Edith Taylor isn’t thinking about the sub-zero wind blowing against her numb face. As she leads her field team across the Transantarctic Mountains, all she can think about are fossils. Finding fossils. Specifically, fossils entombed in rock-like peat. Surveying the barren landscape ahead, she trudges forward in her mountaineering boots on to the next patch at the end of the plateau. Pick in hand, Taylor takes a deep breath and swings at a hard black mass. These specimens may be able to tell us about the future of global warming.

Fifty-four-year old Taylor is from a breed so rare, she might as well bleed blue. Taylor is one of the world’s leading experts on plant fossils and she has explored Antarctica on eight separate occasions. She was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. But, most importantly, Taylor is a female scientist in a line of work still heavily dominated by males, a fact she is actively working toward changing. In fact, the KU Women’s Award Hall of Fame recognized Taylor’s advocacy work and inducted her in 2004.

Taylor may be queen in Antarctica, but at the University, she’s more fittingly democratic. Instead of brown bag lectures, Taylor leads brown bag discussions.

Arms crossed, salt-and-peppered hair securely bunned, she sits at the front of a classroom across from scientists diverse in age, ethnicity and gender, who come on their own time to discuss the politics of women in science.

They begin by discussing the pipeline effect, in which women drop out of their careers on the way to the top. This is not unheard of at the University of Kansas. The number of male to female assistant professors is almost equal, 149 to 138, respectively, the Office of Institutional Research and Planning (OIRP) reported in 2005. But at the higher position of professor, women constitute only 18 percent of the faculty.

Taylor made it through the pipeline, but she says women often feel they have to choose between their careers and raising a family because the government doesn’t offer enough support, like childcare or maternity leave, for female scientists to be successful at both.

“If society’s brightest women are then choosing not to reproduce, our society is in big trouble,” she says.

In an effort to educate KU students on the oppression of women in science, Taylor teaches the seminar Women in Science each fall. The course introduces students to scientific products, inquiry and careers as studied by feminist scholars.

“I’ve been a real champion for getting more girls to go into science and getting more college women to go on and do more graduate work in science,” Taylor says.

Heather Burkard, KU alumna, took Taylor’s seminar in the fall of 2004. She says Taylor taught everything from gender discrimination in health insurance coverage to the media’s stereotypical portrayal of female scientists as spinsters. Taylor defies this stereotype by balancing teaching and researching with marriage and children, Burkard says. She hasn’t seen many female role models in science like Taylor, which she says makes it difficult for women to imagine themselves in the field.

“We could definitely use more Edith Taylors in the world,” Burkard says. “Women like her are few and far between.”

Taylor’s agenda to increase the number of females in the science pool seems to be working, at least with one student who took the seminar. Jennifer McNutt, KU alumna, says that learning about prominent female scientists provided her the motivation to push forward to be a cosmetic surgeon. She wants to be a role model like Taylor and other scientists she learned about in the seminar, she says.

Taylor doesn’t just “talk the talk” when it comes to getting more women in science, but she also “walks the walk,” as Thomas Taylor, her husband and coworker, says.

In addition to speaking out on feminist issues, Edith Taylor actively volunteers in several outreach programs to recruit future generations of female scientists. Taylor has participated in TRIO days, which serve underrepresented and low-income students. She supports these young high school students, whom she sees as potential scientists, by giving them the “joy of discovery” through hands-on workshops.

Last month, Taylor volunteered at Expanding Your Horizons, a discovery program that connects women in math or science careers to girls in sixth through eighth grades.

Patty Ryberg, Omaha graduate student, assists Taylor at these workshops. Taylor lets the students participate in science, Ryberg says, teaching them how to prepare Antarctican fossils for the microscope while talking to them about her travels to the continent. “She really makes science exciting and accessible,” Ryberg says.

The fossils Taylor uses in these workshops is not in short supply at the University. Taylor says her field teams, which collected the fossils, have added at least 200,000 specimens to the University’s fossil plant collection, the largest in the world. The peat Taylor discovered in Antarctica is particularly important because it could help experts predict the effects of global warming. With carbon dioxide levels constantly on the rise, Taylor says, “the only way we can know the future of global warning is to look back at the past, to look at fossils.”

The fossils are preserved in petrified peat, which looks like dark rock.

Petrified peat is akin to backyard compost turned to stone, Taylor says. The tree rings found in the peat serve as a fossil record that tells us not only how old a tree was, but also what sort of climate it lived in, she says.

