Women in the Academy

WOMEN IN SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

Hiromi Matsui - Thanks very much Cher. I just want to say before I start, that I think Cher's done an incredible job of organizing this conference and I want to pay tribute to her. It's been a huge amount of work and she really does deserve our public thanks for giving a forum so we can all talk. My name is Hiromi Matsui and I work in the Faculty of Applied Sciences. I am one of the fortunate people on campus who has a job where I can work at stuff that I really like and believe in which means that I work in Diversity and Recruitment and I actually get paid to do it. That's possible because I have the support of a very unusual Dean and I have to say that I am very grateful for this. It's a very empowering thing to be able to work at projects relating to diversity. Diversity is a fundamental principle that I believe in. Right from the word go I knew I was a different looking person, that I wasn't the same as others and that kind of shapes you in your thinking.

I just want to say a few words before I introduce the panel. We have been working with a number of different groups and right now one of our projects is with a group called CCWest. Canadian Coalition of Women in Engineering, Science and Technology. Helen is also on the working committee and we have a project that's called Women in SETT, Women in Science, Engineering, Trades and Technology. What we did was we received funding from funding from Status of Women to hold three regional consultations where women could get together in a forum and voice their concerns. We recently had a National Forum and leader's breakfast in Ottawa where we had very positive feedback from senior women and men in government, industry and academic associations. We were delighted. We had people at the assistant deputy minister level. We had Suzanne Fortier, who is the Vice President of Academic at Queens and we got encouraged in a big way. If you would like more details I am happy to talk to you afterwards or please talk to Helen during the break. I have given the url for the website where you can find out more about our project. It is a baseline foundation project and we are going forward with another phase and we so successful with fund-raising that we actually have enough money to pay someone to help us to develop a plan for next phase. We are excited. In collaboration with this, this all grew out of this CC West group which holds a conference every two years. The conference this year will be held in June at Brock University and here is the URL for that. I am happy to answer any questions. We will be having women from across Canada talking there and if I can finish my paper in the day before the deadline I guess we can talk about women in computing which is what I am going to talk about there.

Going on, I am really delighted today to have a group of women from the Faculty of Science and Applied Science with us. They are a very mixed group at different stages in their career. Starting at this end of the table, we have Leah Bendell-Young, who is a professor in Biological Sciences and I didn't bring all my notes but there was a big, long descriptor about Leah's research work. I know she does a lot about ecology and shellfish and she may mention that briefly. She holds a number of research grants; I think, we are very fortunate to have her here to talk about her research and her experiences as women in the Faculty of Science at SFU. Then we have a representative from Computing Science. Alma is a graduate student, a doctoral student in Computing Science who has experience working in industry and coming back to academia also while juggling family stuff. She's going to talk about that a bit. Meera Nair Patterson is a graduate student also, who has just completed her Masters in Communications. She is going on to do a doctorate and she is also juggling family responsibilities. At the end of the table, but not least is Atousa, who has also had experience in industry and in the academic setting. She has returned to SFU from industry because she finds that she really enjoys teaching. She also is a little bit late because she just came from her flamenco lesson which she sacrificing half of to talk to you today. I am going to turn it over to our panel. We want to keep the format here very informal so please feel free to raise your hand with any questions and we'll just go on from there.

Leah Bendell-Young - I'm going to speak a bit about my career path and how I got to the place where I'm at now as a professor. No one is more surprised than I. I think I am going to start from graduate studies when I started my career and tell a little bit about my personal story. I will also caveat this to say that I believe that everyone has their stories and I am not unique in this aspect. I think we all have to deal with insurmountable odds and I will tell you about mine and how it did lead me to where I am now.

I did my Masters at the University of Toronto and I was with a fellow named Harold Henry Harvey, I don't know if any of you are from Ontario, but he is considered the "father of acid rain". In Canada he had a large research program in place, and is considered a world class scientist. I started my Masters with him and he was my greatest mentor and support. He was a very good friend and he gave me solid support. So then I transferred into the PhD. in part because he believed I could do it. Not so much myself. I didn't have the confidence in me, but he did.

