A true measure of gender equity in academe would look at both the career and family outcomes of female Ph.D.'s
The Chronicle of Higher Education
By MARY ANN MASON
Federal investigators of Title IX, the law that forbids sexual discrimination in education, have only recently discovered that there may be a problem for women in science.
Investigators for the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Department of Energy have been inspecting several campuses for potential Title IX violations in mathematics, science, and engineering departments (The Chronicle, January 20, 2006). The New York Times revisited the issue this summer and found that, "So far, these Title IX compliance reviews haven't had much visible impact on campuses beyond inspiring a few complaints from faculty members."
Evidence of the problems women face pursuing careers in academic science shouldn't be hard to find.
Look around the campus of any large research university. In most humanities and social-science disciplines, departments are blooming with female graduate students where there would have been few 30 years ago. But in math, engineering, and the physical sciences, the numbers remain embarrassingly low. In 2006, women received 28 percent of the doctorates awarded in the physical sciences, including computer science and math, and only 20 percent of those awarded in engineering. But that is great progress compared with 20 years ago when the numbers were often too small to register statistically.
The great loss is the absence of women on the faculty in those fields, because those are the women who have walked the whole walk.
Only 10 percent of faculty members in physics are women, the American Institute of Physics found in 2005, in a study that prompted the Title IX investigation. Less than half of the women who earn Ph.D's. in these challenging fields continue through to positions in academic research.
So far, as the Times article reported this summer, scientists seem to be telling Title IX investigators that the problem in academe is not so much discrimination as a lack of interest.
While proponents of women in science say there is evidence of discrimination in certain fields, the article said, "The quality of that evidence is disputed. Critics say there is far better research showing that on average, women's interest in some fields isn't the same as men's."
Some researchers quoted in the article found that "information technology workers (more often men) especially enjoyed manipulating objects and machines, whereas workers (more often women) in other occupations preferred dealing with people." Susan Pinker, in her book, The Sexual Paradox, argues that "the campaign for gender parity infantilizes women by assuming that they don't know what they want." She said her interviews with women who had abandoned successful careers in science and engineering convinced her that they chose other careers because they lost interest in science.
I would invite Title IX investigators to talk directly to graduate students and postdocs in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering to find out what discrimination looks like.
You will find women like Jennifer Mitchell, a Ph.D. in neuroscience and a postdoc at the University of California at Berkeley. When Eve Mason Ekman (my daughter) and I interviewed Mitchell for our 2007 book, Mothers on the Fast Track, Mitchell told us, "I don't think I'll ever do a tenure-track job, and people were very upfront about that when I had my child."
You'll also find women like Sherry M.J. Towers, a particle physicist and a postdoctoral fellow, who had a baby and was effectively blacklisted by her adviser (The Chronicle, November 11, 2005). When she was pregnant, she said, her adviser refused to write a letter of recommendation for her unless she returned to work almost immediately. She did return, and he still refused. She received no interviews for any of the positions to which she applied.
Discrimination against job candidates who are pregnant or have children is a very real part of gender discrimination. Some scientists may believe that women who have families cannot be serious scientists because academic science demands exclusive attention to research. But they do not hold the same beliefs about male scientists with kids. In fact, research shows that male scientists are far more likely to have children than female scientists; two years after their Ph.D.'s, nearly 50 percent of men, but only 30 percent of women, had children.
Women in science and math learn that truth early on. When I was dean of the graduate division at Berkeley, my staff members and I studied thousands of graduate students and faculty members to learn more about the effects of family formation on the careers of Ph.D.'s. Our project — "Do Babies Matter?" — traced the career tracks of academic men and women through their doctoral years to retirement. We found firm evidence that the lack of family-friendly policies turns away both men and women, but far more often the women, from careers in academic research.
That is true across all disciplines, but more notably in the physical sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics, where the number of women is small to begin with.
Women who do pursue careers in academic science pay a high price for playing the game. Nationally, "married with children" is the academic-success formula for men, but the opposite is true for women, for whom there is a serious "baby gap." Among scientists who achieved tenure, 72 percent of the men are married with children as opposed to only 50 percent of women. Is that gender equity?
Federal investigators, when counting heads, shouldn't just consider the number of women who have succeeded in academic research. A true measure of gender equity in academe would look at both the career and family outcomes of female Ph.D.'s. We call that two-pronged measure the "baby-gap test," because it takes into account both the gap in professional outcomes for women with children compared with men and the gap in family formation for academically successful women.
Investigators need to ask not only how many women are professors and deans relative to their male counterparts, but also how many women with children are in high places compared with men with children. Viewing the situation in that way reveals that women have much further to go to achieve gender equity than we think.
Subtle maternal discrimination is difficult to deal with, but concrete measures, such as parental leave, child care, and other support at both the student and faculty levels, would go far to reduce this unnecessary loss.
Mary Ann Mason is a professor and co-director of the Berkeley Center on Health, Economic and Family Security and author of Mothers on the Fast Track (Oxford University Press). She will write regularly on work and family issues for our Balancing Act column. She invites readers to send questions or personal concerns about those issues, and she will answer your questions in a future column.
E-mail your comments to careers@chronicle.com or to mamason@law.berkeley.edu.
To read previous Balancing Act columns, see http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/archives/columns/balancing_act
Monday, October 20, 2008
Women Accuse Rutgers Political-Science Department of Bias and Hostility
By KATE MOSER
Female faculty members and graduate students in Rutgers University at New Brunswick's political-science department feel unfairly compensated and shut out of leadership positions by their male counterparts, says an internal university report obtained by The Chronicle. In at least one case, a woman has been afraid to complain about sexual harassment because of worries about retaliation.
"We were often shocked to hear that the kind of discriminatory attitudes that, sadly, were prevalent in much of the academy decades ago and that have long been unacceptable in our own departments are apparently still prevalent in political science," concludes the July report, put together by a faculty committee convened by top administration officials. Several faculty members have taken the additional step of filing a complaint with New Jersey's Office of the Attorney General.
Historically, political science has been one of the most male-dominated disciplines among the social sciences, and observers say that may contribute to a culture of bias.
Reviewing a variety of salary data, the committee uncovered "evidence of subtle and not-so-subtle bias against women in the department," leading committee members to recommend that the university "take decisive action to remedy the departmental culture," the report says.
Douglas Greenberg, the university's new dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, told The Chronicle that the report has been at the top of his agenda since his first day on the job in August. No steps have been taken yet to deal with the report's findings. Mr. Greenberg said he wanted to fully understand the "very serious charges" in the report before he acts.
