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50 Unorthodox journey to statisticsbut that turned out to be a problem. At that time in my Brooklyn publichigh school, and probably at the other public high schools in New York City,boys were automatically enrolled in mathematics in the first semester of 9thgrade, and girls in a language of their choice. That left me with only 3 1/2semesters, and course availability made it impossible to take more than onemathematics class at a time.This was just one example of the stereotyping, not to speak of outrightdiscrimination, against women in those years, especially in mathematics andscience. In fact, Brooklyn Technical High School, specializing in the science–technology–engineering–mathematics (STEM) area, was restricted to boys atthat time. (It became co-ed in 1972.) My interview in JEBS discusses severalother such experiences.I solved the problem by taking intermediate algebra as an individual readingcourse, meeting once a week with a teacher and having problems assigned,along with a geometry course. In that way I managed to take all four yearsoffered.I started college (Swarthmore College) as a Chemistry major, but began toconsider other possibilities after the first year. Introductory psychology waschosen in my second year to satisfy a distribution requirement. In the introductorylecture, the professor presented psychology as a rigorous science ofbehavior, both animal and human. Although some of my fellow students foundthe lecture boring, I was fascinated. After a brief consideration of switchingto a pre-med curriculum, I changed my major to psychology.In graduate school at Stanford University I received a doctorate in psychology.I enjoyed my psychological statistics course, so took an outside concentrationin statistics with several courses in the mathematics and statisticsdepartments.There was then much discrimination against women in the academic jobworld. During the last year at Stanford, I subscribed to the American PsychologicalAssociation’s monthly Employment Bulletin. Approximately half theadvertised jobs said “Men only.” Of course, that was before overt sex discriminationwas outlawed in the Civil Rights act of 1964. After an NSF Fellowship,used for a postdoctoral year working in mathematical psychology at IndianaUniversity with one of the major contributors to that field (William Estes),I got a position in the Department of Psychology at the University of Kansas,thankfully one of the more enlightened departments.5.2 Becoming a statisticianItaughtpart-timeduringseveralyearswhilemythreechildrenweresmall.There were no special programs for this at the time, but fortunately my departmentallowed it. There was no sabbatical credit for part time, but finally,