Martha Richmond began her teaching career at another Boston-based institution, UMass Boston, for two years. She was then interviewed by future Suffolk colleague and close friend Maria Bonaventura, and invited join the Suffolk faculty on a tenure-track position, which she chose as a more promising path in her professional career in biochemistry.

Later in her career, she pioneered and became chair of the Environmental Studies department at Suffolk.

"Very, very, very few women actually achieved it to the level of making, becoming a professor at a university level in a high-powered research institution.

And of those women who did, the option of having anything other than a career was often very, very difficult. So, it was a choice that you made, is this really what I want to do or do I want another kind of life?"

Being a Woman in STEM

In her oral history interview in 2018, Martha Richmond recalled how challenging it was as a woman in a male-dominated field in the 1970s. She also referenced the then-recent comments of Harvard University president Lawrence Summers (pictured on the left), who said in 2014 that women lacked the "instrinsic aptitude" to succeed in science and mathematics.