S1: i wanna welcome all of you intrepids who have managed to get up and and out today. i expect we'll have people joining us, throughout the morning. um, but i think we'll get started now. um, i want to introduce myself my name is Jane Hassinger and i am the, director of the Interdisciplinary Program in Feminist Practice. uh one of the, sponsors of this program today. um, it gives me a great deal of pride, a lot of pleasure, to see this event occur. and uh, i see it in many ways as, one of the, uh flowerings, of efforts, of a lot of people over a lot of time to create a community of scholars and practitioners um at the University of Michigan who_ whose feminism and whose commitments to social justice, um continue to, uh enhance and invigorate their work. n- uh just let me tell you a word or two about, the Interdisciplinary Program in Feminist Practice this project was, initiated in nineteen s- ninety-two, um with the intent of, uh helping faculty and graduate students become acquainted with the, significance of gender race and other aspects of social identities to their practices. and to their professional work. today's conference we- represents the work of graduate students, from multiple programs and departments, um with whom the Interdisciplinary Program has worked over the years. who have made a commitment to practice that holds to the principles of social justice and feminist values. as we will see today, these works, uh ask us to reassess the foundations of our work. the basic principles on which we do our work. both theoretical and practical. in order for us to illuminate the biases and the strategies that disempower in our practices. as well as allowing us to extend our gaze into the into the corners and beyond the borders of the problems that we address. rather than letting the borders, of our disciplines or our professions define and focus our efforts. these presentations will excite us about the promise of feminist multiculturally-competent practice. out in the professional workplace. they will also accent the essential values of praxis or the dynamic, interplay of engaging in action, reflection, theorizing and then back to action again, in collaboration with others. where reciprocity and mutuality are accented, and where, multiple sources of expertise and learning, are recognized, and respected. i know that today will invigorate us and draw us closer. today in our work_ our creative work and play. i'm so happy that you're here to help us celebrate these important works. i wanna pass the um podium now to, my colleagues Amy Zann and Kim Price. 
<P :14> 
S2: um well first of all we would like to start off by thanking a few people and organizations that helped uh make this conference possible um first of all we would like to thank the organizations for spon- who sponsored this c- um conference. um which are the Interdisciplinary Program in Feminist Practice, the Institute for Research in Women and Gender, the Women's Studies Program, the Horace Rackham School of Graduate Studies and the Office of Academic and Multicultural Affairs. 
S3: there are also several individuals that we'd like to thank, uh first Jane Hassinger director of the Interdisciplinary Program in Feminist Practice, uh secondly and especially Nancy Quay, who we were going to ask to stand but she's already standing, <SS LAUGH> uh
S4: i've been running around.
S3: also of the Interdisciplinary Program in Feminist Practice um, Nancy was really the glue that held this project together, and without her extraordinary organiza- zhay-(sic) organizational skills this conference would not have happened. so we especially want to thank Nancy, um also Nancy Cantor Provost and Pat Gurin Dean of L-S-and-A, for their unfailing support of the Interdisciplinary Program in Feminist Practice over the years, uh and also Judy Mackey of the Women's Studies Program for facilitating a lot of the logistics of this conference. 
S2: uh we'd also like to thank the speakers h- for submitting such great papers and for presenting great papers and um we would like to um announce that the papers that are being presented here at this conference will be published by the Institute for Research on Women and Gender so Gender so if you're interested you should contact them to get copies um um of the papers actually gonna be published as part of their working papers series. and also we'd like to remind the speakers to turn in your papers and um your consent forms to Nancy Quay, um by the end of the day. 
S3: just a few words about the planning committee um who we'd also like to thank. um we've been working on this project since January and it has been a long and and wonderful process, um, this conference was organized by graduate students from a variety of disciplines uh including political science, psychology, public health, the Romance languages, social work, and women's studies. um you'll notice that there are two of us up here and um that represents that this really is a group effort and um, we've done this together. um, i should mention also the committee's put together an evaluation, um there are multiple parts to it but this white sheet you got is the overall evaluation for the entire conference, uh once you complete this at the end of the day there's a little green table out in the hallway if you can leave it on? um, also this blue sheet is for any of you that wanna get involved in next year's conference uh to be part of the planning committee to, speak um, if you want to be involved just fill this out and also leave it on that green table. um, you've also received a copy of the program, it has the abstracts for all the talks in it, um and a full schedule... that's, okay
S2: okay um and we'd just sort of like to end by kind of talking about the um inspiration for this conference um, basically the inspiration for this conference was to uh recognize the importance of um feminist theory on um the professions and to explore the links between theory and practice um, we kinda wanted to honor um feminists at work, um students at work and (guess) responsible um practitioners whether they're in teaching or in research um in the practice disciplines or in the professions such as um business and law.
S3: it's also our hope that this conference inspires more creative feminist scholarship, more dialogue between feminists from different disciplines, and more connections um for women in this area. um last night's talk really inspired a lot of of of feeling and thought in me and a lot of discussions i think that are yet to be had, um and we hope that a support network of women from various disciplines develops as a result of this conference both last night's talk and today's presentations, um we encourage you to get together during lunch in order to meet and and begin some of these dialogues, and we hope you enjoy the conference. thank you for coming.
<APPLAUSE SS> <P 1:01> <SS LAUGH> 
SU-F: we could shift (too) 
SU-F: that's so (much) better 
SU-F: if that's okay with you... actually that works a lot better. (that does) (xx)
<P :16> 
S5: i think_ my name is is Jean Moran and, um i organized this panel to, um examine ways in which feminism is applied in the physical sciences. and i think it's very exciting and very appropriate that the physical sciences and engineering are included in a conference on feminist practice. my interest in um, this area has really derived from my desire to integrate my feminism with my scientific work. and this really began for me as an undergraduate student, m- in an engineering primarily an engineering college, and i i studied nuclear engineering at that time and i kept my, feminist interest very separate from the work that i was doing. so um i was active in things such as sexual harassment sexual discrimination, and later uh domestic violence, but i did not necessarily integrate that with what i was i was studying in school, and in the questions i was asking in my research... over um the course of my time here at the University of Michigan as a graduate student, i i d- my field of study is medical physics which i do through the environmental (of) industrial, environmental and industrial health, in the School of Public Health. but i do my research in radiation oncology which is a clinical department which students aren't really a part of. um their primary goal is is tr- treating patients and training residents. when i first came to the university i participated in, um one of the seminars for the Interdisciplinary Program for Feminist Practice. and um Jane was part of that, initial um, experience where i found that, a lot of the women in other fields at that point_ ar- i didn't identify with what they were saying strongly and and they really didn't understand what my experiences were. so i would get comments in class about things such as you know wow you guys are really in the Dark Ages. and that's because the fields in which i, i practice is primarily male. um this year at the annual meeting of uh the American Association of Physicists in Medicine, there was a panel on women in the A-A-P-M which, is great progress, but um, you know there are eighteen percent women in this field. and so it's a struggle. um so after that initial experience, i wanted to actually talk to other women in the sciences. and because i was in a clinical department i did not have that experience of interacting with peers on a daily basis in my work. so at at that point i talked to Cinda-Sue Davis, at C-E-W and we formed a discussion group for women in the sciences and engineering. we read many different feminist critiques of science, and really found that as a group we felt these critiques came from women who were not scientists and who did not necessarily understand the science we were doing. and we struggled we really struggled to see how we could apply that feminism these articles into what we were actually doing. and um the group was compi- comprised of people from many different disciplines including mathematics, um, chemistry um biochemistry uh different forms of engineering, geology, and as a group we struggled through this process of self-identity really. and found that, many of us had to stop and talk about well what did we mean by feminism and did we wanna be identified as feminists? and i i think that's something that we'll see if we get into a little bit with the panel this morning. so that's really how how we got to this point. <P :04> in trying to answer the question how can, feminist approaches be applied to science? um and i think we'll see different responses from each of the panel members. so the really_ the focus of this panel is on the practical. how do we do this? the members of the panel represent different disciplines and are at different stages in their careers at the University of Michigan. Cinda-Sue Davis is Director of the Program for Women in Science and Engineering, Joyce Yen is a graduate student in industrial and operations engineering, and Mary Brake is an associate professor of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences... a- at this point i'd also like to mention that i think the climate for women in science and engineering, is changing on campus and and there have been a lot of great things. uh Joyce will talk a bit about some of the great work that Graduate SWE is doing that's the Society of Women Engineers, and, in addition to providing programs for women they, do a lot of professional work a career fair which is open to all engineering students and um, provide wonderful services to the university. there's also a new chapter being formed here for a um Association of Women in Science, chapter. and um Jayne London is also at this point facilitating um, group discussions giving graduate women the opportunity to meet and talk across disciplines about um different things related to career and so on. things that that cross boundaries. that go across that go outside of science and engineering or social work or psychology, giving all of these women a chance to talk and meet each other. and so i i think that's one of the wonderful things about today, that we can uh listen to each other, and understand a bit more of where we're coming from and see similarities and differences and and talk strategies. and so i hope that in spite of differences in fields of study, hope that as each speaker presents you'll see some similarities to your own work and learn from those presentations. we're going to have each speaker present and then we'll have plenty of time for questions and discussion. and um i hope a- at that point you will also share some of your own experiences and strategies for practicing feminism in your work... Cinda-Sue Davis is going to begin, uh Cinda received her bachelor's degree in chemistry and her PhD in biochemistry. for a number of years she did post-doctoral research and was a research scientist in toxicology. in nineteen eighty-four she became director of the Women in Science and Engineering Program and she's coeditor of the Equity Agenda. and Cinda 