During undergrad, I'd met a young fellow by the name of Jeff Young and he was physicist, probably one of Canada's top physicist, just outstanding. I was married in '81 so I've been married 23 years. I married while I was an undergraduate student so we had a number of years together. Jeff took a position at the National Research Council in Ottawa and I decided to stay back and finish my doctoral studies. I commuted between Ottawa and Toronto for about five years. I figure that I spent about three months solid on some mode of transportation, plane, train or automobile, back and forth. I graduated in 1990 and was having just at a wonderful time. I really had no plans to become an academic. I just was having a really good time, doing my doctorate - best years of my life. I was diving in fresh water lakes in Ontario. It was just a lot of fun. I look back on those days with tremendous fondness. I did my post-doc with a lady by the Dr. Francis Pick. Fran was really neat too because when you think about role models and mentors and those moments in time; I remember being interviewed by her and she was behind her desk and I was talking to her. I was fairly young. I was still 29 at that point. I noticed that she had a picture of her daughter behind her and I did take note of that. She's a professor, she's got a daughter, and she's got a family. That was an important point.

I was fortunate enough to obtain scholarships throughout my graduate/post-graduate years. We are sailing through life and it is going quite well. Jeff and I were settling down into Ottawa life and then I had Cam;. He was just a beautiful 10.1 pound baby that was delivered through C-section. Two months after I had Campbell I still hadn't thought about where I was going to go on a career path. I knew that I enjoyed what I was doing; I was enjoying being in an academic environment and I enjoyed the company of people and the role I was in. It was just where I liked to be.

Two months after Campbell was born Jeffrey was diagnosed with a very rare form of tongue cancer. The cancer was the type that incurred in individuals that smoke and drank very heavily and usually they acquired it by the age of 65. This was right out of everybody's book. They didn't know what the heck was going on. I was dealing with this new baby and then being told that you might be a single mom. I was thinking, what do I do? What have I trained myself for? Academia. I went out and started applying for positions.

Jeffrey came through his ordeal with cancer, but a very changed individual; at that time he needed a change from his own work so he ended up accepting a position at UBC. We picked up and moved in January of '93. Me with an 18 month old, a husband going through issues related to his health and starting a new position and me starting a faculty position at SFU in 1993 in a less than hospitable environment. The approach was, when I think back, just go for it. Just do it.

The main thing that kept me going through it all was that I knew I could do it, I believed in myself and I knew that my abilities were there. I don't think I came up for air until 1998 when I was tenured and promoted. Then I started to look back at all that had happened over that period of time and started to take stock of where I was going and what I was doing. I was able to take sabbatical and then I came back feeling more confident. Cam was older. Jeffrey was well into his career.

We were back on track again. I was now an associate professor and the next set of battles dealt with the shellfish industry. Not intentionally, but it transpired by just raising the question, "Do you know your environmental boundaries?" The shellfish industry had gone out of their way to promote themselves as a green industry and I was challenging that green industry. Now I realize it's because I rocked the investors confidence in them as an industry. I didn't think about that, all I was asking was, do you know if you can do this and birds can access the beach too? Do you have an idea? The response of the industry was to set out their "hit men" on the messengers and I happened to be one of the messengers. They shoot messengers. I went through about a year and a half of being smeared by the industry. Then being backed by the university and the university was tremendous in their support and putting their institution behind me. This attack by the industry was in part why I again went for promotion so that the statement could be sent out to these people. You are not going to discredit her and she's a solid scientist, nationally and internationally respected by her peers.

I think a lot of these directions in my career path have been made by external events that have guided me through this path. It hasn't necessarily been me saying alright what do I do next? I just wait for the next thunderbolt. That's why I'm here as a professor and I think that the bottom line is, I don't think the attitude is to go out and craft a career. I think you do what you're good at doing and because you love to do it. If you do that and you know that you're good at it and you believe in yourself it's easy. You can cut through so much as long you've got those guiding principles at your side. And that is my story.

Hiromi Matsui - Is that an inspiration or what? I knew on paper as I had read all about Leah's accomplishments but this is quite amazing and an inspiration to all of us.

Alma Barranco-Mendoza - It's hard talking after the previous presentation. I'll tell you a little of my story. Currently, I'm a PhD. student in the Department of Computing Science and I am working under the supervision of Dr. Veronica Dahl, whom some of you that were here in the "Mixing family and career" talk heard from. She is a fantastic women and a true role model for myself.

