Innovating for Energy Efficiency: Savitz Looks Beyond Technology

Abstract

When Dr. Maxine Savitz headed to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for graduate school in 1958, she found life in Cambridge different than what she had known as an undergraduate chemistry major at Bryn Mawr College. The biggest change was sheer size: she went from a campus of 600 students to one of 6,000. But there were other differences. She had left the all-women’s school, one of the Seven Sisters, for one where there were only 30 women in the undergraduate school and another 30 in the graduate school, and suddenly she was a teaching assistant in a chemistry department where the head of the department refused to let women teaching assistants into the labs.