S6: great. well i'd like to thank Jean first of all for inviting me to be on this panel uh it's been quite an experience trying to gather my thoughts and and put them down for this presentation and it it's really made me think about my history and my evolution as a feminist and, when Jean and i were talking about this Jean said i'd like you try and to define what feminism means to you, and the more i thought about it the more i realized that it meant something different at almost every stage of my life and that it's still evolving i feel. i'm probably the oldest member of this panel and my growing up period sort of mirrored the growing up period of the Women's Movement or at least the current Women's Movement i know that the movement's been going on for, hundreds of years probably as well you can you can see it in the eighteen hundreds, um also. but when i grew up in the fifties, in Grand Rapids Michigan which is a very conservative, Dutch-based Christian-reform population on the western part of the state, women didn't work. they stayed at home at least the women i knew didn't work. and in fact i remember um, a elementary school teacher in my school who did return to work after the birth of a child and and what discussion that generated among the other parents um of my peer group. i was an only-child of older parents and my mother interestingly was very supportive of this woman, going back to work and she said she really didn't see what the problem was in fact it seemed ideal to her because when the child got into school the mother would be working and and the schedules would match very nicely. and in fact when i look back at influences of my own life it was really my mother who was continually telling me things and one of the things she told me was that you should never ever expect to have somebody financially support you. in your life you had to plan your life so that you would always be financially independent. now my father was almost twenty years older than my mother so i'm sure that she had in her mind at some point in her life she would again have to support me and indeed that was the case because my father died when i was in high school. (but) i think that was quite remarkable, for a woman of the nineteen fifties to be telling her daughter that you you had to have a career. and if it was_ if you did find a partner and you could share resources that was really nice but don't count on it cuz that may or may not happen. also when i, started showing an interest in science every time i would express an interest in a particular career she would always urge me to look higher than that. uh at one point i said, gee i think i would like to be a nurse and she s- she sort of laughed and said well you've never been able to take an order in your entire life you better be a doctor. <SS LAUGH> um, i_ one time they took me to Disneyland and we rode the simulated rocket ship ride to the moon and, when we got off of that i thought and it was a really hokey ride now in retrospect um, <SS LAUGH> but when we got off of it i was so excited and i said to my mother you know when i grow up there's gonna be regularly scheduled flights to the moon and you know what i'm gonna be on those flights and she said what, i said i'm going to be a stewardess. <SS LAUGH> and she laughed and and she said well it would be really exciting to go to the moon but don't you think it would be more fun to pilot the rocket? and so she was a very influential um source of support for me. i then went on to Grand Valley State University to do my chemistry degree, and i wanted, as i said to do something in science and the only career i was aware of was medicine so i was a premed major but i loved chemistry so instead of majoring in biology i decided to go the chemistry route. Grand Valley was a very new school at that time, it did have some women on the faculty there was one women in the chemistry department of a faculty of about five individuals, and it was in retrospect an extremely supportive environment for me. i really can't say that i experienced any discrimination the faculty went out of its way to find me research opportunities and grants and_ but i was a good student and they were a new school and they needed good students so i think it was a very pragmatic approach, on their part. i did have a friend who was a year ahead of me who was also a premed major and she applied to the University of Michigan and came down for an interview, uh this was in the late sixties and at the end of her interview the committee looked at her and said well you have terrific grades terrific M-CAT score and if you were a man you would be in. but you're not so we are putting you on a waiting list. and she came back and told me that story and i was horrified because i was this child who'd always succeeded at everything and i thought gosh if she can't get in to med school what are my chances because i thought she was so much better than i was. she did get into med school they called her the day before classes started, and asked if she was still interested and she said yes and she came in. so i decided having had several research experiences up to that point that maybe there might be another route. and i had had an opportunity to go to Ohio State University to do research in chemistry and decided well maybe a PhD was another route and i had had fallen in love with research as well. and so i applied to the University of Michigan and to several other institutions and got in to all of them. i think, that affirmative action played a role, in that, in those days um and i_ it's interesting when i say to people now, um particularly men that i am confident affirmative action played a role in my getting admitted into the University of Michigan or into any of these graduate programs they quite often say oh don't feel that way you were good. but in those days it was not good enough to be good. um there were very superbly trained and experienced people who were still not getting into it and i i think we've forgotten that message or many young people aren't aware of it today. also, now i realize in doing some historical research and i knew it at the time but i didn't connect it, was at the time i was applying to go to graduate school was the height of the Vietnam War, and they had just changed the draft-deferment process. so you could be draft-deferred if you were in medical school you would not be draft-deferred if you were in a graduate program. so s- there were a lot of women in graduate programs in in science in those days because it was not a draft-deferrable degree program. and i, don't have any evidence that that was at work but i've often wondered about that. so i came down here to go to graduate school and my horizons started to broaden quite a bit. i remember the first issue of Ms Magazine and my neighbor who was an English major bringing it in and saying have you read this? and i read it and it was very interesting and very enlightening. um there were_ our our class in in the biochemistry department was fifty-fifty male female but i had no female faculty members. uh there was one woman who was a research scientist whose husband was on the faculty in the medical school very prominent um and and she herself was very prominent in her research but she was not given a tenure-track faculty position here. but she would often ask me out for lunch and i would talk to her about her career i would also talk to her_ i knew she had two children and i'd say how did you do that? uh how did you_ tell me what your day is like um and we would discuss issues like that. um, there was a new movement starting up uh the Women in Science Group which was, put together by the few women faculty who were here. and occasionally i would go to some of their activities um this this woman i knew would invite me to go to them there was a postdoc in the lab where i was doing my graduate work, who was putting together a workshop for this group so i, gradually became more aware of these issues and the more i learned the more interested i was in them. i became aware of the role of the women in media and advertisements largely through my reading of of Ms Magazine. so i- it was a great enlightenment for me. i then went on and became a postdoc and eventually a research scientist in the de- um Program in Toxicology in the School of Public Health. and again i became very much aware that the higher i was going the even fewer women were there. i was the only woman pa- postdoc there were no women faculty in toxicology at that time, i would go to professional meetings like the Society of Toxicology and it was truly amazing what an old boys' network it was. i i still remember the bandwidths at the S-O-T meetings, and the two interesting things about 'em is first of all the room was blue with smoke and these were toxicologists <SS LAUGH> i couldn't believe it. the other thing that was interesting is there were no women. um there was one, prominent woman who was probably in her fifties um who was very involved in the governments of toxicology but she was it. and there were all these white males everywhere you looked. and i remember my first presentation at a S-O-T meeting i was doing a poster, and i was working with Rudy Richardson who's still on the faculty in toxicology and, a colleague of his um from his graduate school days came up and asked me questions about my poster and it was a completely appropriate exchange. what i didn't know is afterwards he went over to Rudy and and comment about my poster and how interesting he found the work but he started off the discussion saying i just had a d- a talk with your little girl, over there and Rudy to his credit uh looked at him and said well she's not little she's not a girl and she's not mine but what did she have to say? <LAUGH> and, so there there were all of these aha moments. so in nineteen eighty-four i became director of the WISE program i, went through a period where i was trying to decide what i wanted to do with the rest of my life. and i was very interested in education issues science education issues in particular, and women's issues. and this, position seemed to be able to combine the best of both worlds. the early founders of the WISE program were those women that were active when i was in graduate school those women faculty. and the program seemed to take on a life of its own an- and became too involved for them to maintain every year and besides as you can imagine they were getting no professional credit for it this was not being figured into their promotion and tenure decisions. so they asked the central administration to form a program, which they did in nineteen eighty and Barbara Sloat was the first director and Barbara recently re- retired from the Residential College, she had a a degree in biology. and the women faculty insisted that the program be directed by a person with a degree in science or engineering. and that it be non-aligned that it serve the entire university and not be housed in any single school or college. what was also interested interesting to me though was when i assumed the position in nineteen eighty-four many of these women founders told me that they very deliberately did not align this program with Women's Studies they didn't want this perceived as a women's studies program. this was an equity program why were there so few women in science and what was it that we could do to change it and they really felt that the success which depended on a large part upon white male deans in these schools and colleges and faculty members, um tha- that your chances for success were diminished if you put the strong feminist interpretation on it. so that's why they said that they had had not put it in with the women's studies program. but as you can imagine, as Barb did a- th- um worked as director and as i worked as director, feminist issues kept creeping in to all of this. one of my earliest experiences however in this was in nineteen eighty-seven we held the first conference on Gender and Science in Technology GASIT, which was a European organization and we held the first conference in the western hemisphere of this organization. this was a meeting with very strong feminist, um ties to it, and, we had um a big plenary session where various American women in engineering groups were discussing the strategies and interventions that they were using to get young women to consider coming into colleges of engineering and, the director of the Women in Engineering pru- a- program at Purdue was speaking and that's probably the most successful women in engineering program in terms of increasing the numbers of women students in their college. and she gave her presentation and the first question after her presentation was why should we encourage girls and women to go into engineering when all they're going to do is build bombs? and all of our program directors were just completely silenced by this. and they said how can you encourage women to go into science which is so patriarchal you have to change science you have to change engineering and then the women will come. and this was an approach that none of us had ever considered really before. uh Americans i think are_ tend to be very pragmatic and practical and at least the um directors at the time were. and it really opened my eyes into the the idea that there could be more than one approach to doing my job. so we, started looking into the issues of feminist science i started to do a lot of reading you know Sandra Harding Evelyn Fox Keller, Evelyn Fox Keller herself was a physicist um i- is a physicist, (xx) i should probably say that, i was very interested in the role of the history of women in science and why there was so little of it. um Vera Rubin who's a member of the National ca- Academy and a very prominent woman astronomer told the story of, when the Air and Space Museum opened up and the IMAX theater they had a huge production of the history of astronomy, and i had w- they'd spent a year putting this production together, and how there were no women or people of color depicted in this, this presentation. and, the the role of women in astronomy in this country is