Sally Ride

by Lynn Sherr

  The company, incorporated in 2001, was called Sally Ride Science (SRS), but it was briefly known as Imaginary Lines, for the invented lattice of longitude and latitude that gives the globe its parameters. Imaginary Lines also suggests the illusory barriers between the genders that divide society, and between the nations of the world. Sally, like all astronauts, knew that looking down on Earth from space, there are no borders separating countries or anything else.

  She also understood the dire warning from a bipartisan commission, that a “steady decline in science achievement” had engulfed the US in a “rising tide of mediocrity,” making us “A Nation at Risk.” A later panel would find that the erosion of America’s technical and scientific strength threatened our economic and strategic security. The science-first urgency of the post-Sputnik years—the impetus that Sally always credited for her own smooth passage through physics to NASA—had evaporated over half a century. By the end of the decade, with four out of five jobs about to require science and math skills just to get living wages, she said, Americans were not prepared.

  Sally liked to point out that all the hydrogen in our water, like all the helium in our balloons, and everywhere else, has been here since the Big Bang, dust from exploding stars, ready to combine into more complicated elements that make our lives possible. Similarly, her concept for science education, if not its form, had percolated for decades. The girl who loved the balance of math and the clarity of physics, the young woman who skyrocketed to the stars and to stardom on the power of a fine education and a social movement, would, as an adult, apply the same logic, along with the same encouragement and opportunity, to the next generation. “Maybe I had just lived long enough,” she said. “I thought that this was something that was really worth using my name and using the visibility that I could bring to it. It felt worthwhile.”

  As the only founder with business experience (after her year at Space.com), Sally became CEO and went in search of initial funding. Asking for money required a new set of skills, and she overcame her anxiety with the expediency of a flight engineer. She tapped into her Rolodex for advice from high-powered friends, created a list of potential investors, then contacted them. If someone turned her down, she moved on to the next. At first, according to former Harvard Business School professor Myra Hart, who informally advised Sally when she drafted her business plan, “It wasn’t about the money, but the money was important in order to deliver the mission.”

  Sally’s pitch would anchor the company’s raison d’être for the next decade plus. It was a simple equation that persists: While the numbers have increased, women are still underrepresented in many scientific fields—notably engineering, mathematics and computer sciences, and physical and Earth sciences—a lopsided gender ratio that increases from graduate school to the workplace. And it isn’t for lack of early interest. Little boys and little girls love science and math equally. But girls drift away in droves during the middle school years—grades five through eight—when the cultural taboos and gender assumptions kick in.

  “A girl who says she wants to be a rocket scientist might get a different reaction from her friends and her teacher than a boy who says he wants to be a rocket scientist,” Sally pointed out, perhaps remembering her high school friend’s mom who scoffed when Sally said she wanted to be an astrophysicist. “It might not be cool for a girl to be the best one in the math class.” Was she thinking about the teacher who made her cry by saying scientists weren’t creative?

  “When you turn on the TV,” Sally said, “any engineers you see are apt to be male, not female. When you open the newspaper, you read about male engineers, not female engineers. As a result, twelve-year-old girls don’t really think of those areas as possible careers.” She nailed it with a simple illustration. Ask a kid to draw a scientist, she said, “she’s likely to draw a geeky guy with a pocket protector. That’s just not an image an eleven-year-old girl aspires to.”

  The buzz term is STEM education—science, technology, engineering, mathematics—an awkward acronym that has crept from the garden to the classroom. Sally, whose years with NASA made her sensitive to arcane allusions, generally avoided it when addressing nontechnical audiences. She had a better way to put it.

  “We need to make science cool.”

  • • •

  The timing was tricky. The nation was focused on terrorism, not technology, after the attacks on September 11, 2001. Sally had spent that long day at the house she and Tam owned in Atlanta, watching the horrid news on television and checking in with her own sources in Washington. She was one of the first people I called from our ABC News studios in New York, and long before we knew the details of United Airlines flight 93—the one that crashed into the field in Pennsylvania—she had imagined the scenario. “That’s the story I want to know,” she told me. “What went on with those passengers?”

  A few weeks later, she tried to calculate the fallout for her own project. In her SRS notebook she jotted down, “effect of terrorism: investors? Sponsors? Publicity?”

  Not everyone signed on. “[A] lot of people,” Sally recalled some years later, “said, ‘This is not a business. There aren’t any girls interested in math and science … There aren’t very many women in engineering, so there can’t be many girls who are interested in math.’ ” Sally answered with facts, citing the 1972 legislation barring sex discrimination in education, including athletics, that did not exist until she was halfway through Stanford. “Before Title IX, you could have concluded that girls didn’t want to be doctors, that girls didn’t want to be lawyers, that they didn’t like to play sports. And you would have been just reflecting the expectation of the time. What was different about me was, I didn’t run into that one person, that counselor or teacher or parent, who said, you should be doing something different, this is not for you.”

  And if she did run into that person—like the professor at Stanford who had never seen “a girl physics major”—she simply ignored him and moved on.

