Conference Will Guide Women on Career Path

When Margaret Kuo became an Orange County Sheriff’s Department criminalist in 1974, she remembers that virtually no women in other labs around the country were doing her kind of work.

But today it’s much more common for women to work as criminalists, “scientists who are responsible for the recognition, collection, preservation, examination and interpretation of physical evidence related to the scene of a crime,” Kuo said.

On Monday, Kuo and about 40 other professional women will discuss job opportunities for women in math- and science-related fields at a Cal State Fullerton career conference called “Bridges to Tomorrow.” The conference is being sponsored by the university and three American Assn. of University Women chapters.

The conference is “aimed at high school girls, but boys (and adults) are welcome, too,” said Jan Skala, an AAUW member who is conference co-chair.

“There’s a definite need for young women to be exposed to women who have pursued careers that are math- and science-related,” Skala said. “Many young women today have never met a woman who is a CPA or a biologist.”

Other women who will lead workshops include a seismologist, transportation analysts, architects, health educators, toxic waste specialists, science and math teachers, geologists, marine biologists, computer experts and an astronomer.

Kuo, 41, of Buena Park said that those who want to enter her field need formal scientific training, common sense and “a strong stomach.”

Criminalists chemically analyze materials for narcotics, identify types of blood and other physiological fluids, attend autopsies, collect evidence and do field work to mentally reconstruct crime scenes, Kuo said. They also write reports on their findings and present “expert witness” testimony in court cases.

A criminalist must “have a strong stomach to touch a body to collect samples from it,” Kuo said. “Some women and men don’t care to go out at night and investigate a very bloody scene. If one is afraid of seeing bodies, then one doesn’t belong in this field.”

Young women interested in becoming criminalists should acquire “a solid background in physical science courses and a solid foundation in chemistry, especially instrumental analytical chemistry,” Kuo said, “because basically what we do is analyze evidence.” To get a criminalist job, a bachelor of science degree is needed.

Kuo earned a master’s degree in chemistry from the University of Illinois in 1968, then held jobs in private industry for several years before moving to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

She is now a chief criminalist (a middle-management administrator) in her department. She hires staff, approves budgets and sometimes presents reports on difficult “questionable death” cases, including in-custody deaths and officer-involved deaths, to a coroner’s review panel.

Today’s field is “very competitive,” Kuo said, and “nationwide the field is pretty much dominated by men.” However, she added, more opportunities for women criminalists exist in California than elsewhere.

In Kuo’s office, seven of the 25 “rank and file” criminalists are women and three of the office’s five supervising criminalists are female. Salaries for the workers begin at $2,000 a month, Kuo said.

Criminalists sometimes find their work very frustrating when they work on death penalty cases that are retried “once, twice and even three times,” Kuo said, and must “repeat our performance in court” over and over.

Yet, she added, the work also offers “moments of great satisfaction, when we feel we are doing the best we can, playing a role in convicting the guilty or exonerating the innocent.”

Jobs in zoos can also offer considerable satisfaction for science-minded young women, according to Santa Ana Zoo Supt. Claudia Collier, who will be a workshop leader at the career conference. She has directed the only exotic animal zoo in Orange County for five years.

Opportunities for women in the field have opened up in the last few years, Collier said, although, overall, zoo jobs are scarce. Job hunters “really have to persevere,” she said.

Collier, 40, supervises a staff of 11 full-time employees and oversees all operations of the 30-year-old Santa Ana Zoo, which runs on a $623,000 annual budget and contains about 300 animals.

Collier said she began working as a volunteer docent at the Los Angeles Zoo in 1966 and was hired there as a zoo attendant and animal keeper in 1968. Before then, “I was kind of lost in college. I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” she said, but “the more I learned about animals, the more (zoo work) fascinated me.”

When she became a zoo attendant, “zoo keeping was a really male-dominated profession,” Collier said. The few women keepers hired were always limited to the nursery, where they hand-raised young animals.

