Interview of astronomer Julie Lutz

Julie Lutz: paving the road for gender equality

By Graciela Matrajt

“I couldn’t apply to Caltech as an undergraduate student, but my male friends from high school applied and were accepted. And I had better grades than them.” This was the early 60s and for Julie Lutz, an astronomer and retired professor from the University of Washington and Washington State University, these gender inequalities did not stop her from pursuing a successful scientific career.

Julie became interested in science at a young age. As a little girl, she lived in Hawaii where she would spend nights staring at the dark skies with her father, who pointed out constellations to her. She started reading books about astronomy and nature and retained an interest in science through the years. By age ten, Julie knew she wanted to become an astronomer. In this era, women were expected to marry and have children, or to get degrees that led to careers as teachers, nurses, or receptionists, Although Julie’s parents never went to college, they were very supportive of her choice to break from the norm and pursue a scientific career. In fact, during her school years, they encouraged Julie’s interest in science. She would get rewarded 25 cents for an A in any subject and 50 cents for an A in math. 

Julie started college at sixteen, having skipped a grade in middle school. She attended local colleges for her undergraduate studies: first, the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), and then San Diego State University (SDSU) to join her long-time boyfriend. She preferred the smaller class sizes at SDSU and appreciated the small astronomical observatory in the mountains that students had helped build.  San Diego had a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for students to use the observatory to do research on binary stars. For Julie, this was an opportunity to get hands-on experience with a telescope. 

Julie received support from the astronomy departments at both UCLA and SDSU in the form of research-related jobs. Despite the paperwork hassles of employing a minor, UCLA gave her an astronomy-related job in her freshman year, working off campus at the Lockheed Astrodynamics Research Center. Not long after she transferred to San Diego, she got an astronomy-related summer job at a company called General Dynamics Astronautics. “This was the beginning of the space age,” Julie explains. “The first satellite was launched in 1957 and I hit college in 1961.” It was also the same time that the race to the Moon was declared. There were many jobs related to calculating interplanetary orbits, and Julie’s job consisted of calculating the shortest way to go to Mars. “People were convinced that if we were going to the Moon, by the end of the decade, we would go to Mars,” says Julie.

Unfortunately, this type of employment was not always offered to women and there were times when workarounds were needed. “One of my physics professors wanted me to be a grader for his class, but the department chair would not hire a woman,” says Julie. “There were no rules about those things, so there was no way to complain. So he changed my name to a male name, but the official paperwork had my real name,” admits Julie. As a female student, things were not any better. While a freshman at UCLA, Julie took an observing course where she did exceedingly well; however, she received a B when she was expecting an A. She went to talk with the instructor, a male lecturer, to inquire about her grade. The instructor said that there were quite a few A’s, but he did not want to have a too-high grade distribution, so he chose to give Julie a B because she would never do anything with Astronomy. “Back then, people pretty much did what they wanted,” explains Julie with a sigh.

Although most graduate programs were open to female students, a few were not, which created frustration among the women scientists. As an undergraduate student, Julie was single and living in a dormitory. This meant she was subjected to certain restrictions which men were not, such as a ten o’clock curfew, and locked dormitory doors. “I could not get a credit card,” notes Julie. Married women could receive credit under their husbands’ names, but single women faced tremendous barriers to buying a house, obtaining credit cards, and becoming eligible for loans. “Fortunately, by the time I got to the credit card sort of stage, I was married.” 

Julie graduated with an undergraduate degree from SDSU with a double major in physics and astronomy, determined to pursue a research career in astronomy. However, she had to move to another university because SDSU did not offer PhDs. This was a difficult decision because by then Julie was engaged and her fiancé did not want to leave San Diego (SD). Julie had to decide whether to stay in SD and marry him or leave to do a PhD. “To go to grad school, I broke up with him. It was a very hard decision. But if I wanted to get a doctorate, I had to leave SD,” she explains. Julie was forced to choose between her education and her relationship. She chose her career.

Julie had been the only woman in her undergraduate advanced physics courses and went to grad school knowing she was entering a world ruled by men.  She was accepted into all the programs where she applied and chose the University of Illinois. There, she met her first husband, Tom Lutz. They got married and had two children during her graduate school years. Tom, also an astronomer, was three years ahead of her. Julie was a teaching assistant when she became pregnant. Her advisor, a man who liked children and had four of his own, arranged for Julie to become a research assistant so that she would have more flexibility when her baby was born. “My husband and I shared an office where we brought our baby often. She slept in the dark room next to our office. Nobody said anything. The department was supportive of those things,” explains Julie, who passed her qualifying exams while taking care of one child and pregnant with a second. She and Tom made it through by alternating childcare duties and work. To make things work, “You have to be married to the right man,” admits Julie, laughing.  When Julie’s husband finished his thesis, he got a faculty position at Washington State University (WSU). The whole family moved and Julie continued working on her thesis remotely and observing at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. Although Julie was three years behind her husband, she finished and obtained her PhD only two years after him. Amazingly, she made up a year while caring for two very young kids.

At that time, spouses were not allowed to work in the same academic department. Those regulations were a serious barrier to employment and affected many academic women. Julie was lucky that the policy changed the year she obtained her PhD, and she was able to accept an offer to join her husband in the WSU Department of Mathematics. Julie and Tom would have fit better in the Physics Department, but some faculty members there were traditionalist males who did not wish to have a female colleague.

Julie started as a temporary part-time faculty member and in just a few years became a full professor. During her career at WSU, she served as chair of the department, Associate Provost, and Associate Dean of the College of Sciences. She also played important roles in advocating for women’s rights. In 1973 Julie joined AWIS. Then, in 1974, she headed a faculty study at WSU that uncovered dramatic differences between the salaries of comparably accomplished and experienced male and female professors, after which WSU rectified the disparities. That same year, Julie, along with other female faculty, founded the WSU’s Association for Faculty Women.

In other academic fields, women were often not even considered. For example, in space travel, men did not have their female counterparts in mind. “I remember talking with Sally Ride, the first woman in space, who came to visit WSU. She mentioned that they still had not worked out the female plumbing for the spacesuit. And she was scheduled to fly soon, but she still did not know how she was going to go to the bathroom in space,” says Julie laughing. “It took them decades to figure those things out.” Women today often do not realize what previous generations of women like Julie went through and how they worked to pave the road for contemporary women to have similar rights as men. “Women often claim they are not feminists. Yes, they are,” says Julie, “because they now expect certain things that were not available a few decades ago, and they just take them for granted.” 

In the 1980s, Julie branched out into science education, while continuing her research in stellar evolution. She obtained education grants to create programs involving planetarium visits for school groups, using their observatory for public purposes, visiting schools to engage kids with science, and training K-12 teachers. Some of these programs lasted more than ten years.  In 1995 Julie’s husband died suddenly from an undiagnosed heart condition. A couple of years later, Julie moved to Seattle, where she joined the University of Washington Astronomy Department as a Research Professor and married another astronomer. She continued her research and education missions through programs for the entire Northwest, including Hawaii, which lasted until she retired in 2007. Julie continues working in research and science education. She works with undergraduate students, directs the UW Manastash Ridge Observatory, and coordinates the UW in the High School astronomy courses.

“Gender disparities are still a systematic problem,” admits Julie. But today things are much better, thanks to the efforts of women like her. 

We certainly owe Julie and many other women of her generation the laws and regulations that protect our rights today. 

Thank you, Julie! And congratulations on all the successes you have achieved through the years!