I may have a slightly casual view on the changing role of women in ocean sciences. When I went to work at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1979, my first two supervisors were women. And when I retired from NSF 27 years later, I answered to a female director of the Division of Ocean Sciences. Along the way, I worked with many very dedicated, talented, and intelligent women who were making a positive contribution to our knowledge of the ocean. For several years, the Director of NSF and the Assistant Director for Geosciences, both women, were ocean scientists. So, I seldom, if ever, thought it strange, different, or extraordinary that the scientist with whom I was working happened to be a woman.

Clark, L., J. Yoder, M. McNutt, and M.C. Colton. 2008. Women in oceanography: 20 years of progress, change, and challenge. Oceanography 21(3):38–43, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2008.33.

This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.