Juliet Popper Shaffer

Education and career

Juliet Martha Popper was born in Brooklyn, and took four years of mathematics at Midwood High School in Brooklyn, a curriculum that was at that time intended only for boys. She did her undergraduate studies at Swarthmore College, following the lead of classmate Arthur Mattuck, and despite the anti-women and anti-Jewish admission quotas then in place at Swarthmore. After several changes of topic she ended up majoring in psychology and minoring in mathematics and philosophy. She graduated in 1953, married a classmate, and moved to Stanford University for graduate study in psychology. Her marriage broke up during her studies, but she completed her Ph.D. in psychology at in 1957. She published a modified version of her dissertation, Motivational and social factors in children's perceptions of height, as Social and personality correlates of children's estimates of height with Journal Press in 1964.

After postdoctoral studies with William Kaye Estes at Indiana University, she joined the faculty in psychology at the University of Kansas. At Kansas, Popper was involved with local struggles for desegregation, and became the first chair of the university's Affirmative Action Board. During this time she married her second husband, Harry G. Shaffer, another faculty member who already had children. She was informed at the time of their marriage that, because of Kansas's anti-nepotism rules, only one of her or her husband could win tenure, but this rule was changed when she finally went up for tenure, a year late because having children made her department think she wasn't serious about psychology. The part-time teaching schedule she followed while raising her children delayed her chances for taking a sabbatical, but finally, in 1973, she was allowed to take a sabbatical at Berkeley, under the supervision of Erich Leo Lehmann. In the same year she divorced her husband.

In 1977 she married Lehmann and moved to Berkeley. The psychology department there was not hiring, so she took a visiting position at the University of California, Davis and then a year later became a lecturer in statistics at Berkeley. At Berkeley, she also ran a "drop-in consulting service", and by 1981 achieved security of employment, the equivalent of tenure for lecturers. Her job title was later changed to Teaching Professor. She retired in 1994, and spent several of the following years as a researcher at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey.