Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Math, Tech and the Women Who Don't Love Them

By GERRY SHIH
December 28, 2009, 9:35 pm
Gerry Shih/The New York Times

Sally K. Ride, a former astronaut, is now promoting a federal science and math education initiative.
It's no secret to anyone in Silicon Valley that math, science and technology fields remain dominated by men, despite some progress by women in recent years. Women make up 46 percent of the American workforce but hold just 25 percent of the jobs in engineering, technology and science, according to the National Science Foundation.
To Sally K. Ride, a former astronaut, that persistent gender gap is a national crisis that will prove to deeply detrimental to America's global competitiveness.
In recent months, Dr. Ride has served as a visible emissary for President Obama's broad push to improve science and math education, including the $4.35 billion "Race to the Top" initiative announced in July. The program would identify and fund effective education programs with the aid of corporate partners.
In an interview earlier this month, Dr. Ride said that hard money is needed to attract more qualified teachers and apply data-driven analyses of education programs.
But she also suggested that much of the problem lies with social and cultural expectations. "There are subtle stereotypes," she said. "There are unsubtle effects of the lowered expectations that we surround our kids with."
At a California Institute of Technology science festival in 2007, a mother approached Dr. Ride with her 12-year-old daughter in tow and bragged for several minutes, Dr. Ride recalled.
According to Dr. Ride, the mother was sending an unconscious message to her daughter that her interest in science wasn't normal. "She was saying, 'I don't know where she got this, she's so different from everyone else,'" Dr. Ride said. Girls "internalize the message that scientists are geeky-looking guys with labcoats and pocket protectors who never see the light of day."
Dr. Ride said children ages 10 to 12, especially girls, are the most susceptible to being "pushed off the track" of pursuing science by negative stereotypes. Ten years down the line, at the gates of colleges and graduate schools, the effects are stark: Today, more than half of the students in American graduate programs in the physical sciences and engineering are foreign-born, Dr. Ride said.
At Stanford University - where Dr. Ride double-majored in physics and creative writing and found time to play on the formidable tennis team - 408 men and 208 women undergraduates enrolled in the college of engineering at the start of the 2008-2009 school year. The math department had 70 men and 19 women, the computer science department, 122 men and 19 women. (The complete breakdown by gender and department at Stanford is found here. We'll post the numbers for the University of California, Berkeley, when we get them.)
Since leaving the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the late 1980s, Dr. Ride has been steadily advocating for science education.
Leveraging her enormous name recognition at the time, Dr. Ride immediately wrote several books for children about space after leaving N.A.S.A. In 2001, she formed an educational company, Sally Ride Science, to attract - and crucially, retain - children interested in science and engage their parents through festivals, science camps and programs that involve engineering challenges with toys.
With her involvement in the new federal initiative, Dr. Ride has recently become more vocal, challenging schools to subject their performance to quantitative measures and compete for federal money.
"We need higher expectations for our students," she said. "Schools need to expect their kids to be taking science and math and we need to measure how they're doing."
And now, with her involvement in the Obama administration's program, Dr. Ride speaks like someone ready to move in policy circles. "We need politicians to appreciate how important this is for the future of our country," she said.
• Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Monday, December 14, 2009

For Immediate Release November 23, 2009 President Obama Launches "Educate to Innovate" Campaign for Excellence in STEM

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary


Nationwide effort includes over $260 million in public-private investments
to move American students to the top of the pack
in science and math achievement over the next decade

President Obama today launched the “Educate to Innovate” campaign, a nationwide effort to help reach the administration’s goal of moving American students from the middle to the top of the pack in science and math achievement over the next decade.

Speaking to key leaders of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Math) community and local students, President Obama announced a series of high-powered partnerships involving leading companies, foundations, non-profits, and science and engineering societies dedicated to motivating and inspiring young people across America to excel in science and math.

“Reaffirming and strengthening America’s role as the world’s engine of scientific discovery and technological innovation is essential to meeting the challenges of this century,” said President Obama. “That’s why I am committed to making the improvement of STEM education over the next decade a national priority.”

The new partnerships, with accompanying major commitments from philanthropic organizations and individuals, mark a dramatic first wave of responses to the President’s call at the National Academy of Sciences this spring for a national campaign to raise American students “from the middle to the top of the pack in science and math over the next decade.” Each of the commitments—valued together at over $260 million in financial and in-kind support—will apply new and creative methods of generating and maintaining student interest and enthusiasm in science and math, reinvigorating the pipeline of ingenuity and innovation essential to America’s success that has long been at the core of American economic leadership.

Among the initiatives announced by the President are:

•Five public-private partnerships that harness the power of media, interactive games, hands-on learning, and 100,000 volunteers to reach more than 10 million students over the next four years, inspiring them to be the next generation of makers, discoverers, and innovators. These partnerships represent a combined commitment of over $260 million in financial and in-kind support.
•A commitment by leaders such as Sally Ride (the first female astronaut), Craig Barrett (former chairman of Intel), Ursula Burns (CEO, Xerox), Glenn Britt (CEO, Time Warner Cable), and Antonio Perez (CEO, Eastman Kodak) to increase the scale, scope, and impact of private-sector and philanthropic support for STEM education. This coalition, with the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, will recruit private sector leaders to serve as champions for STEM at the state level; mobilize resources to help scale successful STEM innovations; and raise awareness of the importance of STEM among parents and students.
•An annual science fair at the White House, showcasing the student winners of national competitions in areas such as science, technology, and robotics.
President Obama has identified three overarching priorities for STEM education: increasing STEM literacy so all students can think critically in science, math, engineering and technology; improving the quality of math and science teaching so American students are no longer outperformed by those in other nations; and expanding STEM education and career opportunities for underrepresented groups, including women and minorities.

The Obama Administration has already taken bold action in the STEM education arena by directing that the $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” school grant program assure a competitive preference to states that commit to improving STEM education. “The Department of Education takes the STEM competitive priority very seriously – and states should as well,” said Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

But while federal leadership is necessary, a real change in STEM education requires the participation of many elements of society, including governors, philanthropists, scientists, engineers, educators, and the private sector. That is why the President’s speech at the National Academy of Sciences challenged all Americans to join the cause of elevating STEM education as a national priority.

“America needs a world-class STEM workforce to address the grand challenges of the 21st century, such as developing clean sources of energy that reduce our dependence on foreign oil and discovering cures for cancer,” said John Holdren, President Obama’s science advisor and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “It is extremely gratifying to see this first and very robust set of responses to the President’s call to action.”

Background on Educate to Innovate: A National Campaign for Excellence in
Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Education (STEM)

Today at the White House, President Obama launched the “Educate to Innovate” campaign, a nationwide effort to help reach the administration’s goal of moving American students from the middle to the top of the pack in science and math achievement over the next decade. President Obama announced a series of partnerships involving leading companies, universities, foundations, non-profits, and organizations representing millions of scientists, engineers and teachers that will motivate and inspire young people across the country to excel in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

President Obama believes that reaffirming and strengthening America’s role as the world’s engine of scientific discovery and technological innovation is essential to meeting the challenges of this century. A growing number of jobs require STEM skills, and America needs a world-class STEM workforce to address the “grand challenges” of the 21st century, such as developing clean sources of energy that reduce our dependence on foreign oil and discovering cures for diseases. Success on these fronts will require improving STEM literacy for all students; expanding the pipeline for a strong and innovative STEM workforce; and greater focus on opportunities and access for groups such as women and underrepresented minorities.

In a speech to the National Academies of Sciences this spring, President Obama announced a commitment to raise America from the middle to the top of the pack internationally in STEM education over the next decade. At that time President Obama also challenged governors, philanthropists, scientists, engineers, educators, and the private sector to join with him in a national campaign to engage young people in these fields. The partnerships announced today are the initial response to this “call to action.”

Additionally, to help meet this goal, the President’s $4.35 billion Race to the Top fund provides a competitive advantage to states that commit to a comprehensive strategy to improve STEM education. Race to the Top will challenge states to dramatically improve their schools and student achievement by raising standards, using data to improve decisions and inform instruction, improving teacher effectiveness, using innovative and effective approaches to turn around struggling schools and making it possible for STEM professionals to bring their experience and enthusiasm into the classroom. These reforms will help prepare America’s students to graduate ready for college and career, and enable them to out-compete any worker, anywhere in the world.

Public Private Partnerships

Time Warner Cable’s “Connect a Million Minds” Campaign: Time Warner Cable, in partnership with FIRST Robotics and the Coalition for Science After School, is launching a campaign to connect over one million students to highly-engaging after-school STEM activities that already exist in their area. Time Warner Cable will use its media platform, Public Service Announcements, 47,000 employees, and a “connectamillionminds.com” website where over 70,000 parents and community members have already pledged to connect a child to STEM. Time Warner Cable has made a commitment of $100 million over the next five years to support this campaign, and will target 80 percent of its corporate philanthropy to STEM.

Discovery Communications’ “Be the Future” Campaign: Discovery Communications, in partnership with leading research universities and federal agencies, is launching a five-year, $150 million cash and in-kind “Be the Future” campaign. This will create content that reaches more than 99 million homes, including a PSA campaign across Discovery's 13 U.S. networks, a dedicated commercial-free educational kids block on the Science Channel, and programming on the “grand challenges” of the 21st century such as their landmark Curiosity series. Discovery Education will also create rich, interactive education content that it will deliver at no cost to approximately 60,000 schools, 35 million students, and 1 million educators, and through a partnership with the Siemens Foundation, will create STEM Connect, a national education resource for teachers.

