The Practice Of Management: The Ascent Of Women As Scholars And Leaders In The Field Of Zoo Biology

When I entered graduate school in 1968, there were few women role models on the faculty in west coast colleges and universities. Fewer still could be counted in the destinations I reached after I received my PhD in 1974. There was one woman professor in my department at Emory University and at Georgia Tech, respectively, and both of them had been assigned administrative duties perhaps to encourage advancement in the women who dared to enter the male-dominated realm of academia in the 1970s. Academic interest in this disparity eventually drove meaningful social change. Recruitment of faculty became a political mine field as advocacy turned adversarial and administrators bent to public pressures from outside academia. Today, the tide has turned and women can no longer be ignored by recruiters. As the faculty workplace has become friendlier to women, so has the workplace devoted to zoo and aquarium biology. In many ways, the workplace trends observed for other disciplines (e.g., dentistry, veterinary medicine, and law) and the field of psychology itself are being replicated in the zoo profession.