I remember thinking, since being a very young kid, "I am going to work in the technology field". I was very supported on this by my parents, whom both are teachers. My dad is a physics professor. So all along I knew I was going to study something in engineering, although at the time I didn't think of computing science. But I was living in Mexico, which it's a little different from Canada in terms of gender issues. When I finally joined the Faculty of Engineering of Mexico's National University I had a technical diploma in software development and I was already working as a consultant since the age of 18. It was interesting; during the first meeting with my first client, who was a lawyer, he said, "I had contacted a consultant, why did they send a secretary?" That was the first of this type of battles that I had to deal with. Eventually, the system was done and implemented and they finally believed that I was indeed the consultant. Until then, they really believed I was a secretary. My first shocking experience going into the university in Mexico was that where there was a less than 0.1% female population in the Faculty of Engineering. The first lecture I attended had about 150 students, all male but me. The professor came in and said, "good morning, engineers... and lady". That set the stage of my first semester at the Faculty of Engineering in Mexico where I had to battle from sexual harassment, to professors not wanting to give me the grades I deserved, to going to complain about all this and the advisor telling me, "well you knew what you got into when you chose engineering. They're not used to dealing with women but you still chose this career." Finally, when I got a scholarship to come to Canada in my second semester I just thought, "Thank God". I went to do my B.Sc. degree at Trent University in Ontario and that was a whole different story for me. I found the most wonderful professors supporting me.

Moving along. During this time, I had continued working in industry. I was working with Du Pont Mexico doing some contract work remotely through the Internet all these years. Every summer, I went back to Mexico to work in the Information Systems department there. I did also my M.Sc. at Trent and I thought that was it; all along I thought I was going to be working only in industry, why would I need a PhD? But Dr. David Poole, my M.Sc. supervisor one day said to me, "You really should do a PhD." He also suggested I should apply for an NSERC scholarship. I thought I was not going to get it but I got talked into applying anyway. Well, I did get it. That pushed me to come to SFU and do my PhD in Computing Science but at the same time, I have continued working in industry as I really enjoy it. I started working on intelligent systems for diagnostics, but during this time, through the BC Applied Systems Institute, I met this man who was starting a software company for telecommunications. It sounded really exciting that there were only three people working there: Dr. Rizwan Kheraj was the CTO, a person in business development and somebody in marketing; but they didn't have anybody who could really build the technology. When they approached me with their problem and it was something that was very similar to the system I had been working on but instead of medical, focusing on a telecommunications problem; it sounded really intriguing to me. I took a leave from my PhD. and worked for three years in Knowledge Junction Systems where we developed this very neat system to sell and configure complex telecommunications systems. We grew this company from the four people who were at the beginning to almost one hundred people when, unfortunately, September 11 th 2001 came and all our investors freaked out. Our customers, who were the main telecommunication industries in the States, stopped spending money in software, so sadly this really great company, which was doing very exciting work, went under.

Just a few months before, I found out that I was pregnant and then, a few weeks later, I found out I was pregnant with twins. So that meant I had to be on bed rest for several months and in that time is when the company went under. It made me reevaluate my priorities and I thought, okay, industry is what I want to do because it is very exciting but I'm putting close to 70 hours of work per week. With kids, I don't think I can do this. Once my boys were born I realized that probably an academic career would also be interesting to me.

I do like industry but unfortunately in the industrial world, especially in the large corporations, is quite difficult to move up beyond a certain point. In Knowledge Junction I was the manager of product development and we were talking, before the company went under, about the possibility of becoming the VP of Research and Development. But then you have investors thinking this is a terrible risk to the company. Why? Because I was going to be a mother. They don't question the male employees of the company about their ability to do their jobs even if they are fathers but they question the females. Even though I had proven that I am more than capable. The core technology was my brainchild. I'd been managing over 50 people in my team and I believed I could continue doing this. It's quite interesting that within the software industry after a certain point it is as far you can go without having to fight for every additional step. I decided that I was going start my own company and that's where I am at the moment. I am in the process of looking for funding and investment for the bioinformatics company that my husband and I started, Infogenetica Bioinformatics. At the same time, I recently got appointed to the Faculty of Computing Science in Trinity Western University. I am going to start this fall as the first female faculty that department has had.

Meera Nair Patterson - This is a tough act to follow. Thank Hiromi. It is a pleasure to be here, I was extremely flattered when Hiromi invited me to join the Women in Science panel, especially in this company as is proving to be the case. I must confess that when I first tried to put some thoughts together for today, I started at my computer screen for literally hours. I felt very remote from my mathematics and my time in industry. My memories are quite sketchy. But what I do remember are years of isolation. So, I thought that is what I would focus on today. To do so, I am going to indulge in some time travel.

