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San Jose Mercury News, Calif., Sue Hutchison Column: Remember Denton As a Pioneer for Women

Posted on: Wednesday, 28 June 2006, 09:00 CDT

By Sue Hutchison, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.

Jun. 28--The first time I ever spoke with Denice Denton was in January of last year. It was a few weeks before she became chancellor of UC-Santa Cruz. And it was exactly 17 months before she fell to her death in an apparent suicide.

She had just returned from the academic conference where Larry Summers, who was then president of Harvard, had lobbed a verbal grenade into the crowd of female scientists by surmising that perhaps more women had not reached the highest levels of scientific research because they don't have the same "intrinsic aptitude" as men.

Denton, an electrical engineer who had been dean of the college of engineering at the University of Washington, surmised that perhaps Summers, an economist, didn't have any idea what he was talking about. She was one of the first at the conference to publicly call him out and say that women were a lot more likely to be held back by such subtleties as unintentional discrimination on faculty search committees and a lack of decent day care on campuses.

Controversy lay ahead

When we spoke, Denton was feisty, funny and passionate about recruiting more gifted women and minorities into the sciences, for which she had a stellar reputation. This was before she found herself in the middle of her own campus controversy.

First she felt the wrath of employee unions when it was disclosed that a job in the UC system was created for her romantic partner, engineering professor Gretchen Kalonji, when Denton was hired. Then Denton was ridiculed for having $600,000 worth of renovations to the chancellor's home on campus.

So when the news broke last weekend that she had fallen from the top of the San Francisco high-rise where Kalonji lives, there was immediate speculation that her troubles on campus led her to kill herself.

It will be doubly tragic if Denton made a decision to jump off that roof and it means the first thing she is associated with in the public mind is her rocky tenure in Santa Cruz. She deserves to be remembered first and foremost as one of the female pioneers in her field who made it to the upper echelons of academia, and not only held the door open for others like her but also pulled them up the stairs.

Sheila Tobias, a consultant and well-known feminist author of books focusing on math and science education, said she was wowed by Denton the first time she heard her speak at a conference about 12 years ago.

"Unlike women of the past generation, she didn't make it appear that she was unique," Tobias told me this week. "She conveyed this sense that if women were completely unfettered, many more could achieve what she had. She stole the show."

Inspiration for women

Robin Jeffries, who works on designing new products at Google, said that she had witnessed how Denton's enthusiasm fired up young women at the beginning of their careers: "She told them that engineers are people who change the world."

Telle Whitney, president of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology in Palo Alto, said it is hard to believe that such a powerful messenger is gone. "She's somebody I so admired," Whitney told me. Then she added quietly, "I still admire her."

Despite all the speculation, we probably will never know what demons finally drove Denton over the brink. But I will remember her as the engineer who told me that she was going to get more girls into the field because helping to shape technology will rock their world -- and ours.

Whatever mistakes she made, the manner of her death should not eclipse the true legacy of her life.

Sue Hutchison's column appears Mondays and Wednesdays. Contact her at shutchison@mercurynews.com.

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Copyright (c) 2006, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: San Jose Mercury News

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