Contributions of Women in Science: Ingredients for Success?

Karen Kafadar

“Since the days of Snedecor and Cochran, the ‘best person’ has frequently been a woman.”
~ Salsburg (2001, p. 206)

“If you want the job done right, ask a woman.”
~ Barry Graubard (2014)

This article arises from an invitation to speak at the ﬁrst Women in Statistics Conference (Durham, North Carolina, May 17–20, 2014). It gave me the opportunity to reﬂect on characteristics of those women who have been tremendously successful in their contributions to statistics and, more generally, to science. Many of them faced enormous barriers (e.g., Gertrude Cox, one of few female graduate students in the 1930s, and Elizabeth Scott, who was denied access to Mount Wilson telescopes despite contributions to a ﬁeld we now call astrostatistics).

Barriers were faced by women in all scientiﬁc disciplines, including Marie Curie in physics and Rosalind Franklin in biology. Even as recently as 1999, women faculty at MIT’s biology department provided evidence to President Charles M. Vest (1990–2004) of being short-changed compared to their male colleagues for research funding packages and laboratory space (see Reports of the Committees on the Status of Women Faculty, MIT, 1999, 2002 update). To the president’s credit, he directed changes to redress the situation and wrote in a letter, “I have always believed that contemporary gender discrimination within universities is part reality and part perception. True, but I now understand that reality is by far the greater part of the balance.” (see Women in Science at U.S. Universities: Criticism and Defense of the MIT Report)

Regrettably, we do not hear about those women who ultimately gave up—a version of the censored data “ﬁle drawer” problem. But for those women who did succeed, what factors enabled their success? Why did they not give up, when many other women had dropped out of their professions? Who or what encouraged them to stay on? How much inﬂuence did external factors have?

These questions intrigued me from an early age. To be sure, many women before the 20th century faced barriers to education. But, by the time I started college, that was certainly no longer an issue in America. (Even my mother, born in 1920, graduated from college.) Like many women born in the baby boom years, I grew up in a conventional family, where the father worked and the mother raised the children and supported his career. But I was fortunate to have been exposed to many of their interesting friends, some of whom were dual-career couples, including John and Peggy Fieldhouse (she was a chemist), Otmar and Lisl Teichmann (she was a professor of romance languages at The University of Chicago), and George and Marjorie Evans (more on her below).

Working women were not the norm where I grew up, but they certainly did exist. Why did they choose to continue their careers, sometimes even after marriage and children, and how did they face the familiar challenges to younger women?

Perhaps because the Evans family lived only a few miles from where I attended college, I came to know Marjorie Evans best and was most impressed by her achievements. Dr. Evans (as we were told to call her) had graduated in the same 1942 class as my mother at the University of Colorado. After earning her BS in chemistry, she was awarded a PhD in physical chemistry from Berkeley (1945), where she became well known for her studies on the chemistry of plutonium, which became important for the Manhattan Project (Howes and Herzenberg, 1999). She met her husband, the son of the namesake of Berkeley’s Evans Hall, and worked on one of Jerzy Neyman’s research projects. Later, she worked at Armour Research Foundation, where she met my father and ultimately reconnected with my mother and her family. Returning to the Bay Area, she became executive director of the physical science division at (then) Stanford Research Institute. In 1968, she realized scientists faced many legal issues they simply were not equipped to handle. She wandered into the oﬃce of Stanford Law School’s dean and told him what she wanted to do. He instructed his assistant to send her a letter of admission—not the usual way one gets into law school.

Needless to say, she broke many glass ceilings during those years; remember that many scientiﬁc organizations and clubs were closed to women. But she commanded tremendous respect from those who worked with her.

One of my favorites of her “stories” arose during the ﬁrst term of Gov. Jerry Brown (1975–1983), when he asked her to serve on an environmental commission. “Well, now, Gov. Brown, I’m surprised you would ask me. You know that I am a lifelong Republican.” He replied, “Yes, but I know that you are a scientist ﬁrst.” And so it was, she came down on the side of the environmentalists on several issues, much to the dismay of the business industry. (Having heard the story many years ago, the quotations are reproduced to the best of my memory, but I believe the content is reasonably accurate.)

Given the year in which she was born (1920) and in Saguache, Colorado, one would not have predicted she would become a leading physical chemist, even today. How did she do it? She ignored barriers or found ways to circumvent them. She had a very supportive husband and father- in-law and opportunities provided by more broad-minded scientists like Jerzy Neyman, who had no reservations about hiring women. She had a no-nonsense personality, was always a scientist, was unemotional, and relied on facts.

