Rock solid at the top of her field
Gail Ashley's life in geology
Archived article from Nov 13, 1998
By Sandra Lanman
Gail Ashley remembers the moment clearly. Fresh out of graduate school with her master's degree in geology, she was being interviewed for her first job as a geologist at an oil company when she was asked: "Can you type?"
"My jaw dropped," she recalls. "They said I would likely be filing maps and typing."
That was 1972. Ashley did not take the job, and her career has moved upward ever since. Last month, the professor of geology was elected president of the 15,600-member Geological Society of America (GSA), becoming only the second woman to lead the 110-year-old organization.
"I've seen things change," observes Ashley, who joined the Rutgers faculty in 1977. She recalls that in 1970 she was denied a research opportunity in Antarctica because there were no facilities for women. Twenty years later, she went to Antarctica as a full-fledged scientist. "They bend over backwards now to make sure they have as diverse a team as possible," she says.
Her research on modern glaciers has taken her to Antarctica many times since that first trip, as well as to Alaska, where she has studied how glacial stability is affected by sediment and water flow. She also has examined ancient glacial deposits in Ireland, looking at the impact of glaciation on the Earth.
She makes annual summer trips to Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, where she is studying a 7- to 8-meter-thick time slice of the gorge's "layer cake of rocks" to learn what the environment was like when hominids lived there 2 million years ago. Ashley is working on the ecological link of freshwater springs to the presence of early humans. Springs would have been a more dependable water source than rivers or lakes.
Pointing to a poster-sized photo in her Busch office of a dozen Olduvai researchers, Ashley notes "there are only two geologists in that picture; all the rest are anthropologists." She hopes to bring along more of her students in future years.
This is important to Ashley because she believes geology is an interdisciplinary science that should be closely engaged in research with fields like biology, meteorology and oceanography. Many of the Earth's processes and problems studied by those disciplines, including coastal erosion and oil supplies, have a geological component.
"It's often been a very insular, isolated science," she says. "My goal is to push forth my aspiration that the geologic profession continue to move in the next five or 10 years into interdisciplinary science."
It's one of the things she'd like to tackle during her year as GSA president. Among her responsibilities will be providing direction for the society and encouraging geology as a profession. Ashley became active with theGSA on the regional level in 1971 and steadily became more involved, serving as general chair of the GSA's Northeast section meeting in 1991 and as national vice president last year.
"I've put in a lot of time, and I've really enjoyed it, because it allows you to make things happen," she says.
Geology remains overwhelmingly a man's field. Ashley, who is married to Jeremy Delaney, a research scientist in the department of geological sciences, notes an "alarming" attrition rate for women as they progress through graduate school. A 1993 survey by the National Science Foundation showed that only 17 percent of geologists employed in government, private industry and academia, including earth-science teachers, were women.
"I feel a special responsibility to mentor and help women," says Ashley, whose own role model was a man -- Marshall Schalk, her next-door neighbor in her native Massachusetts who was a geology professor at Smith College.
Ashley serves as an adviser to undergraduate women in the Douglass Project for Rutgers Women in Math, Science and Engineering and works with female graduate students when their research is within her areas of expertise.
"I think the Douglass Project is a wonderful program, because women do have special needs. Faculty, in particular, can provide encouragement to help build confidence," she says.
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