YSM Issue 87.4

FINDING
EQUILIBRIUM
expanding the network of
female scientists at Yale
By Tessa Adler // Art by Audrey Luo
As a young girl, Joan Steitz didn’t plan on becoming a
scientist. She didn’t imagine doing research. She didn’t
anticipate making a breakthrough that would illuminate
how RNA is processed in early stages. She didn’t foresee a
career in science because she had never seen a female scientist
before. But her effort and successes repeatedly earned the
respect of important figures in science.
These people included her lab
director, Dr. James Watson, who
earlier had discovered the doublehelical
structure of DNA. In 1970,
Steitz became a faculty member in
the Molecular Biochemistry and
Biophysics Department at Yale.
Within ten years, she had discovered
an entirely new kind of small RNA
and showed how it is involved in
cutting out the unused portions of
messenger RNA, and piecing back
together the parts that need to be
kept.
For decades, Steitz didn’t question
the disparity between men and women
in her field. “It was always men, and
few women, and that’s just the way it
was, and I didn’t think about it,” said
Steitz. That changed in 2005, when
she co-authored a report documenting
the gender bias in sciences.
Dr. Vivian Irish, a developmental
geneticist who researches flowering
plants, is another female scientist at
Yale who has witnessed changes in
the gender balance over time. For 21
years, she’s worked for the Molecular,
Cellular, and Developmental Biology
Department at Yale. She works
mostly with a white flower species
called Arabidopsis thaliana, and seeks
to discover the patterning events in
development that give rise to floral
organs. “When I was a graduate
student, there was a very different
perception of women in science,”
said Irish. But she got lucky: while
conducting her graduate work at
Harvard, Irish found herself working
in a lab that had an abnormally large
percentage of women. “Once a
number of very bright and capable
women started working there, it made
it more attractive for more women to
join the group,” she explained.
Every year, Steitz has made it a goal
to try to teach one of the three core
courses that undergraduates majoring
in MB&B are required to take. If she
didn’t, most MB&B undergraduates
would graduate from Yale without
having been taught by a single female
professor in their field of study. “For
decades, I’ve been the only woman
who teaches these undergrads, just
because that reflects the complexion
of our department,” she said.
Steitz has been at Yale for 44 years,
but she continues teaching. I asked her