Einstein’s Wife

I came across an interesting book, Einstein’s Wife by Andrea Gabor. In ﬁve chapters, she discusses the lives of ﬁve women in increasing order of success. The first chapter concerns Mileva Maric Einstein (1875–1948), Albert’s ﬁrst wife. The story is tragic, so tragic that I skipped the chapter when I re-read the book. Mileva had great potential, having been educated in Austria-Hungary’s top schools with top marks in physics and mathematics. Her health led her to Switzerland and Zurich Polytechnic (now ETHZ), where she met Albert Einstein in 1896. They married in 1903 and had two sons, but separated in 1914 when Albert moved to Berlin and Mileva and her sons moved to Zurich. Mileva essentially dropped out of science. After their divorce in 1919, Albert remarried and subsequently had only minimal connection with her and their children. One son was institutionalized for schizophrenia and her own health issues required she spend her last years in a sanitarium—a sad story for a woman of tremendous potential.

Chapter 2 concerned artist Lee Krasner (1908–1984). Few people have heard of her, but almost everyone has heard of her husband, Jackson Pollack (1912–56). According to professors who had both of them as students, Lee had at least as much&mdash:if not more—talent than Jackson did. But her husband did a great job of convincing her otherwise, criticizing her work (despite praise from others) and ridiculing her, even in public. Upon his death from a car accident, which also killed one of the two young women with him, Lee threw herself into the advancement of her husband’s work, all but abandoning her own promising career, despite encouragement from her professors. She never had such support from Jackson and she was convinced that indeed her husband, not she, had true artistic talent.

Chapter 3 focused on Maria Goepper Mayer (1906–1972), who shared the Nobel Prize in physics (1963) with Hans Jensen and Eugene Wigner, 10 years after her discovery (nuclear shell model) and, amazingly, only three years after her ﬁrst paid position as a professor at the University of California at San Diego. With tremendous encouragement from her chemist-husband, Joseph Mayer, and her mentors, including Max Born and Eugene Wigner, she completed her PhD in physics and continued her collaborations with eminent particle physicists. But upon arriving in the United States with her husband, who had appointments at prestigious universities (Johns Hopkins, Columbia, and The University of Chicago), Maria was offered only an assistant position or a “voluntary associate professor of physics,” without pay. Her husband continued to provide encouragement for her research activities, and she did make signiﬁcant scientiﬁc discoveries through her understanding of atomic elements and their shell structures. In 1960, UCSD offered the couple professorships (she in physics, he in chemistry) and, three years later, she was awarded the Nobel Prize. Here was a woman who faced barriers from administrators, but received tremendous support from her husband, colleagues, and mentors.

Denise Scott Brown (1931–) is the subject of Chapter 4. Brown is a well-respected architect who was responsible for many urban projects, including the Denver Civic Center (1995), and several university spaces. She likewise received respect from mentors and colleagues, as well as strong support from her architect husband and business partner, Robert Venturi. Despite numerous awards in her own right, it was Venturi whom the architects chose to award the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 1991. (In an act of genuine respect for her, Venturi started a campaign for the shared recognition of his wife in the prize; see Dezeen magazine, April 4, 2013.)

The last chapter focuses on Sandra Day O’Connor (1930–) and is a joy to read. At a time when many universities were admitting only men, Stanford had women in its ﬁrst graduating class of 1895. O’Connor graduated in 1950 and earned her JD from Stanford in 1952. Despite these impressive credentials, her ﬁrst job was as an unpaid assistant to the San Mateo, California, county attorney. She settled in Arizona into private practice and then became assistant attorney general (1965–1969). After serving in the state senate for five years, she was elected judge of Maricopa County Supreme Court (1974–1979) and then on the Arizona Court of Appeals. Her then conservative positions and support of the Republican party attracted the attention of the Reagan administration and, two years later, she was appointed as the ﬁrst female Supreme Court Associate Justice in 1981.

By the time she retired 24 years later, she was usually the swing vote between the conservatives and the liberals on the court. The law school at Arizona State University is named after her, and she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. Her husband, whom she married shortly after graduating from law school, never wavered in his support of her career, even at the expense of his own, giving her time to do whatever was necessary while they both jointly raised their three children. In reciprocity, O’Connor retired from the court solely to watch over her husband who had Alzheimer’s disease and died in 2009. The story of such devotion from a husband and the hard work O’Connor dedicated to the law provide clues that lead to women’s success.

