MARIAGIOVANNA SAMI

During the day spent at the Politecnico we had the opportunity to ask numerous questions to Professor Mariagiovanna Sami, professor of Digital Processing Systems at the Politecnico di Milano. What has most involved and fascinated us - and what we want to tell through this interview - are the extraordinariness and modernity of his path, which we were able to discover through the experiences and anecdotes he generously shared with us.


INTERVIEW

What was your personal experience in being a woman in the engineering field, and what difficulties did you encounter in establishing yourself initially in school and then in the world of work?
When I started my studies at the Polytechnic there were the old amphitheater-like classrooms, with uncomfortable wooden seats, perhaps designed by a woman expert in torture. There were nine hundred freshmen in all, we girls were only three. On the first day of class, after opening the door to the classroom, I found four hundred males shouting "Nude!" I had two options: either to turn my back and decide to go to the faculty of literature, or to say "Guys, you don't know who you are dealing with!".
Fortunately, today such facts no longer happen.
A quei tempi non c’erano bagni per le signore alla facoltà di ingegneria, quindi noi ragazze eravamo costrette ad andare alla facoltà di architettura.
But, apart from these difficulties, we were so few that we were even a little pampered. For example, I always had a seat in the front row: in these huge classrooms, with four hundred students, being in front was an advantage, because those in the back row sometimes couldn't even see the blackboard.
Over the course of my career I must admit that, in this particular department, I met some leaders who were very open, broad-minded people, and who made no gender difference: the important thing was to point out traces of good teaching and good Research. I found myself in a lucky situation with a very good boss; unfortunately I know for sure that it has not been and is not so everywhere.
The situation looked different during international congresses. On those occasions in a room with two hundred participants there were only two or three women and they were treated like white flies.
I remember having lively discussions in the 1980s with a Dutch colleague at the time of a very first European research plan for microelectronics. There was a representative from each nation and I represented Italy. The Dutch colleague confided to me that he was very angry with his daughter because she wanted to enroll in engineering, but in his opinion engineering was not a job suitable for a woman: women should have been a teacher or a nurse. I did not take this externalization well.
In the 1980s these things still happened: I hope they won't happen again today.
I also happened to have to defend my students. In the mid 70's we had the first microprocessor laboratory in this faculty. At a business lunch, I found myself sitting next to a lady, the owner of a medium-sized but high-tech company, who had recently had major personnel problems. Chatting, she told me she was interested in hiring a recent graduate who had done specific studies on microprocessors. Since this company was not located very close to Milan, but in another province, I proposed to hire a very good girl, in the process of completing her thesis on this topic, who lived in the capital of the province where she was located. the company. The reaction was one of refusal to hire a woman, who would surely have faced motherhood. Unfortunately, this is a case that sometimes occurs: that women are the worst enemies of women. The girl was later hired in a large company with much broader ideas.
Today the behavior of that businesswoman would be subject to denunciation, but in the 70s there was not yet this possibility. In those years the small-medium business was dominated by a closed mentality; today, small-medium enterprises only value specialization and immediate operational capacity, not gender.
In your opinion, in the future, will the proportion between men and women in the engineering field change compared to what it was in the past or compared to what it is today?
I sincerely hope so, also based on the speech an Intel executive once gave me. Intel has always strongly supported studies, even for girls. That executive's reasoning was straightforward and effective. Starting from the consideration that about half the world population is made up of women, he believed that the statistical distribution of the population's intelligence was "white noise", that is, spread in an absolutely uniform way. So he wondered what was the point of giving up half of human potential just out of stupid prejudice.
I hope that today there are no longer any conditioning on the part of high school teachers, as was the case in the past, when girls were addressed at most to the faculties of mathematics and physics, but generally dissuaded from undertaking engineering studies. Today the situation is completely different: for example, a company like BTicino, which deals with home automation, appreciates feminine flexibility and the ability of women to better understand certain types of needs.
Knowing what awaited you, what prompted you to choose engineering rather than another address?