The matter surfaced officially in April 2007, when some of the female faculty members in the department lodged a formal complaint with the then-dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, citing inequalities in compensation. The school examined the complaint but found no evidence of unequal pay. Female faculty members disputed that conclusion and followed up with a letter to the university's president, Richard L. McCormick, in May 2007.
After the dean's office had analyzed the claims and concluded that they were unfounded, in December Philip Furmanski, executive vice president for academic affairs, assembled the investigative committee. Four faculty members from a variety of disciplines across the university sat on the committee, which conducted its investigation from late fall of 2007 to June 2008.
Gatherings of Men
Their report cites many acts of exclusion, such as a longstanding Tuesday dinner regularly held by male senior faculty members. The report found that many in the department considered the dinner an unofficial decision-making venue to which women were not invited. Emeriti professors, all male and some of them former chairmen, still have offices in the department and shape the culture there, the committee also says. The report describes a feeling within the department that the subdiscipline of women and politics isn't valued highly, exacerbating the gender-equity problems.
The report stops short of delving into allegations of "a long-term and persistent pattern of sexual harassment" but does describe two issues, based on interviews with faculty members: at least one graduate student who "is said to be 'terrified of retaliation' if she lodges a complaint" and at least one male faculty member described by women interviewed by the committee as a "creep."
The committee summed up a pervasive impression of behavior in the department as a culture of a cliquish group of senior men. "Members of this club apparently have no clue about modern norms of what is acceptable in the workplace," the report says.
Unhappy because the university did not immediately respond to the report, five political-science faculty members at Rutgers filed complaints of differential compensation, based on gender, with the civil-rights division of the state attorney general's office on August 13. The division was informed on September 29 that the parties involved decided to participate in private mediation, said Lee Moore, a spokesman for that office.
Mr. Greenberg said he could not comment on the question of mediation. Faculty members who lodged the complaint with the state did not respond to The Chronicle's phone and e-mail messages.
Political science and international relations, along with economics, are traditionally among the most male-dominated fields in the social sciences. Women earned 38.5 percent of total political-science and international-relations doctoral degrees granted in the United States in 2006, compared with 30.4 percent in 1996, according to the most recent survey of earned doctorates by the National Opinion Research Center, at the University of Chicago.
A Broader Pattern
Across disciplines, female faculty members continue to lag behind men in pay, particularly at doctoral universities, where their average salaries are 78.1 percent of their male colleagues', according to the most recent study on gender equity in the professoriate, which was conducted in 2006 by the American Association of University Professors (The Chronicle, November 3, 2006).
"It's an issue we've been seeing in the last couple of years again," said John W. Curtis, the AAUP's director of research and public policy and an author of that report. "There's an attitude that this is something we've taken care of already, but the data indicate otherwise."
The Rutgers committee comes to a less definitive conclusion on what the data say about the alleged gender inequity in faculty salaries, though it does conclude that the department's gender bias is reflected in salaries, particularly at the associate-professor level. In one example the report provides, female associate professors earned 82 percent of what their male counterparts made during the 2006-7 academic year. One senior female faculty member in the department was earning $113,029 after 35 years at Rutgers, the report says, compared with a senior male faculty member who was earning $123,359 after 16 years at the university.
During the 2007-8 academic year, the School of Arts and Sciences "took aggressive steps to correct several of the most blatant examples of salary inequity for women faculty members," the report says.
Many universities respond to allegations of gender inequity in pay by considering individual cases, Mr. Curtis said. But that approach doesn't change the way promotion decisions are made or how starting salaries are determined, he said: "It doesn't fix the underlying structure."
http://chronicle.com
Section: The FacultyVolume 55, Issue 8, Page A14
Female faculty members and graduate students in Rutgers University at New Brunswick's political-science department feel unfairly compensated and shut out of leadership positions by their male counterparts, says an internal university report obtained by The Chronicle. In at least one case, a woman has been afraid to complain about sexual harassment because of worries about retaliation.
"We were often shocked to hear that the kind of discriminatory attitudes that, sadly, were prevalent in much of the academy decades ago and that have long been unacceptable in our own departments are apparently still prevalent in political science," concludes the July report, put together by a faculty committee convened by top administration officials. Several faculty members have taken the additional step of filing a complaint with New Jersey's Office of the Attorney General.
Historically, political science has been one of the most male-dominated disciplines among the social sciences, and observers say that may contribute to a culture of bias.
Reviewing a variety of salary data, the committee uncovered "evidence of subtle and not-so-subtle bias against women in the department," leading committee members to recommend that the university "take decisive action to remedy the departmental culture," the report says.
Douglas Greenberg, the university's new dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, told The Chronicle that the report has been at the top of his agenda since his first day on the job in August. No steps have been taken yet to deal with the report's findings. Mr. Greenberg said he wanted to fully understand the "very serious charges" in the report before he acts.
The matter surfaced officially in April 2007, when some of the female faculty members in the department lodged a formal complaint with the then-dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, citing inequalities in compensation. The school examined the complaint but found no evidence of unequal pay. Female faculty members disputed that conclusion and followed up with a letter to the university's president, Richard L. McCormick, in May 2007.
After the dean's office had analyzed the claims and concluded that they were unfounded, in December Philip Furmanski, executive vice president for academic affairs, assembled the investigative committee. Four faculty members from a variety of disciplines across the university sat on the committee, which conducted its investigation from late fall of 2007 to June 2008.
Gatherings of Men
Their report cites many acts of exclusion, such as a longstanding Tuesday dinner regularly held by male senior faculty members. The report found that many in the department considered the dinner an unofficial decision-making venue to which women were not invited. Emeriti professors, all male and some of them former chairmen, still have offices in the department and shape the culture there, the committee also says. The report describes a feeling within the department that the subdiscipline of women and politics isn't valued highly, exacerbating the gender-equity problems.
The report stops short of delving into allegations of "a long-term and persistent pattern of sexual harassment" but does describe two issues, based on interviews with faculty members: at least one graduate student who "is said to be 'terrified of retaliation' if she lodges a complaint" and at least one male faculty member described by women interviewed by the committee as a "creep."
The committee summed up a pervasive impression of behavior in the department as a culture of a cliquish group of senior men. "Members of this club apparently have no clue about modern norms of what is acceptable in the workplace," the report says.