Nobel Prize Women in Science: Their Lives, Struggles, and Momentous Discoveries

Soon after having read Einstein’s Wife, I found at the National Academies’ bookstore a volume with a most interesting title: Nobel Prize Women in Science: Their Lives, Struggles, and Momentous Discoveries, by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, the author of The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy (2011). Ten of the 15 chapters are devoted to a mini-biography of women who received a Nobel Prize in science, including Marie Curie (physics, 1903, for radiation; chemistry, 1911, for radioactivity); Irene Joliot-Curie (chemistry, 1935, for artiﬁcial radioactivity); Gerty Theresa Cori (physiology or medicine, 1947, for carbohydrate metabolism; ﬁrst American Nobel Prize woman in science); Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (chemistry, 1955, for biochemical structure via X-rays); Maria Goeppert Mayer (physics, 1963, for nuclear shell model); Rosalyn Sussman Yalow (physiology or medicine, 1977, for development of the radioimmunoassay); Barbara McClintock (physiology or medicine, 1983, for genetic structures of maize); Rita Levi-Montalcini (physiology or medicine, 1986, for discovery of nerve growth factor); Gertrude B. Elion (physiology or medicine, 1988, for biochemical development of drugs to block viral infections); and Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard (physiology or medicine, 1995, for genetic control of embryonic development).

Five more chapters are devoted to women who made groundbreaking discoveries that led to Nobel prizes for others. McGrayne describes their experiences and struggles just to pursue their research, much less be recognized for it. Many were afforded virtually no lab space, nor even access to lectures, and had to ﬁght for whatever resources they were able to ﬁnd on their own. McGrayne asks the key questions: “Why so few? Why have only 10 women won Nobel prizes in science when more than 500 men have done so? Many faced enormous obstacles… In the face of such obstacles, what sustained these women? What prevented them from giving up, as many other women scientists had?” McGrayne offers potential factors that enabled their success:

They adored science
Sympathetic parents and relatives were particularly inﬂuential
Religious values stressing education were critical
The importance of institutional support for women scientists
Good luck and good timing were vitally important
Behind many of these successful women stood a man

With respect to the fourth point, of the six (of 10) women who came from the United States, two attended Hunter College in New York and two were from Washington University in St. Louis. The last point seems true today of statisticians as well as the 15 women in McGrayne’s book. Lynne Billard once told me that, in her experience, most women in our profession had a man working behind the scenes on their behalf; she speculated that the man for her was Ingram Olkin. Indeed, I suspect many women owe gratitude to Olkin, who has been tremendously supportive of the careers of women in statistics.

Five Notable Women Pioneers in Statistics

To what extent do these factors apply to women in statistics? Billard and Kafadar (2014) discuss the careers of several notable women in statistics (and also salary data from 1971–2013 published in the academic publication Academe). We look at ﬁve of them here. Did some of the same factors noted in McGrayne’s book apply to these ﬁve female statisticians? They all made tremendous accomplishments at a time of little appreciation for either statistics or women professionals. How did they succeed, not only in making these contributions, but also for being recognized for them? This section concentrates only on women pioneers born no later than 1917. (None of the notable women in our profession today is yet old enough to be included.)

Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) is probably best known for having established a nursing school in London, but she also had strong interests in mathematics and the display of statistical data. She collected health and mortality statistics and devised informative displays that persuaded inﬂuential 19th-century British members of parliament of the need for health policy reform among soldiers in the Crimean War. She later served as a consultant to the U.S. government on army health during the Civil War. She came from a privileged background, which both helped and frustrated her: Her well-educated father provided her with a solid classical education, but both her parents objected strongly to her career in nursing. It was Secretary of War Sidney Herbert who asked her to organize a nursing corps for the soldiers in Crimea, and the “no-nonsense Nightingale” assembled and organized her small team accordingly. By improving sanitary conditions and caring for soldiers and collecting data and systemizing health records, she stimulated the reforms that led to a drop in the hospital’s death rate by two-thirds (www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/nitegale.htm). With her “polar-area diagram,” she was a pioneer in demonstrating the effectiveness of statistical graphics.

Nightingale believed strongly that women had a responsibility to “bring the best that she has,” regardless of “whether it is ‘suitable for a woman’ or not” (www.amstat.org/about/statisticiansinhistory). But she credited her success to “the friendship of power men.” “I have never found one woman who has altered her life by one iota for me or my opinions.” (www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence Nightingale). Certainly more men than women were in positions of power in the 19th century, but one wonders how different the situation is today.