Because plant life is practically nonexistent in Antarctica today, it seems unimaginable that the continent once had forests full of trees. But Antarctica, in fact, had a warm climate 260,000 million years ago.

Some people don’t worry about global warming because it will lead to more vegetation growth in areas previously too cold to support it, Taylor says. But, as Taylor has found, the trees that grew in Antarctica were not dense enough to be used as building materials. If trees 200 years from now are as spongy as the ones that grew in the Permian Age in Antarctica, they will be of no use.

If you asked Edith Taylor 30 years ago if she could imagine herself collecting rocks on the coldest continent on earth, she probably would have let out one of her contagious full-bodied laughs. Back then, she knew women only as nurses, teachers, artists or secretaries.

Thirty years ago, Taylor was behind a typewriter, tediously typing up reports as a secretary at a chemical abstract company. Because she wasn’t challenged by her job, Taylor grew bored and quit.

She then enrolled at Ohio State University as a piano major. Indifferent to which course she would take to fulfill a science requirement, she took botany because it had the fewest lab hours. While she struggled through her piano training studies, her experience in the lab, coupled with motivating role models such as plant anatomist Kathryn Easu, convinced Taylor to switch majors. Years later, working toward a graduate degree in botany, she met Thomas -— then her Ph.D. adviser, now her husband.

In 1995, the husband-wife team joined the KU faculty in biological sciences.

The University of Kansas is ideal among universities, Taylor says, because there are a lot of women working in the science departments. In the fall of 2005, the OIRP reported that 31 percent of the biological science faculty was female, which Taylor says is better than most universities.

Although gender equity has improved over the years at the University of Kansas and universities nationwide, Taylor says that an imbalance still exists, particularly in the sciences. There are 922 male faculty members and 565 female faculty members across disciplines at the University, the OIRP reports. Specifically to the natural sciences, which includes all the sciences ranging from biology to physics, only 52 of the total 212 faculty members are women, constituting about 24 percent — significantly less than the 38 percent on faculties across campus.

After 11 years at the University, Taylor is living proof that a woman can have a career and a family, and succeed at both. She couldn’t have done it without the support of her husband and coworker Thomas, she says.

Thomas was there to support Taylor on her first expedition to Antarctica in 1985, and has accompanied her on seven of her eight visits. Although she was the team leader, Thomas says, questions were deferred to him not only because he was male, but also because he was older and had been in paleobotany longer.

Now that people are aware of her reputation, he says, it’s a different story when they’re working at the South Pole. “Now in Antarctica, she’s the boss. It’s her field,” he says.

Jeffrey Osborn, professor and chair of the biology department at Truman State University, accompanied Taylor and observed her leadership on two Antarctic expeditions.

During their most recent trip to Antarctica in 2003, bad weather and logistical problems delayed helicopter and plane transport from the camp to the field sites. Taylor reorganized her field team’s schedule with the six other teams’ schedules to maximize their productivity, while re-coordinating transportation, Osborn says. “She’s an excellent role model to both men and women alike,” he says.

Some males in the field have interpreted Taylor’s domineering personality as “bitchy,” Osborn says.

“Like all of us, we can have another side to our personality. Edith is charming and very engaging, and she also has a strong personality – type A,” he says. “Unfortunately, in our society, if a woman comes across as assertive and with a strong personality, people may perceive that as bitchy. Edith may tell you about such a reputation, but it doesn’t accurately reflect her personality.”

Despite the use of the word “bitch” as a derogatory term towards women, Taylor says that she has taken ownership of her reputation as the “bitch queen of the Midwest.”

“Society doesn’t value a woman that’s not afraid to give her opinion. If speaking your mind makes you a bitch, than I’m proud to be one. If someone wants to call me a bitch for knowing my own mind, then I’ll have to say thank you, yes, I am,” Taylor says.

Though she’s faced discrimination in the field on past expeditions, Taylor doesn’t hesitate to return to Antarctica. She submitted a grant proposal to the National Science Foundation to travel there again to continue her research, but was turned down, which she says is common. Taylor is adjusting her proposal based on reviewers’ comments and plans to resubmit it. If approved, Taylor will travel to Antarctica with Thomas and Ryberg next year.

As Taylor continues to trek to Antarctica to collect more specimens, she also continues her legacy as a prominent and respected scientist, not just a female one.

In the field, she attentively taps at the luminous black rock like she begrudgingly did on a typewriter so many years before. But in Antarctica, no one tells her what to do. In Antarctica, Taylor is on her own turf. And, there, she rules.