Unhappy because the university did not immediately respond to the report, five political-science faculty members at Rutgers filed complaints of differential compensation, based on gender, with the civil-rights division of the state attorney general's office on August 13. The division was informed on September 29 that the parties involved decided to participate in private mediation, said Lee Moore, a spokesman for that office.
Mr. Greenberg said he could not comment on the question of mediation. Faculty members who lodged the complaint with the state did not respond to The Chronicle's phone and e-mail messages.
Political science and international relations, along with economics, are traditionally among the most male-dominated fields in the social sciences. Women earned 38.5 percent of total political-science and international-relations doctoral degrees granted in the United States in 2006, compared with 30.4 percent in 1996, according to the most recent survey of earned doctorates by the National Opinion Research Center, at the University of Chicago.
A Broader Pattern
Across disciplines, female faculty members continue to lag behind men in pay, particularly at doctoral universities, where their average salaries are 78.1 percent of their male colleagues', according to the most recent study on gender equity in the professoriate, which was conducted in 2006 by the American Association of University Professors (The Chronicle, November 3, 2006).
"It's an issue we've been seeing in the last couple of years again," said John W. Curtis, the AAUP's director of research and public policy and an author of that report. "There's an attitude that this is something we've taken care of already, but the data indicate otherwise."
The Rutgers committee comes to a less definitive conclusion on what the data say about the alleged gender inequity in faculty salaries, though it does conclude that the department's gender bias is reflected in salaries, particularly at the associate-professor level. In one example the report provides, female associate professors earned 82 percent of what their male counterparts made during the 2006-7 academic year. One senior female faculty member in the department was earning $113,029 after 35 years at Rutgers, the report says, compared with a senior male faculty member who was earning $123,359 after 16 years at the university.
During the 2007-8 academic year, the School of Arts and Sciences "took aggressive steps to correct several of the most blatant examples of salary inequity for women faculty members," the report says.
Many universities respond to allegations of gender inequity in pay by considering individual cases, Mr. Curtis said. But that approach doesn't change the way promotion decisions are made or how starting salaries are determined, he said: "It doesn't fix the underlying structure."
http://chronicle.com
Section: The FacultyVolume 55, Issue 8, Page A14
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Prizes for women. Progress for women?
It Could Go Either WayOctober 15, 2008
Janet Stemwedel discusses three German prizes for women in science that are only open to female researchers who have children. She wonders if that requirement implies that to be fulfilled women have to be mothers, or if it shows that serious women scientists can also be mothers. Suzanne Franks weighs in, saying, "Complaining about the awards is aiming our wrath at the wrong target. The proper target is the structural inequalities that leave women mostly responsible for raising the next generation and caring for the sick and elderly, without that labor being recognized and/or valued."
Prizes for women. Progress for women?
Category: Globalizing science * Social issues * Tribe of Science * Women and sciencePosted on: October 9, 2008 12:01 PM, by Janet D. Stemwedel
2008 is the tenth year of the L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science awards to remarkable female scientists from around the world. Indeed, our sister-site, ScienceBlogs.de, covered this year's award ceremony and is celebrating women in science more generally with a For Women in Science blog. (It, like the rest of ScienceBlogs.de, is in German. Just so you know.)
In addition to the global contest, three further scholarships are given to women scientists in Germany. But, the only women eligible for these awards are women with kids. (The rationale for this is that childcare options in Germany are not as good as they should be for working mothers, so women scientists with kids need special support.)
I was chatting about these awards with some woman friends of mine with science backgrounds, and there were some mixed views of these awards.
On the one hand, children are labor-intensive (as is science), so help caring for children is a good thing. But in theory at least, this would also be an issue for male scientists with kids.
It's possible to interpret scholarships like this as saying that no woman, remarkable scientist or not, could be completely fulfilled if she is not also a mother. Is this a social pressure that really needs to be reinforced with cash prizes?
On the other hand, it is still not uncommon for women in science to feel like having kids will be taken as definitive evidence that they weren't really serious about being great scientists -- because if they were, they would never sacrifice the time and energy children require, but would devote all of that to their research. (For some reason, kids aren't counted against the seriousness of male scientists in quite the same way. Maybe it is still assumed that they have wives who will carry the burden of the care-work so their husbands can attend to the mind-work.)
In the grand scheme of things, three prizes don't accomplish much more than helping three female scientists in Germany piece together some of the additional resources they need to take care of their kids and their scientific careers. Real change would be more structural, whether in terms of societal support of childrearing more generally, societal acceptance that not having kids is a perfectly reasonable choice, scientific workplaces that recognize that even scientists might have important things in their lives beyond their scientific work, etc., etc.
But until real change comes, what kind of message does an award like this send to you? Do you think it's a step in the right direction, or does it entrench assumptions that ought to be abandoned?
http://scienceblogs.com/ethicsandscience/2008/10/prizes_for_women_progress_for.php
What's Wrong With These Scholarships?
Category: Daily Struggles * Manifestoes * Naming Experience * Why There Are No Women in SciencePosted on: October 14, 2008 9:52 PM, by Zuska
Janet at Adventures in Ethics and Science writes about prizes for women:
2008 is the tenth year of the L'Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science awards to remarkable female scientists from around the world. Indeed, our sister-site, ScienceBlogs.de, covered this year's award ceremony and is celebrating women in science more generally with a For Women in Science blog. (It, like the rest of ScienceBlogs.de, is in German. Just so you know.)
In addition to the global contest, three further scholarships are given to women scientists in Germany. But, the only women eligible for these awards are women with kids...On the one hand, children are labor-intensive (as is science), so help caring for children is a good thing. But in theory at least, this would also be an issue for male scientists with kids.
It's possible to interpret scholarships like this as saying that no woman, remarkable scientist or not, could be completely fulfilled if she is not also a mother. Is this a social pressure that really needs to be reinforced with cash prizes?
On the other hand, it is still not uncommon for women in science to feel like having kids will be taken as definitive evidence that they weren't really serious about being great scientists -- because if they were, they would never sacrifice the time and energy children require, but would devote all of that to their research...
...[W]hat kind of message does an award like this send to you? Do you think it's a step in the right direction, or does it entrench assumptions that ought to be abandoned?
Here are my thoughts in response.
