Today we interview Julie Des Jardins about the world of professional women in the mid-20th century. Julie is a historian of American women and gender who has taught and written extensively in the field, particularly on the history of women in the professions. Along with pieces on gender and women’s history for blogs, journals, and Oxford’s History of History Writing, she has written several books, including Women and the Historical Enterprise in America: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Memory; The Madame Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science; Lillian Gilbreth: Redefining Domesticity; and the study of American masculinity, Walter Camp: Football and the Modern Man. She is currently director of diversity and cultural inclusion at the Center for Quantum Networks at the University of Arizona. Julie is the perfect expert for us to talk to about the time period of our October book, Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. The book is set in the mid-20th century with the brilliant chemist, Elizabeth Zott as the protagonist. We wanted to discuss more about women in the professional work world at that time. Julie’s training is as a cultural historian and was a history professor. She has focused on 20th-century women in the workforce. She is now working directly on the issue of women in STEM at the University of Arizona’s Center for Quantum Networks. Julie tells us that in STEM fields, because of the focus on data, scientists often don’t recognize the bias in their work. She was a consultant in Silicon Valley prior to joining U of A and she found she had to describe how a more diverse workforce leads to superior outcomes. In science, diversity is needed to ask the right questions. Julie tells us women, aside from their technical skills, often bring the social skills that keep collaborations alive; vital in science since science happens in groups, not in the lab of the mythologized lone genius. Julie says many people have the right intentions in diversity and inclusion, but it is hard to help people see the bias in systems. There is a culture to science. Julie has found younger generations tend to understand diversity aims and benefits more readily. American women have a different relationship to science because it was defined as antithetical to domesticity. Indian women, for example, don’t see science at cross purposes to their domestic lives and even femininity. Of course, Julie points out, these are generalizations. Each workplace and person in it come to these issues with their own backgrounds and beliefs. Julie reminds us that women were in the workforce during the Depression, very often Black women, especially. The shift during World War II was that middle class white women were encourage to join the workforce, and then leave it after the war; both movements were labeled as patriotic. After the war, many women did not choose to and many of those who did, missed the work and the financial autonomy. As a cultural historian, Julie tells us that pervasiveness of the image of the 1950 June Cleaver woman covered over what was underlying it. Linny recounts some of Elizabeth’s challenges in Lessons in Chemistry: she isn’t accepted into a PhD program because she defended herself when she was raped by her supervisor, upon getting her Masters she received only one job offer, at that job she was paid considerably less than less qualified men, she is given insignificant work assignments, colleagues steal her ideas, she is fired for being pregnant. In Julie’s book, The Madame Curie Project, she recounts some of the same barriers faced by real women scientists during this time period, some Nobel prize winners. Maria Goeppert Mayer won the Nobel prize for physics in 1963. It was not until years later that the University of California San Diego finally started paying her the work she was doing as a professor. She had not been paid but instead was considered a “volunteer professor.” Women in science often worked in stealth. At Los Alamos, women were doing the research to produce the atomic bomb, but they perpetuated their own invisibility by not writing about their own work, but instead that of the men they worked with. Many of the women were influenced by Lise Meitner who did her work in stealth in Europe, though she did have male colleagues who recognized her contributions. Marie Curie received visibility due to men who insisted on her role being acknowledged. Like in Lessons in Chemistry, women scientists married to other scientists often was considered just a helpmeet or lab assistant to their husband, this was how she was referred to when she received the Nobel Prize. It was a delicate balance. Julie uses the stories of women scientists to show the different strategies women used to create a career in science. Rosalyn Yalow, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, worked her 80-100 hours a week in the lab while having children and sneaking out to breastfeed. She didn’t see herself as a feminist but just someone who worked twice as hard. Jane Goodall, rather than conform to the masculine culture of science at the time, redefined her field to make a feminine orientation a good thing. Julie does believe the culture of science is slightly more feminine. For example, a scientist can have an advocate or activist point of view. Scientists are understanding medical science must be done on more diverse subjects. However, even today, more women than men feel that having a family and a career are mutually exclusive choices. Julie believes the key to change happening is the recognition that achieving diversity in STEM is not a numbers issue (more women in the field), rather it is a cultural issue. It is still primarily a masculine culture. Julie tells us about her role on the Scholars Advisory Council for the National Women’s History Museum. Unfortunately, Congress had stopped short of appropriating funds to build the museum in DC. Instead, the museum does several things to promote women’s history: they are a clearinghouse for historical information and speakers, they have created a virtual museum and exhibits, and there have been some live events in DC. The museum can be found at: www.womenshistory.org Julie continues her work to move the needle at the Center for Quantum Networks and hopes to publish results of her work there. She also is working on a project about the superpowers of Gen X women! She is conducting surveys to ensure good representation of experiences.