Sesame Street’s Early STEM Literacy Initiative: Celebrating its 40th Anniversary, and with First Lady Michelle Obama appearing on the first episode, Sesame Street, in partnership with PNC Bank, is announcing a major focus on science and math for young children and a $7.5 million investment in the effort. Sesame Street’s new season kicked-off with “My World is Green & Growing,” which will be part of a two-year science initiative designed to increase positive attitudes towards nature, deepen children’s knowledge about the natural world and encourage behavior that shows respect and care for the environment. Twenty of the 26 new episodes will have a focus on STEM; 13 focus on science and seven focus on math. In addition, Sesame Workshop, in partnership with PNC Bank’s Grow Up Great Program, is announcing a new math initiative for preschool children entitled Math is Everywhere.

“National Lab Day,” Bringing Hands-on Learning to Every Student: National Lab Day is a historic grassroots effort, online at nationallabday.org, to bring hands-on learning to 10 million students by upgrading science labs, supporting project-based learning, and building communities of support for STEM teachers. The effort is a partnership between science and engineering societies representing more than 2.5 million STEM professionals and almost 4 million educators, with strong financial support from the Hidary Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and industry partners. Collectively, this partnership is committed to working with more than 10,000 teachers and 1 million students within a year, and 100,000 teachers and 10 million students over the next four years.

National STEM Game Design Competitions: The MacArthur Foundation, Sony Computer Entertainment America, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) and its partners (the Information Technology Industry Council, the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, and Microsoft) are launching a nationwide set of competitions that include the design of the most compelling, freely-available STEM-related videogames for children and youth. The competitions will include the 2010 Digital Media and Learning Competition, a $2 million yearly effort supported by the MacArthur Foundation that advances the most innovative approaches to learning through games, social networks and mobile devices. One of the competitions will be open only to children, to help them develop 21st century knowledge and skills through the challenge of game design. This year Sony will participate in one segment of the competition and encourage the development of new games that build on the existing popular video game Little Big Planet.

Women Hold More Jobs than Ever But Salaries Still Lag

Pottsville (PA) Republican (Monday, Nov. 28)
Former AAUW Fellow Heather Boushey, a leading economist who co-edited The Shriver Report — A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything, shares her view about the current job climate, “The labor market is highly segregated, with women and men in different jobs.” Boushey continued, observing that, “there’s a lingering gender pay gap. It’s really a residual, most likely discriminatory, effect.” The article elaborates, reporting that average female workers in Pennsylvania earned 79 percent of the median income of their male counterparts in 2008.

Nobel Prize Winning Member Talks about Women in Science on NPR

The Diane Rehm Show (Thursday, Dec. 3)
Nobel Prize Winner Carol Greider, Ph.D., the Johns Hopkins University molecular and genetic biologist and AAUW member, participated in a conversation about women in science. AAUW members across the nation are using their wealth of social capital to get girls involved in math and science through the National Girls Collaborative Project.
To learn more, visit: http://www.aauw.org/education/ngcp/

Longtime Advocate for Women in Medicine Leads Diversity Effort at Weill Cornell

The Chronicle of Higher Education

December 6, 2009

By Abby Brownback


Debra Leonard could paint her medical career with two broad strokes.
Weill Cornell Medical College's first chief diversity officer is both a molecular pathologist and a longtime advocate for women in medicine. This past summer she became director of the college's new Office of Faculty Diversity in Medicine and Science.
The office's goal is "to change the Weill Cornell environment to a diverse and inclusive community, so all people feel welcomed, accepted, and part of the team," says Dr. Leonard, who is 54.
Differences in the demographic characteristics of American physicians and their patients can cause misunderstandings that result in a lower standard of care, she says. "If you don't understand that the cultural background of your patients influences how they cooperate with and respond to treatment, then you won't be able to treat them as effectively."
To train doctors from diverse nationalities, races, religions, ages, and sexual orientations, medical-school faculties must themselves model diversity, she believes. And they still have a long way to go.
About two-thirds of the country's medical faculty members are male, and almost 70 percent of them are non-Hispanic and white, the Association of American Medical Colleges found in 2007. African-American and Hispanic professors made up just 3 percent and 4 percent, respectively, of the American medical faculty. And women on medical faculties are far less likely than men to reach the ranks of associate or full professor.
Dr. Leonard's first challenge is to better train a diverse student body by recruiting professors from more-varied backgrounds.
Carla Boutin-Foster, the office's director of diversity, says each of the office's three directors contributes her own expertise in pursuit of that goal, and Dr. Leonard's expertise lies in developing leaders from underrepresented populations, especially women.
Last fall, Dr. Leonard harnessed what Dr. Boutin-Foster calls her "direct dedication and passion" to push for her beliefs. Separately, the two women approached David P. Hajjar, dean of the graduate school and executive vice provost of the medical school, about the need for a program focused on faculty diversity. Rache M. Simmons, now the office's director of women in medicine and science, proposed a similar idea to Antonio M. Gotto Jr., dean of the medical school.
The perspectives of each professor strengthened their collective argument for establishing a diversity office, Dr. Boutin-Foster said. After hearing from the women, Mr. Hajjar convened a committee to generate suggestions, and less than a year later, with Dr. Gotto's backing, the Office of Faculty Diversity in Medicine and Science was created.
Dr. Leonard was a natural choice to direct it, Mr. Hajjar says, thanks to her leadership of a mentorship program for women pursuing combined doctoral and medical degrees while she taught at the University of Pennsylvania. But Mr. Hajjar wanted more than just mentors for junior female professors at Weill Cornell. He wanted a formalized structure for recruiting and supporting women, and faculty members from distinct backgrounds.
As chief diversity officer, Dr. Leonard would like all faculty members to be happy to work at the college. Through faculty surveys, town-hall meetings, and seminars, she hopes to foster a "diverse, inclusive, and equitable" environment to ensure faculty retention.
Though she knows she may face some opposition in confronting the problems her efforts identify, Dr. Leonard is no stranger to an uphill battle. Her first applications to medical schools were met with rejection—something she calls "the first major failure of my life." She was admitted five years later to the New York University School of Medicine, where she specialized in molecular pathology. Dr. Leonard started in that field in 1992 and has watched as it evolved from identifying pathogens and researching genetic diseases through DNA and RNA to using what she calls "CSI-style methods" to learn about cancers and transplants.
Between the end of her undergraduate education and the beginning of medical school, Dr. Leonard studied the inner ear in auditory-physiology laboratories and completed one year of a bachelor of science program in nursing. After medical school, she moved from New York to the University of Pennsylvania, where she was tapped to run the mentorship program for female students. She guided the women along the narrow career paths open to minorities in the medical profession at the time.
"The focus of my career for the last 12 years has been … to make it a better world for those coming behind me," Dr. Leonard says.
Abby Brownback is a graduate student at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland at College Park.

Saturday, December 5, 2009

The Bi-College News

Liberal Arts for Science Majors

By Anna Giarratana

Recently, people have asked me why I chose to attend a liberal arts college. A liberal arts college may seem like an odd destination for a pre-med science major involved in research. Often questioners wave off my answer, replying with a smile, “Yes, yes, you deal with the liberal arts classes because Bryn Mawr has a good academic reputation.” Or sometimes the questioner is more cynical and replies, “Oh yes, you want the breadth of classes so you don’t have to deal with the depth.” Both of these responses fall so short of the reason any person should chose to attend a liberal arts college. So maybe it’s time we discuss why we all actually chose to do so.
The traditional notion is that a liberal arts college gives students the opportunity to broaden their minds with the study of varied topics. As Albert Einstein said, “It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education at a liberal arts college is not learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.” While Einstein had a valid point, I think a liberal arts education today offers something even more vital to students—freedom.

At Bryn Mawr and Haverford, we enjoy what is possibly our last four years of absolute freedom. We come here with the chance to study whatever strikes our fancy, so to speak. We have to ensure that we take enough classes in one subject to earn a degree, but determining that path is our choice. For me, that ability to choose is the essence of a liberal arts education.

Proponents of liberal arts colleges love to expound upon their advantages. However, sadly, many overlook science as a part of the liberal arts program. For example, the Bryn Mawr divisional requirement of just two natural science courses is lost in a sea of social sciences, languages and humanities. While some people will claim the purpose of a liberal arts college is not to teach facts but rather skills, I don’t necessarily agree. While I agree teaching skills is important, I think a well-rounded education is even more vital. I believe science majors should learn languages to use in the future; take English classes to learn vital communicational skills; and take sociology, anthropology, or history courses to learn more about human cultures. But many of these skills and facts science majors continue to nurture. We read for fun, travel and practice languages, and learn about cultures: it’s human nature. However, after many students take their required natural science classes, they never think about science again. I believe our liberal arts experience fails us in this case.

The ignorance even-well educated people display about science shocks and dismays me. Perhaps this ignorance is due to the fact that even with the increasingly large number of books being published on science, few people want to teach themselves the subject. But just as English, languages, and social sciences are vital to everyday life, so is science. People who tell you differently just don’t understand science. By avoiding the truth about science—biology, physics, chemistry, and others—we are keeping generations of decision makers and world movers in the dark about the very essence of our world. So while we have these four years of freedom at our respective liberal arts institutions, let’s take full advantage of them, learning the science that will broaden our education and inform our worldviews.