I have no patience with those who would constrain the value of women's lives to their reproductive capacity. But neither do I worry about a few tiny bits of funding going to women researchers with kids. It isn't a few scholarships that support the notion that women ought to have kids. In fact you could argue the opposite, that a scholarship for a woman with kids undermines the notion that the only thing a woman ought to be doing is have kids. We need to value the choices of women who want to have kids AND a career. We might well argue that working to establish affordable, accessible daycare for all parents would be a more effective way to achieve this than to provide individual solutions for a few elite women but that's another story.The fact is that the way things are now, women still have primary responsibility for childcare, and academic science still operates in a way to disadvantage people (mostly women) who have to devote large amounts of time to childcare. The L'Oreal awards are an attempt to mitigate these circumstances. It might be cool if the award was revised to allow support for women involved in any major family care situation - elder care, say, as well as child care. But complaining about the awards is aiming our wrath at the wrong target. The proper target is the structural inequalities that leave women mostly responsible for raising the next generation and caring for the sick and elderly, without that labor being recognized and/or valued. On the one hand, we have massive societal pressure on women to have kids and to obtain their complete identity through motherhood, while on the other hand we have massive societal denial that the work of motherhood is in any way an important societal function. It is seen as a purely individual choice and private matter and therefore society has no obligation to help those who are having kids. The problem, as I see it, with something like the L'Oreal scholarships is that they are just a band-aid. They are an acknowledgment of a widespread culture that sees child-rearing, or indeed any life event requiring one's time and attention, as an undesirable infringement upon work. They don't challenge or change this norm; they merely offer a coping strategy for a few lucky individual women. Band-aids aren't bad, but they aren't transformational change, either.
Yes, it needs to be okay for women not to be mothers. But it also needs to be okay for women to be mothers AND have careers. Or, to be only mothers and have that work seen as an important part of contributing to society. All three choices need to be equally valid, equally valued, equally viable. No one of them can be truly a choice for any woman until and unless all three are really truly a choice. No matter what we do it isn't valued and we end up vilified by someone. Vilified by conservatives if we choose career and motherhood for supposedly harming the kids; vilified by some feminists if we choose only motherhood, for being retrograde and setting back the cause of women; vilified if we choose not to have children in favor of a career as somehow being unnatural women who can never really be fulfilled. There is no choice a woman can make that is neutral, or positive. Criticizing some initiative that attempts to help a subset of women navigate the impossible set of "choices" before them misses the wider problem, which is the system that sets up the impossible choices to begin with.
We absolutely have to fight for our freedom not to have kids if we don't want to, and not to be defined solely by our ability to bear children. But our antagonists in that fight are not women who chose to have children, or some foundation that throws some money their way. There isn't just one way to win this fight. Over here we battle for the right of mothers to have careers. Over there we battle for the right of women not to be defined by childbearing. Multiple strategies, multiple fronts, multiple fights going on all the time. It's a false dichotomy to think that you have to be opposed to support for working mothers if you are also for support for women not to be defined by reproductive biology.
I will say this, however. I do think that the somewhat excessive focus on childcare issues in the gender-and-science arena is not a good thing. The implication sometimes is almost as if the ONLY issue facing women in science is childcare. This completely ignores all the problems faced by women who do not have children, and all the problems women with children face that have nothing to do with them having children. It also produces the nagging feeling that if those darn women would just stop insisting upon having kids and a demanding science career, there wouldn't be an issue. You know, everything in science is good, except we have to make special accommodations for those demanding baby mamas, who don't realize they really ought to go home and stop bothering all the rest of us who've devoted our lives to science. It makes it seem like the problem is those darn reproducing women, not the structure of science, or the misplaced values of society.
In this regard it's good to see the way that some of the NSF ADVANCE programs deal with this issue. For example, the University of Washington ADVANCE program has a Transitional Support Program that is available to women and men, and that posits childcare as just one of an array of life issues for which a faculty member might need some extra help. Rather than the extremes of either ignoring or singling out childcare, it normalizes childcare as just one of many parts of life that people have to deal with while managing their careers. By being open to women and men, the program also makes clear that it does not view responsibility for such life issues as solely belonging to women. That's a good start.
Janet Stemwedel discusses three German prizes for women in science that are only open to female researchers who have children. She wonders if that requirement implies that to be fulfilled women have to be mothers, or if it shows that serious women scientists can also be mothers. Suzanne Franks weighs in, saying, "Complaining about the awards is aiming our wrath at the wrong target. The proper target is the structural inequalities that leave women mostly responsible for raising the next generation and caring for the sick and elderly, without that labor being recognized and/or valued."
Prizes for women. Progress for women?
Category: Globalizing science * Social issues * Tribe of Science * Women and sciencePosted on: October 9, 2008 12:01 PM, by Janet D. Stemwedel
2008 is the tenth year of the L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science awards to remarkable female scientists from around the world. Indeed, our sister-site, ScienceBlogs.de, covered this year's award ceremony and is celebrating women in science more generally with a For Women in Science blog. (It, like the rest of ScienceBlogs.de, is in German. Just so you know.)
In addition to the global contest, three further scholarships are given to women scientists in Germany. But, the only women eligible for these awards are women with kids. (The rationale for this is that childcare options in Germany are not as good as they should be for working mothers, so women scientists with kids need special support.)
I was chatting about these awards with some woman friends of mine with science backgrounds, and there were some mixed views of these awards.
On the one hand, children are labor-intensive (as is science), so help caring for children is a good thing. But in theory at least, this would also be an issue for male scientists with kids.
It's possible to interpret scholarships like this as saying that no woman, remarkable scientist or not, could be completely fulfilled if she is not also a mother. Is this a social pressure that really needs to be reinforced with cash prizes?
On the other hand, it is still not uncommon for women in science to feel like having kids will be taken as definitive evidence that they weren't really serious about being great scientists -- because if they were, they would never sacrifice the time and energy children require, but would devote all of that to their research. (For some reason, kids aren't counted against the seriousness of male scientists in quite the same way. Maybe it is still assumed that they have wives who will carry the burden of the care-work so their husbands can attend to the mind-work.)
In the grand scheme of things, three prizes don't accomplish much more than helping three female scientists in Germany piece together some of the additional resources they need to take care of their kids and their scientific careers. Real change would be more structural, whether in terms of societal support of childrearing more generally, societal acceptance that not having kids is a perfectly reasonable choice, scientific workplaces that recognize that even scientists might have important things in their lives beyond their scientific work, etc., etc.
But until real change comes, what kind of message does an award like this send to you? Do you think it's a step in the right direction, or does it entrench assumptions that ought to be abandoned?
http://scienceblogs.com/ethicsandscience/2008/10/prizes_for_women_progress_for.php
What's Wrong With These Scholarships?
