Green asked the obvious question: “What do you want me to do with this?”
During her dissertation defense, Mari-Vaughn Johnson was asked, “How do you feel about being a woman entering a man’s world?”
“Was that an appropriate question? No.”
Virginia Jin changed her major from premed to biology and went on to earn a doctorate in plant biology from the University of Georgia. Unlike her counterparts at the Grassland Soil and Water Research Lab in Temple, she has escaped the brunt of prejudice as a woman in the traditionally male-dominated field of science.
“I would say that within my experiences in grad school that I have never faced any gender or minority discrimination,” she said last week. “I’ve always been lucky to have a department and a professor and an adviser who were very fair. My adviser was a woman who was very sympathetic to what I might have to face.”
The three young scientists are representative of what has been called “the changing face of science.” An article in the July issue of Nature reported that women earned more than a third of the science and engineering doctorates awarded in 2003-04 but that women held fewer than a third of all science and engineering posts and just 18 percent of all professorships.
Ms. Johnson, a research agronomist doing postdoctoral work at the Grasslands lab, noted that women do postdoctoral work but their influence and numbers begin tapering off at that point. She speculated that the situation might stem in part from universities’ emphasis on producing graduate students.
“If every Ph.D. program produced one Ph.D. every four years and they have a four-year career that’s 10 new students to replace that one position,” she said. “And they’re producing a lot more than one Ph.D. every four years. A lot more. So you end up with a glut of people who are theoretically qualified to take that position.”
The women were drawn to their respective scientific fields through the same interests and passions as their male counterparts. The interest began early in life and blossomed into careers.
Ms. Jin, initially torn between a career in medicine or music, settled on premed but realized that it wasn’t for her.
“I thought about what I liked as a child,” she said. “I remembered hiking trips and camping trips a very close friend used to take us on. He was a professor of entomology at Cornell. He wasn’t related to us but we called him Grandpa.
“Grandpa would take us out on these trips and shows us bugs in the woods and different kinds of leaves. He would dig in the dirt and show us these things. So I thought I’d give that a shot.”
At the Grasslands lab Ms. Jin is doing postdoctoral work that includes determining how rangeland and agriculture lands contribute to the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and how the land might be managed to better control emissions.
Part of her work involves working with a hydraulic system called a Lysimeter but is often referred to as a time tunnel. Different sections of the tunnel are dosed with varying levels of carbon dioxide to represent the amount of carbon present in the atmosphere at different times in the world’s history.
“I love being here,” she said. “I like the work I do and the people I work with but there’s no guarantee I will stay in one place. The competition to do the kind of work I do is very intense.”
She said she was drawn to her work because she believes it’s important.
“There’s a lot of good work to be done, things that we can contribute, things that are important,” she said.
Like Ms. Jin, Ms. Johnson’s childhood passion for the outdoors led her to pursue a career in science. Her doctorate in wildlife sciences began with an interest in plants.
“For some reason I always liked plants, even though that’s really strange because most kids like animals. But I was playing in dirt all the time,” she said.
For her, science is a way to feed the curiosity that began when she was that child playing in the dirt.
“It’s really about being inquisitive and coming up with creative ways to address that inquisitiveness,” she said. “Science isn’t about what you know. It’s about ways to approach what you don’t know. Scientists have an alertness and an awareness when they look at a problem that a lot of people who aren’t trained in science don’t have.”
As for her the line of questioning at her dissertation defense, Ms. Johnson’s attitude has softened over the years.
“In retrospect, I better understand his point and see the connection in his line of reasoning,” she said.
Ms. Green has a doctorate from Colorado State University and works extensively with the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT), which has evolved over 30 years into an internationally recognized tool for tracing the source of pollution in an entire watershed or basin.
For her, as the others, it all comes down to the work.
“A female mentor told me ‘You’re not competing with them (men). You don’t have to be any better. Just do your work. Do the work that you know how to do and you will end up on top. … Is what I’ve gone through worth where I am right now? Absolutely.”
Ms. Green can laugh at the man who unwittingly handed her his registration forms at the meeting in Australia because that incident has proved to be the exception more than the rule.
At a more recent meeting featuring scientists from NASA, the Agriculture Research Service and the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Ms. Green was the only female among 38 participants. That meeting went off without a hitch.
“It was just no big deal,” she said. “That’s how it’s done now.”
ccoppedge@temple-telegram.com