Giarratana, a senior chemistry major, can be reached at agiarratan@brynmawr.edu

AAUW

AAUW's Position on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Education

Since its founding in 1881, the American Association of University Women has been committed to making the dream of higher education a reality for women. AAUW's 2009-2011 Public Policy Program reaffirms our commitment to "a strong system of public education that promotes gender fairness, equity, and diversity….and advocates increased support for, and access to, higher education for women and other disadvantaged populations."1

The shortage of American scientists threatens our nation's ability to compete and innovate in the coming years, especially as the outsourcing of jobs to, and importing of science from, other nations continues to grow. By 2014, the U.S. will have added more than one million additional information technology jobs to the workforce.2 However, women still lag far behind in earning computer technology degrees and working in computer technology-related professions. High school girls represent only 17 percent of computer science Advanced Placement (AP) test takers.3

College-educated women earned only 18 percent of computer and information sciences bachelor's degrees (down from 37 percent of computer science degrees in 1985).4 In 2006, women earned only 21 percent of doctorate degrees in computer science.5 Overall, women comprise 24.8 percent of computer and mathematical professionals, down from 27 percent in 2006.6

AAUW's Tech Savvy (2000) and Women at Work (2003) have documented the troubling shortage of girls and women preparing to work in STEM fields. In order to close this gap, AAUW supports efforts that train teachers to encourage girls and other underrepresented groups to pursue STEM careers.

AAUW supports promoting and strengthening science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, especially for girls and other underrepresented populations. These efforts will help increase America's competitiveness by reducing gender barriers that deter women from pursuing academic and career goals in STEM fields.

For more information, call 202/785-7793 or e-mail VoterEd@aauw.org.

AAUW Public Policy and Government Relations Department


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 American Association of University Women. (June 2009). 2009-11 AAUW Public Policy Program. Retrieved July 9, 2009, from http://www.aauw.org/advocacy/issue_advocacy/principles_priorities.cfm.

2 National Center for Women and Information Technology. (2007). NCWIT Scorecard 2007: A Report on the Status of Women in Information Technology. Retrieved June 26, 2009, from http://www.ncwit.org/pdf/2007_Scorecard_Web.pdf.

3 National Center for Women & Information Technology. (2009). By the Numbers. Retrieved June 22, 2009, from http://www.ncwit.org/pdf/BytheNumbers09.pdf.

4Ibid.

5 National Science Foundation. Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering. Table 2. http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/wmpd/pdf/tabf-2.pdf

6 Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2008). Current Population Survey, Table 11. Employed persons by detailed occupation, sex, race, and Hispanic or Latino ethnicity. Retrieved June 29, 2009, from http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.pdf.

Sunday, November 22, 2009

TheScientist.com

Pioneering protein chemist dies
Posted by Jef Akst
[Entry posted at 3rd November 2009 04:07 PM GMT]
View comment(1) | Comment on this news story

Mildred Cohn, a renowned chemist who battled sexual discrimination for much of her career, died last month (October 12) at age 96, succumbing to pneumonia at a hospital in Philadelphia. Combining chemistry, biology, and physics, Cohn opened up new avenues for interdisciplinary biology and helped found the emerging fields of biochemistry and biophysics.


Image: Erica P. Johnson
"Mildred was a pioneer in many ways," Joshua Wand of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, a former student of Cohn's, wrote in an email to The Scientist. "She surmounted great structural barriers (for women) and was essentially forced to work outside jobs to pay for equipment and chemicals during her PhD."

Cohn's research spanned from isotopes to ATP to oxidative phosphorylation. She was one of the first to take meaningful pictures of proteins using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), Wand said, and applied this technique to a variety of biochemical problems, such as the mechanisms of enzymes.

Cohn's work identifying the structure of ATP was a particularly exciting time for her, she shared with The Scientist during an interview in 2003. "In 1958, using nuclear magnetic resonance, I saw the first three peaks of ATP. That was exciting," she recalled. "[I could] distinguish the three phosphorous atoms of ATP with a spectroscopic method, which had never been done before." Her findings about ATP's structure were published in two papers in 1960 and 1962 that together accrued over 600 citations, according to ISI. Over her career, Cohn published more than 160 papers, including several that she co-authored with six different Nobel Laureates.

After receiving her bachelor's degree from Hunter College in New York City at age 17, Cohn enrolled in a chemistry doctoral program at Columbia. When she found she couldn't get a teaching assistantship because she was a woman, she turned to babysitting to support herself until she received her master's in physical chemistry the next year.

Out of money, Cohn accepted a job at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the forerunner of NASA. She was the only woman among 70 men and was banned from working in the lab for that reason. She worked there for two years until she saved up enough money to return to Columbia to work with future Nobel Laureate Harold Urey and complete her PhD.

After graduate school, Cohn took a postdoc at George Washington University Medical School with another future Nobel winner, Vincent duVigneaud. There, she met physicist Henry Primakoff, whom she married in 1938. The duo eventually settled at the University of Pennsylvania, where she worked until she retired in 1982.

Even after her official retirement, she maintained her office and still kept in touch with the scientific community. "At the age of 95, she was still coming to departmental seminars, still asking those deeply penetrating questions and generally keeping the department on its toes," Wand recalled.

Over the course of her career, Cohn was honored with a number of awards, including the National Medal of Science and election to the National Academy of Sciences. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame the day before she died.


Related stories:
• Mildred Cohn
[6th October 2003]
• Elite Society Celebrates Scholarship In All Disciplines
[1st November 1993]
• Magnetic Resonance Imaging Captures Brain In Action
[12th October 1992]

Professors of the Year Are Celebrated for Innovative Teaching

Tracey McKenzie
professor of sociology,
Collin County Community College

Tracey McKenzie wants her students in her classes to see connections between academic disciplines. To highlight them, she has co-taught classes with instructors from computer science, statistics, Spanish, and political science.

It makes particular sense for her to teach across disciplines, Ms. McKenzie says, because sociology is about social problems, and some solutions to those problems are studied in other parts of academe. For example, Ms. McKenzie teaches a class on the power of the media with a political-science faculty member. The teachers ask students in the courses to analyze political propaganda and then create their own. Using political history to demonstrate ideas from sociology enriches students' understanding of both disciplines, she says.

For a class on sexuality, co-teaching with a political-science professor means the students examine the roles of women in politics, Ms. McKenzie says.

The diversity of students in her classes mirrors the diversity of disciplines that she has worked with. Working at a community college means students come with different levels of college readiness, from different ethnic backgrounds, and at different times in life. Ms. McKenzie says she has had students as young as 18 and as old as 76. That means they bring a range of experience that enriches class discussions, she says. "Whatever I'm talking about, there's always one student who's had that experience."

Chronicle of Higher Education

Title IX Includes Maternal Discrimination

By Mary Ann Mason

Barack Obama, in the month before his election, promised an audience of members of the Association for Women in Science and the Society of Women Engineers that he would do more to enforce Title IX, which prevents sexual discrimination in educational programs and activities receiving federal funds. He also vowed to significantly increase the number of women in science and technology.

On the 37th anniversary of Title IX, the Obama administration recommitted to women's advancement in the sciences when Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Valerie Jarrett, a White House senior adviser, issued a statement that said the law was integral "to encourage women to pursue their aspirations in fields in which they have been historically underrepresented, such as science and technology."

President Obama should be aware that Title IX does not just cover blatant gender discrimination—such as a bias that women are not as competent as men in science or math. It also protects women against sex discrimination on the basis of marital, parental, or family status, and on the basis of pregnancy. Those provisions come into play over the issue of retaining female scientists in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, the STEM fields.

Our research group at the University of California at Berkeley this month published a major report, "Staying Competitive: Patching America's Leaky Pipeline in the Sciences." Our conclusions were based on four years of original research, including a study of work-life policies at all of the institutions in the Association of American Universities and at 13 federal grant agencies.

Where is the biggest leak? It's at the point at which women who have received their Ph.D.'s or are working as postdoctoral scholars are making the critical decision of whether to continue their careers in academic research. Too many of them are deciding not to, primarily because of their interest in starting a family.

Our study found that married female scientists with young children who have received their Ph.D.'s are 35 percent less likely to enter a tenure-track position than are married men with children. We found little difference between single childless women and married men with young children in terms of their likelihood to enter the tenure track. A similar pipeline leak occurs at the point of granting tenure: Married women with young children are 27 percent less likely, on a yearly basis, to earn tenure than are married men with young children.

Job candidates in the sciences who are pregnant or have children may face very real gender discrimination. Some scientists may believe that women who have families cannot be serious scholars, because academic science demands exclusive attention to research.

Women in science and math learn that bias early on. When I was dean of the graduate division at Berkeley, my research team and I studied thousands of graduate students and faculty members to learn more about the effects of family formation on the careers of doctoral students. Our project, "Do Babies Matter?," traced the academic careers of men and women from their doctoral years to retirement. We found firm evidence that a lack of family-friendly policies and a lack of support for academic parents on the part of senior professors turn away both men and women—but far more often women—from careers in academic research.

It bears repeating: Unfriendly family policies—not lack of interest or commitment—are what turn many women away from academic science.