Category: Daily Struggles * Manifestoes * Naming Experience * Why There Are No Women in SciencePosted on: October 14, 2008 9:52 PM, by Zuska
Janet at Adventures in Ethics and Science writes about prizes for women:
2008 is the tenth year of the L'Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science awards to remarkable female scientists from around the world. Indeed, our sister-site, ScienceBlogs.de, covered this year's award ceremony and is celebrating women in science more generally with a For Women in Science blog. (It, like the rest of ScienceBlogs.de, is in German. Just so you know.)
In addition to the global contest, three further scholarships are given to women scientists in Germany. But, the only women eligible for these awards are women with kids...On the one hand, children are labor-intensive (as is science), so help caring for children is a good thing. But in theory at least, this would also be an issue for male scientists with kids.
It's possible to interpret scholarships like this as saying that no woman, remarkable scientist or not, could be completely fulfilled if she is not also a mother. Is this a social pressure that really needs to be reinforced with cash prizes?
On the other hand, it is still not uncommon for women in science to feel like having kids will be taken as definitive evidence that they weren't really serious about being great scientists -- because if they were, they would never sacrifice the time and energy children require, but would devote all of that to their research...
...[W]hat kind of message does an award like this send to you? Do you think it's a step in the right direction, or does it entrench assumptions that ought to be abandoned?
Here are my thoughts in response.
I have no patience with those who would constrain the value of women's lives to their reproductive capacity. But neither do I worry about a few tiny bits of funding going to women researchers with kids. It isn't a few scholarships that support the notion that women ought to have kids. In fact you could argue the opposite, that a scholarship for a woman with kids undermines the notion that the only thing a woman ought to be doing is have kids. We need to value the choices of women who want to have kids AND a career. We might well argue that working to establish affordable, accessible daycare for all parents would be a more effective way to achieve this than to provide individual solutions for a few elite women but that's another story.The fact is that the way things are now, women still have primary responsibility for childcare, and academic science still operates in a way to disadvantage people (mostly women) who have to devote large amounts of time to childcare. The L'Oreal awards are an attempt to mitigate these circumstances. It might be cool if the award was revised to allow support for women involved in any major family care situation - elder care, say, as well as child care. But complaining about the awards is aiming our wrath at the wrong target. The proper target is the structural inequalities that leave women mostly responsible for raising the next generation and caring for the sick and elderly, without that labor being recognized and/or valued. On the one hand, we have massive societal pressure on women to have kids and to obtain their complete identity through motherhood, while on the other hand we have massive societal denial that the work of motherhood is in any way an important societal function. It is seen as a purely individual choice and private matter and therefore society has no obligation to help those who are having kids. The problem, as I see it, with something like the L'Oreal scholarships is that they are just a band-aid. They are an acknowledgment of a widespread culture that sees child-rearing, or indeed any life event requiring one's time and attention, as an undesirable infringement upon work. They don't challenge or change this norm; they merely offer a coping strategy for a few lucky individual women. Band-aids aren't bad, but they aren't transformational change, either.
Yes, it needs to be okay for women not to be mothers. But it also needs to be okay for women to be mothers AND have careers. Or, to be only mothers and have that work seen as an important part of contributing to society. All three choices need to be equally valid, equally valued, equally viable. No one of them can be truly a choice for any woman until and unless all three are really truly a choice. No matter what we do it isn't valued and we end up vilified by someone. Vilified by conservatives if we choose career and motherhood for supposedly harming the kids; vilified by some feminists if we choose only motherhood, for being retrograde and setting back the cause of women; vilified if we choose not to have children in favor of a career as somehow being unnatural women who can never really be fulfilled. There is no choice a woman can make that is neutral, or positive. Criticizing some initiative that attempts to help a subset of women navigate the impossible set of "choices" before them misses the wider problem, which is the system that sets up the impossible choices to begin with.
We absolutely have to fight for our freedom not to have kids if we don't want to, and not to be defined solely by our ability to bear children. But our antagonists in that fight are not women who chose to have children, or some foundation that throws some money their way. There isn't just one way to win this fight. Over here we battle for the right of mothers to have careers. Over there we battle for the right of women not to be defined by childbearing. Multiple strategies, multiple fronts, multiple fights going on all the time. It's a false dichotomy to think that you have to be opposed to support for working mothers if you are also for support for women not to be defined by reproductive biology.
I will say this, however. I do think that the somewhat excessive focus on childcare issues in the gender-and-science arena is not a good thing. The implication sometimes is almost as if the ONLY issue facing women in science is childcare. This completely ignores all the problems faced by women who do not have children, and all the problems women with children face that have nothing to do with them having children. It also produces the nagging feeling that if those darn women would just stop insisting upon having kids and a demanding science career, there wouldn't be an issue. You know, everything in science is good, except we have to make special accommodations for those demanding baby mamas, who don't realize they really ought to go home and stop bothering all the rest of us who've devoted our lives to science. It makes it seem like the problem is those darn reproducing women, not the structure of science, or the misplaced values of society.
In this regard it's good to see the way that some of the NSF ADVANCE programs deal with this issue. For example, the University of Washington ADVANCE program has a Transitional Support Program that is available to women and men, and that posits childcare as just one of an array of life issues for which a faculty member might need some extra help. Rather than the extremes of either ignoring or singling out childcare, it normalizes childcare as just one of many parts of life that people have to deal with while managing their careers. By being open to women and men, the program also makes clear that it does not view responsibility for such life issues as solely belonging to women. That's a good start.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Opening Opportunities for Girls in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM)
Visit AAUW's new website on STEM.
There are many projects devoted to increasing the number of girls interested in STEM across the country, and the premise of the National Girls Collaborative Project (NGCP) is that these programs could be more effective if they worked together.
Often, individuals working on one "girls in STEM" project are unaware of similar projects nearby. The goal of the NGCP is to facilitate collaboration among projects so that they can share resources, work together, and learn from one another. A big part of the National Girls Collaborative Project is the creation of a Program Directory of these girl-serving projects. You can find the Program Directory here.
The Program Directory allows organizations interested in creating more opportunities for girls in STEM to register and learn about similar organizations in their area. Another big part of the NGCP is the mini-grant program. NGCP will make $1000 mini-grants available to collaborations of 2 or more participating programs who apply through the Program Directory.
For example, if one organization has meeting space with computers available, and another organization has mentors and girls available, the two organizations both register in the program directory and then apply for a $1000 mini-grant to help pay for the costs of their joint event.
