CASBS encouraged us to come with fellowships, so I found it convenient to have Guggenheim help that year. I commuted to the Center from Berkeley, since I had young children, but sometimes spent the night in my study or in a friend’s spare bedrooms. (One of those families in the next generation produced a female Silicon Valley CEO!)
As a graduate student in the fifties, I had had the good luck to be an assistant to a new SSRC committee (on linguistics and psychology), so while still a student I met many important scholars at regular conferences.
The year at CASBS was one of meeting and talking with many stimulating colleagues, and using the library a lot too.
I remember it as a very productive and exciting year. The lunch conversations were unusually interesting,
the anthropologists being most relevant to my work on pragmatic contexts of talk. I did not come with a group project, and was on my own working on a series of articles.
That year followed several years at work on affirmative action in Berkeley, so I also spent time trying to get more women nominated as CASBS fellows. That year, Gillian Sankoff, Scarlett Epstein and I were the only women. I also tried to get the SSRC to study gender issues more and got support letters from many leading female social scientists. Though NRC studies showed females with PHDs had better ability test scores than males when tested, they were underemployed. At UCBerkeley then in the social sciences the deficit between available PhD women and hired faculty was 14.1% at full, 8.7% at associate, and 15.5% at assistant professor levels. (It’s still true they get paid less than matched men). My year at CASBS was productive in many ways.
Susan Ervin-Tripp
Professor Emeritus
Psychology Department
University of California, Berkeley
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