Women In Technology
I spent part of the morning today at a Women In Technology Summit at Harvard. It wasn't a law professor crowd; it was a group of us older women talking to undergraduates.
Someone asked the members of my panel to talk about something interesting we'd worked on. So that allowed me to spend a few moments telling them how much fun it is to be a law professor. Everything I do is interesting — at least to me — and I learn something new every day. Either I have an alarmingly low “interesting” threshold, or it really is a good job.
There was an impassioned talk (sorry, no links available apparently) by Debra Rolison of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory about just how bad it is to be an aspiring female academic in math or science. Terrible discrimination, terrible prospects. She's suggesting (as has the GAO in a 2004 report) that math and science departments undergo Title IX compliance reviews. She points out that Title IX has been used for sports equipment/funding issues, but that its language isn't limited to sports. (Under Title IX, all entities receiving any form of federal financial assistance have to
prohibit sex discrimination in their education programs and activities.)
The women next to me had, like me, a background in private non-technical services industries (for them, investment banking; for me, law) and I think we all felt lucky that we hadn't tried to get tenure in a math department.