Title
Becoming the First Female Department Chair
Files
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Identifier
KripkeM_01_20120328-Final_Clip02
Publication Date
3-28-2012
Publisher
The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Transcript
Tacey A. Rosolowski, Ph.D
Now, you said that the issues around being a woman were much more palpable here in Houston than they were in Frederick. How did that manifest itself when you first arrived?
Margaret L. Kripke, Ph.D
Well, it was just perfectly obvious. All you had to do was look around, and the fact that I did know that I was the first chair of an academic department who was female, that there had been, of course, a head of nursing who was female. There were some other women, prominent women in the institution, but none had ever been an academic department head. I was continually the only woman in the room when I was at a meeting of department heads or activities, committees and things that were populated by senior leadership.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, Ph.D
Now, as you went about setting up your lab from scratch I kind of want to hear about that process, if you’d like to cover that, and then maybe you could comment along the way on whether or not you ran into any difficulties in leadership in that position as you were setting up the lab in this brand-new department.
Margaret L. Kripke, Ph.D
I don’t think there were any difficulties that were unique to women. It was very hard from a remote site trying to organize research things in an environment that was—and to some extent still is—totally geared to the hospital. And so everything is organized and set up according to running a clinical department, not running a research department.
Recommended Citation
Kripke, Margaret L. PhD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Becoming the First Female Department Chair" (2012). Race, Gender, & Work @ The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center: Triumphs of Houston’s Leading Hospital. 40.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_racegenderwork/40