I take you back to myself around age 16/17 when I was first contemplating university studies. When I thought about doing a Bachelor of Science degree I had no specific plan of where I was going and what I wanted to do. I had no career aspirations. I had no idea of what life was going to be. In a vague way, I thought it would unfold--I would study at university, get a job, get married, and have children and so on and so forth. These things that you feel are out there on your horizon but in a very blurry sort of way. It struck me that I seemed to be a bit of an oddity because amongst all my friends they all seemed to know exactly what they wanted to do. There was one who was determined to be a speech pathologist, and she is. Another one wanted to be a doctor and she is. Another wanted to be an engineer and she has been extremely successful in engineering. For each of them their time at university was a necessary step to their overall plan of life. They had it all mapped out. All I could say is that I wanted to study mathematics and, invariably a question would come up. What could you do with a degree in mathematics? I would have to come up with "I don't know". And try to reassure myself that it's okay not to know. It's okay not to have this sequence of life that other people seem to be able to grasp. But that constant reassurance didn't completely obliterate the self-doubt that comes with that and I felt that I was planting seeds of mental isolation.

Then I began my mathematics degree and I found myself physically isolated. All my friends had gone to different universities. I recall that in my early years of mathematics female students were very much the minority. I believe it is better today. As I progressed into the upper division courses (which, remember we're talking mathematics here, it's not well populated to begin with) I would be the only female student. In fairness, I must say of my male colleagues of that time, they were extremely nice. I don't recall ever any sense of hostility or that I didn't belong there. And yet, I still didn't feel at ease. There was something missing, I think, that women bring to an environment that you really notice when there aren't any other women there.

Now I am going to move ahead a few years. After I got my Bachelor's degree and worked in industry for a while, in 1992 my husband and I started a small consulting service. Now please bear in mind that the climate of small business was quite different back then. Today, if you say you are self-employed nobody really blinks whereas in those days we got gaping stares. So much so, it almost was shameful. We didn't want to talk about how big our company was--that we were two people working out of our living room. We had this enforced cloak of secrecy around us which we could get away with because we never really saw our clientele. Our customers were members of academia and industry in Europe and in the United States. We only corresponded with them through telephone or fax machines. Remember again, this was a time was before email. Through a hefty investment in elegant business stationary we created this façade of respectability for our company. We felt that we had to build this impression of what we were, this conventionality if you will. But the façade extended not only to our customers but also to our vendors, our suppliers. There was no acknowledgement from the business sector, in that day anyway, that our needs might be different. Being different was a liability. If our vendors really knew how small our company was would they take our work seriously? Even so, there were a few occasions when we'd get the distinct impression that our order of image processing boards were shipped to somebody else. You know, despite the fact that we would have paid the deposit and gone through all the mechanics of the import/export license and still they didn't show up for us which meant, naturally, that we couldn't provide what we were supposed to do on time. We were very anxious not to cause waves, no disturbances, not to draw attention to ourselves. But again, this enforced isolation means that we had no support structure. If there was any out there we couldn't find it. We struggled through every new situation in isolation.

Now for me, the isolation took on a more personal dimension because early on in our business dealings I realized that we couldn't present ourselves as husband and wife. I staunchly clung to my maiden name. Because if we announced as husband and wife there was a, not so subtle, downgrading in the perception of my ability. All of a sudden I wasn't a business partner, I wasn't a productive member of the company, and instead I was the telephone receptionist--I answered the phone to justify drawing a salary (which is really quite ludicrous given that we had no salary for the first little while.) Now truthfully I did answer the phone, I also handled all our correspondence. I did all the accounting. I looked after legal affairs and I have to say when you are dealing with international business regulations, that's challenging. And, I carried out a consulting function--I had billable hours. But people did not look past the identity of wife. I recall a comment I heard from one of my parent's friends. They said, "Meera is helping her husband start his business." I felt that if our nearest and dearest were going to interpret my work in this way, there would be little respect forthcoming form clients. For more than five years no one knew we were married. It was not until after our daughter was born and I stepped away from day-to-day interaction with our clientele that we revealed our marital status.

