Ed Hare, John Hunt (Woods Hole), Tom Hoering, Marilyn 1981 |
In graduate
school, I paid no attention to the relative proportions of women to men. I was
engaged in my studies and ignored the fact that all of the faculty were men,
and most of the fellow graduate students were men. As long as there were
undergraduates around, it never seemed like an overwhelming number of male
cohorts.
Not until I arrived at the Geophysical
Laboratory, a rarefied environment on a hilltop in Northwest Washington, DC,
was I aware of how rare I was at that time.
There were
no other women postdoctoral fellows or staff scientists in 1977-1979. Every
summer, a few women from other universities would arrive and work as interns.
The Director of the Lab addressed memos to Dr. Hoering, Dr. Hare, and Mrs.
Estep (my married name at the time). The only other woman scientist, on staff
in the 1960s briefly, was referred to as Mrs. Donnay, who was married to Dr.
Donnay, both of them crystallographers. Of course, “Mrs.” Donnay was in her own
right Dr. Gabriel Donnay. A senior woman professor from France, who visited
frequently and had been a postdoc in the 1960s, was called Mrs. Velde, since
she married another postdoc, Dr. Velde. “Mrs.” Dr. Professor Danielle Velde was
by far the more prominent scientist, with a long productive career as a
petrologist at the University of Paris.
At this time, visiting speakers at the
Geophysical Lab during the 1970s and 80s, were used to addressing a male
audience. I was often the only woman attending the seminar. Male speakers took
full advantage of the sex-biased audience. One prominent male professor from a
California university punctuated the sections of his seminar with photos of
naked women. Thinking back to the 1990s, one of my colleagues tells this story:
“I was
recently talking with a couple colleagues about how there were postcards of
women in skimpy bathing suits taped up on a wall in the laboratory where I did
my graduate work. Now, this was a
laboratory of someone who has high respect for all the women in his life –
however, it did not dawn on him to take these postcards down until a comment by
a new woman postdoc prompted him to. I suspect this being his first woman
postdoc and his noting her attitude may have jarred his understanding from
simply a joke amongst male colleagues and students to the reality of what it
meant to all the rest of his colleagues and students. “
Off-color jokes and swearing were not
common at the Carnegie, because in general I worked with gentlemen. However, in
attending conferences and interacting with outside scientists, it was clear
that women in the earth sciences were not taken seriously. When I started to
look for a full-time position as an Assistant Professor in 1979, I am fairly
certain that my applications were not reviewed as fairly as those of my male
colleagues. For example, two men in the stable isotope biogeochemistry field,
all of us recent Ph.D.s, were interviewed at the Geophysical Lab, before I was
even considered to be a viable candidate for a permanent position.
After my divorce, I was stuck with the
chore of changing my name from Marilyn L. F. Estep back to Marilyn L. Fogel. In
1974, before I’d published any papers, it was a simple thing to change your
name to your husband’s name. When I married Chris Swarth, a name change was out
of the question. Personally, some people call me Marilyn Swarth, including my
own mother, who could not fathom not having her husband’s last name. In the
science world, I am often just known as “Marilyn”—a distinctive first name in
the biogeochemistry field. Young scientists often ask me if they should change
their name. I usually advise them to keep their own name, unless they really
despise their given name, which is rare. Nowadays, most people are familiar
with husbands and wives having different names.
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