On the playing fields of Stanford University,
Kristina Johnson earned a reputation as a fierce field hockey and
lacrosse player. While conducting postdoctoral work at Trinity College
in Ireland, she secured a spot on the Irish women’s cricket
team. (To her regret, she says, work obligations precluded her from
accepting an invitation a few years later to join the team in World
Cup play in Australia.) She’s also earned a red belt in Tae
Kwon Do.
It seems apt, therefore, that Johnson, the first woman dean in the
history of the Pratt School of Engineering, would look to the success
of Title IX in the athletic arena to call for similar progress in
the sciences. Speaking to the U.S. Senate subcommittee on Science,
Technology and Space in 2002, Johnson asked, “Wouldn’t
it be great if we could see the same advances in the academic world
of science and engineering participation by women as we have produced
due to Title IX legislation?”
The subcommittee considered a variety of barriers that prevent women
from gaining parity with men in the sciences. For her part, Johnson
recommended reshaping high-school curricula to require four years
of math and one year each of biology, chemistry, and physics; and
increasing financial aid and child-care support for women in graduate
school.
Johnson acknowledges that Title IX’s success in the athletic
realm came about, in part, because of actual or threatened high-visibility
lawsuits. Given the snail’s pace at which changes are made
to national public-school curriculums, and the lack of political
muscle that most graduate students have to lobby for change, creating
opportunities for women scientists will take time. But it is essential
to remedy the disparity, she says, to produce a highly skilled technical
workforce.
“Imagine trying to walk on to the women’s or men’s
basketball team at Duke without ever having played the sport,” she
says. “And yet that’s what we do for girls and boys in
preparing them to even consider a career in science, math, engineering,
or technology.”
—Bridget Booher |