Now I jump ahead a few more years. As Hiromi said, I just finished my Master's degree which feels very good and I am looking forward to starting doctoral work in the fall. My area of interest is in the realm of intellectual property. My central argument throughout my research is that a community is essential to fostering creativity and innovation. This element of community or lack thereof, I think, exacerbated the difficulties I encountered in both my undergraduate and my business years. My sense of women in any field, but for today's purposes, I'll say science and technology, is that they see the world through its communities. Women bring a sense of cooperation to their environment and will gauge the overall impact of their actions. If I may borrow from Ursula Franklin, I'd say that women maintain a holistic perspective all the while carrying out individual duty. Whether it's by biological nature or societal convention, I don't know. I think this awareness of the whole is a very positive contribution that women make. From my experiences I feel the challenge for women is that this contribution is deemed without value. It has no tangible dollar figure to put to it, no efficiency index. I think one of our best contributions is that we promote environments where others can flourish, but this contribution is both a blessing and a curse.

Atousa HajShirMohammadi - I will also tell you a little about myself and my background. I was born in Iran and I was raised there. I did my undergraduate and masters studies in electrical engineering both at Aswan (?) University of Technology in Iran. The reason I went into electrical engineering was that in Iran the high school curriculum is very close to what it is in France, I beleive. We have four different fields that we should choose at the first year of high school for the last four years for your diploma. They are Humanities, Math and Science, Biology and the fourth one is in Literature. Between math and biology, good students usually go to math and biology and that's very unfortunate to say but that's the way it. The demand for it is higher and you need a higher average to get in there. So it was by default that I would to one these and then I started in math and there was this urge for everyone to do medicine back home. But because there is a very horrendous university entrance exam in Iran in order to get to university math students who would study biology on their own would do very well in the university exam entrance and they would get into medicine easier. That's how I started going to math but then I realized I really enjoyed my course in math and then I tried doing biology on my own and my mom is a biologist and teaches biology. I realized that I am not able to learn what I am supposed to learn and I decided, that's it, and I'll go to engineering. I hadn't really tried all different fields of engineering and I cannot say that I went to engineering because I loved it but all I knew is that I liked the subjects, at least the background subjects of engineering. Once I went in, it was good. There was three of us, three girls in a class of 50 and in Iran after the Islamic revolution things were very much changed for four years, you will laugh at me, and it could differ from university from university, depending on cultures of each school but in my school, for four years we didn't even say hi to our boy classmates, even once. We would sit at the same class almost every day and we wouldn't even say hi to each other. Fortunately, the three of us were quite well self-contained and we didn't need them. We were okay. Sometimes they would steal our assignments from behind the prof's door and go copy from them. We had fun. Then I did my Master's there and then I came to Canada for my PhD. and I went to University of Waterloo. I never worked during these years except as just doing my research as a research assistant. So in Waterloo I was, again, a woman and a foreigner which is nothing unique in Canada, especially with the multicultural society that we have here. I did my Ph.D. in five years but after the fourth year, which was the year 2000, I got a two year limited term assistant professor position at the School of Engineering Science here at SFU. I stayed here for one year and I very much liked it except that I really felt, shamefully I should say, lonely. I had suddenly lost all my friends that I had back east, not lost them, but geographically lost them. I really didn't have a social life that I was looking for so I decided to make a change and I went to industry in Silicon Valley, California. I went there in 2001 and I had a good time there. Industry is nice but I knew that I really liked to teach. When another position for a lecturer came up here at SFU, again this year, I grabbed it. I applied for it and I got back here. So that's how I back at SFU and this time my family is here and I have found more friends here and I am doing my flamenco classes. Everything is going very well now. I haven't really prepared a formal presentation and I don't have very unique and different stories to tell you fortunately, or unfortunately, but you know how these emails go around - quotes from Dali Lama or things grandma taught me. I decided to write one of those for myself based on my experience and what I have been told by my friends who shared their experiences with me and these are very basic, nothing special. I am not sure if there is enough for everyone but I will just pass them around. I've really come to know that the key to success is, of course, do what you love, but also love what you do. We don't have all the time in the world to try every water and to see where is it that we really want to swim. Sometimes we just end up in different tracks of life like we heard here, just by external factors. It's very important that we try to love what we do and the return will be positive and we'll start this nice loop of, lets call it, positive feedback, which is not technically correct but which will help us achieve more and then we will love it more. As a women in engineering and science my advice really is that forget that you're a woman and you're underrepresented and things might not be fair and equal. For me, I really didn't, fortunately, I don't have any such experience because of being a woman feeling undermined. Part of it, I believe, is because I don't have much experience yet and part of it is because of ignorance and I really ignored the fact that I was a woman. When I walk in an interview room I really forget that I am a woman and they might be thinking "oh, she's a woman, should we hire her, should we not?" They might be hesitating about that. I just think that this is me and this is what I have to offer. I put it on table and I think when you go in with this attitude they also forget that you're a woman as far as my experience tells me. You're as good as anyone else except you're better because you are beautiful and you have the bits and you can dance. Like Meera says you can really contribute values that might not be measurable by dollars or efficiency, but there are values that exist and you should know that you have them. As a person, know your rights and believe in them and your capabilities and try to be at your best and in return demand the best and just believe that you deserve it and you'll get it. I don't know how many of you here are doing graduate work but I know at least two up here. My advice is to first, publish, publish and publish. It's really good to publish. You'll get to meet people. You'll get technical feedback from them, not just from your advisor but from different points of views. It looks great on your resume and gives you recognition and strengthens your presentation skills to verbal and presentations and, of course, you'll get to travel for free too. Another thing is that if you are doing your graduate work or planning to, at some point in time it is very likely that you will hate your work and your thesis and you don't want to look at it again and you feel nauseous just thinking about it. That's just normal and nobody else feels like that, only you. Back to the famous quote from, I don't whom, but I've seen it everywhere, "work like its not for money, love like you've never been hurt, and dance no one else watching.