phenomenal and yet they w- had all been forgotten. so i started reading more about that. the t- issues that i find interesting today are_ i might back up a bit and say many of the founders of the Women in Science Program themselves have come along and evolved in this process and i i recommended to Jean that Seyhan Ege be included in this panel unfortunately she's_ wasn't in the country, um she is the most senior woman faculty member in the chemistry department and she can really talk about feminist theory now and and i'm not sure that she could have uh ten or fifteen years ago. the questions that i find interesting today, is i am am very interested in what diversity and multiculturalism brings to the disciplines themselves. how for example does the discipline of engineering evolve and how do different viewpoints come in to it. i had a German faculty member in engineering tell me last spring at an international conference that engineers don't like change they don't like diversity they like the status quo they wanna duplicate replicate, um put in standards um, and yet when you look at the history of engineering where engineering has made tremendous gains is when tension has been introduced into the system. and what a better way to introduce tension than to introduce diversity. different points of view. he gave the example of drilling for um for example, um for many years it was thought you could only drill vertically, and it was a woman who said no you could drill horizontally too and it would work. and and of course it does. um one could come up with other examples of where lack of diversity has produced fault- uh faulty systems the air bag system for example (if there had been) been on that team that was short, we wouldn't have air bags that could ki- potentially kill short people. um, so i'm very interested in really doing, a a systematic look at that um because when i talk about the value of bringing diversity into these disciplines, scientists and engineers like to say prove it. give me data. and i'm interested in finding this sort of data and we're now working with the National Academy of Engineering to actually pr- prepare and present a white paper on this topic. i'm also interested in the issues of work-life balance. and work-family balance i have two children who are now in high school. and i certainly came_ my generation came up with the id- um with the approach that yes we were going to do it all we were going to have a career we were going to raise family (that) we were going to have these other outside interests. and maybe i'm going through separation anxiety because i have a child who's about to leave for college next year, but in looking back with that i'm not sure i did it the best way, um i think the next generation'll have a real challenge to figure out what the best balance is um, i also am concerned about the young students that are coming into our programs now our first-year students we direct a living-learning program for first-year women in engineering and science in Mosher-Jordan residence hall we have about a hundred and a twenty first-year women. we know from our research that the h- point of biggest attrition for women is_ for all students in science and mathematics and engineering is the freshman year. um the attrition is higher for women than it is for men, so we hope by building in these support groups and having facilitated study groups and, preventing isolation of these women that they will me- stay in their majors. it concerns me however that, you say the word feminist and they're out the door. [SU-F: mhm ] um, we don't_ they don't seem t- and and i'm i'm generalizing but in general it doesn't seem they want to talk about these issues, this is something that their mothers were concerned with or this other generation and that it's all fixed now, what we like to try to do is to introduce these ideas, gently and gradually so when they hit the wall and they will hit the wall, sometime maybe not at eighteen but maybe at twenty-two or thirty or forty or fifty, they will realize it's not them it's a societal issue it's a larger issue, um because the research shows that oftentimes when women run into these issues they do internalize it [SU-F: mhm ] they do think i'm not good enough i shouldn't be in engineering and they'll leave um they'll go into another discipline. so i i'm very interested in, trying to figure out how we can include younger women in these issues. the other_ the last thing i'm concerned about is it appears to me that the Women's Movement has become a bit rigid. and i i find myself working in a lot of vari- various women's groups and how we can't discuss issues as freely as we might have done twenty years ago that there seems to be a litmus test that we apply, not in all the women's groups i am b- i'm in but some of the ones that are very important to me. um and i wonder i i was speaking with um, oh i'm blanking on her name it's too early in the morning now but one of the early women um who worked in the women and science areas and founded some of the first women's studies group- uh programs and and she said that she also has this concern um so i i just throw that out, um for possible discussion. and i think i'll end now and let my colleagues, share their experiences.
S5: okay, thank you Cinda. um, Joyce Yen is going to speak next, um she is currently a graduate student in the industrial and operations engineering department, she received her undergraduate degree in mathematics, and she's currently director of the graduate uh chapter of the Society of Women Engineers. 
S7: thanks Jean. um as Cinda was talking i was like oh my gosh i have to talk about that, <SS LAUGH> oh oh and then i have to talk about that i mean like i had all these things that i i've added um, uh so hopefully i won't be too long-winded but um, as Jean said um i am in industrial and operations engineering and i do come from a math background um, i went to_ i grew up in Nebraska, uh very, very homogeneous uh, and uh i actually i actually think that was okay uh for some reason i didn't, encounter nearly as much discrimination as for example my brother did, um or even even what my parents have later told me about when we moved into the neighborhood and the neighbors across the street who, were like are great now who are really wonderful but sort of, their first reactions to, my family i had no idea you know all that sort of stuff i think, um, my experience was a very a very cushioned experience which i'm grateful for, but now that i now that i know better or know more i'm i'm kind of you know kind of wondering about what else what else was going on that i didn't know about. but, but since it was pretty cushioned um, my experience in science and mathematics and and now engineering has been relatively um stress-free. all through high school and elementary school there were enough, good women in my um cohort that, i could do work with and that and that was really great i mean there was, in in the honors classes there was at least half if not more of the students in the classes with me were women and that was really encouraging. uh when i went to the University of Nebraska for a math degree, i came into a department where the chair was already very much in tune with women in mathematics and, and very actively recruiting, women in mathematics and building um, his program his graduate program to have a lot of women. and the superstars in that program at least the ones that the students saw, were the women students so that was really exciting um, so when i came into when i came into my program, um, i didn't really realize that there weren't other women in mathematics in other places um, a really good friend of mine was in the class ahead of me and we took this uh analysis class which was a a senior-level, uh math course uh basically proving theories of calculus, and the first semester it was like probably fifty-fifty men and women and then in the second semester um, there were six people in the course, five of which were women. i mean it was just really incredible that it happened to turn out that way um it was really sort of a stroke of luck on my part so i i got to work with a lot of really strong women mathematicians and, and then the interesting thing was then this this same friend who later went on to went on to Yale to get um her her graduate degree, ran into the wall. she ran into the wall where they were not supportive at all of women in mathematics and and it was a very um, very competitive very aggressive environment where, they expected students to stand on their own and just work twenty-four hours a day um, to basically be superhuman and in their intellectual endeavors, and she didn't know what to do she, she didn't know_ she didn't have any other women there, who were willing to support h- be supportive of each other she didn't have um people who were even willing to talk about the idea, when she would approach her male friends they would just be like, what are you talking about? you know just, suck it up deal with it hang with it you know and, she_ it really threw her for a loop and she actually um, she came_ she, was in the math department she then chose to transfer to the statistics department feeling that maybe that was a better place for her, uh ran into the same problems and eventually left with a_ with master's degrees but um which is okay but she's really intellectually curious and really deserves to have a PhD and probably will be going back for it at some time but just, ran into this incredible difficulty where she would call me and say there's just_ i don't have any women friends here. i have like one or two or_ this person came got her degree master's degree and left and there's nothing here and uh that that happens a lot i think that's part of the impetus for uh Graduate SWE which was that, the women who initially formed that organization were feeling that, in engineering, uh a graduate program in and of itself can be a very isolating experience and then when you're a woman in a field that's dominated by men where again the climate is very competitive, very much based on ego and uh, proving yourself and uh, showcasing your talents, while stepping on other people in in some cases is not, is not a place that fosters, uh, fosters self-confidence and and and women, need an environment where they can um have that_ have a more supportive experience and so that was that was some of the motivation for for Graduate SWE's formation. um, my own journey for feminism, started um, pretty much when i went to a conference. uh women Women As Leaders conference in Washington D-C it was a two week conference, uh put on by um, a group that i can't remember now <SS LAUGH> and 
S6: it's catching 
S7: <LAUGH> i know i know uh, but um it was it was really interesting for me because here i was um, thrown into a conference where there were, a hundred women, in college um, both non-traditional and traditional-aged women, from all sorts of backgrounds saying all kinds of things hav- amazingly uh diverse career paths. and they were all talking about feminism and they were all talking about what it what it means to be a woman doing the kind of work that they do and i had never heard of that before i never i never knew that i should be thinking about that. um i never knew that that was an option, uh i just sort of, went around doing, feminist-type things or having sort of a feminist ideology in my head that i i thought well that's just, that's just the way i was brought up and that's just what i think that, that i can do anything and, um i i should be treated equally and all my women friends are being treated equally cuz where i've grown up and the environment that i happen to fall in i had enough of a, equity uh going on in my_ with my peers but, um so i was_ i went to this conference and they pair you up uh with your uh roommate alphabetically so my last name is Yen so i was with Melissa (Ziemer.) <SS LAUGH> and uh, Melissa went to Smith College. and, uh we were talking one time and i i i distinctly remember this we were having breakfast we we were just at this cafe and i was like so, so you consider yourself a feminist and she's like yeah i'm like well what's your definition of that? i didn't have a definition at all i didn't really know uh d- what it was uh everything that i had heard about feminists were, um the very um, media exciting things to talk about feminisms you know the very very radical feminist uh, exposure. and that that's all that i had heard and i didn't really know like well so why why do you why do you call yourself feminist and, she said, um cuz i think women should be treated equally and i was like oh. i agree with that and, she'd be like and i am_ i believe that um women have rights to all sorts of things that um that are_ they aren't necessarily getting recognition for and and that's something that i wanna work for and believe in and support and, i thought oh, i guess i'll call myself feminist too. <SS LAUGH> and it was a very safe place to do it it was a very safe place for me to start that because i was surrounded by women, who were very strong and who um were very interested in in women's issues so so that's where that started and that was the summer after my junior year, of college and then following that i went to uh Florida State to do a research experience for undergraduates, and uh, so while i was there i was like oh well maybe i'll just_ cuz i didn't have that much to do cuz, i had no car and i was stranded in, Tallahassee so i uh, i'd started checking out some books on like