The notion of fairness was something always stressed by his father, says Carl E. Heath Jr., Engr ’52, who instilled the same values of equality and justice in his own children. So, he was surprised when giving his daughter a chemistry set as a Christmas present ruffled some feathers. Later, when he encountered female work colleagues in need of family leave options as well as a shortage of female faculty at his alma mater, he just felt compelled to get involved. First, while working for Exxon Mobile in England, he helped institute a maternity leave policy that would serve as a model for other similar programs. And in the case of faculty, when Dr. Heath learned there was a dearth of qualified female engineering candidates, he reasoned having more female graduate students would help populate the field with more women professors.
As a result, in 1996, he started the Heath Fellowships for Graduate Women in Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, to which Exxon Mobile now gives a 3:1 match for Dr. Heath’s own contributions. Currently, women represent 39 percent of the Whiting School of Engineering graduate population and the number of female faculty members stands at 20. “I feel I’m doing something for the school that gave me the opportunities to become aware of such issues and to do something about it,” says Dr. Heath, who is now also turning his attention to fighting racism and youth violence.