Hiromi Matsui - Thank you very much Atousa. I think that we are very privileged to hear the stories that have been shared by our panelist. I would like to open the floor if anyone has questions of anyone up here I am sure that people would be happy to answer them. We have heard a lot of different stories and what struck me through much of this how much we have to brag about in terms of our strengths and how little we actually do sell and market ourselves and I'm beginning to think that women as a group, that's one area that we are very weak in. We tend to be too passive, too quiet, too much the facilitators and not taking the leadership and taking the praise for the leadership. Now we have a few exceptions and we have people like Ellen Balka who is taking leadership and going for it and this is great. It is a great role model and people like Leah taking on industry. I mean taking on industry when you're talking about shellfish and contamination, that's huge . I admire your courage Leah. I would like to open the floor to any questions people might have for any of the panelists.

Ellen Balka - Thanks to all of you, I have sister-in-law who is an engineer and she went back to engineering school when she was quite old. One of the things that she talked about was how one of the ways that she got along as a woman in engineering was she just acted like one of the guys. I wondered if people could talk about that. Was that a strategy that you were aware of, is that a strategy that you adopted. I mean, obviously in Iran it wasn't a viable strategy for cultural reasons but if people could just comment on that I think it would be quite interesting.

Atousa HajShirMohammadi - Actually, for me it was never a strategy that I adopted because I just liked to be feminine. No, but I do think when you are talking to guys, colleagues, engineer colleagues we don't really need talk about our hair or dress or things that are fun but just about very professional matters, like the industry or what's going on or in the news, stock market or whatnot. That's all I can say as far as trying to, it's not even trying to be like them, its just part of who I am or at the same time that I am a woman and I just show them that part but otherwise, no.

Meera Nair Patterson - I am going to continue on that same line, I have always been a little hesitant when people introduce that, you know, to fit in you have to be one of the guys. I am not even sure what that means so I don't know if I am going to get the right answer out here. I think in general, in any situation women, or I hope everybody, but you try to get along you try to get along with the people you're working with, with your studying and I don't know from my own perspective or my immediate friends, I don't think any of us went through personality shifts because we were not surrounded by women. But as you say, you try to engage the people around you with some commonality, with something that everybody can relate to. So that's my take on that.

Participant - If I could just give my two cents' worth, I had a chance to work with the association of professional engineers counsel and this is a, not too diverse, a group you know, a lot of civil, and structural engineers mainly male, and I have been working with that group for about six years. I have been interested in the extent to which they listened to my opinions, which are usually different from theirs, and they accept it with good grace and, in fact, now I am getting feedback that I give value to the counsel because I am good at being a conciliator and I listen. I don't think that I've been acting like one of the boys, I tell them I'm different and I tell them "oh, you're thinking like engineers" and they laugh and they take it but I think there is a richness that comes out of the different mix of ways of thinking. I think women can enrich a lot of different communities in that.

