives Ambar professional flexibility that's all but impossible to have while trying to get tenure or working one's way up a corporate ladder. "I do think there are some things about this role that make it easier to manage my kids than would be the case in other jobs," she says. "I have a schedule that is totally controlled. Being president means being able to say no one o'clock meeting, let's do 2:30; not 7:30, I want to do it at 8.... I can be straightforward and say I have to skip certain events that aren't all that important for me to attend."
But that doesn't make her an absentee president. "I don't think you'd hear around campus that I'm not very visible and not at events," she says. Instead of spending a week traveling from city to city, she prefers to travel for two days and then come home for two days just to be sure she isn't away from her children for too long.
Ambar's office assistants, Cheryl Wenner and Karen Dorney, say that though she sometimes has to reschedule meetings and gets stressed, she takes it all in stride. "The schedule has to be rearranged from time to time but it's not a hardship at all," Wenner says, "and it would happen with any president, not just one with young kids."
Dorney says Ambar "doesn't get flustered by changes or unexpected events," in part because "she realizes that some things are going to change just by the very nature of being a parent or a president."
One key to success, Ambar says, "is to put systems in place, like all moms have, to manage everything." They use a chart in the kitchen to keep track of meals and diaper changes, and maintain the same routine day in, day out. "The kids are on a strict schedule. If you ask me what they're doing at any time, even if I'm not with them, I can tell you."
Marie Wilde, Cedar Crest's director of institutional research and planning, says Ambar "does two very demanding jobs in the same way, with a lot of structure -- timelines, deadlines, meeting times." Though Ambar is busy and has plenty of reasons to be distracted, "when you're meeting with her you know she's 100 percent there with you, you're not getting short shrift."
One of Ambar's strengths, Wilde adds, is that she is "filled with bounteous energy and enthusiasm" and "genuinely happy." She wakes up at 5 a.m. to exercise and often doesn't stop moving until 18 hours later.
Ambar says she lives in a state of "low level sleep deprivation." She last took a nap in January at the Council of Independent Colleges' annual meeting in Florida and the nap before that came a year earlier at the same event. "She doesn't drink coffee, so I don't know how she does it," Saladin says. "I drink coffee."
Despite all their energy, "every day we feel too old for this," Saladin says. "We see the toll bending and kneeling and holding and carrying takes on our bodies and how it has aged us."
The Ambars don't do it all alone but with "a lot of support all around." Her parents helped her move from central New Jersey to Cedar Crest's presidential house. The same nanny has spent weekdays with the triplets since they first moved to Allentown. Three students in early childhood education each work a few hours a week to help the nanny during meal times. Ambar also has three assistants, two who work out of her office and one who manages her household.
There is lots of outside help but, Ambar says, it's primarily when she and Saladin are working. They made a conscious choice not to have a live-in nanny, and spend all their free time with the triplets. Gender roles don't apply in the Ambar household, partly because of ideology and partly out of necessity. "Triplets require from the parents no discussion about what you can't do or what you won't do," she says. "Sometimes a parent will say, 'I don't change diapers,' but with three times as many dirty diapers, you just can't say that."
Though necessity drives them both, Saladin insists that his wife is truly extraordinary. "Part of what is amazing is that Carmen has assumed the idea that the incredible things she does are just par for the course."
- Jennifer Epstein
(c) Copyright 2010 Inside Higher Ed
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Subject: Articles from the AWIS Winter 2010 magazine http://www.awis.org/
Joan Steitz and Nancy Andrews are two highly successful and highly recognized women scientists whose careers are separated by a generation. The profiles are very informative in terms of the barriers Joan Steitz, PhD saw and her lack of role models and the choices available as alternatives to the younger Nancy Andrews, MD, PhD.
One assumes that Professor Steitz at Yale was one of the role models for Yale undergraduate Andrews.
Joan Steitz by Laura L. Mays Hoopes
When it comes to breaking through barriers for women in molecular biology, Joan Argetsinger Steitz was an early heroine. In 1963, she was the only female graduate student, in a class of ten people, admitted to the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology program at Harvard University. She was also the first female graduate student under James Watson, one of the two men who discovered DNA's double helix.
