'The Change Is Glacial'

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DEBRA R. ROLISON,
head, Advanced Electrochemical Materials Section,
U.S. Naval Research Laboratory

Age: 52

Ph.D.: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1980

American Association for the Advancement of Science, fellow

Her research: Builds nanoscopic objects to improve fuel cells, magnetic separations, sensing, and the power density of batteries.

Background: Grew up in Iowa, cooking alongside her mother. "I don't trust an experimental chemist who's not a good cook," says Ms. Rolison.

Personal: Single

***

Q. You're not shy about saying what you think regarding the paucity of women in academic science. Why have you decided to use such an in-your-face approach, even if it puts some people off?

A. The original title of my uppity-woman talk was: "Isn't a Millennium of Affirmative Action for White Men Sufficient?" At Argonne [National Laboratory], there was a very distinguished female physicist who has also seen so little change over such a long time. She said, If the title weren't quite so confrontational we might get more men in the audience, and they're the ones who really need to hear this talk. I said: I've given that thought and I could cut down on the confrontation and make it something like, why we need more women in science. But that's not going to get their asses into the seats in the auditorium either. I think we've had far too many of the helpful, educational approaches. We don't have 30 years here.

Q. Has the situation for women gotten any better since you've been out there pushing?

A. The answer is yes and no. No, in the sense that we're not seeing the fraction of women on the tenure-track in the top 50 universities get markedly larger. The change is glacial. And yes, in the sense that more of these young women earning Ph.D.'s do seem to be aware now that if this is the career they want, they're going to have to grab it by both hands. They are going to have to, in some respects, fight.

Q. What's the top reason there aren't more women in academic science?

A. It's not just day-care or child issues. It's the nature of the scientific life. Many of these young people who I work with find it just so tiresome with respect to how they have to interact with the broader scientific enterprise. This sense of constant promotion, somebody has to win the scientific point, or even some of this aggressiveness in how science is discussed publicly at meetings or locally in your own group or department. They see that people who are very well respected and accomplished in science have achieved it in a path they may not wish to emulate. Part of that path might be their perception that this person is very good at undercutting detractors in public. Or very polished and aggressive in how they are projecting their science.

Q. Why do you think it is a good idea to use Title IX to investigate gender bias in academic science?

A. It arose out of many years of conversations with my friends in academe, extremely powerful people who all felt they had no power within their own system to make a change — even Nobel laureates and chaired, fully endowed professors who saw no way to go about doing the many things that needed to be done to make their university more appealing to women. So, my thinking was, you need the external threat. If you've got a biomedical study ongoing, and there are human-subjects' violations, the feds turn off the money and then those things are solved in 48 hours. To get the attention of people who can completely reshuffle things, you just turn off the money. I've always equated Title IX with death at the door. No university can function — public or private — without the federal funds. Death at the door gets people's attention. And I have never forgotten that this is fundamentally about power and resources. And most people who hold power are not willing to share it because it's the right thing to do.

Q. You've suggested the creation of online reviews of faculty members and their research groups, evaluating them on their treatment of women. How would that work?

A. We need a consumer-report index for a department where you know each faculty member's record. There will be certain groups which women have never joined or have not done well in. Or women have joined but they've all gone into industry or four-year colleges and none have gone on to work at research universities. Or they've left chemistry entirely. Those are data, and we could generate them. Then the really motivated faculty members at Oberlin or Swarthmore or Bryn Mawr, if they have those data, they can look and say to their undergraduates, whoa, there have only been one or two out of 20 women who've gotten a Ph.D. out of this man's group. You may not want to work for this person.

Q. Why did you choose to work for the federal government as opposed to a research university?

A. I knew I needed to sit under a tree and read a book. So, if I went to a university, I'd be the person who they would have been delighted to have on their faculty 10 years into my career, but I never would have been tenured. I was reading too broadly. If you want to get tenure, you have to come out of the gate fast. And a lot of scientific issues are deeper and broader than what can be generated with fast productivity. I wanted the chance to indulge in art and theater and music and read outside of science.

Q. Is the environment at the Naval Research Lab any different for women than it is on campuses?

A. If you look at our staff, we are as lethal as the Top 10 departments of chemistry. We have a chemistry division that is larger than a standard department, so the number is around 100 full-time staff. And our fraction of women is not even 10 percent. So we are as bad as the worst.