Margaret Bryan Davis

Dr. Margaret Bryan Davis is an American palynologist and paleoecologist, who used pollen data to study the vegetation history of the past 21,000 years and showed conclusively how temperateforest species migrated at different rates and in different directions while forming a changing mosaic of communities. Early in her career, she challenged the standard methods and prevailing interpretations of the data and fostered rigorous analysis in palynology. As a leading figure in ecology and paleoecology, she served as president of the Ecological Society of America and the American Quaternary Association and as chair of the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior at the University of Minnesota. In 1982 she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Margaret Bryan Davis was born on October 23, 1931. She spent her childhood and early adolescence in the greater Boston area. She married Rowland Davis in 1956 however the couple divorced in 1970. When Rowland obtained a job in the Department of Botany at the University of Michigan, she knew that she had to have a job in the area and accepted a research position at the University. In a 1972 Ann Arbor News article, she admitted that she believed this put her in a poor position to bargain for salary. Because of this, Davis believed that her future employer took advantage of her weak bargaining position. Salary is set by bargaining, she said and added that the employer pays what he feels the market will bear, not what the merits of the employee are. Men can move. Everybody believes women cant, she says. I was vulnerable to low wages because I couldnt leave the University. I was the lowest paid person in my ranking. Dr. Davis felt her promotion to full professor at a belowtheminimum salary

Source: Wikipedia