F.N. David (1903–1993) was named for Florence Nightingale, whom her parents admired and knew well. Beginning with strong parental encouragement, she graduated from Bedford College for Women with a degree in mathematics. In search of practical applications, she sought a position as an actuary, but ﬁrms in London would accept only men. She introduced herself to Karl Pearson at University College, who hired her as a research assistant, then as an assistant lecturer in the statistics department. He also introduced her to Egon Pearson (Karl’s son) and Jerzy Neyman. She attended Fisher’s lectures but, being a woman, was not allowed to ask any questions. “I would sit next to Churchill Eisenhart and Sam Wilks, who were visiting, and I’d say, ‘Ask him! Ask him!’,” she said. Having published several papers in combinatorics, probability, and game theory, Neyman encouraged her to submit them for a doctorate, which the University of London awarded in 1938 (and where she later supervised other notable statisticians, including Colin Mallows (1953) and Gwilym Jenkins (1956)). She used her theoretical training during World War II at the Home Office to estimate the effects of bombs on human life and its infrastructure (public works systems), which enabled the Allies to prepare effectively for the German offense in 1940–1941. She moved to the University of California at Riverside in 1968 and founded and chaired the department of statistics in 1970. She retired in 1977 and spent her last years doing research at Berkeley.

What factors inﬂuenced her success? Certainly an early education encouraged by her parents set her on the right path. She was a brilliant and creative mathematician. And she acknowledged with gratitude her mentors, Karl Pearson, who hired her as his research assistant, and Jerzy Neyman, who, in addition to encouraging her toward a doctorate, later hired her at Berkeley.

Stella V. Cunliffe (1917–2012) was the ﬁrst woman president of the Royal Statistical Society (1975–1977) and the ﬁrst woman director of statistics at the Home Office London UK. She was the top student at Parsons Mead School in Surrey, England, and was awarded the BS degree in economics, specializing in statistics, at the London School of Economics in 1938. Her technical expertise and common sense led to signiﬁcant roles at the Danish Bacon Company (1940–1945) and for the Guide International Service (1945–1947), but most of her career was at Guinness brewery (1947–1970), “a community in which the attitude to the statistician, because of the reputation of one Gosset, was one of reverence” (Cunliffe 1976, p. 2).

Disqualiﬁed from being director due to her gender (Dorking and Leatherhead Advertiser, Jan. 26, 2012), she left the brewery to head the research unit on crime at the UK’s home office; two years later, she was named director of statistics, the ﬁrst woman to reach this rank in the British Government Statistical Service. Working closely with Home Office Secretary Roy Jenkins, “her research helped to inﬂuence many of his key decisions, including the abolition of capital punishment.” (Dorking and Leatherhead Advertiser, Jan. 26, 2012). In 1977, she became statistical adviser to the Committee of Enquiry into the Engineering Profession (1978–1980).

Cunliffe was, by all accounts of those who knew her, an amazing and remarkable person with a formidable character. Her research and interaction with her superiors brought her great respect for her judgment, which usually was accepted. Her presidential address to the Royal Statistical Society focused on the need for statisticians to use our training to make an impact on society by interacting with others, “wherever they ﬁnd themselves; with other disciplines and with society” (Cunliffe 1976, p. 1). Gosset’s “true brilliance” was his “rare ability to explain, to the uninitiated, the intricacies of the discipline.” (p. 3). She emphasized that “we must explain our ﬁndings in their language and develop the powers of persuasion.” (p. 11). Talent, dedication, and hard work led her to being honored as a Member of the Order of the British Empire (1993). In his remarks following her presidential address in 1976, former Royal Statistical Society President H. E. Daniels proposed to “congratulate the society on, for the ﬁrst time, electing as its president one of our most distinguished woman fellows. Perhaps I should also reprimand it for taking so long to come to its senses!”

