ucceeding in a Man's World 



By C.R. Edgerton 



A scientist is a frizzy-haired Caucasian 

 man in a bleached lab coat hovering over 

 a beaker of bubbling liquid, right? 



Wrong, except that most working sci- 

 entists are Caucasian men. 



In the last decade, women have made 

 great strides in banking, construction 

 and dozens of other vocations formerly 

 dominated by males. 



Not so in research science, where only 

 a few women have broken into the ranks. 

 Some folks are wondering why. 



Sea Grant researchers Celia Bona- 

 ventura and JoAnn Burkholder have 

 some answers based on their own per- 

 sonal pursuits of science. 



"The idea is that females are not en- 

 couraged to take risks in our society," 

 says Bonaventura of the Duke University 

 Marine Lab in Beaufort. "And only if a 

 person is willing to take risks can they 

 advance new things and be on the fore- 

 front of new ideas." 



Both Bonaventura and Burkholder, a 

 botanist at North Carolina State Univer- 

 sity, are respected scientists. As Sea 

 Grant researchers, they have made im- 

 portant contributions to our knowledge 

 of the marine ecosystem. Along the way, 

 they've encountered barriers because they 

 are female. 



For Burkholder, the pressure started at 

 home. 



"My mom tried to get me to be a sec- 

 retary," she says. "But I knew what I 

 wanted to do. When I was 15, I read an 

 article about the nuisance algae that was 

 threatening the Great Lakes. My interest 

 was aroused, and I never looked back. I 

 really wanted to make a difference." 



Her father became her mentor. He 

 taught her that being a woman should 

 not stop her from doing what she 

 wanted to do. 



"My father is part Indian," she says. 

 "He had a great reverence for the woods 

 and for conservation. I remember him 

 showing me bluebirds when I was four 

 and helping me build a butterfly collec- 

 tion when I was five. Through him, I 



developed that same reverence for the 

 outdoors and that has guided me ever 

 since." 



But from her first job in science as a 

 junior in college, the fulfillment of her 

 career goals has not been simple. 



Her first important research position 

 was "extremely difficult," Burkholder 

 says. "I was harassed by my male counter- 

 parts in a lab. I had to ignore it and go 

 with the flow." 



But sometimes she would lash out at 

 men who exhibited what she calls a 

 "knee-jerk reaction" to a woman in a 

 research position. 



"That was not good for me profession- 

 ally," she says. "Now I'm trying to be 

 more professional, gentler. I will let 

 them know that it's not the kind of 



But her father-in-law's influence alone 

 didn't bring Bonaventura into the scien- 

 tific limelight. Like Burkholder, she en- 

 countered those who believed only men 

 could be scientists. 



She says she "never did press the point 

 of being female" to her male counterparts. 

 Instead, she let her work speak for her. 



"When people saw I wasn't going to 

 be confrontive, there weren't any prob- 

 lems," she says. "I believed that the 

 negative repercussions of being defensive 

 was not a good way to proceed. 



"I counted on my ability to make the 

 science clear in every grant proposal I 

 wrote," she says. "I was not offensive or 

 defensive. I just presented my ideas and 

 insights as science. It worked, and I 

 succeeded." 



Celia Bonaventura 



thing I will accept, and then I'll go on 

 with my work, which is the most impor- 

 tant thing." 



Bonaventura's major role model and 

 mentor was her husband's father, an 

 Italian physician who immigrated to 

 America in the 1930s to flee the political 

 repression of Benito Mussolini. 



"He was a political rebel with a con- 

 viction that individuals do make a dif- 

 ference, whether they're male or female," 

 Bonaventura says. "I was a junior in high 

 school when I first met him, and he in- 

 fluenced me a great deal." 



For Bonaventura and Burkholder, the 

 risks have paid off. Both have successful 

 careers and, at the same time, have been 

 able to step away from the microscope to 

 pursue satisfying personal lives. 



But many females never get a chance 

 to test scientific inclinations. 



For most, the stifling of interest comes 

 in junior high school. Recent studies 

 have shown that male and female stu- 

 dents show the same interest in math 

 and science until they begin to take 

 courses that require a certain amount of 

 risk-taking. It is here that females fall by 