the Feminist Mystique and the Beauty Myth and just some very standard, um, feminist literature and i was reading it and was just like wow this is really interesting. um, i can't believe that we don't talk about this stuff ever and nobody's ever said anything about this to me and and like and that it's so aligned with th- much of the things that i think about myself. so, so that sort of that sort of started it and then that n- during my senior i took a women's study introduction course and it was just sort of like this chance to feed myself and just, get this exposure and uh, and i thought wow that's that's that's really interesting and then i got to choose a graduate school and um like Cinda i applied to a number of schools and was accepted at all of them and when you said affirmative action affected, i_ you know, it's really uh i find it hard to say, okay something helped me. it wasn't maybe it wasn't completely on my own merit not that i don't think that i, was deserving, but um, being a woman, from Nebraska, going into engineering, um, i'm sure that affirmative action as they like spell out the numbers and say oh and she's well qualified and she does these sorts of things we should really get this person, and um, and i got offered money at every place that i applied to and i know that, um not all my <LAUGH> male friends, who were in my program did so that's that was weird i was like oh my gosh affirmative action, so um, so when i went to look at graduate schools um one of the things that i was very concerned with was, was having a support group when i got there um, because i had i had grown up in this wonderful place where i i did have people to support me both men and women students and and faculty, so i went to the_ i went to these different schools and um some of the places i_ it was just me by myself um, one of the places that i went to visit was Carnegie Mellon, and um they h- you know appropriately had a woman student meet me at the airport and i got to talk to her about her stuff and she said, you know there aren't very many women here and in fact um, the classes that they uh, admit each year can range from zero to three, i mean it's just really really really small and i- it_ my impression of the place was that it was incredibly competitive and um uh very very hostile almost and i thought i'm_ i- it was my top choice before i went there too and uh, i thought i i can't go here i really i really don't think i would, survive here and that's not what my goal is to, die in graduate school. <SS LAUGH> so um, so then and then i came here uh to the University of Michigan and, they had a recruitment weekend and during that weekend um there was_ i got to meet the people who would possibly be my cohorts, um there was one woman who is my_ who turns out to be my best friend here who was also in my recruiting class and and just the fact of knowing_ just the fact of having met a woman who was gonna be in my department who was gonna be going through the same sorts of things as i was and also meeting some of the men who were going to be, my classmates and, talking to them and at least feeling, okay, maybe we'll be able to collaborate here and and maybe this environment is really_ is warm_ more warm and more friendly than the other places i've gone to and and that turns out to be_ that was my major criteria um i, i had a vague idea of what i was interested in doing in graduate school but i was still pretty open and pretty unsure so, for me i_ it was very important that i pick someplace uh a little bit uh more supportive and caring than, than some of the other places um, and it turns out that that is now one of the things, where i think um, i try to practice some of the feminist ideals that i believe in because, um i got here and it and it was okay but the uh, no offense to, faculty <SU-F LAUGH> but, some of the faculty, are not exactly, um, warm fuzzy, hand outstretched let me help you kinds of kinds of individuals and um, and and that's something that um that concerns me and that's something that i'm working with because, i don't, i don't think that um, that science, and engineering should stay where it is where it has been incredibly, um, in some ways aggressive and, and um, one-upmanship type of environment, th- where trying to prove yourselves and trying to say i am a star recognize me i i am no better than you or, or y- you can go into a seminar where uh a person who was an invited guest is coming in to give a presentation and they're speaking and then a professor goes excuse me i don't, i don't see the relevance of that i- you know being very, just in- incredibly um, incredibly rude and non-collaborative with someone who maybe they should be collaborating with or at least, be open to the idea of collaborating with this person um, and and, reali- and realizing that uh, the you know that sum is greater than_ the whole is greater than the sum of the parts sort of idea that that really we should be working together more and i think_ and for me_ and when i think about that idea i think that is more of a, a a woman, centered or identified feminist idea, or more naturally, um would, occur to women than it does to men and so_ and whenever i talk to the other women graduate students it_ their remarks are very similar and their observations are the same things and confusion is the same like i don't understand why, why we have to be so aggressive and why we can't be more collaborative and why, why we shouldn't be crossing boundaries more, in our work because science and engineering is very much intertwined and and we should be doing that we should be supporting each other and we should be applauding the things that people are doing and, and we should be questioning because that's, that's what helps science, um advance but we should be questioning in a way, such that we're not damaging people's egos and so that people don't have to put up, huge fences and, so that people don't have to feel like, um i have to show you just how smart i am all the time, and i always have to be on stage um, so so that's something that um, that i'm working_ that i'm trying to work with um, last year i heard this statistic in the College of Engineering that, um there's approximately, twenty-five percent women undergraduates, seventeen percent women graduate students and, nine percent women faculty, it just keeps going, farther and farther and farther down and you look for your mentors and and they might not be there um, or you ask people to talk about it i remember last, last summer we decided that we wanted to get together the women students in the department and the uh women faculty just to informally talk have a like have a luncheon maybe once a month, and just share experiences uh cuz it it goes on a little bit informally but it's mostly on the impetus of the students, to to walk up to a faculty member and say so, how's it going? how's your how's your, how's your, uh work, how_ what's it like to be a woman in this department cuz my faculty, there's about thirty_ twenty-five thirty people in my department two of which are women both of which are assistant professors up for tenure in the next couple of years, um, and they they haven't been able to retain any women faculty or or have chosen not to tenure them for one reason or or another, so um you know we uh we're asking them so so what's it like and and, what was your graduate experience like i mean, share this share this information it's important for us to hear what what experiences that you've gone through and, for us to be able to ch- tell you what we're going through and how we can make it better. um, and so we did that and that was that was really good but we only did it once. you know, um, a- and that that's kind of what happens um, so, so we're trying to work on it and w- and we're trying to, we're trying to uh encourage people, to gather together both for academic and social reasons and just, uh have a chance to, discuss anything i mean, r- if you want to label it with f- as a feminist label or not um it's all it's all related to the work that we do and the p- and the people that we are, so, so we should be talking about that stuff um, i must say though that um once again i i've lucked out in my department and uh, there are, th- there were, two women who um i consider my mentors in my department, women students um, one of which graduated last May and got a position here at the Business School she also_ she got, an offer from almost every place that she, applied to which was_ is pretty amazing_ well one the job market is really good in my field right now in academic the academic job market but, two she is a woman, she is African-American, she's good at what she does, and it's it's the same sort of it's the same sort of um, things working for her but she she is she's very good at what she does um so a- and then another woman who's going to be graduating in December and i'm i'm really sad to see them leave because i don't, i don't know who, who's going to, be there for me or or now i'm i'm coming into the position where, i'm going to be a person for other, for other students for the you- uh the, less senior students uh but the exciting thing was that we went to a conference in um one of our, national uh conferences INFORMS in- the, Institute for Operations Research in Management Science and i- the conference was in Montreal this past May, and the really cool thing was that we had a woma- uh we had a room that was full we had four women from my department sharing a room, and that's so incredibly rare usually you'll see email come across the uh the Women of Operations Research in Management Science subdivision of this group, sending out emails going i need a uh somebody to share a room with me if interested please you know please email and me and all that sort of stuff and, we got to have an entire room of, women U-of_ university of women_ Michigan women graduate students in this field and that was so exciting and in fact um our professors had said to us, the women professors in our group were like that's really great that's so_ you know we didn't have anything like that. it was like one person or you know, or no people going and and here you are you get this whole nice, n- critical mass of some sort of people and it was it was really great it was it was really important for us to be able to hang out with each other and to uh do work with each other but also uh be support for each other and share our experiences at that conference uh conference with each other so, so uh, so that was really that was very exciting for us. um, i guess the last thing that i wanna talk about is, um, other ways that, i try to um, try to encourage feminism or the um ideas of feminism in in the interactions that i have and, one i've already mentioned is sort of getting together with faculty um the other as Jean said was Grad SWE which_ what we do for Grad SWE is um, we host, a number of events we have a semesterly, luncheon with the women faculty um, where we choose a topic we've done climate we've done um... we've done uh harassment we've done, uh a lot of different a lot of different issues um, we also host like brown bags, where it's just a chance to, have lunch with some other people and meet people from different disciplines um, we host a poster exhibition which is uh, which is our contribution to the general u- uh, college community it's an exhibition where, uh anyone can submit their uh academic poster both undergraduates and graduates and then we have judges and it's a really nice, way to um, to allow people to share their work, on campus um so so often you, you only hear about the things in your area, or the things that your friends are doing and you don't know what anybody else is doing in the community as far as research goes and this poster exhibition is one of our ways of saying let's let's celebrate everyone let's celebrate people who do good work here. anybody who does good work here and that's important that's an important thing to acknowledge, and so we're gonna have this poster session, where you can practice doing a poster and also you can share your work with people and people are gonna come and look and it's very well attended it's been a very successful event. um, and then, the other thing is just uh, slowly but surely influencing friends um, and people that i come in contact with saying you know well have you thought about this or, why don't you come and go to this thing with me and and, it's it's sort of a, it's a ground up movement um i think in in Engineering and for the students and, we know about it and we're trying to work on it and yet our environment is uh, not really warm and friendly and conducive to it so, so we do it and we try to share it_ share what we're thinking but um it's it's a long road i think it's still_ there's still a lot of work, the work to be done for the graduate student community so, i guess those are um, some of my random thoughts on on, my experience but um, that's it 
S5: thanks Joyce
S7: sure
S5: okay our final speaker is Mary Brake. uh Mary studied, physics as an undergraduate at um M-S-U, and then uh continued on into graduate school, but then switched to engineering so that she could study plasma physics. she received her PhD in mechanical engineering in nineteen eighty-three from M-S-U, and, she works on plasmas, now um ionized gla- gases, that are used in manufacturing of microelectronics. (and) she also performs research on microwave produced plasmas, and she's an Associate Professor of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Science.
