Decades before personnel directors talked about diversity, Irene Hanson Frieze learned what it took to be the lone woman in a graduate psychology program at the University of California in Los Angeles.

With bachelor's degrees in mathematics and psychology, the Los Angeles native applied to graduate school in psychology and was rejected.

"People would tell you privately that they didn't accept women," said Dr. Frieze, a 37-year member of the University of Pittsburgh's psychology department faculty.

Her mentor, Professor Peter Bentler, successfully intervened, arguing that his student was not really a woman because she had a math degree.

In 1967, "They let me into the program without any funding. I had to be in the top third of all of my classes. I was the first woman ever admitted in our program. He persuaded his colleagues to let me do it under these conditions. That's when I felt like I started being a pioneer."

Since the mid-1980s, Dr. Frieze, 65, has taught business administration at Pitt. She's conducted long-term studies of the salaries achieved by people who earned MBA degrees and also examined intimate partner violence in a book called, "Hurting the One You Love." More recently, her research has focused on changing attitudes toward work, gender and family in the United States as well as Central and Eastern Europe.

Back in the 1960s, Dr. Frieze spent years in graduate school as the only woman in classrooms of men. As the decade progressed, more women joined the graduate school ranks of social, clinical and developmental psychology at UCLA. Dr. Frieze and her colleagues decided to teach one another a class on the psychology of women. Those informal seminars led them to collaborate on writing one of the first textbooks devoted to the psychology of women.

That experience proved useful when Dr. Frieze moved with her husband to Pittsburgh in 1972. Though she was based in Pitt's psychology department, Dr. Frieze came here to start a Women's Studies Program with Mary Briscoe, a faculty member in the school's English department, and Maurine Greenwald, a Pitt history professor.

"None of us knew each other before we came here. We had to figure out what a women's studies program should look like and set it up. We didn't have any templates we could look at," she said.

No women's studies textbooks existed, so each professor chose readings from history, English and psychology.

"We found it hard to combine these three disciplines into one course. So we soon stopped teaching together," Dr. Frieze said.

But all three academics and a steering committee continued to meet to create new women's studies courses with quality content and set high standards so the university would take the program seriously.

"We had to figure out how to get these courses into the curriculum," Dr. Frieze said, adding that there was lots of lobbying with individual faculty members and department chairs.

Those efforts paid off.

"We have a huge number of faculty who have affiliations with women's studies. It's now become socially acceptable to do that," she said.

For years, Dr. Frieze taught a psychology of gender course, an expertise she relies on in her task as editor of an interdisciplinary social science journal called Sex Roles that is published monthly.

"Many, many disciplines have found that by considering gender as a serious issue that you rethink a lot of things in the discipline. In history, this has led to more of a focus on the common person rather than the king."

In psychology, she routinely requires students to consider the differences between males and females in their research projects. "People didn't even used to think about that," she said.

Failure to control for males and females in scientific studies, Dr. Frieze said, meant "there was a big bias in terms of samples that nobody was really talking about -- to at least consider gender as a possible variable and how it might affect a person's response, and it almost invariably does."

Human resource managers, she added, need to be aware of an unconscious tendency "to hire people like you to do similar tasks."

There are ways, Dr. Frieze said, to control for gender bias in the workplace.

For years, she observed, American and European symphony orchestras were made up of men. Women were not hired in large numbers until audition protocols changed and musicians played behind a screen that obscured their identity, leaving listeners to judge players based on their abilities rather then their gender.

"Money Q&A" and "Company Town" are featured exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.