Title IX protects against unfriendly family policies. It makes clear that "a recipient shall treat pregnancy, childbirth, false pregnancy, termination of pregnancy, and recovery therefrom as a justification for a leave of absence without pay for a reasonable period of time, at the conclusion of which the employee shall be reinstated to the status which she held when the leave began or to a comparable position, without decrease in rate of compensation or loss of promotional opportunities, or any other right or privilege of employment."

But it's possible that those legal requirements are not being met at all universities. In our study of AAU institutions—the 62 pre-eminent research universities that receive the bulk of federal science money—we found that 43 percent provided either no leave policies for graduate-student mothers or very limited, ad hoc policies. Only 13 percent offered a baseline of at least six weeks of guaranteed paid leave. For postdoctoral fellows, 15 percent of universities offered no leave or had very limited policies, while a mere 23 percent provided at least six weeks of guaranteed paid leave. Few of those young scientists are eligible for the job-protected 12-week leave provided under the Family Medical Leave Act.

Faculty mothers fared much better, with 58 percent of institutions providing a baseline paid leave, but by this time many women have already decided against careers in scientific research.

Our inadequate benefits policies for doctoral students and postdocs make no economic sense. In the world of federal grants, people who drop out of science after years of training represent a huge economic loss and are a detriment to our nation's future excellence. Given the Obama administration's interest in maintaining America's competitive advantage, federal stimulus efforts and money should be focused on retaining our highly skilled female scientists.

Our report recommends that colleges and universities:

•Promote clear, well-communicated, family-responsive policies for all classes of researchers. Researchers in the United States do not receive nearly enough family-friendly benefits, particularly junior researchers. Together, federal agencies and universities can make headway in solving this systemic problem.
•Federal agencies—particularly the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation—along with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which oversees federally supported research fellows for many agencies, can help by setting equitable, clearly communicated baseline policies for those fellows. At the same time, universities need to adopt supportive policies for all classes of researchers, not just faculty members. Graduate-student researchers and postdoctoral scholars receive the most limited benefits and are arguably the most important people affecting the future of U.S. science.
•Supplement benefits for academic parents with additional money provided by federal agencies or universities. Without those supplements, faculty members who are principal investigators—those with primary responsibility for the design, execution, and management of a research project—will continue to bear the brunt of supporting family-related absences using their own research dollars. That is unfair to the principal investigators and may create a situation in which they will find it to their advantage to avoid hiring young researchers who might eventually need family-friendly policies, an unintended form of discrimination against women. To avoid that structural difficulty, supplementary financing needs to be provided when researchers paid via grants take necessary leaves.
•Work collaboratively to build a family-friendly package of policies and resources. Sharing and wide-scale adoption of proven practices are necessary.
•Rid the academic career of its lock-step timing and rigid sequential deadlines. Time limits and barriers to entry—such as requiring a postdoctoral position to begin within a certain number of years following receipt of the Ph.D.—should be removed. Universities and federal agencies need to examine all of their policies and look for ways to encourage re-entry into the pipeline for academic researchers who take time off for giving birth or caring for children. Institutions must promote a more holistic concept of career patterns that honor individual needs.
•Collect and analyze the necessary data to make sure family-friendly policies and programs are effective. Decisions about family-responsive policies, programs, and benefits will continue to be made on intuition and anecdote if they are not tracked by systematic longitudinal data. Federal agencies and universities need to build and maintain the necessary data sets to assess whether their efforts are yielding positive results and whether Title IX requirements are being met. Title IX-compliance reviews should include questions on family-responsive policies.
Subtle maternal or caregiving discrimination is difficult to prove, but concrete measures at both the student and faculty levels would go far toward reducing the unnecessary loss of female Ph.D.'s in academic science. The changes our report suggests would help to stop the female brain drain and would satisfy both the letter and the spirit of Title IX.

Mary Ann Mason is a professor and co-director of the Berkeley Law Center on Health, Economic & Family Security at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, and the co-author, with Marc Goulden and Karie Frasch, of the report "Staying Competitive: Patching America's Leaky Pipeline in the Sciences." Readers may send questions or comments to her at mamason@law.berkeley.edu.

Family versus science

[Entry posted at 11th November 2009 04:35 PM GMT]
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The pressures of family obligations and child-rearing are pushing young female researchers out of science, according to a new study released this month by the Center for American Progress (CAP), a think tank based in Washington, DC. The report provides a contrast to an earlier report by the National Academies of Sciences that focused on dissecting the subtle biases against women in science.

CAP, together with the Berkeley Center on Health, Economic & Family Security at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law surveyed some 25,000 University of California postdocs and graduate students for the report. They found that married women with children were 35% less likely to get a tenure-track position than married men with children and 33% less likely to do so than single women without children.

In an article for The Scientist last year, Association for Women in Science president Phoebe Leboy explored some of the reasons why women, who enter most scientific fields in equal numbers to men, only occupy some 30% of the highest echelons in academia. Leboy suggested that universities weren't doing enough to promote their female researchers. She suggested that search committees and review boards make a point of including women, who might be more likely to suggest the names of other women than men would.

But while the focus in recent years has been on discrimination, many women who added their voices to an online forum on the subject at The Scientist discussed how their experience in the lab changed when they started a family. If a lab is essentially thought of as a small business, the loss of an employee -- even for a short period of time -- can be devastating.

Universities have responded to the call for better support of scientists who want to start families with policies such as stopping the tenure clock and offering paid parental leave. However, "there is a huge variation" in how these policies are administered, said Mary Ann Mason, coauthor of the CAP report, in a press conference yesterday (November 10). Often "researchers don't know what [these policies] are" and how they work. Also, few of these programs are offered to early career scientists, who need them the most, she said.

The report stated that women who had a child while they were postdocs were twice as likely to rethink their career goals as men, or as women who no children and had no plans of having them. Only 13% of graduate students and 23% of postdocs surveyed said their research institutions entitled them to 6 weeks of paid maternity leave, compared with 58% of faculty.

The report also puts the onus on funding bodies such as the NSF and the NIH to provide more financial backing that is better coordinated with university efforts. Universities and funders should offer financial supplements to labs to offset the productivity loss when a scientist takes family leave, the report says. It also suggests removing some of the time-based assessment of scientific accomplishment and tenure review.


Related stories:
Who's the greatest woman scientist?
[9th June 2008]
Fixing the Leaky Pipeline
[January 2008]
Help women stay in science
[27th September 2007]

Monday, November 16, 2009

On Campus with Women

Check out a recent issue by the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Monday, November 2, 2009

Progress for Women in Academic Science

November 1, 2009

Meeting Notes Progress for Women in Academic Science, but More Work to Do
By Audrey Williams June

Alexandria, Va.

At an annual meeting of professors and others who have received grants through the National Science Foundation's Advance program, which seeks to help increase the number of female scientists and engineers in academe, there was talk of how far gender equity in those disciplines has come, particularly on individual campuses.

Programs supported by more than $130-million in Advance grants have helped bring about new family-friendly university policies, networking groups, and mentor programs designed to retain women scientists and engineers—and, of course, science and engineering departments that include more women than ever before.

But even as the chilly climate for women in science and engineering has shown signs of thawing at some institutions, attendees at the meeting—now in its eighth year and held last week in partnership with the Association for Women in Science —also talked of unfinished business.

"I'm convinced that we have made some progress," said Freeman A. Hrabowski III, who is president of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County and was the keynote speaker at a town-hall meeting held during the event. "But we still have a lot of work to do."

At Maryland-Baltimore County in particular, a $3.2-million Advance grant awarded in 2003 made it possible for the institution to change the face of the faculty in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. For the first time, 54 percent of the assistant professors in those disciplines at Baltimore County are women, up from 27 percent in 2003. More women have joined the ranks of associate and full professors, too, although growth in those two groups isn't as marked.

Mr. Hrabowski, however, said that it's key to "get beyond the numbers and work on the attitudes" of people, including the department chairs, professors, and top administrators who play a key role in shaping a campus culture that makes recruiting and retaining female scientists and engineers possible. "You can't change attitudes unless you know what people really think," said Mr. Hrabowski, adding that he encourages open dialogue on his campus about issues related to diversifying the faculty and student body.

Sessions at the meeting covered topics that included the business case for diversity, resources for promoting gender equity, and managing department climate change. The climate in individual departments matters because "the department is where the rubber meets the road," said Sue V. Rosser, provost at San Francisco State University and a zoologist. That's where most professors "spend their lives," she said.

For institutions like Baltimore County, whose NSF grant money has run out, the task now is to continue the progress made. At a time when the economic downturn has pushed colleges to make hard choices about what to spend money on, "institutionalizing" the effects of an Advance grant can be tough—particularly if a change in leadership takes place. But attendees were urged to press ahead, even after their own Advance funds are exhausted.

"When you're writing your grant, think about, How will this end up?" Ms. Rosser said. "Think about where the funding will come from down the line."

Said Mr. Hrabowski: "Even when we're cutting the budget, we have to say we really believe in this, and we're going to keep doing it."

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Shriver Report

A Woman's Nation
Executive Summary

By Heather Boushey and Ann O’Leary

This report describes how a woman’s nation changes everything about how we live and work today. Now for the first time in our nation’s history, women are half of all U.S. workers and mothers are the primary breadwinners or co-breadwinners in nearly two-thirds of American families. This is a dramatic shift from just a generation ago (in 1967 women made up only one-third of all workers). It changes how women spend their days and has a ripple effect that reverberates throughout our nation. It fundamentally changes how we all work and live, not just women but also their families, their co-workers, their bosses, their faith institutions, and their communities.

Quite simply, women as half of all workers changes everything.

Recognizing the importance of women’s earnings to family well-being is the key piece to understanding why we are in a transformational moment. This social transformation is affecting nearly every aspect of our lives—from how we work to how we play to how we care for one another. Yet, we, as a nation, have not come to terms with what this means. In this report, we break new ground by taking a hard look at how women’s changing roles affect our major societal institutions, from government and businesses to our faith communities. We outline how these institutions rely on outdated models of who works and who cares for our families. And we examine how our culture has responded to one of the greatest social transformations of our time.

Our findings should not be surprising to working men and women. Today, four-in-five families with children still at home are not the traditional male breadwinner, female homemaker. And women are increasingly becoming their family’s breadwinner or co-breadwinner (see Figures 1 and 2). The deep economic downturn is amplifying and accelerating this trend. Men have lost three-out-of-four jobs so far since the Great Recession began in December 2007, leaving millions of wives to bring home the bacon while their husbands search for work. Women working outside the home, however, is not a short-term blip. This is a long-term trend that shows no signs of reversing.

Although our report is titled “A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything,” this is not just a woman’s story. This is a report about how women becoming half of workers changes everything for men, women, and their families. The Rockefeller/Time nationwide poll, conducted in early September as the chapters of the report were being finalized, finds that the battle of the sexes is over and is replaced by negotiations between the sexes about work, family, household responsibilities, child care, and elder care. Yet, while men generally accept women working and making more money, men and women both express concern about kids left behind. Whose job is it? Men and women agree that government and business are out of touch with the realties of how most families live and work today. Families need more flexible work schedules, comprehensive child care policies, redesigned family and medical leave, and equal pay. The aim of this report is to take this conversation up to the national level, to engage men and women in thinking about what this new reality means for our vision of ourselves, our families, our communities, and the government, social, and religious institutions around us.

In short, this report lays the groundwork for how our society can better support the new American worker and the new American family.

The chapters in this report examine a host of ways in which our lives have changed forever because women have entered the labor force in ever greater numbers. The policy implications vary from issue to issue, but the conclusions are clear: We need to rethink our assumptions about families and about work and focus our policies—at all levels—to address this new reality.


Clearly we aren’t going back to a time when women were available full time to be their families’ unpaid caretakers, so we need to find another way forward. This report builds on the decades of work on these issues and aims to spark a national conversation and attract the attention of policymakers and political leaders to focus on the implications of this transformation for our society.

Maria Shriver opens our report with A Woman’s Nation. Her chapter describes the unique ways the Shriver and CAP teams approached this complex set of topics. She details how together we took a “deep dive” into how our culture and our society are responding to changes in women’s dual roles in the workforce and in the family. Shriver takes a historical look at the transformation of the American woman since her uncle, President John F. Kennedy, asked Frist Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to chair the first Commission on the Status of Women in 1961. Shriver connects this overarching social shift to the most consistent roles of her life and of most women’s lives—the roles of daughter and mother. As our country reshapes the face of its workforce, Shriver reminds us that the struggles of the women before us opened the doors for us to guide the next generation of young women through.

In her chapter, Shriver also describes the conversations she conducted with everyday Americans around the nation, discovering that men and women are indeed negotiating everything—from the daily struggle over whether the husband or wife will drop off their child at school in the morning to major life decisions about whether a family will relocate to further one spouse’s career even if it hampers the other’s. You’ll find quotes from these conversations highlighted between the different chapters of this report—insights that bring to life the equally telling analysis of how we work and live today. And alongside our chapters is a collection of essays that Maria Shriver and her team gathered from an intriguing array of women and men, among them Oprah Winfrey, Billie Jean King, Suze Orman, Patricia Kempthorne, and Tammy Duckworth; less famous but equally insightful individuals such as Col. Maritza Sáenz Ryan, First Gentleman of Michigan Dan Mulhern and Accel Partners’ Sukhinder Singh Cassidy; and everyday Americans at the forefront of these monumental changes in our society like Gianna Le, a young Vietnamese-American seeking to enter medical school this year. This chapter captures these insights and matches them to the analysis in the report to sharply define these personal experiences on the larger canvas of our changing nation.

The New Breadwinners, by Heather Boushey, Center for American Progress senior economist, explores the economic underpinnings of the transformation of women’s work. This chapter homes in on who’s gone to work, where women are working, why they are working, how well they are coping, and what this means for the economic well-being of women and their families. The chapter finds that while women are now half of workers and mothers are breadwinners or co-breadwinners in the majority of families, institutions have failed to catch up to this reality. Women have made great strides and are now more likely to be economically responsible for themselves and their families, but there is a still a long way to go. Equality in the workplace has not yet been achieved, even as families need women’s equality now more than ever.

Family Friendly for All Families: Workers and caregivers need government policies that reflect today’s realities, by Ann O’Leary, Center for American Progress senior fellow and executive director of the Berkeley Center for Health, Economic & Family Security at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, and Karen Kornbluh, former visiting fellow at the Center for American Progress, explores the implications of women in the workplace for government policy affecting workers and caregivers. O’Leary and Kornbluh argue that we need to reevaluate the values and assumptions underlying our nation’s workplace policies and social insurance system to ensure that they reflect the actual—not outdated or imagined—ways that families work and care today.

Up until now, government policymakers largely focused on supporting women’s entry into a male-oriented workforce on a par with men—a workplace where policies on hours, pay, benefits, and leave time were designed around male breadwinners who presumably had no family caregiving responsibilities. But allowing women to play by the same rules as a traditional male breadwinner worker is not enough. Too many workers—especially women and low-wage workers—today simply cannot work in the way traditional breadwinners once worked with a steady job and lifelong marriage with a wife at home.


O’Leary and Kornbluh suggest that a fruitful way for government to address this new economic and social reality would be to update our basic labor standards to include family-friendly employee benefits and reform our anti-discrimination laws so that employers cannot disproportionately exclude women from workplace benefits. Their chapter also argues that we need to modernize our social insurance system to account for varied families and new family responsibilities, including the need for paid family leave and social security retirement benefits that take into account time spent out of the workforce caring for children and other relatives. O’Leary and Kornbluh close with suggestions for increasing support to families for child care, early education, and elder care in order to help working parents cope with their dual responsibilities.

Next is a reflective essay, Invisible Yet Essential: Immigrant women in America, by Maria Echaveste, Center for American Progress senior fellow and senior distinguished fellow at the Warren Institute at University of California Berkeley School of Law. This chapter focuses in on how we often overlook the crucial work—child and parental care, home maintenance, food production, and cleaning—once done by the unpaid wives of male breadwinners but which is now the work of immigrant women. These hardworking immigrant women have helped make possible other women’s mass entry into the workforce. Echaveste points out that our economy is increasingly based on a growing service-sector industry, which in turn challenges all of us to value the work of the millions of immigrant women performing these services. Indeed, she concludes that the work these women do will be necessary regardless of how high-tech our economy becomes. They can no longer be ignored.

Sick and Tired: Working women and their health, by Jessica Arons, director of the Women’s Health and Rights Program at the Center for American Progress, and Northwestern University law professor Dorothy Roberts, explores the implications of women working and earning the family income on women’s health, as well as women’s access to employer-based and private health insurance. They find that women’s breadwinning has not always come with greater access to health benefits and, too often, women’s health is compromised as they combine work and family responsibilities. As more women work, the authors note that we are developing a greater understanding of the health implications for women and their families—everything from inequitable job conditions and workplace health hazards to the timing of when women become mothers. Further, they highlight how our current health insurance system, centered as it is on employer-sponsored insurance, fails women in a variety of ways.

Better Educating Our New Breadwinners: Creating opportunities for all women to succeed in the workforce, by professor and former dean of University of California Berkeley’s graduate division Mary Ann Mason, explores the implications for our education system, focusing on post-secondary education. She finds that women have made great advances in educational attainment, yet there is still clear evidence that women face barriers within our educational institutions. Further, even when women receive the same degrees as men, they continue to face lower wages and fewer high-paying job prospects due to inflexible and unsupportive work environments.

Mason examines both sides of this gender coin. Women receive 52 percent of high school diplomas, 62 percent of associate’s degrees, 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees and 50 percent of doctoral degrees and professional degrees. But three problems persist. First, not all women have gained access to post-secondary education. Hispanic women, for example, lag far behind their counterparts. Second, women remain concentrated in the “helping” professions of health and education and are falling behind in entering the higher-paying fields of the future, including science, mathematics, engineering, and technology. Finally, more women with family responsibilities are attending all levels of post-secondary education, but they need family-friendly support to get their degrees (just as all workers need businesses to respond to the fact that our highly-educated workforce necessarily combines work and care). Mason recommends that policymakers focus on these three problems and offers some solutions to help them do so, including increasing family-friendly environments in our educational institutions and increasing compliance with Title IX with regard to science, engineering, mathematics, and technology at all post-secondary levels.

Got Talent? It Isn’t Hard to Find: Recognizing and rewarding the value women create in the workplace, by Brad Harrington, professor of organization studies and executive director of the Center for Work & Family at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College, and Jamie Ladge, assistant professor of management and organizational development at Northeastern University, point out that women make up half the talent that is available to corporate America and small businesses. The authors argue that women’s outstanding performance in educational institutions, especially in higher educational and professional schools, demands that employers create workplaces that attract, retain, develop, and exploit (in the best sense of the word) this tremendous resource. They detail, however, that the vast majority of employers need to let go of outdated models such as thinking that there is only one place that work gets done, one way to structure a workday, one model for the ideal career, and one leadership style that works in today’s workplace.

Harrington and Ladge show that flexible work arrangements, flexible career paths, and new leadership styles better meet the needs of today’s diverse workforce as well as today’s flexible and fast-changing economic environment. They argue these new work policies should not be perks for only a chosen few. All workers need policies that meet the changed realities of work and family, not just elite workers. In short, the conversation is no longer about whether women will work, but rather about how businesses are dealing with the fact that their workforce is increasingly made up of women and most workers today—men and women—share in at least some care responsibilities.


The Challenge of Faith: Bringing spiritual sustenance to busy lives, by Kimberly Morgan, associate professor of political science and international affairs at The George Washington University, and Sally Steenland, senior policy advisor for the Faith and Progressive Policy project at the Center for American Progress, explore the ongoing role of religion and spirituality in women’s lives. They ask how traditional faith communities and new organizational forms of spirituality have responded to women’s increased employment outside the home. Their conclusion? Women are struggling to find the time for religious involvement amid the responsibilities of job and family, which in turn means religious institutions need to adapt to these new realities—especially as the support and services that organized religion provides become more important than ever.

Morgan and Steenland note that some congregations have actively engaged with today’s new realities, providing increased services that address the challenges for families that no longer have an adult who remains outside the labor force. Yet others have not, and in many cases while women have entered boardrooms and are leading companies, faith institutions have been slow to incorporate women into their leadership. Morgan and Steenland suggest several ways for faith and spiritual communities to better engage with today’s busy women.

University of Michigan communications professor Susan Douglas then shows us in Where Have You Gone, Roseanne Barr? how the media that we’re surrounded by every day have in some ways overshot reality and in many ways not caught up on the way women work and live in our society today. The mainstream media outlets often suggest that women have “made it,” portraying women as successful executives at the top of every profession, yet in real life there are far too few women among the highest ranks of the professions, and millions of everyday women struggle to make ends meet and to juggle work and family. Douglas suggests women need to challenge these misleading portraits with facts, vigor, and humor.

Douglas’s provocative chapter is accompanied by an essay titled Sexy Socialization: Today’s media and the next generation of women, by Stacy L. Smith, a fellow at the Center for Communication Leadership and Policy at the Annenberg School of Communications, and two of her colleagues, Cynthia Kennard, a senior fellow at the Center, and Amy D. Granados, a policy analyst at Annenberg. The three authors highlight what today’s 8-to-19-year-olds are taking in about the role of men and women in the workplace and society through the lens of various media, focusing on how troubling male and female sexual stereotypes could affect the life and career choices of our next generation. The authors express concern about the future of women breadwinners in the coming decades because of these stereotypes, but hold out hope that the media industry itself will change as more women rise within its ranks or launch new media outlets on their own.

Our report then shifts focus to a series of chapters and essays that we hope will get people talking about all of our analytical research. In Has a Man’s World Become a Woman’s Nation?, Michael Kimmel, sociology professor at the State University of New York, Stonybrook, surveys the varied responses that men have had to women’s entry into the workforce and to losing the title of sole breadwinner. He finds that most men have chosen the path toward acceptance of greater gender equality and often relish the extra earnings women bring into the family—but that some groups of men continue to struggle with the idea of widespread employment of women and mothers as it has made them question their very notion of masculinity.

Above all, though, Kimmel finds that while both men and women want the kind of support that makes it possible to have a dual-earner, dual-caregiver family, these issues are more often misperceived as only “women’s issues” in Washington and statehouses around the nation. Men need family-friendly policies so that they can have the sorts of family relationships they say they want to have, as well as careers that enable them to work and live better in our changing 21st-century economy. Kimmel closes his chapter with a call for men to rally behind efforts to make it better for women and men together to work and live in our changing economy and society, not rely on women alone to do so.

Next, we learn that negotiating around the kitchen table can be good for your marriage. In her reflective essay, Sharing the Load, Evergreen State College sociologist Stephanie Coontz provides evidence that the most stable, high-quality marriages are those where men and women share both paid work and domestic work. This is a shift from generations ago when the most stable marriages were those where husbands specialized in paid work and wives did all the domestic work.


In this section we also include two concluding reflective essays, one by senior correspondent for The American Prospect Courtney E. Martin and the other by political strategist and media consultant Jamal Simmons. They explore what it all means for today’s generations of women and men who grew up in a world that was less likely to question the desirability of the equality of women but understands that does not yet mean true equality.

Simmons focuses on how the woman you commit to today may have the same name and social security number as the woman you are with tomorrow, but she may want completely different things in her life at different times throughout your lives together. For him, the rules seem to be maddeningly flexible. Martin notes that the women (and men) of her generation have come of age at a time when feminist values are simply in the water. But she argues that we need comprehensive policy reform that reflects an accurate picture of the workers and families as we really are, not as we imagine ourselves to be. She closes by saying that “It’s a good thing we’ve been so pumped up on post-gender idealism, because there are some big battles ahead.”

To gauge just how representative these conversations and observations are of actual conditions in American homes and workplaces, we close the report with a hot-off-the-press landmark nationwide poll. This Rockefeller/Time poll of 3,413 people nationwide takes a broad and deep look at what men and women think of their changing roles in society and their attitudes toward each other as spouses, parents, bosses, and co-workers. Center for American Progress fellows John Halpin and Ruy Texiera, Kelly Daley with global research company Abt SRBI Inc., and former Los Angeles Times pollster Susan Pinkus conducted, analyzed, and then concisely summarized the poll findings for us in their chapter Battle of the Sexes Gives Way to Negotiations.

The poll results reveal a truce in the battle of the sexes, demonstrating that men and women are in agreement on many of the day-to-day work and family issues. The old line in the sand separating them has largely washed away. Indeed, both men and women agree that women’s movement into employment is good for the country. Virtually all married couples see negotiating about the rules of relationships, work, and family as key making things work at home and at work. The authors conclude that the one clear message emerging from this poll is that the lives of Americans have changed significantly in recent years, yet the parameters of their jobs have yet to change to meet new demands. They find that political and business leaders who fail to take steps to address the needs of modern families risk losing good workers and the support of men and women who are riding the crest of major social change in America with little or no support.

Rather than pining for family structures of an earlier generation, the authors report that the poll found that men and women agree that government and businesses have failed to adapt to the needs of modern families. Americans across the board desire more flexibility in work schedules, paid family leave, and increased child care support. Given the ongoing difficulties many people face in balancing work and family life, it is not surprising that large numbers of Americans—men and women alike—view the decline in the percentage of children growing up in a family with a stay-at-home parent as a negative development for society. Yet, ever practical and pragmatic, this poll demonstrates that Americans understand that everything has changed in their work and lives today and that consequently they are working things out as best they can while looking to their government and their employers to catch up.

The academic research, anecdotal evidence, personal reflections, and poll results that make up this unique report all confirm that recognizing women now constitute half of the workers in the United States is only the first step. The second is identifying what we need to do to reshape the institutions around us. We can then begin to take the necessary actions to readjust our policies and practices. When you finish reading our report, we’re confident you’ll agree that more than four decades after President Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women, we’ve learned that while there’s much to cheer about, we still have a long way to go. We as a people must transform the way our government, our businesses, our faith-based institutions, and our media deal with the realities of a woman’s nation so that all of us can better cope with the transformation of how we work and live. The ultimate goal is a more prosperous future for all women and men in a nation that recognizes the unique value of each of us to contribute to the common good at work and at home. We believe that we can get there together, and that this report takes an important step along that path.

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Suggested Readings on Difference, Power, and Discrimination

Cudd, Ann. 2006. Analyzing oppression. New York: Oxford University Press.

Frye, Marilyn. 1983. Oppression. In The politics of reality, 1-16. New York: Crossing Press.

Hill Collins, Patricia. 2008. Toward a new vision: Race, class and gender as categories of analysis and connection.In Women's voices, feminist visions: Classic and contemporary readings, eds. S. M. Shaw and J. Lee, 57-65. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Lorde, Audre. 1984. Age, race, class, and sex: Women redefining difference. In Sister outsider, 114-123. New York: Crossing Press.

McIntosh, Peggy. 2008. White privilege and male privilege. In Women's voices, feminist visions: Classic and contemporary readings, eds. S. M. Shaw and J. Lee, 78-85. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Pharr, Suzanne. 1988. The common elements of oppressions. In Homophobia: A weapon of sexism. Little Rock: The Women's Project.

Yamato, Gloria. 2008. Something about the subject makes it hard to name. In Women's voices, feminist visions: Classic and contemporary readings, eds. S. M. Shaw and J. Lee, 86-88. New York: McGraw-Hill.

-Susan M. Shaw, Donna A. Champeau, and Robert Amico

Infusing Diversity in the Sciences and Professional Disciplines

By Susan M. Shaw, director of women's studies and the Difference, Power, and Discrimination program, and Donna A. Champeau, director of Women's Advancement and Gender Equity and associate professor of public health, both at Oregon State University; and Robert Amico, professor of philosophy at St. Bonaventure University in New York

Susan Shaw talks with Ron Adams, dean of Oregon State University’s College of Engineering, before leading a workshop for College of Engineering faculty. Photo by Justin Smith for Oregon State University.
When we lead curriculum transformation workshops around the country, we almost always encounter more participants from the liberal arts than from the sciences and professional disciplines. Faculty in English, history, sociology, anthropology, ethnic studies, and women's studies seem to see a natural affinity for diversity in their curricula. In contrast, faculty in the sciences and professional disciplines often perceive their work as limited to technical skills and a certain canon of disciplinary knowledge. Nonetheless, myriad opportunities exist within these disciplines to attend to issues of difference, power, and privilege and to transform courses around matters of diversity, inclusion, and social justice.

