SYMPOSIUM ON
WOMEN IN BIOMEDICAL CAREERS: DYNAMICS OF CHANGE
June 11 ,1992
National Institutes of Health

Maxine Singer

Keynote Address

I begin with some personal reminiscences.

Bright and early one morning in the mid-1960's, the telephone
rang in my lab. It was the Executive Secretary of an NIH Study
Section. Would I, the person wanted to know, become a member of a
biochemistry Study Section? I chuckled, and said no thank you, you
haven't wanted me or thought me qualified before, and as far as I
knew nothing much had changed since yesterday afternoon except
that President Lyndon Johnson has decreed that all federal
government advisory committees would, henceforth, have a
substantial number of female members. I'd been getting along quite
well without all that additional work and might just as well stick to
the lab.
How I wish that I had continued to be so principled. But in the
end, my ego, or the promise of influence, or the argument that it
would be good for women scientists if they were represented on this
or that committee, got to me and I succumbed and found myself
accomplishing some interesting and important work for science but

also wasting many hours..

Many of you can tell similar stories. We have, by-and-large,
been at least as serious members of many important committees as
have our male colleagues. Often, we have served on even more
committees and boards than our average male colleagues, because
given our small numbers and the mandated requirements for
representation by women, we are needed, or so it is said. Some of us
have served on too many such bodies, giving up a great deal of time
that could otherwise have been spent in the lab, or the clinic, or with

our families, or walking on a beach.

One of the most interesting opportunities I had, at least in part
because women were needed, was to serve on the board of trustees
of a major private research university. Indeed, it was a stimulating
and worthwhile 15 years. But it had a discouraging aspect. Each
year, the university administration reported to the board extensive
analyses of the results of affirmative action policies for faculty hiring
and promotion. The administration took this challenge seriously; I
have no doubt of that. They worked hard with search committees
trying to effect change, but progress seemed to be barely perceptible

when it came to tenured faculty. And the explanations for the
discouraging state of affairs were never totally satisfactory, not for
want of commitment, but because the explanations remained

complex or obscure.

About five years ago, a distinguished colleague and friend at
another major research university headed a search committee
charged with recommending appointment of several senior scientists
in several biomedical fields. He sent the usual letters out all over
the country, and they contained the usual sentence about being
especially interested in nominees who were women...a sentence he
truly meant. And he had the usual response; no women were
nominated. So he sent another letter, somewhat less formal. "Look
guys", he said (or something like this) "I really mean this. Search
your brains and your souls and tell me about the terrific female
graduate students you've trained and what they're doing now". Did
it work? No. So finally, he went searching himself, and of course he
identified smashing women candidates and even managed to attract

several of them to his institution.

Some 25 years after President Johnson's directive, in 1990, I
was completing a term on what is widely believed to be an
influential and important policy committee of especially
distinguished members of the National Academy of Sciences
representing a variety of fields of research. The committee members
were discussing possible replacements for those about to rotate off
the group. Physicists suggested physicists, biochemists suggested

biochemists, and so forth. They turned to me and said that with my
departure, the committee would be without a female member, and
would I please offer some ideas for women who might be appointed.
I should have done my bit, recommended names, tried to assure
opportunities for women on this committee. But I was frustrated. So
I pointed out that people carrying two X chromosomes did not
constitute a particular branch of science and I thought that they
would know the women in their own fields better than I would, so
why didn't they come up with the names. It was, I said, their

responsibility, not mine, to be sure that women were part of the

committee.

Why am I telling you all this? You've all had similar
experiences and could tell many similar stories. The point is that a
great deal of progress has been made, and the opportunities for
women in research are substantially improved compared to 25 years
ago. Just two days ago the New York Times' Science Times (Tuesday,
June 9, 1992) featured a story about telomeres and their possible
role in maintaining viable cells and perhaps even their association
with the phenomenon of aging and with the vigorous growth of
tumor cells. The new work, as well as much of the earlier work on
telomeres is correctly credited, and all the major contributors have
been women, starting with Barbara McClintock's studies on
chromosome stability, right thru the recent work of Elizabeth

Blackburn and Carol Greider.

Yet, we have to face up to the fact that affirmative action, no

matter how laudable it is (and I think it is) has worked at a snail's
pace. Many women have been trained in science in the last 25
years, and many of them are superb, accomplished scientists. Still,

so few have reached the professorial ranks, and so many are still
discouraged. You've no doubt read the recent Science Magazine issue
on women in science. The situation is still so dismal that they
actually characterized Chemistry as a field that was middling on the
issue of opportunities for women, somewhere between neurobiology
which was painted as being pretty good, and mathematics, which was
deemed to be the pits. How many Chemistry Departments do you

know of where women abound and feel as though they belong?