S8: okay thank you. um before i start i have to uh make a couple of comments in in I-O-E um actually they have a good record, of having a fair number of women undergraduates, [S7: mhm ] but in terms of keeping women faculty they're not so good and i'll talk about that off-the-record if you wanna know. <SS LAUGH> and then i also wanted to comment um, uh about uh uh Cinda um, i'm not that much younger than Cinda <S6 LAUGH> but from a slightly different uh generation and i'll talk a little bit about that. um i- i just also wanted to, uh, when you were talking about growing up it reminded me, when i was growing up i've got a younger sister and then two younger brothers and i liked science early on and i was always the science strange person in my family, and i'm still considered that way, <LAUGH> and nobody ever asks me about my research, except every now and then uh both my mother and my sister have called me up um, i can't remember which, asked which question. one is it okay to sleep with my electric, blanket, the other one <SS LAUGH> was <LAUGH> is it okay to have my uh electric_ er, have my radio next to my bed. if you wanna know about that i can tell you about that later too. <SS LAUGH> um, so, my family especially my father is very supportive of education and you know willing to send me to college and, um, but he thought physics was a strange thing, and he told me that um, uh a degree in physics, i would be a taxicab driver in New York City. well i had never been never been to New York City. <SU-F LAUGH> i'm not sure that i'd even ridden in a taxi by the time i graduated from high school. so um i started out and actually kinda continued that way where i was always kind of um, the odd person out and i didn't really care but it does catch up with you eventually. um anyway what i i, have prepared uh, le- lemme talk a little bit about that, um, i was an undergraduate at that other Michigan university it's kinda hard to say the_ where i came from, here in Ann Arbor, uh <LAUGH> during the mid nineteen seventies, um now at that time what i remember as one of the highly-debated topics was the Equal Rights Amendment and that's sometimes not talked, about much anymore unfortunately. and the s- the statement was very straightforward and i'll read it to you <READING> equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged, by the United States or any state on account of sex. </READING> seemed straightforward to me, especially as a kind of a science and math person, seemed like, what's the problem here? um, but there was lots of controversy at the time, um i found a good quote from the Bentley Library website which is a, interesting website to go to, um in there when they talk about the Equal Rights Amendment, they said it was originally proposed in nineteen twenty-three which i didn't realize, um and it created a rift amongst suffragettes, uh during the twenties, <READING> women who had fought for protective labor legislation feared that the Equal Rights Amendment, would undo their efforts, protect women in the workplace while feminists believed that the amendment was necessary to bring about equality for women in American society. the opposition to the amendment by women who otherwise supported Women's Right, persisted through the mid-century, as is illustrated in the records of organizations such as the National Consumers League. in the nineteen sixties and seventies </READING> which is the time period that i'm talking about, <READING> the Women's Liberation Movement began to produce new views of the Equal Rights Amendment, and renewed support for the amendment. </READING> um, th- uh Cinda reminded me i totally had forgotten about this at the time like i say it was very controversial the Women's Rights Movement was um, very active even on the cover of Newsweek that's when you know something is important cuz it's on the cover of Newsweek i guess, um yeah there's, bra burning that's i think what made it on the cover of Newsweek, Cinda reminded me that um, people were concerned if this amendment uh passed, that there'd have to be uh unisex toilets. what i remember because it was the Vietnam era is that people were concerned that we'd have women soldiers. and somehow that thought of women being killed in battle was just unpalatable to most Americans. um, but like i say to me it seemed, kind of a straightforward issue and something that should be passed but it was very controversial at the time. and i think uh, women who were involved in the women's movements had different feelings about that amendment because of its implications. um, just to tell you a little bit of the rest of the history of that um, it was ratified by the House um in October of nineteen seventy-one, and the Senate in March of nineteen seventy-two. during that first year after it was ratified by Congress, thirty states voted to ratify the amendment. uh what you needed was two-thirds of the states to ratify that amendment for it to be added to the Constitution. um as near as i can figure out and what people have told me three states backed out which might not have been legal, um and three states were added but to make a long story short, uh there's a ten year ratification period that expired in June of nineteen eighty-two, and only thirty-eight of the required_ only thirty-five of the required thirty-eight states approved its ratification. so they were very very close but it did not pass, um, Cinda and i had talked a little about this some women wouldn't go_ some women would not go to states that had not ratified the Equal Rights Amendment i mean it was that controversial. um but it's just kind of, died a slow death since then i don't think i've heard of anybody mention it since then which is uh unfortunate. um so to be perfectly honest, um at that time, when i was an undergraduate, i just never gave much uh thought to feminism per se, despite the fact that that was the era of Women's Liberation like i say on the cover of Newsweek, and Gloria Steinman(sic) and uh Betty Friedan and the National Organis- Organization of Women was very prominent at the time, i was just somebody who wanted to study physics. and i knew there were not many women physicists, it, didn't occur to me that um i should take any stand uh, uh on anything, um, to me it was uh perfectly obvious that women should have the same rights as men and as the dictionary puts it to have political economic and social rights equal to those of men, that just seems sort of self-evident to me. i was obviously kind of clueless, um, <LAUGH> and since the National Organization of Women was getting a lot of publicity at the time and they appeared to have a lot of support as far as i could tell, um i basically left it to women who, called themselves feminists at the time, uh to work on women's issues and to set the world right. you know in my mind it was like, i'm glad they're working on this, they're gonna set things right this is great. i'm just someone who wants to study science. and even though i was the only uh uh girl in a- just about all my classes, i basically just wanted to blend in i didn't wanna stick out. i didn't wanna be an activist in any sort, um because it was hard enough to be the only woman as it was. i just wanted to be part of the wallpaper so to speak. um and i think that's true for a lot of uh women scientists and engineers of my generation, uh we kind of bought into the system because we wanted to be part of the system. we liked science and engineering so much that we were willing to put up with this. uh plus you don't have much power when you're an undergraduate i mean you're <LAUGH> you're <SU-F LAUGH> heh heh you know if you wanna graduate you kinda have to follow the rules. um so like i say i was_ i i went to college immediately after the Vietnam War so i i went to undergraduate school just a few years after Cinda did, um, and that was on the heels of the the Peace Movement and uh like i say the Women's Liberation Movement and the generation gap, but i was just a little bit after that just a couple years after that. i don't know if you've ever watched the T-V program The Wonder Years? remember Kevin in The Wonder Years? um, i was the same age as Kevin, is during the time period of that program. if that sentence makes sense, uh i was in junior high in the sixties basically just like Kevin is in uh the program. and in the early episodes of the series uh Kevin observes a lot of activism going on especially with his sister, and with the older brothers of his friends who are uh trying to decide should they go to Canada or should they_ because they've been drafted, should they run away to Canada, should they join the ar- er- jo- be part of the army and go to Vietnam, but Kevin's an observer he's just young enough he's in junior high, um he isn't old enough to really participate, and that's kind of uh where i was uh when i went to school. uh so i i really did not appreciate how unequal the world was for women at that time. uh by the time i was awarded my baccalaureate degree i did start to realize that things weren't the same for women as it was for men, i was treated differently by many of my physics professors, and i know this is being tape-recorded and you can tell Michigan State Physics Department for me, <SS LAUGH> i feel very strongly about that. um i was the only woman out of thirty who graduated um with a degree in physics um in uh nineteen seventy-eight, um, as was mentioned i i changed to engineering and that's a long study_ story i don't have enough time to go into that, but i received my PhD degree in nineteen eighty-three in mechanical engineering, and at that time only three percent of all PhDs given nationwide went to women. three percent. and i remember at my defense my advisor said um uh you know i've looked back through the records. we know you're not the first woman to get a PhD from here, but you know i can't find the last person who_ last woman who got a PhD from here. so um obviously there had not been very many. and i do wanna mention that affirmative action you had mentioned that, um when i started graduate school in physics um, i was given uh an affirmative action scholarship. and um there's a lot of controversy about affirmative action, but that enabled me to go to graduate school so i guess i_ put me on the list of a proponent of affirmative action, um, uh, there's a lot of_ especially in physics there's a lot of emphasis on who's smart and you must be the very smartest person and all this and i'm not sure what would've happened to me without that affirmative action scholarship. um, so, just on the personal side of things two years before i graduated from graduate school i married a physicist, um, uh there was a um, survey uh several years ago that i filled out, that the American Physical Society uh put out, to study their women members and they found that one-half of the women physicists who were married and i don't know what fraction of women physicists are married, but anyway one-half of the women physicists who are married are married to other physicists. and, uh you laugh but i can tell you the guys that i dated who weren't in sciences thought oh she's studying physics oh that's kinda like a hobby sort of thing like needlepoint or something. <SS LAUGH> and seriously i mean they just really d- devalued that, and that's why i didn't marry any of them, <SS LAUGH> w- where the guys in physics on_ i_ at the time i i didn't really feel any discrimination against them, their social skills are not real great, <SS LAUGH> (so) um, i, once i had a physics boyfriend then i was included in their group. i was pretty isolated until then. i mean they were very shy and they were afraid to talk to me cuz they would_ i'm sure they thought that, you know it would appear that they were hitting on me or something i don't know, and i know that um, once i had uh started to date uh someone in physics, he was al- his friends were always saying can Mary fix me up? and <SS LAUGH> i i did this with we went on several del- double dates but it got to the point where i call like my sister my friends and i'd say, do you mind going on this double date before i'd even have the rest of the words out of my mouth they'd say, is this one of your physics friends? <SS LAUGH> and so anyway i kinda ran out of uh uh women friends to help out uh these physics guys. um but like i say i i felt like i was treated okay by the under- by the undergraduate guys they were they were pretty much my friends. um, my husband uh is a few years older than i am uh he had taken a job with the University of Michigan uh he did get a PhD in physics, and when i got out of school in the early eighties there was this terrible, double-digit unemployment uh in uh a depression in the state of Michigan, because of the auto economy. uh there were bumper stickers that said last one out of Michigan turn off the lights. and it was a really serious sort of thing. um, i grew up in Lansing, Car Town, i thought everybody owned an Oldsmobile and if you didn't, it was a foreign car to me i mean my grandparents had a Chrysler and i thought it was made in a different country. <SS LAUGH> um, i just assumed i'd go work for uh you know the G-M Tech Center or the Ford Research Center. but that was just not an option in the eighties they were laying off all sorts of people not just people on the line but their their PhD researchers too. um and because i was married to someone uh another scientist it's uh very difficult to find two positions in the same town. so i ended up taking a postdoctoral fellowship position in the department of nuclear engineering. um and i had um my first uh son during that time. um about a year later um, not even quite a year later a faculty position happened to open up, and a male faculty member uh who has been a mentor for me uh encouraged me to apply for this position, and uh, lo and behold uh they hired me. um, and i was hired as an assistant professor. at my three-year review_ how it works when you're hired as a faculty remem- member is uh they see how you do and then t- after three years they tell you kinda how you're doing. like are you gonna make it to tenure time or not is kind of what it is or how you should improve. um and since i thought, well if i_ they don't renew my contract you don't really exactly have a contract but if they say they say bad things, um i'm just gonna have another baby and i just won't worry about it so i had my second son um, a- a- at that three-year review time. um after i was awarded tenure and promoted to assistant professor again i wasn't so sure about this whole procedure i thought i don't care, i'll have another baby so i have three sons and that's how this all worked out. <SS LAUGH> um, so anyway i have a really male-dominated life. um, <SS LAUGH> and industrial operations there are a fair number of women, in nuclear there just aren't. um so uh it's it's wonderful to be here today. uh now my definition of feminism, is really that of the Equal Rights Amendment but i i would add a couple words to that. so lemme read it again with my words. um <READING> equal rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or state </READING>or any organization or any person <READING> on account of sex, or account of gender. </READING> um i've been asked to comment on how i practice feminism in my everyday life, and to be perfectly honest i've never thought about this, um, as i mentioned there are so few women scientists and engineers my main goal has been to kind of fit in. um, if, uh we try to advocate change women try to advocate change they have to do so very very carefully. um and if you don't the powers that be and i'm talking about usually men, um then i- uh it's assumed that you're not a serious scientist or you're not a serious engineer. um, but my philosophy of kinda day-to-day life actually does fit in with feminism. i grew up in a community where helping others and being of service to others, was not only re- was respected but was expected. um and so that is something that i grew up with and it's part of my philosophy. and since i'm a woman in a traditionally male, field i end up being an advocate for women a lot of times just because i'm trying to help somebody else out. it doesn't come from um a conscious feminist thought, um it just comes from trying to help out um other people and usually this turns out to be women they don't have many advocates, um so i was hired in nineteen eighty-four um as an assistant professor so i've been here for almost fifteen years. uh so lemme give you an example um, this was a few years ago an untenured professor who had recently had a baby uh came to see me and she was very unhappy with the fact, that her chairman, who by the way his wife had just had their third child, um would not let her work part-time first semester. she was scheduled to teach one class of just a few graduate students her graduate students, class she initiated, and she was willing to take a big salary cut to not have to teach this one class, and she just wanted to have a little more time to spend with her baby. now i could identify with that, and the treatment of the system just seemed very inhumane to me. so i enlisted the help of a woman lawyer in the provost's office, she has since left for another job, um and and she agreed with me and we drafted a policy that outlined the procedure for how untenured women could work part-time. um and the provost uh at the time told us that he would approve the policy, um if engineering would officially send the proposal back to him. and uh this woman who was working with me she was a uh or she is a lawyer and she had worded it so_ and passed it by the legal department cuz tenure's a real funny thing at universities they have to be real careful about this. and even a legal uh um, department approved this policy and basically how it worked was if you worked part-time for two years that would count for one year on the tenure clock. how it works at universities is um, during your_ well it depends on the kind of departments and college but around your seventh sixth seventh year you come up for tenure and they decide if they're going to keep you. once you have tenure it's very hard to fire you. if they kind of forget all about you which they never do you automatically get tenure. so that's why the legal department is very careful about their definition of tenure. and i remember uh this woman lawyer telling me at the time when she brought the the policy that she had reworded, uh for me, uh to the provost he said i don't understand why this is even needed can't this be taken care of at the, the chair's level, or at the college level? obviously he wasn't from e- engineering, and unfortunately no it couldn't it it can't be taken um care of at that level people just aren't that enlightened over in engineering. um, so anyway the policy got sent back to engineering, and it sat there for three years. and after much ado and a lot of criticism, of me, um i wasn't clearly serious enough about my research i was spending too much time on service things is how several people put it to me, um, uh, uh like i say it sat there for quite awhile, um, but eventually the policy passed. okay so meanwhile this this woman who i was trying to help, had had a second baby. there's no law against that you know it's perfectly fine, and she had also um, just received tenure. so the policy had just passed and she said oh great you know it's like all this work that we've gone through, and she said can i take advantage of this policy? and they said well no you're tenured now. well you know when we were drafting this policy we thought for tenured women this would be, know you know be a piece of cake it was the untenured women because of the tenure clock that was be- the big issue. um but we never thought that they would exclude tenured women from this policy. <SS LAUGH> don't ask me the logic of all this. engineers can be real logical about some things but not other things. um, so anyway my work on this policy is an example where i felt that i was helping someone in need rather than helping the Women's Movement although i've_ actually a lot of things that i've worked on have really been helping women. um, i- i- just another example of kinda the culture of engineering, um an administrator i know f- told me not too long ago, that he feels graduate students and he's referring to men and women, they should not be married while they're in graduate school. so i very quickly told him about a graduate student of mine, of a few years back, a- at the time_ well she still does have children, um she had two small children, and she was very good at time-management and she got her PhD in three years which is really record time. [SS: yes ] uh she was_ you know her life was really scheduled but she was very focused so, to me being married is just a non-issue much less children. i'm embarrassed to say that nuclear engineering has awarded almost four hundred PhD degrees since nineteen fifty-eight when i- they started out as a program before they was a they were a department, they were one of the first uh in the country i think they were s- the second in the country. now out of those four hundred PhDs thirteen have gone to women. i don't even wanna think of the percent even though i'm, can do the math. um but i'm proud to say that four of these women were my students and um i've helped many of the rest of these students um in their times of trouble. however i don't feel that you need to have a woman advisor, um, my advisor uh was male, and he helped me tremendously without his help and his encouragement i don't know that i'd have a PhD today. um but clearly having women faculty around does seem to make a difference. um, let's see what else was i gonna say here... so i i i i feel that um... women in nontraditional fields uh go through um, many experiences where they're made to, uh uh they're painfully aware of their gender i mean you really know that uh you stick out. and because of that uh women tend to be more sensitive uh to gender issues and to minority issues as well. and i think that's why m- uh you find more uh women engineering uh faculty members and some men too i don't mean to imply that it's only women who care about these issues, uh uh but they tend to be sensitive to issues not only for women but for minority students as well. and in engineering i'm considered a minority so i do a lot of work with Minority Engineering Program office. so just to summarize my philosophy of feminism it's basically to help whoever i can, uh to help them achieve their goals, um i also believe that um, these programs are not at the expense of men. you know men seem to think that somehow they're losing something by programs that help women. and i feel that by helping women achieve their goals that that makes everybody's life easier and um it helps right injustices that have b- been around for many many years, and it helps all of us um men women and children.
S5: thanks Mary. okay we have about uh fifteen minutes for some questions and discussion... would anyone like to start?
<P :06> 
S1: one of the things i noticed in a lot of your comments is uh, the amount of work that exists in the crevices, um that has to do with building community building relationships, being supportive of one another extending oneself, and that work not only is unrecognized but often works uh to your detriment you mentioned that Mary. uh, does that, does that get better as numbers increase? did that that problem of invisible work, that um some of us might regard as some of our feminist work you know making those linkages and and all. but i think we find in organizations that it fa- it's work that falls to women in any case. [S8: mhm that's true. ] as you're as you're pointing out. does it get better as numbers grow? or is that a problem that we still have to address that happens to women in general in the workplace?
