The mentor of The Odyssey was divine—the goddess Athena disguised as an older man. S/he was positioned offstage in Greek friezes, offering wise advice, helping the young hero over impossible hurdles and even saving his life from time to time.
Enter electrical engineering professor Bob Gray, he of the piercing blue eyes, heroic beard and expansive eyebrows. “I don’t think he went out saying, ‘I’m going to change the world by bringing women in,’ but he was very careful and conscientious in terms of giving credit to his students,” says Michelle Effros, ’89, ma ’90, phd ’94. An associate professor of electrical engineering at Cal Tech, Effros says of her former adviser, “He attracted women to his lab because it was a friendly environment to be in, rather than a hostile one.”
Eve Riskin, ms ’85, ms ’86, phd ’90, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Washington, concurs. “Two different [faculty] practically chased me out of their offices,” she says about her first Stanford advisers in electrical engineering. “It’s a difficult department, and I almost left a number of times.” Then Riskin heard about Gray’s lab. “He didn’t do anything that extraordinary, other than treat people fairly,” she recalls. “He was able to look past people not having confidence and take a chance on them.”
Riskin and Effros are part of a remarkable statistical pool. It turns out that in his 35-year career at Stanford, Gray has advised 47 doctoral students. In the process, he has nurtured 7 percent of women faculty in the top 23 electrical engineering departments in the United States.
Who knew? Not Gray, who currently serves as vice-chair of the ee department. “In my view, I hadn’t had such a major impact because I’d produced so few women PhDs,” he says. “But when you look at their percentage of the total, it’s significant.”
Two years ago, Riskin and several other Stanford electrical engineering alumni nominated Gray for the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring, administered by the National Science Foundation. Gray received the award at the White House last year. In June, some 70 faculty members and graduate students from more than 25 institutions turned out to acknowledge his success—and model it—in a two-day workshop on mentoring in engineering.
The agenda careened from one topic to the next: what to do when you’re assigned a difficult mentor; early and mid-career mentoring; local and national resources; the need for integrity at a time when there’s more cheating on campuses than ever before.
And then there’s the issue of how to have a life while writing a dissertation or getting tenure. Pamela Cosman, MS ’89, PhD ’93, said that Gray’s flexibility in allowing her to work odd hours after her first child was born enabled her to finish her degree. Now a mother of four and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC-San Diego, Cosman said she transferred to Gray’s lab even though she knew very little about vector quantization, one of his fields of specialization. “I’d never heard of it, but at that point it didn’t matter,” she recalled. “I just wanted a good adviser.”
Throughout the discussions, participants focused on the importance of recruiting and retaining women in electrical engineering as graduate students and as faculty members. “People who’ve been successful at [recruiting], notably at the University of Washington and Duke, go out and beat the bushes,” Gray said in a recent interview. “They find phd students who are potential stars, get to know them and build on the fact that they already have a pretty good environment.” Although Stanford has only two tenured female professors on its ee faculty of 50—Andrea Goldsmith and Teresa Meng—Gray argues that’s “better than a lot of places.”
The conversations spurred a handful of young women in the audience, all graduate students in ee, to meet for a brown-bag lunch the following week. On their agenda: big-sister matchups for first-year graduate students, a speaker’s program and discussions about maternity leave. “The department has its own nuances, and it’s very hard to get an adviser because there are so many students,” says fourth-year student Taly Gilat. “We knew we needed something, but it wasn’t very well defined before the workshop.” They’re still working on a name for their informal network, but they already have a website [http://wee.Stanford.edu]. They also are committed to finding an adviser—make that mentor—by winter quarter.
