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Saturday, February 04, 2012
Feature: June 2008
First Ladies
Pioneering women with local ties blaze the trail
Story by Nancy Brand Wards
Some might be tempted to call 2008 the Year of the Woman. Women have taken extraordinary leaps in U.S. politics this year. Karen Bass became the first black woman elected to lead a legislative house when she became speaker of the California Assembly. Nancy Pelosi isn’t just the first woman to hold the job as speaker of the House of Representatives, she’s also the highest-ranking woman in the country’s history, second in line after Dick Cheney in succession for the presidency. And this year, Hillary Clinton became the first woman to win a presidential primary with her victory in New Hampshire.
More than two decades after the Wall Street Journal coined the term “glass ceiling,” women have made huge professional gains. In 2006, women comprised 51 percent of managers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Yet top jobs across the board continue to elude women. According to the 2007 UC Davis Study of California Women Business Leaders, women make up 10.4 percent of the directors and executive officers of the 400 largest companies in the state.
And the disparity between salaries is widely documented. For example, education is a female profession historically. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women outnumber men 2.5-to-1 in education, training and library occupations. However, women earn about 81 percent of men’s salaries in postsecondary teaching, according to the American Association of University Professors.
While the glass ceiling hasn’t shattered yet, some women have made some serious cracks in it, including the following four women who helped blaze the trail with their own firsts, right here in the Capital Region.
Sethanne Howard
First woman to earn a physics degree at UC Davis
In her book about women in science, “The Hidden Giants,” Sethanne Howard tells the story of Vera Rubin, the famous astronomer who broke the “toilet” barrier at Palomar Observatory. Until 1963, women were excluded from the all-male “monastery.” The rationale was printed at the top of Palomar’s application, which Rubin filled out: “Due to limited facilities, it is not possible to accept applications from women.” Someone changed the period after “women” to a comma, and then scrawled “usually” in pencil. Rubin’s proposal was accepted, and when she arrived for her tour of the observatory, it included a stop at the infamous toilet.
Rubin may have paved the way for women in astronomy. But Howard, 64, insists she never experienced discrimination during her 40-year career. “There have always been women in astronomy. Men didn’t get in your way.”
That doesn’t mean it was easy to be the first woman to earn a physics degree at UC Davis in 1965. Today, the proportion of women in physics remains small. For example, five of the 70 physics faculty at MIT in 2006 were women — a percentage far lower even than other sciences.
In the 1950s and 1960s there wasn’t a lot of encouragement for a woman interested in physics. For Howard, it was more like: “Nobody said, ‘No.’ One of my professors did tell me that I wasn’t wasting his time because I could always teach my children math.”
At UC Davis, Howard says she was considered “a little strange.” The boys refused to study with her, “but that was a blessing because I had to really learn the subject.”
Howard’s love affair with the universe began at age 6 when she read a Little Golden Book on the stars. After graduating from UC Davis, she started her career as an astronomy assistant at Lick Observatory. At age 25 she picked up a master’s degree in nuclear physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She continued to work as an astronomer, returning to graduate school at 42 and earning a doctorate in astrophysics from Georgia State University. Over the years, Howard also worked for NASA, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the National Science Foundation.
Her research specialty is interacting galaxies, and she identifies her greatest discovery as defining the shape of the Whirlpool Galaxy, also known as M51. Using a protractor, ruler and compass, she unwound the galaxy to show for the first time that its companion galaxy, NGC 5195, formed M51’s structure.
What she’s most proud of, however, is her work to digitize and colorize the 1910 apparition of Halley’s comet. That image graced the covers of Time and Look magazines as the comet made its return approach in 1986, and found its way onto a 1-rupee stamp in India. A rupee is roughly equivalent to 2.5 cents.
“It’s a silly thing to be proud of,” says the woman whose résumé includes more than 30 academic publications, 50-plus abstracts, numerous conferences and full-length books. “But I just thought that was neat — I’m worth a rupee.”
Howard recently retired as chief of the Nautical Almanac Office at the U.S. Naval Observatory. She was the first woman to hold that position. Although she plans to slow down in retirement, Howard continues to tap into the research computers at the University of Alabama from her Maryland home to work on astronomical analyses with colleagues. She’s also looking forward to traveling the country, continuing to lecture on her favorite subject: women in science.
Lauren Hammond
First black woman elected to Sacramento City Council
Ask Lauren Hammond what she thinks about being the first black woman elected to Sacramento’s City Council, and she says: “It was just hard to believe that in 1997, I was the first African-American woman to be elected. It’s been a century and a half. I was humbled.”
That’s the thing about the 52-year-old 5th District councilwoman: She speaks her mind. And sometimes she says things people would rather not hear. For example, injustice gets her going.
With little prompting, she’s likely to jump up, pull out a 6-foot map detailing the poverty in Sacramento and point out that women represent the poorest districts in the city — by far. Hammond’s own district is one; it includes Oak Park, Brentwood, Carleton Tract, Curtis Park and Colonial Heights. “Some of the issues in the urban core are just not as important to people,” Hammond says. “It takes longer to make them a priority.”
It took 10 years, but in 2007 the city created the Office of Youth Development to focus resources and attention on Sacramento’s youth, helping them find work and offering solutions to gang violence.
“Now, we’re looking at what we can do at the street level. We’re talking to OGs — do you know what that is?” Hammond asks, referring to “original gangsters,” the slang term. “We’re trying to get them involved in talking to the kids.”
Shifting direction, Hammond says: “You know what the young people want? A job. They’re hungry,” she says, tearing up while telling a story about a man who first got into trouble as a child, stealing food for his siblings. “You hate to think of anyone who’s hungry, but when it’s a kid … ”
Hammond is also proud of her success in bringing her neighborhoods “their fair share of services” in her first year as an elected official, which involved more code enforcement for older buildings, streetscapes and façade improvements for businesses.
Even before her election to the City Council, Hammond established herself in government. She worked 22 years as a telecommunications contract administrator for the state Senate and as the Senate coordinator for the Americans with Disabilities Act, before turning her efforts full time to the City Council. As a councilwoman, she sits on regional boards for transportation and air quality.
She won re-election in 2006 by more than 76 percent, adding another four-year term. But a decade after breaking her first barrier, Hammond still finds that gender can be cumbersome to progress.
“Sometimes it takes longer to earn respect because you’re a woman,” she says. “My candor is a challenge. If you’re strong-willed and outspoken, you’re always the ‘B.’ Use the same terms for a man, and he’d be described as a leader.”
What can a woman do? Hammond suggests a change in attitude. When confronted with life’s unfairness, she says: “You just have to deal with it. Take a timeout. Then come back, and find another way to reach your goal.”
Kathryn Hirst
First woman to work as a cable splicer in Northern California
Kathryn Hirst’s start in telecommunications more than three decades ago wasn’t unusual. She landed a job in 1970 as a long-distance operator for Pacific Bell. But that’s about all that’s typical about the rest of Hirst’s career path.
As an operator, Hirst earned $99 a week. That wasn’t enough. Not when men in the warehouse pulled in $200. Her boyfriend’s parents owned an earth-moving equipment hauling business, and she’d learned to drive. So in 1971, she started work in a Pacific Bell warehouse driving a forklift and truck. When she tried to get an even higher-paying job with the operating engineers in Rancho Murieta, however, she was told “absolutely no women allowed.” Undeterred, she learned to climb telephone poles and splice cables — those guys earned $400 a week — and in 1972, became the first woman in the region on the job.
“I wanted to prove that we can do the job, that gender isn’t important,” Hirst says. “If I didn’t carve that path, who would? I just felt it was something I needed to do.”
Pole-climbing school was tough. Hirst, 57, hasn’t forgotten the long-sleeved shirts, Levi’s and hooks strapped to her boots — all in the July heat of Sacramento.
“My pole-climbing instructor was a combination of George C. Scott and Paul Newman,” Hirsh says. “He drove you so hard. He liked me, though. He told me: ‘I’ve never seen anyone take to a pole like you.’”
After she completed the course and moved on to cable-splicing school, the Scott/Newman clone approached her with a challenge: “There’s a guy out there from Roseville Telephone who says he can ‘beat any broad around.’ Get your belt and hooks on. I’ve got 50 bucks on your ass.”
So Hirsh raced him. “I was down on the ground before he got half way through,” she says, laughing, but still proud more than 30 years later.
Hirst worked as a cable splicer, installing telephone systems for new commercial buildings and rerouting existing circuits in Stockton for five years. It was dirty and dangerous: exposure to toxic chemicals, climbing poles as tall as 55 feet and working in manholes that might as easily be filled with rats as undetectable leaking natural gas. Sexual harassment once went as far as a physical attack on the job.
At first Hirst thought it was a joke when she was promoted on April Fools’ Day 1978 to run a crew of seven men and two women in Sacramento. It wasn’t easy. The men, who didn’t know she’d been doing the job for five years in Stockton, thought she got the promotion just because she was “a broad.” Hirst ultimately ran crews of up to 18 men before moving into engineering management. Today, she’s the marketing manager for Verizon Business’ state of California account.
Hirst says she was able to go into a man’s world because “change never scared me. I have a passion for change. If you stay the same, you become mediocre.”
Emily Vasquez
First Latina judge in Sacramento Superior Court
When Emily Vasquez made the decision in the fourth grade that a college education would be her ticket out of the farm worker’s poverty she was born into, she never dreamed she’d become the first Latina judge on Sacramento’s Superior Court.
The 56-year-old Vasquez says she never even thought she’d be a lawyer. That idea came to her during the year she spent studying in Spain in the early 1970s while dictator Francisco Franco was still in power.
“The law school was next door to where I was studying at the University of Madrid,” Vasquez says. “The Spanish law students I met were going to use their degrees to create a better society through the law. When I heard that, I thought: ‘This is the perfect career for me.’”
She finished her undergraduate degree at UC Davis, and then headed to UC Berkeley to study law. While there, Vasquez served on the admissions committee, student association, Ecology Law Quarterly and La Raza Law Students Association. She belonged to the honor society, too.
She began practicing law in Stockton, where some of her first clients were farm hands who worked in the fields alongside her family, picking everything from cotton to peaches and tomatoes to cucumbers.
“I was among the first wave of minorities and women to begin breaking down the glass ceiling,” she says. “I have always had the need to excel, to show that women of color can do well, because I was paving the way for others.”
This year marks seven years on the bench, and Vasquez has presided over more than 125 civil and criminal jury trials. “The decisions are difficult. We’re passing judgment on people’s lives,” Vasquez says. “I’ve had many sleepless nights, but the rule of law guides me. My job is to issue a just and fair judgment — to make sure the lawyers do their jobs, that I do my job and that the jury does its job.”
It’s her job to be a calming, yet firm, voice in the courtroom, where emotions can run high. Vasquez credits her upbringing for the practical and common-sense approach she brings to the law, and sees the adversity in her life as an asset.
“I think the many obstacles I’ve encountered have provided me with lots of inner strength and courage,” she says. “I was able to be a litigator for 24 years before becoming a judge. I’ve presided over conflicts in many other situations: I chaired the [Sacramento] Regional Transit Board when light-rail came in. That was controversial!”
