When Sue Rosser was doing her postdoc in zoology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, she got pregnant with her second child. She went to her principal investigator (PI) to discuss how to proceed with her project. He said there was no way her science could survive another baby, and advised her to get an abortion, she recalls. Appalled at the suggestion, “I decided not to do that,” she says.
That was 1973, and discriminatory comments such as those Rosser experienced are less common today. That change in perception and respect has allowed women to climb to leadership positions in the life sciences, even though their numbers still lag significantly behind those of men. “I’ve seen many positive changes,” says Rosser, who went on to become a dean at Georgia Institute of Technology, recently took a position as provost of San Francisco State University, and authored Women, Science, and Myth: Gender ...