The NGCP is now accepting applications for mini-grants! Click here for more information on mini-grants.
Click here for a list of mini-grants awarded from September, 2007 - May, 2008.
The NGCP will also provide research-based promising practices in informal learning environments and evaluation and assessment to the participating programs to help further advance the work of these girl-serving projects.
AAUW members across the country are acting as Regional Liaisons for the National Girls Collaborative Project. These Regional Liaisons help the people involved in the NGCP to make connections — to one another, to resources on gender equity, and to AAUW.
There are many projects devoted to increasing the number of girls interested in STEM across the country, and the premise of the National Girls Collaborative Project (NGCP) is that these programs could be more effective if they worked together.
Often, individuals working on one "girls in STEM" project are unaware of similar projects nearby. The goal of the NGCP is to facilitate collaboration among projects so that they can share resources, work together, and learn from one another. A big part of the National Girls Collaborative Project is the creation of a Program Directory of these girl-serving projects. You can find the Program Directory here.
The Program Directory allows organizations interested in creating more opportunities for girls in STEM to register and learn about similar organizations in their area. Another big part of the NGCP is the mini-grant program. NGCP will make $1000 mini-grants available to collaborations of 2 or more participating programs who apply through the Program Directory.
For example, if one organization has meeting space with computers available, and another organization has mentors and girls available, the two organizations both register in the program directory and then apply for a $1000 mini-grant to help pay for the costs of their joint event.
The NGCP is now accepting applications for mini-grants! Click here for more information on mini-grants.
Click here for a list of mini-grants awarded from September, 2007 - May, 2008.
The NGCP will also provide research-based promising practices in informal learning environments and evaluation and assessment to the participating programs to help further advance the work of these girl-serving projects.
AAUW members across the country are acting as Regional Liaisons for the National Girls Collaborative Project. These Regional Liaisons help the people involved in the NGCP to make connections — to one another, to resources on gender equity, and to AAUW.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
The Lab Is Her Kingdom
The Lab Is Her Kingdom
October 2008 By Matthew Dublin
To try and encapsulate in a few sentences what Mary-Claire King has done, not only for genomics and female scientists around the world, but for the human race, is a futile pursuit. Clearly, this is one woman who needs no introduction, but it behooves us to mention a few key achievements for which King will surely be remembered in years to come.
To say that her career started with a bang is an understatement. In 1973 at the University of California, Berkeley, King published her doctoral dissertation - and it landed on the cover of Science. In it, she demonstrated through comparative protein analysis that the humans and chimpanzees are 99 percent genetically identical. Since the early 1980s, King used her skills to spearhead efforts fighting human rights abuses in South American, Asia, and Europe with a method she developed that used mitochondrial DNA and HLA-serotyping markers. In 1990, while at Berkeley, King developed techniques that led to the discovery of the BRCA1 gene, which is now well known to be strongly implicated in breast and ovarian cancer.
But King, currently a professor of genome sciences and medicine at the University of Washington, says that her graduate studies did not begin without some struggles. In fact, King says she grew frustrated while first attempting to complete her graduate work on the Berkeley campus during those wild and wooly days of the late 1960s, with the constant presence of the US Army and local police. "From the time I started graduate school and finished, it was long and fraught," King says. "I ended up dropping out in the middle and going to work for Ralph Nader and then coming back."
Upon returning, she began working in the lab of the late Allan Wilson, whom she credits with informing her on the finer points of running a successful lab. It is worth noting that it was Wilson who convinced King to stay at Berkeley and continue working on her PhD, rather than taking a job offer with Nader in Washington, DC. "Working with Allan was transformative. He was always focused on the science and focused on the data, and he allowed one to free oneself of all the insecurities," she says. "It didn't make failed experiments any less discouraging, but it did mean that you weren't being judged as a person, you just needed to do the experiment again."
She also says Wilson was great when it came to listening to what everyone in the lab had to say. The ability to hear what the people in one's lab are saying and try to give useful feedback is enormously important, she says - and it's something she is still trying to perfect in her own work to this day.
Confidence and funding
King says that the key characteristics she looks for in young researchers aiming to join her lab are curiosity and a strong work ethic. "Background can be learned and techniques can be taught, but only to a receptive person who is curious and is prepared to put in the time when experiments don't work," she says. "Those are the most valuable types of people I've found since doing this since 1974."
A key element of being a good leader is bringing home the proverbial bacon, and the ability to do so is one thing King makes an effort to instill in her postdocs as they venture out into the world. "Clearly you can't run a lab if you can't bring in the money, and the primary job of the lab director is to bring in the money and let the postdocs and students have at it," she says. "So you need to give them a sense of where the money is buried, and not to get discouraged when it takes multiple rounds to get it."
Eric Lynch, co-founder of Sound Pharmaceuticals, a biotech company focusing on drug discovery for the auditory system, remembers his time with King fondly. "She instilled in me a desire to take on really hard problems and pursue the answers doggedly despite the critics and status quo," he says. "She definitely gave me confidence in myself as a researcher and let me know that the results mattered. ... She was also an inspiration on how to build research teams."
One event during his stay in the King lab was particularly memorable: the presentation of the team's findings for BRCA1 at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. "I went up to the podium showing a slide with a razor blade and a pulsed field gel. I then proceeded to explain how YACs could be gel isolated in sufficient quantity for radio labeling and screening of cDNA libraries - oh, and here are all the genes we found," he says. "People were pretty surprised and supportive, and with all of the genomic sequencing taking hold and the enamorization of exon trapping, here was the King lab getting it out and getting results."
King feels that it is important for would-be researchers to understand what being in a lab is all about, and that it's so much more than just science. "Very few people outside of experimental science recognize what a lab culture is. It's somewhere a cross between a kibbutz and a family, and it's very hard to convey to people who don't live it," she says. "The combination of the closeness day to day, the transition of people coming out and new people coming in so that people start as newbies and then end up mentoring other people, it's a very special kind of culture."
Naming Names
King says that more than 50 postdocs and graduate students have passed through her lab. Here are just a few of those who were lucky enough to do so.
Lori FriedmanDuring her time with King, Friedman was hard at work helping her mentor to further elucidate the role of BRCA1 in breast and ovarian cancers. After completing her graduate studies in 1995 and landing several fellowships, she eventually headed to her current position, director of cancer signaling and translational oncology at Genentech.
Jeff HallKing remembers former graduate student Jeff Hall fondly as the one who helped map BRCA1. After leaving academia, Hall jumped the fence to industry, serving as the vice president and director of several biotech companies. He is currently vice president of cell biology at Genoptix Medical Laboratory.