It attracted me. I liked the humanities very much, but also the scientific ones. On the other hand, for my character, for my mentality, I preferred something that did not lead me towards
theoretical studies, but towards studies that involve aspects of implementation. For example, if I had followed the humanities, my choice would not have been philosophy, but archeology.
I firmly believe that everyone should do what they feel brought to or what they feel attracted to. I remember an old Neapolitan doctor who said to his niece "Do what you like otherwise, as they say in Naples, work becomes hard".
Do what you feel brought to!
What are some hobbies that she managed to pursue in her spare time?
Until recently, until I had some free time, that is, until I agreed to be the director of this department, I had a somewhat particular hobby: I wrote detective novels for children, then published by Mondadori. I also wrote some romance novels, which were not published under the name of Mariagiovanna Sami, as they were part of a series that was very much appreciated by our librarian at the time: I preferred to avoid interrogations on the plots of my writings. I also did some disclosure for kids, but I ran out of time afterwards.
How important was your family for your choice?
They left me free to choose. I remember the joke of my maternal grandfather, whose only perplexity with my university choice was the fact that I came from a classical high school and therefore had a poor foundation in mathematics and physics. My father was a friend of Professor Bottani, so I decided to ask his opinion. His reaction was very particular: "You have the right eyes to do engineering". What that meant I never knew. My luck has been that there has always been a lot of openness in my family.
We talked about the relationship of women in engineering to men. What relationship was there with the few other women?
During our studies we were very few, it was therefore natural to make friends between girls of the same section. Then, as we progressed in our studies, we girls chose to follow different courses, so the opportunities to meet became more sparse and it happened to get lost, as happens with high school friends.
With my colleagues in this department, however, there has always been a great friendship and, to be honest, also a certain complicity.
In your opinion, does the field of science and technology generally offer more opportunities for a woman to succeed than other fields such as economics?
I believe that a kind of Copernican revolution is taking place in that field too. Some friends, who work in the world of finance, told me that thirty or forty years ago they found themselves living in a very closed world, perhaps even more than ours. I also remember a law professor who years ago, when the distinction between full and associate professors was established, boasted that his faculty had neither women nor associates.
Today, however, the world is completely different: the president of the Court of Cassation is a woman.
I was even told that a few decades ago a new employee in a bank was not destined for the cash register, because it was believed that that position could be more dangerous for a woman than for a man. It was thought that a woman could more easily be the victim of the violence of robbers.
Closure towards women was also present in unsuspected areas, such as teaching: I remember that in the Region, at the Department of Culture and Youth many years ago they had exhibited a photocopy of a legislation from the late nineteenth century, which showed the teachers had a lower salary than the teachers, but in return they had an extra task, which was to ensure that the auxiliary staff worked well.
When did you choose the university, what ambitions did you have?
Above all, it was important to me to graduate well. In the second half of the 1960s, Italy was in full industrial expansion, so I had the feeling that I could find a satisfactory path. At the end of the fifth year I participated in a call for a postgraduate scholarship. From that moment on I think that life becomes the result of choices, but also of opportunities.
Any advice for girls who may have prejudices towards scientific addresses? Any advice for jumping in?
This bias is a big mistake. Years ago a Harvard professor delivered an unacceptable speech, in which he argued, based on statistical data, that women are anatomically and cerebrally less suited to STEM-type studies. These statistics do not take into account the fact that, in the past, very often women were not allowed to appear under their name. In the eighteenth century there was a great mathematician, Sophie Germain, who was forced to enroll at the university with a male name; his works, of great value, were never published with his name, but with that of his professor.
The same thing happened in all areas. In the world of music, for example, Mendelssohn's sister, who was an excellent composer, was unable to publish her works due to the veto of her brother, who evidently wanted to be the only Mendelssohn in the world of art. Tintoretto had a very good daughter, who worked in her father's shop, but was never able to sign a job. These are but a few examples of the failure to recognize the role of women in the scientific and cultural development of humanity.
Very often then the statistics hide, the reality is different from what is brought out.