All the coverage of Sandy on the television over the last
few days had me thinking about the days when all hurricanes were given female
names, and the brouhaha that surrounded the change to that tradition. Sandy, of
course, is a nice androgynous name, but it is difficult to believe that as
recently as 1979 people would say in public that hurricanes should be given
female names because women are more likely to be stormy and unpredictable. . .
(for the record, Sandy is on the list as a woman’s name, sandwiched between
Rafael and Tony).
The next thought in this train had to do with the number of
women covering Sandy – whether standing in the downpour or fighting to remain
vertical against the wind or warm and dry in the broadcast studios, women’s
faces were on every screen. And I remembered that broadcast meteorology was one
of those careers in which women were severely underrepresented – and in fact,
that the long tradition of “weather babes” (sometimes slightly less blatantly
called “weather bunnies”) had made it even more difficult for women to be taken
serious in meteorology than it was in other science careers.
So here’s a short tribute to American women in weather.
Sarah Frances Whiting was the first professor of physics
when Wellesley College opened. Like many scientists of the 19th
century, her interests were wide-ranging; like many women of the era, she
fought an uphill battle to be allowed to study and to advance in her field.
After being invited to join the New England Meteorological Society (the first
woman so honored) she established a course in meteorology at the college and
built a weather-data collection center there, as the United States Weather Bureau
had no observation stations in the area.
Joanne Malkus Simpson, who died in 2010, was recognized as
one of the top meteorologists in the world. Appropriately enough for this post,
she was an expert in tropical storms, one of the two scientists who in the
1950s explained how and why hurricanes form in the tropics and move across the
oceans the way they do. Simpson had developed this knowledge as a part of her
pioneering work in cloud studies, a field so untouched that a professor at the
University of Chicago approved of her work, saying it would be a good area “for
a little girl to study.’’
Bernice Ackerman got her start as a weather observer with
the WAVES in WWII, and after the war went on to earn advanced degrees in meteorology.
Like Simpson, she studied clouds and wind, and became an expert on tornados and
on manipulating clouds to cause rain.
June Bacon-Bercey became the first woman broadcast
meteorologist in the United States in Buffalo, NY in 1970, breaking two
barriers at once, as she was also the first African-American in that role.
Although she got the job for being in the right place at the right time (she
was a science correspondent for NBC in Buffalo when the chief meteorologist at
the station was arrested and fired), she proved more than adequate to the job.
There are in fact several dozen well-respected women among
the annals of meteorological science, but the broadcasting world has been slow
to recognize them. In television, especially, the accepted wisdom was that the
serious scientist in the weather department was a man, and the role of a woman
was to be eye candy. As in so many scientific fields, the images of women
promoted by the broadcasting industry have had significant impacts on the entry
of women into the field. To some degree this is still true, particularly in
markets outside the US and UK, but things are finally changing in the United
States. As recently as 2008 studies still showed a dramatic lack of women at
the top of the weather departments in local and national news organizations,
but in the last two or three years a number of large markets have shifted, with
several or even all the local newsrooms having women as their senior meteorologists.
My non-scientific observation of the broadcasting around
Sandy was that the male-female ratios were pretty evenly divided. As changing climate
and weather become ever more important in our lives, it’s good to see that we
are not relegating women to the role of visual aid any more.