When Roberta Humphreys arrived at the University
in 1972, the newly hired 28-year-old assistant professor
of astronomy was, as she recalls, “the fifth and youngest
woman faculty member in IT.”
Over the next 30 years, Humphreys rose to the rank
of full professor, received recognition for her research
in astrophysics, and set a college milestone by becoming
the first woman to be named an IT Distinguished Professor.
Active in faculty governance, she served on the Faculty
Consultative Committee for four years and as vice chair
of the University Senate for two years. In August 2002
she assumed a half-time appointment as IT’s associate
dean for academic affairs.
During that same period, the number of female faculty in IT increased to 33
out of nearly 400 tenured and tenure-track positions—a substantial jump, to
be sure, but still not a ratio that would cause students, faculty, and staff
to take the presence of women scientists and engineers for granted.
Although women in IT still run the risk of feeling somewhat isolated in mostly-male departments, Humphreys believes that overall much has improved for women in science during those three decades.
One change is very clear. Humphreys herself is now in a position to remedy the situation even further.
Among her responsibilities as associate dean is managing the college’s Program for Women. “I want to create an environment [in which] women faculty, postdocs, and students get to know each other and to encourage interactions,” she says, adding that networking is crucial for academic women.
Shortly after assuming her new position, she began meeting with IT women in small groups. “I just wanted to get acquainted with them [and] find out [their] issues and concerns,” she explains.
In the months ahead, she will continue the meetings—but
with a twist. “I’d like to mix women from different
departments and from all levels of faculty,” she says.
She also plans to sponsor a retreat for IT women faculty at the end of spring semester. By then, she hopes, group members will know each other’s concerns fairly well and “we’ll be able to formulate where we go from here.”
She also hopes to establish special funds to augment hiring possibilities within IT. “The University needs to make hiring and retention of female faculty in IT of sufficient priority that it will create opportunities within individual departments, as it does for minorities,” she says.
Another new program is already in place. “I’ve established a lecture series for distinguished women scientists and engineers,” says Humphreys. “They’re invited to speak at a regular departmental colloquium [in their academic specialty], but then we arrange for them to stay for an extra day or two to interact with students.”
She hopes the eminent visitors will be role models
for students who may be at a critical juncture in their
choice of careers. Informal discussions will give students
a chance to hear women scientists describe their full,
well-balanced lives in a natural setting. As Humphreys
puts it, “They’ll show the students that
‘Yes, I’ve had a life in science, but I’ve
also had a life!’ I want to get that image in
front of undergrads and graduate students.”
It’s a reality that Humphreys lives every day. Married to astronomy professor Kris Davidson, she is the mother of a college-age son, who is one of the reasons she feels hopeful about the future of women in science.
“Young men are much more tolerant now [of girls who excel in math and science],” she says. “My own son doesn’t see anything strange in smart girls.”
As Humphreys can testify, it wasn’t always that way. When she was growing up in Indianapolis in the 1940s and 1950s, smart girls were definitely not encouraged to make the most of their abilities. As a teenager, Humphreys told her high school advisor that she wanted to get a Ph.D. “He laughed and said maybe I could become a high school teacher,” she recalls.
He’s also responsible for the fact that she never learned to type. “At the time, I was advised to take typing so that I could be someone’s scientific assistant,” she explains. Instead she vowed that typing was the one subject she would never study.
Even well into her career she didn’t find herself in an atmosphere of perfect equality. During her early days at the University, a former department chair (long since departed from Minnesota) warned her, “Well, Roberta, you can’t expect to get the same salary raises as men.”
She’s ignored such negative messages most of her life, ever since a memorable family trip to Chicago awakened two lifelong intellectual passions. “I was five or six,” she recounts, “and we got up very early to drive from Indianapolis to Chicago. I remember looking out the window, seeing this really bright thing!”
Her father explained that she was looking at the planet Venus and then followed up this brief astronomy lesson with visits to the Chicago Planetarium and the Field Museum of Natural History, where the family viewed the museum’s collection of Egyptian mummies.
“My two loves—archaeology and astronomy—were formed on that trip,” she
reports. “Much later, I had to pick a major [as an undergraduate at Indiana
University]. There was no archaeology major at Indiana, so astronomy was next
on the list. If archaeology had been there, I don’t know what would have happened.”
Archaeology’s loss is astronomy’s gain—specifically, observational stellar
astrophysics with an emphasis on stellar evolution and stellar populations.
Humphreys is best known for her work on the most massive and luminous known
stars. Highly unstable, these stars end their very short lives dramatically
with high mass-loss events, eventually exploding as supernovae.
In addition to being named an IT Distinguished Professor in 2001, she received the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist Award in 1988 and the college’s George W. Taylor Award for Distinguished Research in 1985.
As a working observational astronomer, Humphreys worries about what will happen when her generation of scientists and engineers begins to retire. The number of women choosing majors in the physical sciences has leveled off in recent years, but she regards this trend as part of a larger problem. American-born men and women alike are passing up careers in science and engineering in favor of other professions including law, medicine, and business.
“It’s a serious long-term problem for our country because our [position of] leadership has come from advanced science and technology,” she says.
Asked for the advice she’d give to a young woman interested
in science, Humphreys’ response is unequivocal. “The
barriers are coming down—the world’s changed,”
she says. “Science still does demand personal sacrifice,
like any profession, but if you’re really interested,
then do it!”
