My daughter graduated from the University of Michigan yesterday with her master’s degree in Biological Chemistry. I believe she is the first person in her direct line of descent to obtain an advanced college degree. I graduated from the University of Michigan in 1995 with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, certified to teach secondary grades 7-12 in mathematics and French. During my five years of teaching, I attended Grand Valley State University and obtained 21 credits toward my master’s degree in education, but after my first child was born, I never went back to finish the degree – but I never intended to and was only taking classes to keep my certificate current. My mom graduated from high school in 1970 and never went to college. My dad holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from General Motors Institute, now Kettering University. Three of my four grandparents graduated from high school (my grandma Nedra was forced to quit high school during the depression to support her family after her father was laid off from his job with the railroad), but none of them went to college. Of my great-grandparents, only one of them obtained any education beyond high school at all – my great-grandfather Vergil, who was a schoolteacher. He attended what was known at the time as a “normal school,” basically a teacher training academy.

 

My husband’s father was a high school graduate and a veteran of the United States Marine Corps. He took some college courses by correspondence during his service years, but didn't obtain a degree. My husband’s mother did not graduate from high school. My husband’s grandparents were blue collar laborers or farmers without any advanced education. Their parents, who were born between 1851 and 1881, were too much concerned with basic survival to consider anything beyond basic elementary education, and that only when their families could spare them to attend school.

 

And so our daughter, at the age of twenty-one years, embarks on her career as a scientist in a world that is only just beginning to see women in scientific or technical fields at all, and in a world in which the current government regime is attempting to force out women, people of color and other historically oppressed individuals from scientific, technical, military and many other fields. She has a guaranteed job in the laboratory in which she conducted her graduate research for the next few months, and a good lead on a longer-term job in another on-campus laboratory as a structural biologist. Until the current government regime took office, she had several good job leads in biochemical industry leaders. These leads dried up because both public and private research firms lost their funding or are scheduled to lose their funding, or because they cannot be sure how they might be funded in the near or distant future. Any woman or person of color can lose their job nowadays simply because by being a woman or person of color they can be accused of securing the job through diversity, equity and inclusion programs – regardless of whether they have been doing the job capably or even superlatively for many years.

 

Some good news is that we are hearing about scientific research firms in Canada and Scandinavian nations that are aggressively recruiting American scientists, taking advantage of the current regime’s backward and vindictive policies. If my daughter has to take a job in another country to meet her career goals, it will be difficult for all of us – but it is something we must keep our minds open about.

 

We have always encouraged our daughter to think big, to know that she can do and be whatever she wants – and she has become a capable scientist with influence in the fields of (among others) biochemistry, medical research, aerospace science and aviation. Like everyone else who enters any field at a young age, she has a big job ahead of her to convince employers that she does know what she is doing.

 

I too was encouraged to think big – for a girl. My parents, whether they meant to or not, did instill traditional gender roles in us. My brother was taught to mow the lawn and my sister and I to do dishes and clean bathrooms. If we asked (and we did), my sister and I were given the opportunity to learn to do yard work and help with car maintenance, but our brother was not typically expected to do laundry, dishes or cleaning. My sister became a forester (a STEM field) and I became a high school teacher of mathematics (a STEM field), and our brother became a mechanical engineer (a STEM field). My elementary and high school education was heavily lacking in a science background. My fourth-grade teacher didn’t like science, so she didn’t teach it. Then my fifth-grade teacher wasn’t really interested in science, so she didn’t teach it either. By the time I was assigned to a sixth-grade science class, I had no early background in the field and even less interest. My freshman Biology teacher retired at the end of my freshman year. My sophomore Anatomy & Physiology teacher retired at the end of my sophomore year. When I took chemistry as a junior in high school, my quite excellent instructor retired halfway through the school year and the district hired someone without a solid science background to finish the year. My senior year physics course was poorly taught by the track coach. I was colossally unprepared for college level science classes, and after a first-semester astronomy course awoke my interest in science for the first time in a decade, I briefly considered becoming an astronomer - until an introductory physics course kicked my butt so hard I abandoned the thought and became a mathematician.

 

My mom was encouraged to finish high school, but she took traditionally female-oriented courses. She learned to type and do shorthand (a foreign language of a sort); she took a lot of home economics courses. She took two years of algebra, but did not take geometry or other higher level math classes. At the same high school, my dad took mathematics courses through calculus and studied Latin. Mom sewed her own wedding dress and was married six months after graduation. In fact, she often tells that she was third in her class – not first or second because her English teacher, knowing she planned not to attend college, gave a higher grade to her classmate Pam McCoy, who was enrolled in college after high school. Mom had the last word, though. She worked as a bookkeeper for an upscale women’s clothing store after graduation, helping to support my dad while he finished college. Pam, on the other hand, got married two months before my mom did, got pregnant, dropped out of college, and never went back. My mom later worked as a teacher’s aide in the gifted program in our school district, and then as an administrative assistant for an automotive industry supplier before teaching herself geometry to design and make quilts and teach quilting classes. My mom’s sisters were a small business owner and a customer service manager in the photofinishing industry. But mom’s brothers were the president/CEO of a photofinishing company, a medical doctor, and an attorney/law professor. Women of their generation are successful when they are wives and mothers; whatever small contribution they make to the family finances is a side issue.

 

My paternal grandma finished high school, was trained as a pharmacist by the Navy, worked as a receptionist in a doctor’s office, and after her children were grown, drove a forklift for an automotive supplier before her retirement. My maternal grandma was forced to drop out of high school at the age of 16 years to work in a general store to support her family. She worked both before and after her marriage at the age of twenty-one in a wire factory. She did the hard work of caring for farm animals her entire life – from horses and cows when she was younger to cats and dogs as she grew older. But neither of my grandmas ever considered an advanced education for themselves.

 

The opportunities our girls have today are probably still greater than I had thirty years ago – but they are not as great as they were even one year ago. We must continue in our communities to make sure our girls can dream as big as our boys, to provide the same support and open the same opportunities for young women as we do for our young men.