Now, we can wait around for a while longer in the hope that
progress will slowly continue and that eventually, affirmative action
will really work. In the meanwhile,. a lot of money that could be
used for good science will be spent on studies trying to figure out
why affirmative action hasn't worked or hasn't worked more rapidly,
why young female scientists disappear somewhere between their
Ph.D. or M.D, degrees and the assistant professor positions.
Ultimately, all the 'old school’ men who still call us "honey' will age
sufficiently to retire and maybe, just maybe, the younger men will
be different. But it seems to me that waiting around is insufficient.
Current strategies have an important flaw. No matter how hard we
may work to have them succeed, they depend finally on other
people, mainly men, changing their attitudes and expectations. In
that same issue of Science, there is a telling quote from Shirley
Tilghman, Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton. At a Gordon

Conference she organized in 1988, fully 33% of the speakers were
women; two years later, at another on the same subject, organized

by men, there were two women speakers.

With due respect to all of you and to the organizers of this
conference, the conference agenda illustrates my point. It speaks to
approaches that require others to change. Here are a few examples
taken from the titles this meeting's sessions. Recruitment, retention,
and re-entry imply getting the current research institution
hierarchies to be responsible for the advancement of women. The
workplace climate that is mentioned is a climate set by the current
faculties. Who is abusing the power in the workplace? Men who are
in charge. Who is expected to become sympathetic to non-
traditional pathways? Men who are in charge. Who is doing the
harrassing? Men who are in charge. How will effective connections
be made between the best of networks and the places where
decisions are being made? Networks can provide sympathetic ears,
but they can't easily provide a lab of ones own. Keeping ones sanity
is not the same as keeping ones lab. And who really wants to be part

of the "old boys' network?

What is needed is a strategy that depends on us. A strategy
that assumes we will expend our energies on improving the
opportunity for women to do science, not on complaining about the

failure of others to do so.

We have to stop expecting that our male colleagues will change,

particularly the leaders among them, those who are the best
scientists. The fact is, many of them are, understandably and
appropriately, much more concerned about their own research than
about the status of women. Their ambitions make them less than

collegial. And, as Dr. Healy was recently quoted as saying:

"If collegiality is the measure by which we evaluate good
scientists, we might as well shut down right now'. Quotation credited

to Bernadine Healy in Nature, 357, p. 4 (made in reference to Gallo

Report.)

Similarly, we need to face the reality of our colleagues' as well
as our own ambitions, and recognize that we are not about to change
theirs. Indeed, ambition and competition are most often constructive
elements in accomplishing good science. Wallace Stegner puts it very
well in his novel "Crossing to Safety": the male protagonist thinks to
himself: "Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice;
it can turn a man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run.
Considered, it can be something else-pathway to the stars, maybe".
We cannot expect that our male colleagues will or should, in our
interests, become more collegial or less ambitious or less competitive.
So, itis not only unlikely that we could succeed in having them
change to meet our needs, but it is also probably not desirable from

the point of view of science.

There is another flaw in our current strategies. They address
the world as it is, not as it will be. Yet, we want to succeed for the

future, the present is, after all, almost past. Our energies should go
into making sure that the future gets shaped to foster women's

contributions to science.

The three essential elements in a new strategy then are: First,
that we strive to do the best science that we can: the most original,
the most rigorous, the most interesting. Second, we need to depend
on ourselves and not on others to enable our contributions to science,
and thus to human welfare. Third. we need to make certain that we,

ourselves, have a substantial say in the shape the future.

What kinds of elements should go into a new strategy? We can
gather some clues from our male colleagues who have, in the past 40
years, built an extraordinarily successful research enterprise in our
country: by success, I mean that they have enormously enhanced
our understanding of the natural world and the ability to use that
knowledge for the benefit of the inhabitants of our planet....the
ability, not necessarily the will to use the knowledge in that way,
that is a separate discussion for another day. Our male colleagues,
like the scientists concerned with telomeres I mentioned before,
have chosen avenues of inquiry that opened new fields, and
expanded even our very sense of what the questions are. And we
should emulate that, but with our own agenda. In so doing, we will
move from the periphery, from being supplicants for fair treatment

to being the shapers of the future.

I'll try to be more specific. In one example, pertinent for those,

like yourselves, who are concerned with biomedical research, Dr.
Healy's new emphasis on research into matters that effect women's
health has opened a door. There are additional indications that this
will be an expanding field. The Institute of Medicine's annual
symposium this coming October is entitled "Gender Differences in
Health". There is now a Society for the Advancement of Women's
Health Research, there is even a new journal, to begin publication
this spring, called The Journal of Women's Health. Past experience
tells us that with each new focus for biomedical research, new
questions and new understandings about the fundamental properties
of living things have emerged. Recall that each of the NIH's institutes
(but one) is named for one or more diseases. The research sponsored
by these institutes focuses on the diagnosis and treatment of the
relevant diseases and also on related fundamental research. The
fundamental research has had profound implications for our
understanding not only of the sponsoring institute's main concern,
but also for other diseases as well, and for our understanding of

nature. The same will be true of the new program on women's
health.

Consider, for example,. the phenomenon of menopause. What
fundamental aspects of living things will be revealed when we
understand this profound change? What will the implications be for

understanding aging in general?

