Boy, having been a woman in science for 50 years has been a trip. Not that women before me didn’t have it worse, cause they did. I could go on for several pages about how the University of Cincinnati, College of Medicine, Department of Anatomy (which of course has had many different chairs, names and focuses by now) really didn’t like women graduate students. In fact I was the only woman in a duration of 6 years to get a PhD there.  I had male counterparts who were so inept that it took the help of many faculty mentors to get them through the program, I was not really supported in that way.

I remember my own advisor wasn’t particularly pleasant to me, and after I left to do a post doc made good on a grant with my “microenvironment for cartilage and bone development” idea.  After my post doc in the Department of Environmental Health I went to Children’s Hospital (the Institute for Developmental Research, no longer an entity really, and the hospital also changed its name, and the hospital front has had two renovations over the original site which are neither better nor more beautiful than the old hospital. They did manage to save the stained glass windows and house them in a different location but I can remember what happened to the two large carved crosses atop the building, which came down with the wrecker ball). My immediate working salary compared to my similarly educated male counter part was an even half of what he was given. When I asked, I distinctly remember Leland Clark, Jr. saying, “take it or leave it”.  Clark was another story, a hugely misogynistic egotist who would take info and publish it with out credit to colleagues, and could never do two things over again, everything was an invention (not good or bad, but terrible for a new career path in science).  I watched him throw oranges, or pens down the hallway at the elevator door. I put up with his genius/insanity for 8 years, and what I got from Children’s was a letter after I took a position back in the Department of Environmental Health doing electron microscopy (Directors Dr. Suskind and Dr. Albert were both MDs and understood the power of electron microscopy…. after that, electron microscopy was not a convenient nor important tool… ha ha… so short sighted). When i left children’s I got a letter from Dr. Pratt…. “your services are no longer required”… that was it. No mention of the insanity from Clark that was tolerated.

The directors in Environmental Health have not been all that great… but for some reason the MDs sort of understood what was ultimately going to affect more lives in the near future than the later directors. The latter just don’t understand that we are still living in a world where some very inexpensive measures, and tools can impact many many children, workers, residents and change their lives so much.  Instead they dove into the minutia, billions of bits of data, when teaching people to wash their kids hands frequently could have saved millions of IQ points. I am not saying minutia is not good, after all I have spent my life looking at objects in cells that are no more than 10nm… that is also minutia.

I did enjoy the old school faculty in the Department of Environmental Health on the 1980s to the early 2000s… then came the change in management (even from the top down) that took the “university” down the “business and profit” path, one of more repression (haha like the time George Leikauf, then director of Toxicology, came into my office and told me that I could not use WordPerfect, that I had to use Word…. i replied, George, are you telling me what kind of pencils I must use) than encouragement for individual thinking, and compartmentalization of the faculty into the secure (big brother tenured)  and expendable (other adjunct, research and collaborative faculty) (not really based on merit), still heavily biased against women (Not to speak of trying to rear three children as a single parent — there were times I looked at one assistant director and thought to myself — all he has to do is pull on his pants in the morning then drive to work).

Two distinctly unfortunate events were both over ridiculous lies…. one from George Leikauf when in front of a site visit for the then Health Sciences Center, he implied that his electron micrographs were from the microscopy service that I ran at the time….  I told him in private afterwards that he could not do that, and besides the micrographs were not all that great and not mine. Haha… therin was the beginning of a struggle to get his recommendation for reappointments each year for the next decade…. his derogatory title for me was the Queen of Corel, because I used this program (which for some reason he didn’t approve of) for diagrams and illustrations for my work, the work of many colleagues and the progress reports and resubmissions of the grant.

Then there was the lie from one of the Acting Directors, Earnest Foulkes, when he stood in front of the faculty and said that I said that “so and so” was a great technician, which was totally untrue, had never had that conversation with him, and actually didn’t particularly like the work of that technician.  I couldn’t figure out why he did that… but in private I confronted him…  saying. you cannot get up and say things to the faculty like that which are totally untrue.  Less than two hours later he stopped by my office and said “Marian, we can no longer pay for the service contract on the electron microscope”  ha ha… give me a break. So I added that to the funding I had to dig up.

There were a few women who managed to survive here, but even the most well respected have been washed away with the waters of time. I guess in a sense, that is a huge waste of resources, and short sighted, but a matter of policy.  UC, you have made changes, change yes, is a part of life (not all change is good, which is something that one hopes an institution of higher learning things about (but in this case, maybe not.  Haha, like the hundreds of thousands spent on rebranding.  oh my god, for what…!  And not even that clever.  Enough.  I am deciding whether to contribute to the Foreign Department of Environmental Health or work on my own.  Guess which… ha ha…  I don’t know yet, maybe you can predict.