Too often, faculty in the sciences and professional disciplines have not been encouraged in their own educational journeys to examine disciplinary content and pedagogical practices from perspectives attuned to difference and power. But once introduced to key concepts and given opportunity to apply them, these faculty members can find creative and exciting ways to modify their courses to be attentive to gender, race and ethnicity, social class, sexual identity, age, ability, and religion, as well as the social structures, ideologies, and uses of power that advantage and disadvantage particular groups.

Transforming the Disciplines

Like most social institutions, academic disciplines tend to reproduce themselves. Because most disciplines (with a few notable exceptions) have been constructed and maintained primarily by white, heterosexual, financially privileged males, they tend to reproduce themselves as white, heterosexual, financially privileged, and male--not simply in terms of their demographic representation, but also in terms of their analytical frameworks. Often the disciplines' very structures, as well as the ways they are taught, tend to marginalize women, people of color, and LGBT students. These students' concerns are rarely at the center of the curriculum because invisible norms have shaped the disciplines to exclude traditionally marginalized groups. A simple additive approach (for example, including readings by women, people of color, or LGBT authors) cannot address these larger structural issues.

To facilitate curriculum transformation in the sciences and professional disciplines, we help faculty identify and understand the ways the curriculum, rather than being objective and value-neutral, is socially constructed and highly politicized. We often begin by encouraging faculty members to examine the subtle and invisible ways in which their disciplines reproduce themselves. We encourage them to consider a wide range of issues that affect their disciplinary work: the curriculum and the hidden curriculum, faculty composition, disciplinary methodology, professional values (overt and covert), professional societies, hiring policies and practices (including rewards, awards, tenure, merit, and promotion), funding, projects adopted, unasked questions and unexplored values, ideology, language, corporate relationships, and compartmentalization of one's knowledge or tasks.

Next, we ask faculty to think about knowledge production as a socially constructed process in which power, privilege, and difference shape and maintain the disciplines in their current forms. We ask such questions as:

How is knowledge constructed in your discipline, and who controls its production and dissemination? Who has access to knowledge, and who doesn't?
How do funding structures affect knowledge production in your discipline?
Are some people systematically disadvantaged by the way knowledge in your discipline is constructed, produced, or taught?
How is knowledge production in your discipline gendered or racialized? How is it connected to social class?
How do these factors affect the questions asked in your discipline? Are there certain questions that are asked and certain questions that aren't?
As we discuss these questions, we introduce literature on key concepts related to systems of oppression and encourage faculty members to make connections between this literature and their disciplines. For example, when we introduce the concepts of white privilege or heteronormativity, we ask faculty members to identify ways white privilege or heteronormativity operates in their disciplines. We also invite faculty members to think about how their disciplines would look (including the different questions they might ask and different processes they might use) if they centered on traditionally marginalized groups. What would business look like if women were at the center of the discipline? What would public health look like if LGBT people were at the center? What would engineering look like if people of color were at the center?

The goal of these questions is to encourage course transformation rather than simple addition of content. Merely adding a few readings or a unit about the concerns of traditionally marginalized people simply maintains those people's outsider status, and students quickly realize that the additions are of secondary importance to the "real" curriculum. Curriculum transformation, however, challenges the foundations and structures of disciplinary content and calls for the perspectives and concerns of traditionally marginalized people to be as central as those of the dominant group. Transformed courses are truly and fully inclusive of a broader range of knowledges and learning styles. These courses challenge notions of disciplines as fixed and objective bodies of knowledge that exist apart from the people who teach and learn and research.

Finally, we ask faculty to consider how they might restructure their disciplinary teaching to focus on issues of difference, power, privilege, and social justice. We ask faculty to imagine:

1. Teaching scientific and technical questions in their social context, asking: What is the historical context for the scientific development, research, or technology in question? What problems have arisen, and why? How have these problems affected traditionally marginalized people?

2. Helping students become ethical thinkers by asking: How do my values inform the way I practice my discipline? What shared disciplinary values form the context for my work? How do issues of power, privilege, and difference inform my work? What are the potential unintended consequences of my work?

3. Teaching students to develop knowledge, technology, products, and policy that will meet social needs by encouraging students to ask: What problem is to be solved, and for whom? What are the proposed solution's ethical, societal, and global implications? Does the proposed solution further the cause of social justice, or does it contribute to injustice or suffering? How might my work challenge systems of power and privilege that disadvantage members of traditionally marginalized groups?

Prompted by these inquiries, several faculty members in the sciences and professional disciplines at Oregon State University have transformed courses to meet the university's Difference, Power, and Discrimination requirement, which the university implemented in the 1990s in response to student demand. Rather than create a single course, the university decided to transform multiple courses so students would see how power, privilege, and social inequality are relevant across disciplines. For example, a microbiology course, Disease and Society, examines the movement of disease at the microbial level in relation to issues of race, gender, and social class. A course in exercise and sport science, Power and Privilege in Sport, examines how the unequal distribution of resources across gender, race, social class, sexual identity, ability, and age plays out in sports. Social Ethics in Engineering asks students to apply concepts of systems of oppression as they consider their professional development as engineers. A geosciences course, Environmental Justice, explores the impact of environmental racism on people of color, and a fisheries and wildlife course, Multicultural Perspectives on Natural Resources, considers how diverse social values affect changes in the physical landscape and biodiversity in the American West.

Examples from Engineering and Veterinary Medicine

We recently conducted two workshops, one for engineering faculty and the other for veterinary medicine faculty. The two workshops shared a number of similar features, but each dealt specifically with issues unique to each discipline.

We began the engineering workshop by asking faculty members to think about engineering's potential and limits in addressing social problems. A primary focus was the issue of technology's unintended consequences. After introducing the concepts of power and privilege, we discussed the example of the Toyota Prius. Engineers designed the Prius to be extremely quiet--so quiet that it poses a danger to vision-impaired people, who cannot hear it. Vision-impaired people are now asking the automotive industry to design automobiles that have minimum noise levels. Other unintended consequences include the impingement on Native American fishing rights caused by hydroelectric dams and the rampant consumerism driven by engineering's focus on creating new products. We also examined two case studies that faculty members can utilize to explore the complex issues of privilege, power, and difference in relation to engineering: the Manhattan Project and Hurricane Katrina.

In the veterinary medicine workshop, we began by discussing climate issues related to the discipline's changing demographics (women now outnumber men in veterinary medicine programs). As we moved on to discuss content, we talked about animals' vulnerability in human society and asked how faculty members might assess animal-human relations in the context of power and privilege. We concluded by asking faculty members to imagine how they might help their students think about issues of difference, power, and privilege in light of a range of questions, including:

What is poverty's impact on the practice of veterinary medicine?
How do cultural and gender differences affect the practice of veterinary medicine?
What role do veterinarians play in organizations that help humans, and do veterinarians have an obligation to work toward improving human conditions?
What ties does veterinary medicine have to pharmaceutical companies?
What role do veterinarians play in global development work, in disasters, and in wars?
What role do veterinarians play in developing legislation about animal welfare issues?
In both workshops, challenging faculty members to apply concepts of systems of oppression specifically to their disciplines was key to encouraging curriculum transformation.

Challenges to Consider

Curriculum transformation is not a quick or easy process, and it often occurs in small increments. While we have made strides on our two campuses, we still see room for growth. At Oregon State University, we need to add more science, engineering, agriculture, forestry, business, and health and human sciences courses to our Difference, Power, and Discrimination offerings. Yet even as we encourage faculty to develop new courses, we see many faculty members integrating questions of difference, power, and privilege and transforming parts of their existing courses. Although content-based accreditation requirements sometimes constrain faculty members in their efforts to transform a course, faculty are finding that they can raise questions of power and privilege, place problems in new contexts, and problematize the disciplines themselves while still meeting content guidelines.

As institutions move forward to begin the process of curriculum transformation, they must examine their reasons for embarking on change. Our experience indicates that the sciences and professional disciplines are usually more resistant to change than the liberal arts. Often, this resistance originates with institutions that have not fully embraced principles of curriculum transformation and may simply be looking to satisfy accrediting institutions by suggesting "good faith" efforts to embrace inclusion. Just as students can quickly recognize when a curriculum addition is of secondary importance to the "real" curriculum, so too can faculty recognize when schools do not fully embrace curriculum transformation throughout the curriculum. Hence institution-wide commitment to curriculum transformation in all disciplines is imperative. Academic disciplines, invested in existing power relations, will not change of their own accord.

An invitation to consider disciplinary content and pedagogical practices from a perspective informed by privilege, power, and difference is most compelling when the institution fully endorses it. The institution must offer monetary compensation, recognize faculty development in tenure and promotion decisions, and consider this transformative work as a component of faculty research obligations. Curriculum transformation requires the full support of the institution and the individual, particularly in the sciences and professional disciplines.