Few women statisticians’ names are as well recognized in our profession as that of Gertrude M. Cox (1900–1978), and for good reason. Her family stressed service; she was “raised on a farm where … I learnt from my mother the value and joy of doing for other people” (Anderson 1983). Needing a college degree to become a Methodist Episcopal deaconess, “she went to Iowa State College and chose to major in math because, she wrote in her diary, it was easy” (gmclife.blogspot.com). With her degree in mathematics (1929), George Snedecor convinced her that “statistics was more interesting” (Salsburg 2001, p. 196) and she earned ISU’s ﬁrst MS in statistics (1931). After two years of graduate study (psychology) at Berkeley, she returned to ISU to work with Snedecor to establish ISU’s computing laboratory. During this time, she met William G. Cochran, with whom she later coauthored the classic text Experimental Designs, published in 1950 and still available today in the Wiley Classics Library. When asked in 1940 for recommendations for candidates to chair the department of statistics at North Carolina State University (NCSU), Snedecor invited Cox to comment on the list. She asked him why he did not recommend her, so Snedecor wrote back on Sept. 7, 1940: “[I]f you would consider a woman, I would recommend Gertrude Cox of my staff.” (www.amstat.org/about/statisticiansinhistory). Cox arrived at NCSU two months later and ended up building one of the largest and most distinguished statistics departments in the United States. She retired in 1965, but remained active as a consultant to promote the development of statistical programs worldwide. Although the number of women faculty did not increase much during her tenure, it has increased signiﬁcantly in recent years, not only in statistics but throughout NCSU’s College of Liberal Arts and Science.

Cox clearly had aptitude as well as a desire for education for herself and others. In a letter to Pat Barber on Dec. 2, 1959, she wrote, “The ﬁeld of statistics is certainly wide open to women. If you are willing to take the mathematics and science courses and then work very hard to get beyond the junior level, there are all sorts of opportunities to go as far as you wish” (lib.ncsu.edu/archivedexhibits/cox/career.html).

The inﬂuence of her family to pursue a college degree in the 1920s, her highly distinguished mathematical talent, her remarkable organizational skills, and the boosts to her career from Snedecor and Cochran surely contributed to her success, in spite of obstacles to professional women in the 1940s and beyond. Although I never met her, I suspect she had many of the same qualities as Marjorie Evans: a no-nonsense personality, always a scientist, and made her cases before others unemotionally and well supported with facts.

Elizabeth L. Scott (1917–1988) grew up in Berkeley in a family and environment where college was within reach, even for women. Despite the Great Depression in 1935, her family placed a priority on education, and she could live at home. Role models in the form of female professors were scarce apart from a few who occasionally substituted for male professors. When she completed her PhD in 1949, already on the faculty and with her name on more than a dozen publications, she was still one of few women on the Berkeley faculty, where she remained for her entire professional life. She collaborated with many researchers in various ﬁelds, most notably in astronomy (modeling elements of the universe as random processes; see Scott and Neyman, 1958) and on weather modiﬁcation (see articles in the Fifth Berkeley Symposium, 1961). She was the ﬁrst to describe a type of “size-biased sampling effect” that arises when more distant systems that contain more galaxies will be brighter and hence easier to detect, a phenomenon known as the “Scott effect.” One wonders why, for her 11 contributions to astronomy alone, she was not awarded membership in the National Academy of Sciences.

Ironically, she initially set out for a career in astronomy, but she realized her future would be limited by restrictions such as women being denied access to telescopes at Mount Wilson, except as an assistant. Perhaps this puzzling restriction was fortunate for us, as it led her to a career in mathematical statistics instead. (Some of the information in this paragraph came from an article by Francesca Webb and Edmund Robertson.)

The design and analysis of weather modiﬁcation experiments (speciﬁcally for stimulating rain) create particularly challenging problems. Unlike ordinary experiments, one cannot simply identify in advance a suitable population of eligible candidates for the study. Even if one could look into the future for such a population, one cannot “randomize” treatments (presence or absence of cloud seeding) without the Federal Aviation Administration having something to say about it. Moreover, weather patterns on given days hardly behave like typical random samples. They certainly are not repeatable, and the “treatment” (cloud seeding) may not take effect for several days (the exact number again being random). Scott and Neyman (1961a,b) used randomization tests on the results of 23 experiments and concluded that the data could not conﬁrm a cloud seeding effect on rainfall. Later research suggested the effect could be inﬂuenced by cloud altitude and location, indicating the need for properly randomized experiments to account for such factors (Breuer, 1980). Morita and Scott (1982) developed models for the effect of ultraviolet (UV) radiation on skin cancer, leading to current guidelines regarding UV exposure.
Most women of her stature and position had time for only their own research, teaching, and occasional service responsibilities. Scott, however, went out of her way to promote women’s careers and to call attention to salary gender inequities. The data pointed unequivocally to these disparities and she worked tirelessly throughout her life to address them (Billard and Ferber 1991).

