Molecular biologist Shirley Tilghman has always pushed science forward. As a postdoctoral researcher, she helped clone the first mammalian gene, a mouse beta-globin gene. As an HHMI investigator at Princeton University for 15 years, she unraveled molecular mysteries behind genetic imprinting, in which a gene's expression differs depending on whether the maternal or paternal form is inherited. All the while, Tilghman has been a vocal advocate for women in science—and the single mother of two children. Last year, she became Princeton's first female president.

What's hardest about being both a scientist and a mother?
Shirley Tilghman: Lack of time. You have to be disciplined about how you use those precious hours at work because they're limited. When you know you have to be out the door at six o'clock to pick up your kid at the day care center, it gets difficult. Related to that issue is guilt management. Too many women spend their time wishing they were someplace else, and that's just an intense waste of energy. You just have to have the self-confidence to say: "When I'm at work, I'm at work. When I'm at home, I'm at home. And each one of them is important."

How have the challenges facing female scientists changed, and what barriers still exist?
If you look at the life sciences, the challenge of my generation was how to be a minority—how to make your way in professions that were largely populated by men. That's not the case in those fields any longer; women are now in the mainstream. On the other hand, the more quantitative fields have had more difficulty attracting women. Many people believe you can trace that back to culture, to expectations in primary school and high school. In education, setting high expectations is half the battle. If you set expectations very high for a group, the likelihood that they will meet them goes way up, as compared to telling a group, "Well, this is hard, and if you don't do well, we'll understand."

You've said that it's time Princeton had a female president. How do you plan to encourage female scientists at the university, both formally and informally?
I've established a task force that will explore Princeton's past record in hiring, promoting and retaining women, and it will make recommendations about how to improve those practices in the future. I would like to think that when I leave this job, we will have a far more diverse faculty. If we can find 1,100 new students a year who look like America, we should be able to find faculty who look like America. And I should say that I believe this can be accomplished without, in any measure, compromising excellence. We have done that with the student body: This year, our entering class of 2005 is more academically gifted than any class we've admitted, yet it's more diverse.

How did you get around the hurdles you faced? Did you feel you had to work twice as hard as men?
No. I had enormous self-confidence that was bred in me by my father. He encouraged me to be a scientist, he encouraged me to do math and he always set high expectations.

A few years ago, Rita Colwell and I went to a meeting of senior female scientists at Mills College in Oakland, California. Before the meeting, we were all sent a questionnaire asking us to describe our experiences as young women and as children. The responses showed one common denominator among all these incredibly successful scientists: Their parents believed in them. Their parents supported, encouraged and promoted them—without exception. Everything else was varied: Some women had great mentors, some had terrible mentors; some women had to fight like hell, some didn't have to fight at all. So what I really often worry about, as an educator, is that by the time I get my hands on these young women, they are either self-confident or they aren't. I can add around the edges, but I can't affect the core.

What advice do you give female scientists and students?
I urge them to focus. You will give up something. In fact, you'll give up a lot. I don't think we should kid young women that they can have it all. Focus on the most important thing to do that day; focus your research so that you're working on just two, not twenty, things; and focus on this time-management issue. That requires discipline.

Basically, you have two choices: You can sit around and feel victimized and feel as though you can't possibly do it. Or you can get on with business and make it happen.

—Kathryn Brown

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Reprinted from the HHMI Bulletin,
June 2002, pages 20-25.
©2002 Howard Hughes Medical Institute