Title IX’s most visible impact has been in athletics, but the law dramatically changed the academic universe for women, too. Evelynn Hammonds was in the first wave of women to break through the barriers women interested in science had faced.
Born in 1953 in Atlanta, Evelynn was intrigued with science and the physical world from the very beginning.
“As a young child, I was always very interested in science,” she said. “I had all these different kinds of science kits — I had a chemistry set, I had a microscope, I had all kinds of building kits, and it just spurred in me an interest in wanting to understand how the world worked.”*
In high school, Evelynn’s interest in physics emerged. A National Merit Scholar, Hammonds attended Spelman College, where she entered a joint engineering program with Georgia Institute of Technology. She also took physics courses at Morehouse College. She graduated in 1976 with degrees in physics and electrical engineering.
Evelynn got her first chance to work in a physics lab in Bell Labs’ Summer Research Program for Women and Minorities. After graduation, she began a PhD program at MIT, but instead of finishing, went to work as a software engineer for five years. She completed her PhD at Harvard in the history of science.
Making inroads
Today, she is Professor of the History of Science and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard. She was a dean at Harvard for five years, but returned to teaching in 2021.
Women like Evelynn are paving the way for women in the sciences. Many of the degrees women seek today are in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields. In 1970, two years before Title IX was passed, women comprised just 8 percent of STEM workers. Today, that number is 27 percent.
But men still dominate: men make up half of all U.S. workers, but 73 percent of the STEM workforce. Engineering and computer science — two of the most lucrative STEM fields — remain heavily male. Only 21 percent of college engineering majors and 19 percent of computer science majors are women.
It’s the culture, stupid
Part of the problem is a culture that is unwelcoming, and even hostile, to women. Evelynn found that to be true as early as her college years.
“You’re in a culture where, on any given day, somebody might think you were a secretary, or a janitor, or anything but a graduate student in physics,” she said. “It was made very clear to us by some people that we didn’t fit, that we didn’t belong, that we were only there because of affirmative action, that we could never be successful. We were constantly finding those attitudes.”**
Because of that, Evelynn authored her first published paper as E.M. Hammond, so people couldn’t tell she was a woman or African American. She was following in a long line of female scientists who have had to fight for recognition. Women in earlier generations had always been victims of the culture.
“I still remember asking my high school guidance teacher to take a second year of algebra instead of a fifth year of Latin,” said Nancy Grace Roman, the first female executive at NASA. “She looked down her nose at me and sneered, ‘What lady would take mathematics instead of Latin?’”***
What’s to be done
Evelynn and others are working to erase the hurdles that still exist for women in STEM fields. Some possible fixes: universities should diversify their faculty and courses should teach social issues, journals should reject research that doesn’t consider gender and sex, and Title IX should be used as a lever to force institutions to comply.
“We’ve fought our fight as my generation, but we’re going to have to keep fighting for a while,” she said.† “We have a lot of work to do. The attitudes and the culture haven’t changed as much as they absolutely have to.”
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* Jennifer Berglund, “Challenges and Change for Women of Color in Science – A Conversation with Evelyn Hammonds, Chair and Professor of the History of Science,” Harvard Museum of Sciences and Culture (August 20, 2020).
** Caitlin McDermott-Murphy, “Women in STEM need more than a law,” Harvard Gazette (June 20, 2022).
*** Report: “The STEM Gap: Women and Girls in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics,” American Association of University Women. Nancy Grace Roman (1925-2018) is known as the “Mother of the Hubble Telescope” for her role in planning the telescope.
† “Challenges and Change” and “Women in STEM.”