Like the other women in this section, she beneﬁted from the support of her family for an education and of her mentors (such as Jerzy Neyman) and she saw great value in applying her theoretical training to important problems that made an impact on society.

The Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies awards, in even years, the Elizabeth L. Scott award, “in recognition of [her] lifelong efforts in the furtherance of the careers of women, this award is granted to an individual who has helped foster opportunities in statistics for women by developing programs to encourage women to seek careers in statistics; by consistently and successfully mentoring women students or new researchers; by working to identify gender-based inequities in employment; or by serving in a variety of capacities as a role model.” The ﬁrst recipient was F. N. David in 1992.

Academic Women with Tenure?

With these women, and many others since them, paving the way for women in statistics, how many have achieved tenure (much less promotion to professor) among U.S. universities? Ingram Olkin considered this question in the online version of the Amstat News in January 2014. As a more recent update, I viewed the faculty web pages for the schools he listed as well as a few others. Tenure is obviously not indicated on these pages, so I presumed the titles of associate professor, professor, professor of practice, and research professor all designated some sort of long-term commitment by the university to such faculty. The numbers of women (numerators) compared to “tenured” faculty (denominators) are listed below:

Overall, out of 454 “tenured” faculty at these 25 universities, 65 are women (14.3%), with NC State taking top honors (28.8%), followed closely by Iowa State (26.7%). (If we count the small departments of only seven “tenured” faculty at UC-Irvine and UVA, and eight at Rice, their percentages are 28.6% and 25%, respectively.) In view of the high proportions of women today who are earning PhD degrees in statistics and biostatistics—38% and 49% in 2012, respectively, according to the American Mathematical Society, 2014, one wonders why the percentages for academic tenure are so low. Olkin notes that the situation for tenured women in biostatistics departments is more favorable.

Concluding Thoughts

What ingredients are important for success? Here are ﬁve that these stories suggest to me:

1. Perseverance: Don’t give up. This ingredient is not a blank check to become a nuisance; rather, it means that sometimes you have to look elsewhere rather than trying to dig through the same obstructed tunnel.

2. Creativity: Good ideas can have impact. Even if the idea seems relatively straightforward, it may not have been used before on a problem of real importance, as many of the contributions from these women indicate.

3. Conﬁdence: Maintain self conﬁdence, especially in the face of enormous social pressures to quit. Doing so in practice is much easier said than done. Having a “cheerleader” in the background is tremendously useful, especially one who is in the same discipline.

4. Support: Support from a mentor or colleague seems to have been tremendously inﬂuential, not only for inspiration, but also for career advancement. Historically, the education of men was deemed more important than that of women, so such support and mentorship came from men. But today, are women getting support from other women, or only from other men? Barry Graubard, who is quoted at the outset of this article, received the National Cancer Institute’s Mentor of Merit Award in 2011 “for excellence in mentoring and guiding the careers of trainees in cancer research.” Many of the trainees were women, two of whom attended the Durham conference in May.

5. Choose colleagues wisely: In my experience, one will always encounter men, and sometimes women, who resent successful women. Deﬁnitely women’s records and accomplishments are scrutinized, and often criticized, more severely than men’s (Billard 1994). Perhaps you can change these people, but probably not. There are many people who appreciate women professionals, so work with them instead.

To some extent, these factors apply to all successful researchers, male and female. But self-conﬁdence can be especially hard for women in the face of societal pressures and biases.

This ﬁrst conference on women in statistics did more than continue to raise awareness of the shortage of women in our profession. It helped identify how women together can help to address the imbalances, in numbers and rewards. Some may come to realize that, indeed, sometimes the “best person” for the job really could be a woman. (Having heard the story many years ago, the quotations are reproduced to the best of my memory, but I believe the content is reasonably accurate.)

About the Author

Karen Kafadar is Commonwealth Professor and Chair of Statistics at the University of Virginia. She earned her PhD in statistics from Princeton University and previously held positions at National Institute of Standards and Technology, Hewlett Packard’s RF/Microwave R&D Division, NCI, University of Colorado-Denver, and Indiana University. She has awards from CDC, ASA, and ASQ. She was editor for JASA’s Review Section and Technometrics and is currently biology and genetics editor for The Annals for Applied Statistics. Kafadar has served on several National Academy of Sciences committees and governing boards for the ASA, IMS, ISI, and NISS. She is a fellow of the ASA, AAAS, and ISI; has authored more than 100 journal articles and book chapters; and has advised numerous MS and PhD students.

Tagged as: contributions, women contributions, women in science, women in statistics