S8: well the the uh situation i was talking about was not all that long ago [S6: mhm ] and what i had found um... i don't know if they respect it anymore but i was just really mad about the whole situation and about a bunch of other things, and i was mad enough that i wrote up a letter of resignation and i enrolled in the teachers cer- certification program here at U-of-M, and i gave it to my chairman and said, i'm leaving i'm going Ed School i'm gonna teach high school i've got a degree in physics, State of Michigan there's only so many degrees you_ certain degrees you have to have to be able to teach like at the high school level, and he was shocked it's like ooh nice Mary is suddenly standing up for herself, and he crossed his arms and he refused to take my letter of recomenda- my letter of resignation, and he said well how about a leave of absence and i thought oh good cuz i'm not really sure about this. (i guess) <SS LAUGH> [SU-F: that's great ] but i did take that leave of absence and i now have what i call a not suitable for framing teaching certificate, and that was what made him wake up it wasn't a sudden realization that this is a good thing but, [SU-F: ah ] oh gee she's gonna leave we never thought of that before you know and and that's kind of sad, and i don't think enough time has passed probably Cinda [S6: no ] can tell you about overall statistics. 
S6: i just got i don't think we've worked in an area yet where there's been a critical mass you know [SU-F: that's right ] and so we don't know um, my gut feeling would be to say no that the numbers don't help because the rules are still so rigid, that this university and this is our experience in working with this university that when it comes to promotion and tenure, service is given lip service, to um... the other thing that was interesting that i was struck with when the other speakers, were talking is that, the support groups that the Women's Movement often talks about by necessity for the three of us have often been male support groups [SS: mhm ] we have to find men, that are sympathetic to feminist issues and, they're out there it's it's surprising [SU-F: mhm ] but we've just by default had to do that, and when i look back at the closest friends in my life both my peers, and faculty members who have helped me they have always been men. my husband finds this very strange, that [SU-F: mhm ] you know all of these men from my college undergraduate days that were my best friends i have no women best friends, from my undergraduate w- w- one, i have one, who was not in science. um, i had very close male friends.
S8: and i might add to that um, when i was, complaining and really mad at everybody, i went to talk to Jim Duderstadt who was Dean when i was hired and, he basically hired me, and this is after uh he had stepped down uh as President and this wasn't too long ago and um, he said uh, Michigan is a conservative place and he said but you know what Mary, most most engineering schools at least most other universities, uh, that are you know the same tier as Michigan, are the same way. it's like ooh this is not good to hear, but that's what he told me and as someone who's been President and, uh, seen a lot of other universities
S7: yeah i think uh, our our graduate group um, were were highly valued in the college because of the, the services [S8: mhm ] that we provide i think [S8: yes yes, yes ] i think that um, i think that, the college administration at least the uh the graduate dean's office um they are very supportive of [S8: mhm ] of w- the women's experiences um and so they're very thankful and grateful and very supportive of our activities but um, but the only way we were able to do that was to do it across the college, i mean there_ you really only reach critical mass if you take everyone, you know? <SS LAUGH> uh so, like like, for example nuclear i know, [SU-F: mhm ] has like one, new graduate woman a year maybe, and then like you know [SU-F: they don't graduate ] right and and in I-O-E we have uh we have more we probably have like, five, [SU-F: five ] and you know, uh
S8: these numbers are high, [S7: right ] Michigan actually is way above the national average in terms of these numbers.
S7: right so and and only if you take all of those people, and then uh and then those who are willing to, actively participate then you get enough of a critical mass to do something, but um
S8: and grad s- SWE has grown i don't know if you realize this [S7: mhm ] it started quite a few years ago cuz one of uh my former students was involved, and um it was kind of uh, depending on who was around [S7: right ] and once they graduated and there were a couple kinda lagging years so it's really nice to see that it's come back um, much more strongly than it was in the past.
S7: right yeah it started in ninety-four, ninety-four i think or something like that? [S8: um or ] like officially sanctioned in ninety-four it could have been earlier 
S8: okay possibly yeah i think you had some informal things before that 
S7: yeah so it's not that old even.
S3: um Joyce so what what is the mission of grad SWE? [S7: um ] does it have one?
S7: yeah we do have a mission and the mission is um, it's basically to foster support and um, interdisciplinary connections for women both w- for all students but in particular women to to help sustain the women's experience, and then to provide, opportunities where there can be, this cross- cross-discipline exchange, whether it's academic or social, um [S3: okay so it's both ] yeah, yeah so it is it is academic and social social was specifically included because, um, because of that that need, so
S9: i was struck by your comments that most of the, application of feminist work is actually, not so much in your research and in the science but in the administration of the departments and in your relationships, and i'm in, medicine and i find that, you know the science itself is socially constructed the_ so the science reflects all of the, the social problems yet science sees itself as objective and a closer mirror of the truth, than humanities and, in humanities and social science people can take the practice principles [SU-F: mhm ] and put them in their research questions and put them in put them in their work and see how their methods, um reflect all the social biases in science it's so much_ and medicine it's so much more of a struggle, and that's what i want to work with when i, talk to my friends who are, other physicians or molecular biologists, who are sympathetic to everything that i feel they say yeah but, this ion and this ion what is what is not objective about that and that's what i that's what i struggle with. how do you work with actually feminism in the in the work?
S6: that that's a very good question. that's the ultimate question, <SS LAUGH> and i don't think we're there yet in engineering and the physical sciences. it's easier in my discipline of biochemistry, perhaps than it is in physics, and engineering, um i've always felt_ and th- even this isn't really touching your question i've always felt the questions asked would have been [S9: oh absolutely ] very different um there would have been far more research on breast cancer than, heart attack, [S9: right ] or women would have been included as experimental subjects in all the heart attack studies [S9: right ] um, in terms of engineering and physics uh, we've discussed_ we've really struggled with this in our group um, a woman once mentioned to me uh, that if you know i- Galileo was jailed for saying that moons orbited, Jupiter that are_ that he could see them in his telescope and he presented this research and he was also excommunicated from the the Catholic chu- he was only recently, restored. um, she pointed out that if Galileo had lived in a Hindu society as opposed to a Christian society, this would not have been heresy, and that perhaps the study of astronomy, geophysics would have progressed at a much faster rate. that's the only example i have ever heard, of a a cultural impact on engineering and it it's really difficult and yet i can't believe that it isn't there [S7: it's yeah i know it has to be there i mean it's in everything else so why wouldn't, yeah ] and the people the people that, are qualified to look at it are people have s- are survivors of the old system <S6 LAUGH> and i think we have blinders on and it's [SU-F: mhm ] it's really difficult [SU-F: yeah ] 
S4: a- actually i would like to to make a comment, if that's okay. um, actually i found a quote that Cinda had had sent to our, our Women in Science and Engineering group, when um, we were first, starting, and, and this really focuses a lot um on_ i_ because i do believe there is a feminist science and that, um in our discussions we, we don't_ we didn't believe as a group that, okay a feminist science meant that, you didn't actually have to do science that you could say oh well i i feel like you know the atoms, interact in this way and therefore that's the way it is and <SS LAUGH> and that it_ to not open it up to criticism that feminist science would therefore be less than um, say any other uh western implementation of science. um so the quote is, <READING> the range of what we think and do, is limited by what we fail to notice, and because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change, until we notice how failing to notice, shapes our thoughts and deeds, </READING> by R-D Laing, and that really um, you know i think we're, we are definitely at the point of noticing and a good example of, of uh perhaps gendered perspectives in in biology Evelon(sic) Evelyn Fox Keller wrote about Barbara McClintock's work in The Nature of the Organism, and she was ostracized by, science, for her research on um, in cell biology, and she_ you know her papers were rejected for publication, because her view of the cell was that um, things were kind of communicating on a cellular level without a hierarchy, and science_ biology at that time was very focused on you know the nucleus is in charge of the cell <SS LAUGH> something has to be in charge, and <SS LAUGH> and think about how that that has affected, biology
S6: when i was in graduate school it was actually referred to as the trinity. [S4: mm ] D-N-A, R-N-A, protein. [SU-F: yeah ] in that order. <SS LAUGH> it never went back the other way
S7: yeah i th- 
S1: i think another recent example was uh, i- the_ in the paper recently actually about the ways in which, what we see are interpreted in gendered terms and, i think the point was made that the assumption betwe- about the sperm was that the sperm is active and in pursuit of its goal the egg, and the egg is passive and plays no role in in in in inviting some sperm and rejecting others, and with that view, we c- we can only learn so much about for example, the sperm or the egg. um, but if we see the egg as active, and the sperm_ some sperm as directed and and as- sort of i- in assertive, pursuit of their goal and others kind of bouncing off of walls if you will and we'll uh we'll have a different understanding and again i think it's i- the way we not only ask questions but interpret what we see, um that can be, uh, uh an important feminist contribution.
