Judith Rodin University PresidentCollege for Women 1966
In my first year as president, University Council was held in McClelland Hall in the Quadrangle. As I neared the Quad, I felt my heart racing. Why was I so nervous for Council?
After a quick, painless swipe of my PennCard, I found myself standing within the walls of the Quad. At that moment, I remembered: Women were not allowed in the Quad when I was a student at Penn. It was a men's dorm into which my friends and I would sneak as undergraduates.
I realized how much had changed. Today, Penn women live in the Quad, and throughout the University, women enjoy the same rights, privileges and status as the men.
I feel privileged to have played a part in this change. I remember meeting regularly with my classmate Tom Lang, president of the Men's Student Government, over coffee in Houston Hall when I was president of the Women's Student Government. Tom and I both believed that separate governing bodies were an anachronism in a coed environment. By senior year, we had succeeded in merging all the committees of the formerly divided governments.
I also remember how my professors inspired me to take on big challenges. I started as a French major with dreams of becoming a United Nations interpreter. Then I took introductory psychology with Professor Henry Gleitman. In one course, I went from a default major in which I had an interest, to a field for which I felt the most passionate love and calling.
One psychology professor -- Richard Solomon -- asked his graduate teaching assistant to take the person who got the highest grade in the midterm and offer him a job in his lab. Well, the he turned out to be me, and my career in psychology had begun.
Today, women are treated more equally and are so much more fully integrated into campus life. For example, when we were undergraduates we had to wear skirts for dinner and we had no women cheerleaders on the Ivy League playing field.
Women at Penn now recognize that virtually every career is open to them. They can see all around them women who have broken so many barriers and successfully integrated family, career and lifestyle. For my generation, such women role models were the exception. Today, they rule.
Penn has broken ground socially in so many areas. It is only fitting that as America's first University, Penn was ahead of the times and most of its peers in admitting women and creating new advantages and opportunities for women and men alike.
I know it's a thrill for all my fellow alumnae to see how far Penn has come in providing women with every opportunity to reach their full intellectual and professional potential.
Karen Jehn Professor of ManagementThe Wharton School
When I arrived at the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, I took an assistant professorship in the Management Department of the Wharton School. It always makes me uncomfortable to mention the following, but it is the way I am most often introduced in academic circles.
I also think it says more about the department than it does about me. When I got tenure in 1997, I was the first woman ever in Wharton's Management Department's 85-year history to receive tenure. Before then, there had never been a tenured female faculty member.
I was asked by the University, Wharton and my department to be on many committees. I thought this was just part of getting tenure, but the number of committees I served on compared to some of my male tenured colleagues was astonishing -- some served on no committees.
A black colleague experienced a similar situation. I give Penn and Wharton credit for this -- they wanted diverse representation in their government.
But I was getting very, very tired. Often, if I would say "No," a junior female colleague was asked. I would advise them to say "No," as well (except for some committees that might be useful to them getting visibility with senior faculty around the school, which is helpful in promotion decisions), and I would suggest a senior male's name to the department chairman.
I do have to state that I am very pleased with the effort Penn and Wharton have put into making sure women and minorities are comfortable at Wharton: the University Review of Female Faculty, the Wharton Gender Experience Review, creating an ombuds position and the wise actions of many of my department's chairmen over the past years.
I've been the faculty advisor to a number of clubs at Wharton and for many years was one of the few women teaching in Wharton's MBA core (required) courses. I heard stories weekly in my office from MBAs, undergraduates, doctoral students and female colleagues and staff about their difficulties with being a woman at Wharton.
Don't get me wrong. I love working with students and colleagues and discussing work or Wharton's culture. Many men of color also came to discuss such issues. I had amazing discussions and built an informal network of people concerned about making change in the direction of diversity and multiculturalism.
I've often thought about leaving Wharton, but I love Penn, Philadelphia and many of my colleagues and students. Also, I love a challenge. I won't be leaving... there is too much to do.