Another important focus for research on women's health is
contraception. Research in this area is currently practically ata

standstill in our country. The findings of the 1991 Women's Health
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Research Roundtables, published by the Society for the Advancement
of Women's Health Research reminds us that "Adolescents in the
United States become sexually active at about the same age as teens
in Canada and Sweden and at the same rate, but the U.S. leads the
industrialized world in teen pregnancies. Clearly, (the findings go on
to say) more choices among effective contraceptives are desperately
needed. Many Americans past their teens would also welcome
improved methods. And work in this area is likely to produce
substantial fundamental understanding of the processes of ovulation,
oocyte and sperm maturation, and fertilization. A successful effort
might also yield innovative routes out of a political issue that is
tearing our country apart: access to abortion. Our male colleagues
have not insisted that contraception be on the active research

agenda; but we should be strongly motivated.

This area of research is important for yet another reason: the
increasing world-wide concern for the environment. These weeks
we are especially aware of this issue because of the Rio conference.
We all decry the extinction of uncounted, even unknown species. We
need to face the fact that the unchecked expansion of our own
species is a root cause of the loss of biological diversity. The recent
joint statement by the officers of the Royal Society of London and the
U.S. National Academy of Sciences entitled "Population Growth,
Resource Consumption, and a Sustainable World" asks "what are the
relevant topics to which scientific research can make mitigating
contributions?" The first topic listed as an answer to this question is

"development of new generations of safe, easy to use, and effective
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contraceptive agents and devices" And Congressman George E.
Brown, Jr., a great friend of science and chairman of the House of
Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology wrote

recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education (April 22, 1992):

"Many scientists, historians, and policy makers believe that
population growth represents the fundamental challenge to
humanity"s capacity to achieve long-term environmental, economic,
and cultural stability". "Exponential growth of population triggers
exponential growth in consumption of resources, in generation of
waste products, in conflict and violence, and in disparities in

economic status and quality of life".

The agenda I am proposing for those concerned with research
in the field of women's health will not be easy to achieve. There are
powerful political forces in our country which would prefer to forget
that the ramifications of sex are central to all our lives. At least in
part, such views reflect a deep denial of women and women's
legitimate rights and interests. Menopause embarrasses them.
Contraception not only embarrasses but gravely troubles some of
them. Indeed, there are indications that if the anti-abortion forces
succeed in turning back the clock by overturning Roe v. Wade, as
well they may, they will then actively pursue an anti-contraception
agenda. But sound biomedical research in these areas will
increasingly bring such matters into the open, will legitimize them,
will make it more and more difficult to ignore the associated societal

and cultural realities. One day, we may even see the federal
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government willing to fund scholarly studies of teen's attitudes to
sex and contraception, and willing to replace the chapter on
contraception that was deleted this spring from the government's
book called "Taking Care of Your Child", a book distributed to federal
employees to give advice on child rearing, deleted because it was

believed to be offensive.

There are other roadblocks in the way of this agenda as well.
In the negotiations about the agreements to be made in Rio, the
Group of 77 developing nations deleted references to the urgency of
slowing population growth. This found support from feminist health
groups from the developed countries. As Jessica Tuchman Mathews
pointed out in a recent column in the Washington Post, "Feminist
health groups, along with some women's groups in developing
countries and representatives of minority women in the U.S., have
long been antagonistic to population control because they believe it
jeopardizes women's health, is disguised genocide, or places blame on
women". Here again, sound science, the careful establishment of
facts about life on the planet, the biology of individuals and of

ecosystems, will make it increasingly difficult to ignore the realities.

I believe that a sound scientific agenda, based on vital issues of
concern to women is one way to promote the role and status of
women scientists. Here again, the Program for Research on Women's
Health is an example. It sets aside monies to support research.
Those whose proposals are excellent enough to be funded will have

something special to offer research institutions at a time when new
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money is very attractive indeed. We need not applaud the
importance of grant potential in recruitment, but it is a fact of life
and advantage can be taken. Moreover, it is very likely that several
more women will be elected to State legislatures and the Congress
this fall. There are 150 women candidates for the House of
Representatives, nationwide, more than twice the number in 1990.
R.W. Apple, Jr., writing in the New York Times (May 24, 1992)
suggests that five new women may be elected to the Senate, which
now has two women, and that there could be 20 new women in the
House, which now has 29. Just as our male leaders have, in the past,
cultivated the interest of senators and representatives in biomedical
research to extraordinarily good effect, women scientists too can
cultivate the interest of women in Congress to assure the stability

and growth of the program for Research on Women's Health.

The availability of these grants and the excellent science they
will support will not only contribute to the ability of women to
capture faculty positions, they will also strengthen bargaining
positions during recruitment negotiations. A few years ago, Carl
Djerassi wrote a letter to Science Magazine suggesting that extra help
for child care should be considered comparable to the mortgage
support that is used as a recruitment device in academic institutions.
I have been wondering whether, in families where one spouse's
benefits provide for a family's health insurance, the other spouse
might not be offered child care support instead. There are many
possibilities to think about. The important thing is seize the

opportunities that are being offered and to use them to define new
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scientific agendas that have the potential for major contributions to
knowledge and societal problems. From this can come a vitality that
cannot be ignored, and that will place women at the center of the

research enterprise.