S7: i think uh in my in my f- in industrial and operations engineering a lot of is um production manufactured base which is in my view very boring but, um, some of the some of the things like last_ a couple weeks ago we had a seminar on a woman, um who is, uh in one of the California schools and she is doing her work which is mathematical modelling of H-I-V policies um like uh, educational policies uh you know should you do more, more um, like just, really general informational work on uh how H-I-V is spread or should you do high impact work and like ho- how to quantify those and and make uh policy decisions in um uh on that sort of work um also there's um, movements w- uh included in my department is also um sort of, um organizational behavior work organizational behavior and um there's, there's movements in in that field about um, as opposed to, a hierarchical, work organizational structure and moving to a more um, horizontal, uh work organizational structure which i think is also, very much attributed to women's ways of work and women's ways of organizing, so 
S6: Kristy
S10: i have a question regarding like the label of feminist um, as a student in the nuclear engineering department and working in the same clinical department as Jean, i really welcome the opportunity to go to like, women-based science and engineering forums and conferences, and stuff like that, and normally i get a lot of support from both my male friends and my female friends of going to like, a conference on you know women in science and engineering and stuff like that but when i said i was going to a feminism in the workplace everyone was like, a what? you know it was like you know they_ immediately i think they got this picture of all of us you know with like, big signs you know like women rule <LAUGH>and, like plotting like this big, you know massive attack on men or something and it just seems like, today like i think this is probably something like that the incoming freshmen are feeling like, if you say you're a feminist then people automatically assume that like, you're this real, radical person and i've always wondered if that you know was the case of most people so i've always questioned whether to consider myself a feminist, but listening to all of your definitions, like i completely agree with that, but it seems like if you, s- if you ever say that in a public place like i even think that if i said that to some of my other women friends they would be like you are? you know it just seems like it has such a negative connotation and often i wonder if that's like, kind of something that people have generated to kind of like hush the feminist movement, you know to_ so like make it seem bad so people don't declare it as much so they're not as (xx) 
S8: yeah but i think it's i think it's a little bit more complicated than that. i just finished reading a book that discussed that, and um, i'm not gonna be able to summarize this very well and Cinda maybe you can help me
S10: what's the name 
S6: i haven't finished it yet <LAUGH>
S8: oh y- okay okay [S10: what's the name of it ] but i- but i- but a part of it's historical it isn't um, uh some of the people who started uh, the feminist movements, tended not to be scientists or engineers and we're actually, uh, this book uses the word, technophobic, and so that turned off a lot of women, scientists and engineers so i think it's a really more complex [SU-F: mhm ] i- don't you think historical, uh, rather than, uh, an an issue of just today i think there's some history behind there
S1: can you can you give us the title of the book?
S8: Women in Science. [S1: oh ] just trying to think of the author at the moment
S5: also um, yesterday w- we were talking in Kay Hagan's um, keynote address, she um, made light of the fact by by presenting ten factoids that um, of what feminism is presented as by the media, and part of that is to to keep, new women away i think [SU-F: mhm ] and to keep men away, and to keep people from really understanding what feminism is about, and and to try to uh divert attention, from from what's really being, r- really being done so i_ and i think there are special challenges for being, um, feminist in the science disciplines and, part of what i'm i'm still trying to do is to, to really put that feminism and that science together as as part of a whole identity instead of okay part of me is feminist and part of me is scientist, and hoping that, um in interactions with my colleagues, that perhaps that would change their definitions of feminism as well... in the back?
S11: what what do we need to do to change the future, um so that as the next generation comes forward, our girls from age ten to sixteen can be encouraged, um without all of this scary exclusion around technophobia and things like that, what do we need to do to get the n- the next kids ready, um so that they can become scientists without the barriers?
S7: um one of the things that um, i talked about briefly, which is what_ one of the things that i'm working on in the college, is um, is giving people, scientists now, graduate students now who are going to be out, in the work force either in a- in research positions or in academic positions having children of their own, i- i- giving them formal training on, on creating collaborative environments giving them formal training about communication skills and how i- how it's okay to to do all these, sort of, softer skills in their heads which are not hard science but which actually are very relevant to the work that they do, and and the ways that they present themselves and the ways that they interact particularly with women who, um, who would_ who might be more sensitive to, to the types of um, aggressiveness_ aggressive behaviors that they might_ that they're currently learning from their their their current mentors or the current environment that they've grown up in, and to teach them that, to teach them that, n- another way to do science is in a much more collaborative, environment where you encourage lots of new ideas and where, where everyone is welcome and, where you do encourage more women to participate and, and that sort of stuff so it's i mean it's a long ways away though like these are people who, who maybe for the first time they're hearing that you can ask a question in, such a way where y- your ego is safe and the presenter's ego is saved you know this might be the first time that they've heard that idea and so so um, i think it's, it's a slow but important um concept to work on. 
S6: (but) i think it's a very complicated issue, [SU-F: mhm ] we we run, programs for middle school girls uh the Women in Science and Engineering program future science future engineering where we bring in about a hundred and twenty girls each year, to do hands-on science, here. uh w- the first_ ten years ago the issue was, making sure the girls took enough math and science courses in in high school that seems to be, working now, but now we have the issues of getting them the proper career information, um telling 'em what they can do in science and engineering uh issues of work family i i i've had so many high school girls say to me i'm not gonna be a scientist cuz there's no way i can have a family so i'm gonna go into law. now why <SS LAUGH> they say that i have no idea, but they have this image that you can't do both of these things in science because they don't know many many scientists they think of Marie Curie working all alone in a garret, someplace even though she had children as well. [SU-F: mhm ] but they never think of that aspect. um the peer pressure is just amazing, um as you know for this particular age group to fit in and not to be different, um i've often said we need a television program called L-A Engineer. <SS LAUGH> because L-A Law did more to get people to go to law school um, the whole image of science and engineering, needs to be changed. it is discouraging, um, fifteen years ago the the enrollments in colleges of engineering just started taking off uh with young women and we thought okay it's gonna be slow but you know in fifty years we're gonna be at at equity. uh then about the late eighties early nineties they started leveling off and in some places they're actually dropping. program directors like me think_ have a hypothesis for this we think that there were two groups of young girls out there. there were girls who were really good in math and science, who were interested in going into a science engineering career but just didn't know what their options were. that's an easy group to reach. then there're the second group of young women out there, that all of these societal issues cultural issues, are impinging upon and we have to change attitudes of teachers counselors parents, the whole society that's a much, tougher nut to crack. and that's where we think we are right now. the absolute numbers of women receiving degrees in computer science is half of what it was ten years ago. we have no idea why.
SU-F: wow
S1: i wonder too if we need to um, change to some extent work to change to some extent how, um, we think work is done. wh- when it's done where it's done [SU-F: oh yes. yes. mhm ] how it's done, um in part because i think one of the walls that women run into, um, i- you know is uh the prejudice about how work needs to be conducted and where which eliminates um their their participation [SU-F: mhm ] to a large extent, if family is an issue i mean that's not a non- a non-problem, um how experiments are run you know what kind [SU-F: that's right ] of time away from, um the lab is possible when when [SU-F: that's right ] one is a bench scientist, but the other has to do with the culture the interactional culture that that grows up in the, laboratory. in which fitting in for women may be completely, impossible and not even uh, you know a a a worthy goal. um instead what we need to do is talk about changing that culture and i have lots of examples of s- stories of hazing of young women i mean not [SU-F: mhm ] literal hazing but, [SU-F: mhm ] uh making life so uncomfortable [SU-F: mhm ] uh making them as you said Mary so painfully aware of gender that membership becomes, undesirable even if it is uh something that's possible. and i i think that those need to really be issues that we concern ourselves with, when we ask you know what do we need to do to make a more, open door for for girls. to create a culture that, women and girls wanna walk into. 
S6: mhm the history of science has always been that you have to be first. you have to make [SS: that's true ] that discovery first, and that sets up an incredibly [SU-F: that's so true ] competitive, climate, and atmosphere.
S8: but as Cinda said it's it's it's very complicated even with male students uh we have, um high school students come visit us in engineering and uh i remember talking to, uh different students and one in particular uh wanted to be in nuclear engineering and said but my parents don't think there's any jobs in it they really don't want me to go into that, so there's a lot of parental, uh education that needs to go on i know uh for a long time i w- i worked with the, undergraduate Society of Women Engineers, and i was amazed at how many of them had fathers who were engineers and were alumni of the University of Michigan so it was okay for them, um so there's_ needs to be parental education, and having just studied secondary ed i can tell you science teachers uh, need some education. uh when i did my student teaching with, um, a physics teacher who was very good, but he had some strange ideas about things despite the fact he had a daughter who was in junior high at the time, when we went to study torque he said oh boy i'll bring in my torque wrenches, the only thing i can think of using a torque wrench for is to put in spark plugs but i'm not real sure about that and i said, nobody does tune ups anymore it's too complicated don't bring it in, and he said well i try and do girl stuff i i talk_ i tried to talk about pressure cookers <SS LAUGH> and i thought (xx) pressure cookers in Ann Arbor <SS LAUGH> you know, so you know clearly he's just <SS LAUGH> and so so so it's s- very very complicated i mean there's a lotta different educational issues, and just changing the laboratory situation to someone who's eighteen, they don't even know about that i mean i didn't even know what went on in lab i thought you wat- put on a white coat went in at eight o'clock, took data till five o'clock and went home you know i just was_ but it didn't matter cuz i like the subject well enough so
S7: yeah i'm reading this book on women mathematicians and um, every single person in this book, they talk about the mentors that they had and the people who allowed them to study science and, the people who who's mother or father or who's father was a chemist or who's father was_ who's mother you know didn't work but like, encouraged the woman to go on and ask more questions and uh every single one of them, succeeded because they had somebody who was mentoring them [SU-F: mhm ] and somebody who was supporting [SU-F: mhm ] them and that's, that, you know that's pre- that's pretty critical
S5: okay well it's time to um take a brief break and then move on to the next session, so i'd like to thank everyone for attending and, thank Mary Joyce and Cinda <APPLAUSE SS> for participating.
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