46 lines
No EOL
3.9 KiB
HTML
46 lines
No EOL
3.9 KiB
HTML
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
|
|
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
|
|
<head>
|
|
<title>Dr. Ruth L. Kirschstein</title>
|
|
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
|
|
<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="../js/nlm.js"></script>
|
|
<link href="../css/nlm.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
|
|
<link href="video-transcript.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
|
|
<script type="text/javascript">
|
|
window.resizeTo("570", "600");
|
|
</script>
|
|
<script>(function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push(
|
|
{'gtm.start': new Date().getTime(),event:'gtm.js'}
|
|
);var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!='dataLayer'?'&l='+l:'';j.async=true;j.src='//www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id='+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);})(window,document,'script','dataLayer','GTM-MT6MLL');</script>
|
|
</head>
|
|
<body>
|
|
<noscript><iframe src="//www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-MT6MLL" height="0" width="0" style="display:none;visibility:hidden" title="googletagmanager"></iframe></noscript>
|
|
<div id="popupbody">
|
|
<div id="descbox">
|
|
<img src="../img/desc_asterix.gif" width="36" height="26" alt="Asterix" class="imgleft" />
|
|
<p class="photoTitle">Dr. Ruth L. Kirschstein</p>
|
|
</div>
|
|
<div id="transcriptbox">
|
|
<!-- BEGIN DISPLAY OF Transcript -->
|
|
<p>I wanted to be a doctor from a very young age, even before I went to high school. And I’m not sure exactly what motivated me. I had a father who was a chemist.
|
|
I had a mother who was extremely ill through most of my childhood, and spent a long time in the hospital. It may have been that, that motivated me partly, as well.
|
|
When I applied for medical school women were not very commonly applying for school—I actually applied to every medical school in the United States.
|
|
At least one of them wrote me and said, “We only take men.” And that sort of was not a very good thing, and it didn’t make me very happy.
|
|
Today, over 50 percent of each medical school class are women. When I went to medical school it was a very small number in my class, which started in 1947,
|
|
which was the first post-World War II class. It actually had 10 out of 110, which was pretty big, but when you think about it, 5 of them were nurses who had
|
|
been in the military, were able to get the GI Bill to go to medical school, and decided they didn’t really want to answer to anybody else anymore—
|
|
they wanted to be their own bosses.</p>
|
|
<p>So it is a real difference now. In addition, Ph.D. biological and chemical scientists make up about 40 percent of our graduate programs in those areas.
|
|
But the problem is that women are still not in sufficient leadership positions in medical schools and in universities. There are very few women deans of medical schools.
|
|
There are not many chairwomen of departments, and where we have been very successful, and I am absolutely thrilled, there are something like
|
|
ten women presidents of major universities—we need more.</p>
|
|
<p>If you have a population of leaders who are all men, they are never going to think of women. They are never going to think of minorities. They are only
|
|
going to think of people like themselves. And so that told me, when I got the job as director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, that I had to see
|
|
that we changed the culture. And that we thought about women for jobs, and we thought about minorities for jobs.
|
|
Actually, people said to me when I became the director of NIGMS—the National Institute of General Medical Sciences—people said,
|
|
“Well, you’re going to hire only women.” And I said, “No; I’m going to give women an equal opportunity to men.
|
|
But I don’t believe in having an institute that’s all men or all women. We are equal.” And so I did that, quite deliberately.</p>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</div>
|
|
</body>
|
|
</html> |