Judith Teller First female Editor-in-chief of The Daily PennsylvanianThe Wharton School 1971 When our class arrived at Penn, the women were required to wear skirts in all academic buildings. We had an 11 p.m. curfew on weekdays, 1 a.m. on weekends. The dorms were segregated by sex, and men were required to wear jackets to University dinners.
Most freshmen arrived at Penn in a virginal state -- we hadn't tried drugs, our parents had warned us away from liquor, and we thought it was likely that we would be virgins on our wedding night.
The movement spawned by The Feminine Mystique had not yet had a significant effect on campus, and we accepted the male-only honor societies as "tradition." Women were the second sex -- we were tolerated at the University, but not expected to become the movers and shakers in the economic life of the country.
Fast forward to 1970, and our world turned upside down, when Ohio National Guards turned guns on an unarmed crowd of Kent State anti-war student demonstrators, killing four and wounding nine.
The pictures were horrific, and there was the quick realization: this could have been any one of us -- bright-faced college students who were acting on their ideals.
By 1971, jeans and sneakers had replaced stockings and high heels. We no longer wore suits to football games. We had learned about sex, drugs and rock and roll. The dorms were coed, and the honor societies, Sphinx and Kite and Key, had voted to admit women members.
I was the first female editor-in-chief of The Daily Pennsylvanian, and, like many "first" pioneers, I wasn't sure how I felt about the fuss my appointment made. Did the world honestly think that the "other sex," as a group, did not have the talent, intelligence, skills and drive necessary to lead a 75-person organization? When you think about it, how insulting -- not to me, but to all women who were perceived as so marginal in their contribution to society that even a minor "first" was worthy of major news coverage.
We have made a lot of progress in the 30 years since our class graduated. Women, for the most part, are no longer asked during job interviews what their family plans are or why they think that have the right to "steal" a job from a well-deserving man. We are no longer asked how many words a minute we can type. We have broken into a variety of well-paid professions that were once deemed men only. We have been promoted to the top echelons of business, education and government --and our successes or failures are generally attributed to us as people, not as representatives of our gender.
Women graduating today for the most part are aware only vaguely of the barriers faced by the women of the "sixties generation." I for one do not deplore their lack of knowledge but applaud it -- they are not bogged down by the limitations which faced us in the past.
Fay Ajzenberg-Selowe Professor of Physics I have been enormously lucky. When I was 14, my parents and I escaped from France two months before we would have been handed over to the Nazis to face certain death. When I was 15, we were permitted to immigrate to the United States after going through Spain, Portugal and Cuba. We landed in New York with $1,000 -- and no funds waiting. Dad was over 50, but he was tough, smart and adaptable, and we made it.
I went to Michigan to become an engineer, as dad was, but switched to physics despite miserable grades; and then I went to Columbia to take graduate courses in physics. I failed four out of five courses, but I was entranced by my fellow students and by the field. A year later I was accepted at Wisconsin; my course work was still poor, but my two mentors there were great. Subsequently I worked for 21 years (mostly one continent apart) with my best friend, Tom Lauritsen of Caltech.
I had no great difficulties getting jobs and government support for my research because Tom Lauritsen and Willy Fowler, both professors at Caltech, aided me behind the scenes, and in 1955 I met Walter Selove to whom I have been married for 46 years. He was hired as an associate professor at Penn, while I became one at Haverford.
And then reality struck: in 1971 I came to Penn as a research professor, and when three non-minority males were to be given tenure, I proposed myself.ÿThe department overwhelmingly rejected me.
I put in a grievance to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission of the Federal government and to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission. A wonderful professor at the Law School defended my case, without charge. In 1973, the Human Rights Commission found a prima-facie case of gender discrimination and gave the University until Oct. 1, 1973 to give me a profesorship retroactive to July 1. Otherwise, the Commonwealth would take the University to court. On Oct. 1, this was done.
The after-effects in my department have been few. I am delighted to be a member of the department and of the University.ÿI have many friends in both.ÿHas discrimination disappeared? In my opinion, it has not. As of January 1, only 1.5 -- I am part time -- out of the 37 members of the department will be women.
