When I started graduate school at Syracuse University in the late sixties, the chair of my department informed me that I would not be eligible for fellowships, because I was a woman. Pulling out a page of statistics, he pointed to the data indicating that women didn’t finish PhD programs, and if they did, they interrupted their academic careers for marriage and children and therefore didn’t go back to catch up with their peers. They were, he concluded, “a bad investment” for the department and the university
