Q&A: Ursula Franklin

Ursula Franklin, 85, received her PhD in experimental physics from the Technical University in Berlin in 1948. In the decades that followed she became a renowned metallurgist, a pioneer of the physics of archaeological materials, an activist, an author, a philosopher, and Canada’s very first female University Professor, at the University of Toronto. Here she dishes about sexism in academia, interdisciplinary research, and being a radical.

Q: How does the way female scientists are treated nowadays compare to when you first started?

What has changed is nobody will ask, “Why does a nice girl like you want to be a metallurgist?” No one is surprised anymore.
What hasn’t changed is that women often want to ask different questions of science. If young women want to do the same things in science as everybody else, that’s fine. But if they ask different questions, it’s still very difficult for them to be taken seriously. The wish of women in science to take their science to different issues and different disciplines is still not as easy as I would like it to be.

Q: Interdisciplinary research seems to be gaining importance these days. You’ve talked about how women have been pioneers in this area. Why?

Women are not only the pioneers in that area, but very often the ones who created that area. Much of it has come out of a time where women in their own professions were marginalized. The whole notion of taking knowledge or a colleague from another discipline to do something neither could do alone has been very much pioneered by women.

There comes a point where what looks like a interdisciplinary field becomes an entity in and of itself, and then you get the eager beavers who run with it, overlooking the potential of collaboration. That’s a point to be watched because frequently, not always but frequently, it’s easier for women to collaborate.

Q: Can you recall a moment when you realized things were changing for women in science?

When I was teaching at the faculty of engineering [at the University of Toronto] there were a set of excuses that engineering firms would offer for why they wouldn’t take female students on. One was that there were no women’s washrooms, another was that the safety boots or hats wouldn’t fit, or the foreman on the floor didn’t like girls.

One year we collected all the excuses and made up clipboards for the girls to take into interviews. It frazzled the interviewers to no end that when an excuse was offered, the women students would just tick it off. The girls would say, “And you have no problems with the foreman?” That beginning of strength among women collectively, and making the companies look pretty ridiculous, was the turning point.

Q: What advice would you give your younger self?

I would say, be much more relaxed. As a mother, I was much too tense, I was much too afraid to take time off. One does not know when one is in it that things will work out all right.

Q: You’ve talked about the need for average people to become “citizen scientists” - to gain technical knowledge to understand issues. How does a person like me - whose science education ended in high school - go about doing that?

Talk to people. I think for me, a great experience was the time when I was a very active member of women’s organizations, many of which were concerned about environmental issues. If one finds a friend in this sphere, and seriously talks about science, I find it absolutely amazing how easy it is to teach the basic science of almost anything, to anybody who wants to know it - provided one is in a non-competitive setting, and where one learns for the common good.

Despite all the propaganda, science, in many ways, is far easier than any of the humanities or the social sciences. You can’t do it, there’s a craft to everything, but you can understand it.

Q: You’ve said scientists have the responsibility to ask questions about the impact of progress on communities. Should scientists be activists? What would you say to those who fear this might compromise their objectivity?

I would say something unprintable! Because objectivity is an illusion. I think scientists have an obligation to be within the best of their ability to be correct, they have an obligation to know the limits of their knowledge. When you come to the interpretation of the knowledge, it is impossible for anyone to not be a child of their times. The key, for me, is the integrity to not hide it. My friend Margaret Benston [a chemist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada] pointed out that the notion that something is a side effect - a sort of “by the way, it also poisons rats” - is a social judgment. You might as well be honest and say “it poisons rats, and I couldn’t care less!”

Q: People have described you as a radical. Do you agree?

I hope so. I think a radical means one can look and think without being prejudiced by existing structures, and remove what is unnecessary or atrophied. It’s like getting all the silt out of a spring, so that the water is clear. That’s not a bad thing to do.

The Ursula Franklin Reader: Pacifism as a Map was just published by Between the Lines late October 2006. All told, Franklin has published more than 70 scholarly works. Her main bestseller was The Real World of Technology about how our increasing dependency on technology.