Alma Barranco-Mendoza - I never had to act like the guys. I enjoy being a woman. I feel very happy to be a feminine woman and the only thing that I know I have changed is when I started to go into board meetings and where I was the only female, at first I was very timid and I was giving them their space to talk. Then I realized I was never been able to talk because I started speaking and somebody would jump in. So I tried to project my voice and slap on the table when I a point to say and continued to interrupt somebody else and starting talking on top of him. That is the change because as women we tend to be a lot more polite than men and sometimes that doesn't work, especially when you have something important to say and if you are overly quiet and overly polite you point has to be ignored especially when you are talking only amongst men. So that was the big change for me but other than that I have never felt the need, and I had, as a personal point for myself, I tried to be as feminine as I like to be because I believe it is the only way as women in other representative fields who are going to be able to encourage other women who had this vision of computer scientist, geeky boy who with pimples, jeans and t-shirt all stuck up in the little lab twenty-four hours a day. We cannot break that image unless you start acting and behaving like a woman. I think now that you (81) in the field.

Leah Bendell-Young - Being primarily in Biology I don't think there is the same issues as you would get in engineering. But I will say that at one point I was at a conference down in Melbourne with a whole series of jewel(?) chemists, _____ chemists and I swear they all had beards. And one time, I wished I had a beard!

Cher Hill - Ellen's question reminded me, Hiromi what you were telling me about skirt day. I was wondering if you could address that?

Hiromi Matsui - Well, I used to work in Engineering Science and now I do work with female engineering students and one of the things that came up in some of the discussions, which relates exactly, trust Cher to make that good connection, it to what Ellen Balka is saying is that some of the female students said that they felt they got along easier with the fellows if they wore baggy, loose-fitting clothing that did not call attention to their bodies. We had this kind of comment from a number of the students and many of the students are very, very attractive and they do like being feminine but what some of them tried to do was have an event on a regular basis called "skirt day" where they all wore skirts and just enjoyed being female and sort of flaunting it and I think that's a healthy thing to do but whenever any group is in a real minority position, you know, there are social and cultural factors there about in-group, out-group power and they're very tricky and actually Kumari Beck in our audience, we worked with her on a project where she got to talk with some of the students in Applied Sciences and I think Kumari works in the Faculty of Education. I think probably I will turn the mike over to her to see if she would like to comment about the culture in Faculty of Applied Sciences in terms of diversity.

Kumari Beck - I would say amounted to culture shock. Yeah, a number of students, again back to the skirt day. It was about walking into engineering and being conscious for the first time, of what you are wearing and having to walk in and out of lecture halls and hearing comments which are not really directed at you but uttered in your hearing that relate to your body and your clothing. Comments related to spaghetti straps on your t-shirt, some as really vile as comments about whores and about being sluts and about being careful about how engineers need to be professional etc. So, it was really harsh to think that here we are in a so-called enlightened time and where the actual faculties boast about giving equal opportunity to women and yet when you talk to women in the privacy of their own circles that you still hear comments about how they really are conscious about their clothing, for example. A second theme that I heard from them is that whenever they got high grades in their marks it was something related to, oh the item must be copied or where did they have the time to do this? Or they must have gotten help from a professor. If they got really good Co-op placements it also related to the fact that they were girls and they could get what they wanted. So, as I said it was reality-check and an opportunity to see that there is an invisible life out there and unless we're willing to actually name them and be willing to speak up and have opportunities, and again, to realize that for those young women it was really difficult to even be identified as making those comments in public. I hope we'll be able to give voice to those kinds of situations.

Hiromi Matsui - Kumari, could you just mention about the racial thing when you were asked a question in the class

Kumari Beck - As part of, Hiromi and I involved in a project to do with inclusive teaching and changing the cultural of Applied Sciences, perish the thought! As I walked in very naively to a first engineering class and did a one and a half hour, you know a few little activities and sort of discussion thing going on around issues around diversity and difference. At one time, I asked a bunch of questions and asked people to stand up if they identified with the question. One question that I thought would get almost everybody standing up was I asked, if any of you have felt like you've been in a minority situation or a minority group at any time of your life growing up, could you please stand. The only people who stood, and this is a lecture theatre with about 140 students, the majority of whom, I would say, of a different ethnic background, I had eight white boys standing up. I was in such shock and there was a sprinkling of women and there were these masses of different faces so I thought, oh maybe people didn't understand my question. I kind of elaborated and the same eight guys stood up. So I kind of, you know, out of curiosity said how do you call yourself, can you explain that? I passed the mike around to each of them. The first guy said, "well, can't you see, take a look around. I am a minority". It went on to other such comments and I, of course, came back and said, well, you sure aren't talking like you are and throughout some really hard questions about what that meant and what silence and not etc. Again there is a lot of work to do and I also when up to the women afterwards and asked I was really curious, why didn't you stand up? Some of them were shy and they did not want to draw attention to the fact that they would actually identify publicly with being in a minority group.