Joan Argetsinger went to Northrop Collegiate School, a girls' high school in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was a forward-thinking institution where women taught mathematics and science. She attended Antioch College, and the school's co-op program sent her to work with Alexander Rich at MIT, where she first encountered the new field of molecular biology. In the summer of 1963, she worked in the laboratory of Joseph Gall and discovered her passion for research. Gall communicated the excitement of science and gave Joan ownership of her project, in which she investigated whether basal bodies of cilia contained DNA. Joan was so interested in research that she wanted to pursue a Ph.D. in biochemistry, but there were very few women who went to graduate school.
Looking back on those days, Joan muses that there was one female science faculty member at Antioch in biology and none in chemistry. Joan didn't see any women running laboratories during any of her co-op terms, so she never considered becoming a science professor. She knew female doctors so, she applied and was admitted to Harvard Medical School in 1963.
The committee of faculty members from different departments that ran the Harvard Biochemistry and Molecular Biology program included James Watson, who, during the time of Joan's degree work, wrote his memoir, The Double Helix. The administration was informal, but the program was rigorous, challenging, and exciting. Joan knew she was a good student, and she was enthusiastic about searching for DNA in basal bodies of cilia. She suggested collaborating with a famous male cell biologist to study cilia via electron microscopy, but he hemmed and hawed and said he wasn't sure he had space. He asked if she meant to get married and have children and looked uneasy. Joan fled in embarrassment.
She considered her options. Watson had become a friend when she worked at MIT; he had even left her daffodils in a beaker on one occasion. He had also helped with the red tape when she had decided at the last minute to switch from medicine to graduate school. However, Watson wasn't interested in DNA in basal bodies. Joan had begun to be interested in ribosomes. She could always return to looking for DNA in basal bodies at another time. So she asked, and Watson accepted her. She was not told until later that she was the first female graduate student he had ever accepted into his laboratory.
In the laboratory, she felt like one of the guys. Differences between genders did not come up; everyone was expected to do the same things, pass the insanely difficult physical chemistry examinations, work day and night, and read all the literature with a critical eye. Giving a talk on her research in Watson's group was an ordeal at first, but not a gender-specific one. He demanded that everyone start with the big picture, then turn to the supporting evidence, and finally recapitulate the whole story from the bigpicture perspective. He was not shy about interrupting the speaker to demand his ideal presentation style. Joan says he also indoctrinated his students with the ability to select important problems. That skill has been useful to her throughout her career.
While she was pursuing her Ph.D., many speakers came through Harvard and almost all were men. A woman lectured in one of her classes only once. It was Marianne Grunberg-Manago, a French scientist who had purified and characterized polynucleotide phosphorylase in the early 1960s. Joan says that Severo Ochoa won the Nobel Prize for Grunberg-Manago's work. Ochoa was laboratory director, and it was the custom for the director to take credit for all the discoveries made in his laboratory. There is no doubt that many women failed to achieve recognition in science because of this custom.
During the first year of graduate training, Joan dated various men, and in 1966, she married a fellow graduate student, Tom Steitz. Tom had finished his Chemistry Ph.D. in 1966 and remained in the laboratory of his mentor, Nobel prize-winner Bill Lipscomb, for another year. This allowed Joan to complete her research, which focused on a bacterial virus that uses ribonucleic acid (RNA) for its genetic material, write her dissertation, and receive her Ph.D. Joan's work was well-regarded, she was well-published, and she was invited to give talks on her work.
Tom studied structural biology using x-ray diffraction, the method Rosalind Franklin had used to study the structures of DNA that had inspired Watson and Crick's model. He was offered a postdoctoral position at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, famous for both structural and molecular biology. Watson's graduates generally went to Geneva for postdoctoral work, but since Tom was coming to Cambridge, Watson suggested that, Crick take Joan as a postdoctoral fellow. Crick agreed, remembering that Joan and her three female roommates had once entertained him for dinner when he visited Harvard.
Instead of preparing to become a professor, she focused her reading and thinking directly on the problem she was studying throughout her postdoctoral period at Cambridge. She had obtained a few feet of bench space in the area assigned to Mark Bretscher, a young MRC staff member. She chose an important, risky project that had only a small chance of being successful, but that did not matter since she would not have to be in the job market for several years. She noticed that her male colleagues in the MRC Division headed by Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner had broader interests because they were planning for future teaching. That was not her goal; instead, she focused on becoming a research associate.