  Sally’s reputation for integrity, and the clarity of her goal, got SRS off the ground quickly. “At that time it was not clear what type of business it would become, but I so believed in its purpose and in Sally that it did not matter,” says Silicon Valley businesswoman Judith Estrin, one of the angel investors. “I was struck by how open and authentic she was, and I invested because I believed in the cause. There was a thoughtfulness about how the company was trying to shift the culture, to shift awareness.” Board member Jane Swift, the former lieutenant governor and briefly acting governor of Massachusetts, calls it “double bottom line investing: funds invested for a return and also to do good.”

  MAKING SCIENCE FUN

  And to have a good time. Sally’s exuberance over her flight on STS-7—“the most fun I’ll ever have in my life”—was not just back-to-Earth hyperbole. In 1970, before she abandoned her tennis dreams, she took a break from a tournament to visit the Seattle Science Center, where she was dazzled by, among other things, the math exhibit in which kids learned about numbers and shapes by using brainteasers that were solved by putting pegs into holes. On stationery with a Snoopy cartoon that read, “Dogs accept people for what they are,” she wrote to her boyfriend, John Tompkins, that the museum “introduced advanced subjects in a very understandable way (even for me!) [with] … incredible displays, demonstrations … of the ‘Random Walk’ theory, perspective, cycloids: soap bubbles … orbits.” She was especially thrilled by a section with gyroscopes and optical illusions entitled “ ‘science can be fun,’ which did a pretty good job of amazing me.”

  Three decades later, that same spirit infused the Sally Ride Science Club, the website she and her partners created where girls could learn and play. Next came Sally Ride Science Festivals—one-day events on college campuses where youngsters could listen to a speech by a scientist or astronaut, participate in science workshops and enjoy a high-tech street fair to launch marshmallow rockets, construct toothbrush robots, play science bingo, learn about the DNA of straw
berries, hear the heartbeat of a golden retriever and choose among environments from the tundra to the jungle to “Design Your Own Alien.” Or just get their faces painted and eat space ice cream.

  The first festival was at the University of San Diego in October 2001. A year later, at the one cosponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, kids also learned why the blood vessels of giraffes might provide valuable lessons for future astronauts. That’s part of the talk I gave when Sally persuaded me to share my own little scientific expertise with an audience of eight hundred enthralled youngsters. It was one of her smaller crowds. From California to Maryland, Texas to Kansas City, each Sally Ride Science Festival attracted up to fourteen hundred preteens and their parents, with a cadre of aerospace engineers, advanced mathematicians, other female astronauts and whoever was needed to help steer them into everything from analyzing meteorites to finding a cure for cancer. Sally’s sister, Bear, joined the team, along with Terry McEntee, to organize and run them for more than a decade. Role models were everywhere; inner-city kids met their first scientists; private school girls wired their first circuit boards.

  Boys were invited, too—no discrimination in Sally’s world. “And the boys would talk about how interesting it was to be in this room full of girls,” says Maria Zuber. “So we’d say, ‘Hey, now you know how girls feel!’ ”

  Zuber was also at the Sally Ride Science Festival in Cambridge, her home turf as professor of geophysics—now vice president for research—at MIT. “You could tell when you walked around and watched the kids at these events that she had really found a formula that worked. Being a scientist or engineer is very mysterious to a lot of kids. Girls tend to be social and like to work in groups, but they have a picture of someone in a white jacket locked up in a lab who never sees the light of day or speaks to other people. So a lot of what I’d do is talk about how wonderful it is to work in teams. And I’d wear khakis and a blouse, or blue jeans. We wanted kids to see scientists as regular people. And one student said, ‘If I become a scientist when I grow up, do I get to wear blue jeans to work?’ ”

  Sally, whose wardrobe would grow to include the occasional thousand-dollar St. John’s jacket with open-toed little heels (showing red-polished nails), often donned her blue flight suit for the kids, the one with the NASA patches promising adventures you could only dream of. After describing her flights, and showing home movies or slides, she answered the kids’ questions, speaking to them as if they were grownups without equivocating: “Is there life in space?” (No, not so far.) “Where do rockets go when they burn out?” (Into the ocean.) “How did you shower?” (With a water gun.) “How gross was the food?” (Not. We had peanut butter.) “Do you have any pets?” (Yes.) And always, the one about the bathroom. Sometimes she told them what happened when she spilled a bottle of water in space. “The water would come oozing out, and just sit there in the middle of the room. The good news is, if you spill something, it doesn’t fall to the ground. But the bad news is, you have to chase it around the room.” Then, with long lines of youngsters and their parents waiting, she patiently autographed their books and programs, with the signature she had streamlined so many years earlier.

  “Girls can do science,” said one California girl, wearing a necklace made of electronic components that glowed like a star. “It’s not only for boys.”

  “If she can do it, so can I,” said another.

  A fifth-grader moving up the queue for Sally’s autograph was asked if she’d rather be a famous, gorgeous rock star or an astronaut. After a long pause she said, “An astronaut. It would be cool to see something no one else has.”

  To these kids, Sally was the rock star.