However, with the advent of feminism, the job climate began changing in the mid-1970s. Collier transferred into the main part of the Los Angeles Zoo and eventually took charge of monitoring a breeding colony of marmosets (South American monkeys). By 1979 she had earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology with a primatology focus at Cal State Northridge.

Attending zoo conferences and taking extra zoo keeping classes also helped her move to her present position, said Collier, who now lives in Irvine.

Today, “80% to 85% of all zoo animal keepers are women, but it’s not necessarily a high-paying job (starting at about $1,500 a month), and the competition is severe,” she said. “There are still very few zoo management positions for women.”

She would advise a young woman interested in zoo work to “get a degree in biology, zoology or even business administration. Keep your options open, and don’t let someone tell you that you can’t do something because it’s too hard.” Doing volunteer work for a zoo can also help a job candidate get a foot in the door, she said.

Zoo keeping isn’t glamorous, Collier said. “Sometimes you have to do things that are real unpleasant. Sometimes an animal dies or is sold to another zoo. . . . We all have stories about bites and scratches” from handling animals.

What’s more, she added, “your time isn’t always your own. If you have an animal emergency you stay here until it’s finished. You may have to cancel your weekend plans.”

But the job also offers a lot of personal satisfaction in both working with endangered species and helping infant animals “become well-adjusted (and) healthy,” Collier said.

Another area with opportunities for young women with scientific interests is college-level teaching and laboratory research, said Barbara Finlayson-Pitts, a Cal State Fullerton professor of chemistry, who will give Monday’s keynote talk.

Finlayson-Pitts, 38, has taught at Fullerton for 12 years. Her specialty is atmospheric chemistry, and she is in the third year of two research projects funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

In recent years, the number of women holding tenured science teaching jobs “has gone up, but not as much as it should have, and why, I don’t know,” said Finlayson-Pitts, who has a doctorate in chemistry from UC Riverside.

While university teaching positions are still relatively scarce, Finlayson-Pitts said, “that’s going to change dramatically over the next 10 to 15 years. A lot of (science) departments are top-heavy in faculty near retirement. There’s a great concern that there will not be enough qualified candidates to fill those positions” later, she said.

To prepare themselves for later studies, young women who want to teach science should “make sure they take as many (college) preparatory courses in science and math as they can get their hands on, and take everything, even though it seems tough.

“The opportunities are all there,” Finlayson-Pitts said.

However, Helen Olson, a Fullerton resident and assistant research biological chemist for the UCLA School of Medicine, said that “it’s easier for men to get established” in science-related jobs. “Women have to be on top of (their work) all the time, and they just can’t relax,” she said.

Olson, a conference participant, said she would advise young women to consider working in “the health and biotech areas of science. There’s a real scarcity of good people who can be creative in recognizing where an area that’s been researched can fit into a product line and product development.”

(Entry-level salaries for university basic research start around $18,000 a year, Olson said, while private industry jobs start around $25,000 a year.)

Olson, 50, earned a master’s degree in physical chemistry from the University of Vermont in 1958, raised a family between 1960 and 1976, returned to school and earned a doctorate in molecular biology from UCLA in 1979. She now works half time at UCLA, doing basic research into cells’ protein synthesis.

She would encourage high school girls who want families as well as careers to pursue both goals, Olson said, and she would encourage any science-minded youth to spend an extra year in college, taking arts and humanities classes. “I really think it’s necessary to get a broad education, as well as working in the sciences,” Olson said.

“Bridges to Tomorrow” will run from 12:30 to 4:30 p.m. Monday at Cal State Fullerton’s McCarthy Hall. Attendance is limited to 400. Registration can be made at the door or in advance by calling (714) 879-0436 today.

Admission to the conference, which is being underwritten with $800 from the Southern California Gas Co., is $3 per person, but organizer Skala said the fee will be waived “in hardship cases. It’s not our goal to raise money; it’s our goal to encourage these girls.”