Questions, comments, and suggestions regarding Diversity & Democracy should be directed to Kathryn Peltier Campbell at campbell@aacu.org.

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Sunday, September 6, 2009

Her College Experience Is Not His

September 26, 2008
Chronicle of Higher Education

Her College Experience Is Not His
By Linda Sax

At a time when national attention is focused on the relative numbers of women and men on college campuses, little is known about the characteristics of the two genders and how aspects of college further shape those characteristics. The popular messages are oversimplified: Gender equity has been achieved, women are an academic success story, and men are experiencing an educational crisis.

Each of those messages has some truth, but they tend to convey the status of women and men as a zero-sum game: If one gender is succeeding, the other must be failing. The reality is that both genders face obstacles and challenges in their pursuit of higher education, and we need a deeper understanding of the nuances and implications of the gender gap in college.

As a scholar in gender issues, I have studied survey responses of more than eight million students who participated over the past four decades in the freshman survey of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at the University of California at Los Angeles. I have also examined longitudinal information obtained by the College Student Survey of students who entered college in 1994 and were followed up in 1998. Such data has enabled me to assess how gender shapes the characteristics of women and men entering college, how both genders experience college, and how college influences them. And I have found that women and men differ significantly from each other — and in ways that raise many questions for further research:

Connection to family. It has largely been assumed that leaving home is equally important for both genders, but we have found that it may be especially beneficial for female students, who develop greater scholarly confidence, stronger leadership skills, and a healthy sense of emotional well-being. For men, whether they live close to home or thousands of miles away is less relevant.

Today, however, students and parents stay in frequent contact with each other. The challenge facing colleges is how to encourage women to develop a healthy sense of independence at the same time that they stay connected to their parents.

Questions for future research: Do women turn to their families because of academic or social difficulties? Does their dependence on their families inhibit their personal and academic development? How do the type and frequency of student-parent communications relate to students' personal, academic, and social development?

Student-faculty interactions. Gender differences fall into three main categories. First, while interactions with faculty members encourage liberalism, political engagement, and a commitment to social activism among all students, we generally find that the more time men spend engaged in one-on-one interactions with faculty members, the more liberal they become in their political views and the greater concern they develop about race relations and the welfare of the larger society.

Second, men who work with faculty members on research or receive advice, encouragement, and support from them hold more-egalitarian views on gender roles. They become less supportive of the notion that "the activities of married women are best confined to the home and family." For women, the opposite is true: Those who spend more time with faculty members, especially in the context of research, become more committed to traditional gender roles.

A third theme relates to professors' influence on women's sense of confidence and well-being. Feeling dismissed by faculty members in the classroom has negative consequences for women's long-term academic aspirations, confidence in math, and even physical health.

Faculty members would benefit from a better understanding of the implications of their actions for students. They need to recognize that even when they believe they are treating male and female students the same way, the two genders may internalize those interactions differently.

Questions for future research: Does the nature of student-faculty interactions depend on where those interactions take place — in the classroom, a faculty office, a research lab, or elsewhere? Why and how do research experiences influence students' gender-role attitudes? What sorts of messages do professors send — intentionally or not — regarding women's social roles? What specific faculty actions lead women to feel they are not being taken seriously? What are effective strategies for promoting healthier student-faculty relations and for promoting safe spaces in the classroom? How does all this depend on the faculty member's gender?

Presence of female faculty members. It is often stated that female students benefit from greater numbers of women on college faculties — and, in fact, attending institutions with more female professors strengthens female students' scholarly confidence, motivation to achieve, and grade-point average. Yet the presence of female professors appears to bring a broader range of benefits to male students, including gains in mathematical confidence, scientific orientation, leadership ability, and emotional well-being. An obvious implication of those findings would be for colleges to hire more female faculty members. That could be an opportunity to shape the academic climate, as female faculty members have been shown to be generally more concerned than male faculty members with students' emotional development, character development, and self-understanding.

Questions for future research: Could the trend of males' benefiting more from the presence of female faculty members result from such professors treating their male students more favorably than their female students? Or, taking another perspective, might the developmental benefits accrued to men result from having less exposure to male faculty members? Are these findings due to a larger climate shift that occurs when an institution employs more female faculty members? In other words, how does the representation of female faculty members shape the culture of departments and institutions, and what impact does that have on male and female students?

Academic engagement. In high school, women devote more time than men do to studying, homework, and a range of academic and extracurricular activities. Women also place greater value than men do on the intellectual benefits of going to college, such as the opportunity to learn more about what interests them and to prepare themselves for graduate school. Women's superior record of academic achievement and intellectual engagement creates a gender gap that holds steady over the course of college.

But although men are less academically engaged than women, the influence of academic engagement is stronger for them. The time that men spend preparing for class has a greater impact on their grades, academic confidence, critical-thinking skills, and motivation to achieve. And the more time that men devote to their studies, the more interested they become in the larger political and cultural contexts that surround them, while the same is not true for women. Certainly, studying matters for women as well, but it seems to make more of a difference for men.

Clearly, colleges need to consider strategies for encouraging greater academic engagement among male students. As Jillian Kinzie, the associate director of the Center for Postsecondary Research and National Survey of Student Engagement Institute, and her colleagues suggested in a 2007 research paper on gender and student engagement, colleges should involve men more in "learning communities, first-year seminars, writing-intensive courses, student-faculty research, study abroad, internships, and capstone seminars."

Questions for future research: How much do colleges consider the different academic needs of male and female learners? Should strategies for promoting student engagement be the same for both?

The impact of diversity programs. My research found that experiences with diversity both inside and outside the classroom are more liberalizing, motivating, and eye-opening for men than women. For example, attending racial- or cultural-awareness workshops or engaging in social diversity — dating, dining, studying, or living with someone of a different race or ethnicity — contributes more strongly to men's desire to improve race relations. In addition, taking ethnic-studies courses and participating in racial-awareness and cultural-awareness workshops give rise to more-progressive gender-role attitudes among male students.

Yet, at the same time, such activities are also often accompanied by heightened feelings of discomfort in male students. Campuses should provide appropriate resources for such students — following up with them in the weeks or even months after their participation in diversity programming to gauge whether they may need counseling or other support.

Questions for future research: Why are men more challenged and conflicted by diversity experiences than women? What specific aspects of diversity programming lead to such outcomes?

Careers and majors. Colleges often find it difficult to attract more women to pursue the traditionally male fields of engineering and computer science. Large numbers of women opt out of the science and engineering pipeline before they attend college, often because of factors beyond colleges' control, such as family influences and early educational experiences.

But colleges are in a position to recruit and retain women who have the ability and preparation for science and engineering careers yet who may nevertheless select other career paths. They have an opportunity to educate students about the ways in which math and science can help improve society and the human condition, particularly at a time of tremendous progress in computer and biological technologies. The more that higher-education institutions can connect scientific concepts to issues that women tend to care about — education, the environment, human rights — the more likely women will become scientists and create change in those areas.

Strategies to increase the number of women in science include summer internships, mentorships, professional-development workshops, and online networks of women in science. They are usually viewed, however, as programmatic supplements rather than integrated into the mainstream curriculum. In fact, we know far less about how to transform the broader culture of academic science.

Questions for future research: How can we make science more appealing to women? What are the characteristics of programs that successfully educate students about the connection between scientific concepts and larger societal concerns?

Besides those aspects of college life, female and male college students' experiences in higher education differ in several other key ways. For example, female students' average income has fallen further behind men's, so they are substantially more concerned than their male counterparts about whether they will have enough money to complete college. Thus, colleges should evaluate whether they allocate student aid and work-study opportunities fairly to women and men, which types of work experiences are most beneficial, and the extent to which women and men have equal access to the most-desirable positions. We should study, for example, whether having a job in the campus bookstore relates to a different set of outcomes than working in the admissions office, in the recreation center, or at the local coffeehouse or a retail store.

Also, despite the fact that college women earn better grades and exhibit a stronger academic orientation than their male counterparts, they tend to suffer from comparatively low academic confidence. In fact, women rate themselves lower than men on nearly every assessment of their academic abilities. Further, these gender differences grow during college. We should learn more about why women rate themselves lower — because they believe they are less capable, or are they simply reluctant to describe themselves as having high ability? — and what conditions account for the widening gender gap in academic self-confidence.

Finally, compared with men, women enter college with higher levels of self-reported stress and lower ratings of their physical and emotional health. Such gender gaps remain significant over four years of college and reflect the fact that men spend more time on activities that can be considered ways to relieve stress (playing sports and video games, partying, and watching television) while women often devote themselves to a range of responsibilities that tend to induce stress (studying, homework, community service, and family responsibilities). Colleges should encourage all students to strike a healthier balance between academics, extracurricular activities, and leisure. We also need to develop a better understanding of what it means for a student to maintain balance.

Although women have a numerical advantage in college, both genders face challenges to their adjustment and development. Just as we need to be concerned about high stress and low self-esteem among women, we must be concerned about growing academic disengagement among men.

And while we aim to encourage all students to become engaged and involved, we must be mindful that the dynamics of those experiences can be quite different for the two genders, especially when it comes to students' interactions with their professors. Thus, institutional efforts aimed at improving the college experience for both genders must consider the distinct needs of each.

Linda Sax is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles. This essay was adapted from The Gender Gap in College: Maximizing the Developmental Potential of Women and Men, published this month by John Wiley & Sons. Copyright 2008 by John Wiley & Sons.