Joan knew that many professors had research associates, typically women who conducted research as specified by their professors. To extend her two-year funded stay in Cambridge and provide funds for her transition back to the U.S., Joan applied for, and received, a Jane Coffin Childs Fellowship. While Joan was in England, some important variables in American society began to change. Betty Friedan's book, The Feminine Mystique, had been a best seller in the U.S., following the earlier lead into feminism by Simone de Beauvoir. Female faculty members in the sciences were becoming more commonplace. Meanwhile, anti-nepotism was breaking down; most U.S. universities had repealed rules against married couples' dual employment as faculty members.
Joan herself became a celebrity by making an important discovery at Cambridge. She found the sequences of three start sites on a virus-derived messenger RNA where particular proteins began to be produced and published her data in the premier journal Nature. She had identified the spacer sequences between genes for the first time, and this breakthrough was heralded as the beginning of understanding how genes work, a foundation for today's molecular medicine advances. Also, Sydney Brenner from Cambridge MRC had toured the U.S. touting molecular biology. Molecular biology had become the new must-have subject area, and Joan was a hot commodity, having made exciting discoveries with both Watson and Crick.
Tom came to the U.S. to begin his faculty position at the University of California, Berkeley, and along the way, he and Joan gave research talks at many universities. The informality of the hiring process in those days meant that Joan wasn't sure which universities were considering her for positions. Although Berkeley made no faculty-level offer to Joan, she and Tom both received written offers of Assistant Professorships from Princeton and Yale.
At Berkeley, where Joan conducted research in the laboratory of Bruce Ames, Tom showed the written offers from Princeton and Yale to his department chair and requested that they make an offer to Joan. The chairman told Tom that women liked to be research associates and asked if she wanted to do that instead. He did not plan to offer her a faculty position. Tom told Joan and made it clear that he thought she deserved to be on the faculty. Joan talked with possible supervisors at Berkeley and mulled over her future.
Today we may wonder, why didn't she jump to accept one of the written offers of professorship? Joan felt conflicted and somewhat unprepared. She knew she hadn't read as widely as the men who trained alongside her at Cambridge and never expected to face this choice. She feared lecturing on subjects she didn't know thoroughly, but she realized that she had a chance to open an important door for women and could be a role model for others. She knew it would be hard, but she would have Tom for support. Plus, Yale had an ace in the hole. Her mentor, Joseph Gall from Minnesota, was now on the Yale faculty. Joan and Tom accepted the offers from Yale.
Joan was still uneasy about her preparation. She worked on RNA. Almost all RNA was transcribed from DNA, so she thought she would be fairly comfortable at a scientific meeting about transcription. During a trip home to visit her ill mother, she attended a transcription meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where Watson had become the director. Joan was appalled to find how hard it was to follow papers at the forefront of the field of transcription. It did not matter that it was not her field; if she became a professor, she would surely have to teach it. She could not keep pretending she could be a professor, so she went to talk to Watson, crying. He told her that she could do it, that lecturing was never easy, even for him, and that she should not worry; she would be just fine.
Watson was correct. Joan learned to teach Biochemistry and has enjoyed it ever since. One undergraduate commented that there are two biochemistry courses at Yale, one for mortals and one for gods. Her course is the latter. Many former students have approached her at meetings to thank her for how much they learned in biochemistry.
Joan has received numerous awards for her research on RNA, including the National Medal of Science and the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research, America's largest prize in medicine. The Albany Medical Center Prize was awarded in 2008 to Joan Steitz and Elizabeth Blackburn of UCSF, the first women to receive the award. Joan is one of the few women who have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences as well. Breaking the boundaries for other women in science did not make life easy for Joan. She looks back and recalls that she was terrified at times, but she affirms that it was for the best. Now she revels in the success of women scientists and hopes for a day when men and women in science will be treated exactly the same.
Nancy Andrews by Elizabeth Eyler
Nancy Andrews, M.D., Ph.D., made her first impression on me a few days before I met her in person. I knew that her research had made significant contributions to our understanding of iron homeostasis and iron-storage disorders. I also knew that she had attracted a flurry of media attention in 2007 when she moved from her position at Harvard to become the first female dean of the Duke University School of Medicine-and the only female dean heading a top-ten medical institution in the United States. In addition, I knew that Andrews had accumulated numerous awards and recognitions for her professional achievements, including election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007 and membership in the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies.