  Mike Coats, Sally’s TFNG classmate and veteran of four spaceflights who became director of the Johnson Space Center, saw her clout with thousands of youngsters, including his own daughter. “You can’t grasp the effect when a woman stands up in a flight suit at the head of a class,” he tells me. “The kids are just mesmerized. How important that is for young girls to see a woman in a position of authority in their business!”

  HEADWINDS

  Sally’s feminism, which had forever expanded the definition of NASA’s manned spaceflight program, formed the critical core of everything she undertook. Girls needed examples like her and her science peers early in their lives, she believed, to combat what she called “a built-in headwind that women face.”

  There was the woman she met who “was the best biology student in high school and had the highest exam scores. At the end of the semester, a teacher told her: ‘I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to give the award in biology to a boy, because it’s more important to him.’ ”

  And the mom who told Sally proudly that her mathematician daughter had just won the state math competition, but then added, “And I don’t know where she gets it! I was never any good at math, and I don’t know any women who are!” Sally pointed out the subtle dissuasion. “This mother didn’t realize that the message that she was completely unconsciously sending her daughter was, ‘You’re not normal. You’re not like every woman I know.’ And what’s the most important thing when you’re twelve? It’s to be normal.” As a result, that little girl might “start internalizing these messages and think, well, she’s also good in French literature, and maybe that is something that maybe her mother thinks is more normal for a girl, or a woman to study.”

  No wonder, she said, little girls and grownup women had such low expectations for themselves: “You see high school boys get C’s in math and say, ‘I’m going to be an engineer.’ And high school girls who get A’s in math and say, ‘I’m not good enough.’ ” It was a disconnect Sally would try to repair all of her working life, often giving women that extra push when they didn’t recognize it themselves.

  She took every loss personally.

  “One time we were sitting outside and she said, ‘A lot of people just don’t understand how the whole structure has been so unfair for women,’ ” recalls Shirley Malcom, who runs Education and Human Resources at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). “And she talked about the fact that she was a world-class tennis player and went to Stanford, and the guys could get a scholarship, but the women were not offered scholarships for sports. And you don’t realize that not only does that send a signal about your relative importance, but it has monetary and financial consequence.”

  As the director of CalSpace for seven years, Sally had sponsored the work of female scientists and tried to get one woman promoted from assistant to full researcher long before the woman herself had asked. “I wasn’t thinking I deserved advanced promotion,” says Lucy McFadden, who wound up with a career at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “And in my position now I fully believe that most talented scientists, and women especially, need continued cultivation.”

  In 1995, Sally had headed up a short-lived Girls & Women in Science initiative at UCSD, with a small conference funded by philanthropist Frances Lear to explore the status of female scientists and learn why young girls disengaged from the field. Lear also offered Sally a $30 million grant for a center focusing on women and science. Sally turned it down, and later told Tam, “Darn, I should have taken the thirty million.”

  In 2005, Sally was asked to comment when Harvard president Larry Summers, in a speech, questioned whether the lack of women in science was due to “issues of intrinsic aptitude.” The implication, echoing Sigmund Freud’s tiresome, “Anatomy is destiny” and widely viewed as sexist, detonated a national debate. Sally, in an interview with USA Today, turned metaphorical. “Suppose you came across a woman lying on the street with an elephant sitting on her chest,” she said. “You notice she is short of breath. Shortness of breath can be a symptom of heart problems. In her case, the much more likely cause is the elephant on her chest. For a long time, society put obstacles in the way of women who wanted to enter the sciences. That is the elephant.”

  When I spoke to her
later that week, she was less creative but equally exasperated: “What,” she said shaking her head, “was he thinking?”

  Later that year, Sally’s commitment to women’s rights was recognized by the megaprofessional services firm Deloitte, who hired her to chair its pioneering Women’s Initiative, an external advisory board to support and promote its female employees. She set the tone early at a meeting with Deloitte CEO Jim Quigley. He spoke with passion about the company’s desire for gender balance, and the goal to increase the number of female partners, principals and directors to 35 percent.

  “Jim,” Sally asked across the table, “what’s the ratio of the people you’re recruiting?”

  “Well, of course it’s fifty percent,” he answered.

  “Why isn’t your goal for partners, principals and directors fifty percent?”

  Quigley got the message. “And she holds my feet to the fire, and I respect and appreciate that very much,” he said, smiling.

  Over a period of seven years, at a series of meetings with Deloitte employees and with the council (where she sat in the middle, not at the head, of the conference table), Sally drilled down through Deloitte’s employment data and examined patterns of advancement to help expand women’s opportunities. What everyone who worked with her mentioned over and over was Sally’s style—quiet but commanding, more suggestive than demanding, collegial rather than controlling. Nobody—here it comes again—wanted to disappoint her. Shelly Lazarus, head of Ogilvy & Mather, the advertising and marketing agency, sat on the Deloitte board for five years with its first chair, former Republican representative and Secretary of Labor, Lynn Martin. “Lynn would cajole, harass, insist, just drive people to do what she wanted them to do,” she says. “Sally patiently and calmly got people to the same place, more by her sense of principle. When Sally said, ‘This is what we have to accomplish,’ you couldn’t look away.”