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]
Sunday, November 22, 2009
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."
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.
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]
View comments(17) | Comment on this news story
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]
View comments(17) | Comment on this news story
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."
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."
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