Jeanette McCarthyThis former King lab member is now focused on the dyslipidemia associated with chronic hepatitis C virus infection. McCarthy is currently an associate professor in the Department of Community and Family Medicine at the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy.
Ruth OttmanOttman's primary research area is genetic epidemiology and research designs for testing gene-environment interaction, methods for collection of valid family history data, and approaches to assessing familial aggregation. She is a professor of epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.
Nancy SpinnerSpinner left the King lab after finishing her PhD in 1984 and went on to focus her efforts on identifying genes that cause congenital diseases. Currently, she is a professor of pediatrics and genetics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
Elizabeth SwisherSince her time as a grad student in King's lab, Swisher has continued to work on breast and ovarian cancers - both independently and with King. She is now an associate professor of gynecologic oncology at the University of Washington.
© Copyright 2008 GenomeWeb Daily News. All rights Reserved.
October 2008 By Matthew Dublin
To try and encapsulate in a few sentences what Mary-Claire King has done, not only for genomics and female scientists around the world, but for the human race, is a futile pursuit. Clearly, this is one woman who needs no introduction, but it behooves us to mention a few key achievements for which King will surely be remembered in years to come.
To say that her career started with a bang is an understatement. In 1973 at the University of California, Berkeley, King published her doctoral dissertation - and it landed on the cover of Science. In it, she demonstrated through comparative protein analysis that the humans and chimpanzees are 99 percent genetically identical. Since the early 1980s, King used her skills to spearhead efforts fighting human rights abuses in South American, Asia, and Europe with a method she developed that used mitochondrial DNA and HLA-serotyping markers. In 1990, while at Berkeley, King developed techniques that led to the discovery of the BRCA1 gene, which is now well known to be strongly implicated in breast and ovarian cancer.
But King, currently a professor of genome sciences and medicine at the University of Washington, says that her graduate studies did not begin without some struggles. In fact, King says she grew frustrated while first attempting to complete her graduate work on the Berkeley campus during those wild and wooly days of the late 1960s, with the constant presence of the US Army and local police. "From the time I started graduate school and finished, it was long and fraught," King says. "I ended up dropping out in the middle and going to work for Ralph Nader and then coming back."
Upon returning, she began working in the lab of the late Allan Wilson, whom she credits with informing her on the finer points of running a successful lab. It is worth noting that it was Wilson who convinced King to stay at Berkeley and continue working on her PhD, rather than taking a job offer with Nader in Washington, DC. "Working with Allan was transformative. He was always focused on the science and focused on the data, and he allowed one to free oneself of all the insecurities," she says. "It didn't make failed experiments any less discouraging, but it did mean that you weren't being judged as a person, you just needed to do the experiment again."
She also says Wilson was great when it came to listening to what everyone in the lab had to say. The ability to hear what the people in one's lab are saying and try to give useful feedback is enormously important, she says - and it's something she is still trying to perfect in her own work to this day.
Confidence and funding
King says that the key characteristics she looks for in young researchers aiming to join her lab are curiosity and a strong work ethic. "Background can be learned and techniques can be taught, but only to a receptive person who is curious and is prepared to put in the time when experiments don't work," she says. "Those are the most valuable types of people I've found since doing this since 1974."
A key element of being a good leader is bringing home the proverbial bacon, and the ability to do so is one thing King makes an effort to instill in her postdocs as they venture out into the world. "Clearly you can't run a lab if you can't bring in the money, and the primary job of the lab director is to bring in the money and let the postdocs and students have at it," she says. "So you need to give them a sense of where the money is buried, and not to get discouraged when it takes multiple rounds to get it."
Eric Lynch, co-founder of Sound Pharmaceuticals, a biotech company focusing on drug discovery for the auditory system, remembers his time with King fondly. "She instilled in me a desire to take on really hard problems and pursue the answers doggedly despite the critics and status quo," he says. "She definitely gave me confidence in myself as a researcher and let me know that the results mattered. ... She was also an inspiration on how to build research teams."
One event during his stay in the King lab was particularly memorable: the presentation of the team's findings for BRCA1 at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. "I went up to the podium showing a slide with a razor blade and a pulsed field gel. I then proceeded to explain how YACs could be gel isolated in sufficient quantity for radio labeling and screening of cDNA libraries - oh, and here are all the genes we found," he says. "People were pretty surprised and supportive, and with all of the genomic sequencing taking hold and the enamorization of exon trapping, here was the King lab getting it out and getting results."
King feels that it is important for would-be researchers to understand what being in a lab is all about, and that it's so much more than just science. "Very few people outside of experimental science recognize what a lab culture is. It's somewhere a cross between a kibbutz and a family, and it's very hard to convey to people who don't live it," she says. "The combination of the closeness day to day, the transition of people coming out and new people coming in so that people start as newbies and then end up mentoring other people, it's a very special kind of culture."
Naming Names
King says that more than 50 postdocs and graduate students have passed through her lab. Here are just a few of those who were lucky enough to do so.
Lori FriedmanDuring her time with King, Friedman was hard at work helping her mentor to further elucidate the role of BRCA1 in breast and ovarian cancers. After completing her graduate studies in 1995 and landing several fellowships, she eventually headed to her current position, director of cancer signaling and translational oncology at Genentech.
Jeff HallKing remembers former graduate student Jeff Hall fondly as the one who helped map BRCA1. After leaving academia, Hall jumped the fence to industry, serving as the vice president and director of several biotech companies. He is currently vice president of cell biology at Genoptix Medical Laboratory.
Jeanette McCarthyThis former King lab member is now focused on the dyslipidemia associated with chronic hepatitis C virus infection. McCarthy is currently an associate professor in the Department of Community and Family Medicine at the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy.
Ruth OttmanOttman's primary research area is genetic epidemiology and research designs for testing gene-environment interaction, methods for collection of valid family history data, and approaches to assessing familial aggregation. She is a professor of epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.
Nancy SpinnerSpinner left the King lab after finishing her PhD in 1984 and went on to focus her efforts on identifying genes that cause congenital diseases. Currently, she is a professor of pediatrics and genetics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
Elizabeth SwisherSince her time as a grad student in King's lab, Swisher has continued to work on breast and ovarian cancers - both independently and with King. She is now an associate professor of gynecologic oncology at the University of Washington.
© Copyright 2008 GenomeWeb Daily News. All rights Reserved.
