Paulette Clancy lauded for leadership in encouraging women engineers

By David Brand

On Sept. 13, an historic gathering took place in the Cornell College of Engineering: the first meeting of women and minority faculty in the college to discuss how best to promote diversity. Chairing the meeting was Paulette Clancy, the newly named director of the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

Professor Paulette Clancy, center, and Krishna Athreya, director of Minority and Women's Programs in Engineering, talk at the Homecoming reception, Sept. 28. Thomas Hoebbel Photography

Clancy was encouraged by the cooperation expressed at the meeting but forthright about the different challenges facing the two groups: "We want to recognize that while we share many similar problems, there are unique barriers for representatives of minority faculty and students, and they should be handled a little differently to reflect our sensitivities to those differences." This pragmatic approach typifies the leadership that Clancy has provided to women in the college since she arrived at Cornell for postdoctoral research from the University of Oxford (where she obtained her D.Phil. in 1977).

Her pioneering role was recognized during Homecoming Weekend, on Sept. 28, when Clancy was honored at a reception in the Fred H. Rhodes Lounge in Olin Hall, where she has been a chemical engineering faculty member for 15 years.

Given the fact that Clancy is the first woman to head a school in the college, it was appropriate that the reception also honored Inez Moselle, who in 1946 became the first woman to graduate from Cornell in chemical engineering, and Carol Boyd Amos, who in 1979 became only the third black woman to graduate from the school. Amos is a member of the college's Engineering Council, an advisory body.

For the past five years, Clancy has chaired meetings of Women in Physical Science and Engineering (WISE), a campus group that provides a forum for female faculty. The group's most singular achievement has been in convincing the Provost's Office to provide startup funds for new women faculty. To date, the fund has helped to attract several new women faculty to the college. "I've been proud to be part of that," said Clancy.

Her interest in helping form the group grew out of her leadership of a college group, the Status of Women Committee, which had been founded in 1985 by William B. Streett, then dean of the college, and by Christine Shoemaker, the recently named Joseph P. Ripley Professor in Engineering in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. For several years Shoemaker was a central figure in pressing the college to take action to increase the numbers of women students and faculty. "Chris has been my mentor, and I am very cognizant of the fact that she has played an important role," Clancy said.

Shoemaker holds a number of firsts: She was the first woman in the college to be given tenure, in 1979, and the first to be named a full professor, in 1985. The same year she became the first woman to chair a department within the college, the Department of Environmental Engineering, then part of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. She held the post until 1988.

In the early 1970s, with the women students in the college numbering about 5 percent, "I was seeing hardly any women students," Shoemaker recalled. "For many years I had felt that protection of civil rights and affirmative action were important for members of minority groups, but only after joining the faculty did I begin to realize that women also needed this type of support. Society didn't view being an engineer as being compatible with being feminine. Women also needed role models."

Through the 1970s and 1980s, Shoemaker spent much time recruiting women students and dealing with issues related to women in the college. Then, in 1987, Clancy joined the faculty as an assistant professor, and Shoemaker had a close ally. (For her efforts on behalf of women, in 1991 Shoemaker received the national Distinguished Educator Award from the Society of Women Engineers.)

For women students in the college, the situation is slowly improving. The entering freshman class is 28 percent female, and students currently affiliated with the chemical engineering school are 35 percent women. Numbers of women faculty are steadily increasing in the college and now are nearly 10 percent of the total. There has been, said Clancy, "a profound shift from the old-fashioned view of seeing women as needing remedial help to that of women providing a unique and valuable perspective on engineering."

However, she stressed, the problem in attracting women to engineering, both as students and faculty, begins in high school. "Women take just as many advanced math classes as male students. But they are not choosing engineering." From her own outreach efforts in schools, she has discovered that young women simply don't understand what being an engineer is, "or worse, they think they know, but have an outdated idea of people in hard hats on building sites."

The other huge loss is in the number of women graduate engineers choosing faculty careers. "We do a great job of getting women to graduate school but not a great job of telling women they should consider a faculty career." What is it that they perceive about academic jobs as not attractive? she asks. Is it that industry is more attractive? Is it the "cut and thrust" of grant proposal writing?

And yet, Clancy firmly believes, women have a natural affinity for many disciplines within engineering. The chemical engineering school, in particular, she said, is a "natural home" for women, partly because of its many bio-related projects, as reflected in the addition of "biomolecular" to the school's name last year. The school also has a long history of involvement in environmental concerns, particularly water- and air-pollution remediation. "It seems as if those kinds of concerns -- social aspects, environmental, humanitarian -- are hot spots for women."

There is one vital issue that, Clancy concedes, concerns many young women graduate engineers considering a career of research and teaching: balancing work and family. She offers her own example as encouragement. The hardest part of her job, she said, is managing work flow while maintaining a solid family life (she has a husband and two teenage daughters). "Maintaining relationships is probably the thing that women worry about most, and I have worried about my entire career. But I'm a very enthusiastic person, and I'm also an optimist. That's crucial."