Yet what impressed me even beyond her array of accomplishments was discovering that Andrews, who had achieved such a high degree of career success, also placed an equally high priority on spending time with her family. I learned this from a passing comment made by the Graduate Student Association president who had made the arrangements for Dr. Andrews' invited talk at Johns Hopkins. She mentioned to me that the talk was scheduled for the morning instead of later in the day because Dr. Andrews wanted to be home with her children in the evening and needed to catch a flight back to North Carolina the same afternoon.
I knew then that I had to meet her. While chatting with Andrews over coffee on the morning of her talk, I learned that even though her son and daughter are now of high school age and do not require her presence at home as much as they did when they were younger, she still makes an effort to be at home in the evenings and on weekends as much as possible.
Dr. Andrews' work life has been quite active nonetheless. She received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in molecular biophysics and biochemistry from Yale University, where she worked with Joan Steitz before moving on to a combined M.D./Ph.D. program at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1985 she earned her Ph.D. in biology from David Baltimore's lab and completed her M.D. 2 years later, followed by a fellowship with Stuart Orkin at Children's Hospital Boston. She joined the faculty at Harvard in 1991, where she started her own research laboratory and was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator from 1993 until 2006. Her administrative career began in 1999, when she became the director of the Harvard M.D./Ph.D. program, the same program from which she had graduated. In 2003 she became the dean of Basic Sciences and Graduate Studies at Harvard Medical School, where she worked until accepting her current position leading the medical school at Duke.
While pursuing her very active career path, Andrews told me that she and her husband, fellow research scientist Bernard Mathey- Prevot, chose to wait to have children until she reached the end of her formal academic training. She feels fortunate that the timing of her pregnancies happened more or less as they planned. Through it all, she emphasizes that having a supportive and equally involved partner was, and still is, essential. "I think kids benefit from having two parents involved in their upbringing," she says. "Being able to truly share responsibilities is very important."
Andrews also stresses the importance of flexibility while raising children and managing a career. "Being a scientist gave me a lot of control over my schedule," she says. "I rarely had to miss things like school events and teacher conferences when the kids were young. It has to be much more difficult for people in demanding careers who cannot manage their own time." She does admit that managing her schedule once she had children required a certain amount of effort and prioritization on her part. "I had to get used to leaving the lab at 5:30 in the afternoon rather than staying until 7 or 8 in the evening," she recalls. "I worked much less at home than I had before, and I became even more efficient at work."
As her career has advanced, Andrews says it has become easier to be selective about the tasks that she takes on and to delegate more responsibilities, which increases her control over her schedule to some degree. She also notes "older kids need, or at least want, less attention than younger kids." However, her approach to balancing her work and family life has remained fairly constant over the years, and she and her husband have both always made their children a priority. In some ways, Andrews reflects, her husband has compromised even more than she has in making decisions that would impact their careers and their family. "He only looked for faculty jobs in Boston when I wanted to go to Children's Hospital Boston for residency," she explains, "and he gave up a job he enjoyed very much to move to Duke."
Ultimately, the family did decide to make the move, and Andrews came to Duke excited by the prospect of tackling new challenges. Her installment was announced in August of 2007, sparking stories in the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, National Public Radio, and other media outlets. Although she was surprised at the time by the publicity that accompanied her move, she also realizes that women in top leadership roles at top institutions are still less common than men in the same roles or on the same career trajectories. In her position at Duke, as one of the relatively few women on a clear path to leadership, one of Andrews' goals is to promote and encourage other women to seek and hold high-level roles in science and medicine. She emphasizes that "we need to build up the pipeline and get more women interested in heading toward leadership positions."
Andrews remarks that several changes over the years have made things easier for women, although additional changes still need to be made. She is encouraged by the increasing number of women in scientific and medical careers, observing, "In some fields there are enough women to have changed the culture and to have started bringing down barriers." She adds that it has become more rare for people to say things that show overt bias against women, and she praises the increase in deliberate efforts to get more girls interested in science and math. Balancing the competing demands of work and family is a challenge for all individuals in high-level careers, though, and remains a particular challenge for women.
As far as Andrews' approach to managing it all, "I delegate a lot," she says. "If someone else can take care of something at least as well as I can, I hand it over to them. That's the only way I can carve out enough time to get my job done and still have a life outside of work."
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