Math Skills Suffer in U.S., Study Finds
October 10, 2008
Math Skills Suffer in U.S., Study Finds
By SARA RIMER
Laura Pedrick for The New York Times
In 1998, Melanie Wood at 16 became the first girl on the USA Mathematical Olympiad team. Today, at 27, Ms. Wood is a doctoral candidate in mathematics at Princeton University.
Jodi Hilton for The New York Times
Since Ms. Wood's first, Sherry Gong, 19, now a sophomore at Harvard, has also won gold medals on the United States team.
Steven Dunbar
Alison Miller, 22, a recent Harvard graduate, was also a gold medal recipient for the U.S. team.
The United States is failing to develop the math skills of both girls and boys, especially among those who could excel at the highest levels, a new study asserts, and girls who do succeed in the field are almost all immigrants or the daughters of immigrants from countries where mathematics is more highly valued.
The study suggests that while many girls have exceptional talent in math - the talent to become top math researchers, scientists and engineers - they are rarely identified in the United States. A major reason, according to the study, is that American culture does not highly value talent in math, and so discourages girls - and boys, for that matter - from excelling in the field. The study will be published Friday in Notices of the American Mathematical Society.
"We're living in a culture that is telling girls you can't do math - that's telling everybody that only Asians and nerds do math," said the study's lead author, Janet E. Mertz, an oncology professor at the University of Wisconsin, whose son is a winner of what is viewed as the world's most-demanding math competitions. "Kids in high school, where social interactions are really important, think, 'If I'm not an Asian or a nerd, I'd better not be on the math team.' Kids are self selecting. For social reasons they're not even trying."
Many studies have examined and debated gender differences and math, but most rely on the results of the SAT and other standardized tests, Dr. Mertz and many mathematicians say. But those tests were never intended to measure the dazzling creativity, insight and reasoning skills required to solve math problems at the highest levels, Dr. Mertz and others say.
Dr. Mertz asserts that the new study is the first to examine data from the most difficult math competitions for young people, including the USA and International Mathematical Olympiads for high school students, and the Putnam Mathematical Competition for college undergraduates. For winners of these competitions, the Michael Phelpses and Kobe Bryants of math, getting an 800 on the math SAT is routine. The study found that many students from the United States in these competitions are immigrants or children of immigrants from countries where education in mathematics is prized and mathematical talent is thought to be widely distributed and able to be cultivated through hard work and persistence.
The International Olympiad, which began in Romania in 1959, is considered to be the world's toughest math competition for high school students. About 500 students from as many as 95 countries compete each year, with contestants solving six problems in nine hours. (Question 5 from the 1996 test was famously difficult, with only six students out of several hundred able to solve it fully.)
The United States has competed in the Olympiad since 1974. Its six-member teams are selected over years of high-level contests, and trained during intensive summer math camps.
One two-time Olympiad gold medalist, 22-year-old Daniel M. Kane, now a graduate student at Harvard, is the son of Dr. Mertz and her husband, Jonathan M. Kane, a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of Wisconsin, and a co-author of the study. The other two co-authors are Joseph A. Gallian, a math professor at the University of Minnesota and president of the Mathematical Association of America, and Titu Andreescu, a professor of math education at the University of Texas at Dallas and a former leader of the United States Olympiad team.
All members of the United States team were boys until 1998, when 16-year-old Melanie Wood, a cheerleader, student newspaper editor and math whiz from a public high school in Indianapolis, made the team. She won a silver medal, missing the gold by a single point. Since then, two female high school students, Alison Miller, from upstate New York, and Sherry Gong, whose parents emigrated to the United States from China, have made the United States team (they both won gold).
By comparison, relatively small Bulgaria has sent 21 girls to the competition since 1959 (six since 1988), according to the study, and since 1974 the highly ranked Bulgarian, East German/German and Soviet Union/Russian IMO teams have included 9, 10 and 13 girls respectively. "What most of these countries have in common," the study says, "are rigorous national mathematics curricula along with cultures and educational systems that value, encourage and support students who excel in mathematics."
Ms. Wood is now 27 and completing her doctorate in math at Princeton University. "There's just a stigma in this country about math being really hard and feared, and people who do it being strange," she said in a telephone interview. "It's particularly hard for girls, especially at the ages when people start doing competitions. If you look at schools, there is often a social group of nerdy boys. There's that image of what it is to be a nerdy boy in mathematics. It's still in some way socially unacceptable for boys, but at least it's a position and it's clearly defined."
Ms. Miller, who is 22 and recently graduated from Harvard, and Ms. Gong, 19 and a Harvard sophomore, both cite Ms. Wood as their role model. Ms. Wood and Ms. Miller helped coach the United States girls' team that began competing in the Girls' Math Olympiad in China two years ago. Thirteen girls from the United States have competed in the last two years, according to the study, and all are of Asian descent except one, Jennifer Iglesias.
The leader of those two teams, and of the United States Olympiad team is Zuming Feng, who grew up in China and teaches math at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.
Dr. Feng says that in China math is regarded as an essential skill that everyone should try to develop at some level. Parents in China, he said, view math as parents in the United States do baseball, hockey and soccer.
"Here everybody plays baseball," Dr. Feng said. "Everybody throws a few balls, regardless of whether you're good at it, or not. If you don't play well, it's O.K. Everybody gives you a few claps. But people don't treat math that way."
A big part of the problem, Dr. Mertz and others say, is that while the young math Olympians are wooed by elite colleges like Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as the country's leading hedge fund firms, they are mostly invisible to the public.
"There is something about the culture in American society today which doesn't really seem to encourage men or women in mathematics," said Michael Sipser, the head of M.I.T.'s math department. "Sports achievement gets lots of coverage in the media. Academic achievement gets almost none."
Ana Caraiani, 23 and a graduate student in math at Harvard, is a two-time Romanian International Olympiad gold medalist. "In Romania, math is not considered as something you need to be a nerd to do," Ms. Caraiani said. "Math is about being smart. It's about having intuition. It's about being creative."
Still, she says, it was not easy excelling in mathematics as a girl in Romania. In 2001, in fact, she was the first girl to make the country's Olympiad team in 25 years.
Related
International Mathematical Olympiad (imo-official.org)
Math Olympiad archives (unl.edu)
2008 Questions (unl.edu, PDF)
2008 Solutions (unl.edu, PDF)
Girls Math Olympiad 2007 (msri.org)
Op-Ed: Girls Math Olympiad 2008 blog (msri.org)
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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