Kathryn Alexander - I am Kathryn Alexander from the Centre for Writing and Learning and I did my work in education and a lot of interdisciplinary areas and I'd be interested in how Applied Sciences and Sciences have included, I would say, feminist, or you know, analyses of their fields in their general programs like are there courses that look at gender in your areas and have a history of mathematics or history of science that would be considering issues around women's historical participation in the field. I think it is really interesting because I am working in a cross-disciplinary centre and I know that disciplinarily creates boundaries for how students get exposed to different kind of thought and different kinds of ideas so students in humanities and social sciences have access to, you know, sociology and cultural anthropology or women's studies or literary studies that may be taking up these concepts. Where the students who are choosing to be in applied sciences and sciences don't have access to those conceptual frames. I am wondering if there is any kind of ways at looking at your programming I know the breadth requirement is coming through by 2006 we are going to be having quantitative reading and writing across the curriculum and breadth in our programs. I think in terms of expanding the band width of diversity and critical analysis that we need to be thinking about creating these kinds of courses. We have faculty in Women's Studies and we have faculty in Education, and we have faculty in Sociology and Anthropology and Psychology that have been looking at this. Our students don't have access to that unless it is structured into their programs and unless it's actually available to them. I think that would be really, really important. I am just putting that out for consideration.

Leah Bendell-Young - I'm on the Breadth committee with K.C. Bell and your point in terms of it being incorporated into the program and it will be and students will have the opportunity to take courses, well they have to take, I think its 12 credits now as the breadth requirement and addressing issues that you just raised in terms of being interdisciplinary and being encompassed more than just a narrow focus upon field. In terms of, you asked a question about whether women in science or applied science have an opportunity to actually see the historical context of women in science. Short answer is no, there is no course to do that, but that is not to say that women don't seek out that information on their own and I know that there is always articles and always information available, for example, on science and nature which are always trying to bring those issues into focus for women and just to the scientific community in general. People stay on top of this and people read those. I think that people do inform themselves on the historical aspect of it and I think it is interesting. One of the ideas we bounced off and wanted to do was to have a seniors women's forum and we wanted to bring six of the top female academics in Canada here to SFU. Older people, we are talking about Ursula Franklin and (inaudible) and so on. For them to come and talk to younger women about their history and their life in science. It never got off the ground because we never had the time to do it. But I think something along those lines will certainly be, I think, amazing. It would also be a neat story to package those six together and say this is how premier female scientists are made up here in Canada.

Hiromi Matsui - I just wanted to mention, that the program that Barb Winston has started downtown, what's the name of it? Dialogue at the Dialogue Centre. I know both students from, female students from Computing and Engineering have taken those courses and they are very different from engineering or computing. I think they have enjoyed them thoroughly because it gives them a breadth, just exactly as you're talking about, Kathryn. Certainly, within both the curriculum of computing and engineering there are electives and students take things but usually they taking kinesiology, economics or philosophy and I haven't heard of that many taking women's studies but you do get the odd exceptional students who finish a degree of engineering and want to do one in contemporary arts or, you know, a combined thing. Actually, the students are pretty amazing and while their curriculum may be relatively narrow, you find they have incredible range of personal interests just like the flamenco dancing kind of thing.

Meera Nair Patterson - Again, my undergraduate time was so long ago, I don't think I can draw from that too well but I do recall, as you say, we do have some allowance for electives but if you are doing a major and a minor your electives are usually taken up trying to balance out those two programs. The luxury of indulging in some extra reading or looking into the humanities, there is simply no time and you can't surrender your precious GPA to it. You dare not take something that could bring your GPA down. I am thrilled if that is happening in the university where better undergraduate curriculum is being devised where there is a requirement for a humanities component within the sciences. It can only help to make better scientists.