By Andresse St. Rose, research associate, AAUW
A college education remains the most reliable path to economic mobility and security for millions of Americans. As women’s college enrollment continues to grow, so does the public’s perception that women are now on equal footing with men. Over the past fifty years, women’s increasing educational achievements have indeed helped to raise women’s earnings and narrow the overall gender pay gap from 59 cents for every dollar earned by men in 1960 to 77 cents in 2008 (Institute for Women’s Policy Research 2010). But although additional education has improved women’s earnings, it has not created a level playing field. Ironically, the pay gap among some college-educated workers is larger than it is for the population as a whole. While college-educated women working full time earn 80 percent as much as their male peers one year after graduation, after ten years, they earn only about 69 percent as much as their male counterparts (Dey and Hill 2007). In part, these gaps reflect different choices made by women and men, such as the critical choice of college major.
Read the complete article.
Friday, October 8, 2010
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Lessons of the Leaky Pipeline
Geneomeweb
October 2010
By Matthew Dublin
It's a situation familiar to many in science: within the first few years after graduate school, women begin to disappear from the field. For several years now, women have made up roughly half of all life sciences PhD recipients, yet they only comprise a small percentage of the upper ranks of academia - and women from minority backgrounds are nearly absent from those ranks.
Men do outnumber women in the upper echelons of academia, but it doesn't start out that way. In 2001, 36.5 percent of science and engineering doctoral degrees were awarded to women and that percentage was higher and nearing parity - 45.8 percent - for doctoral degrees in molecular biology, according to statistics from the US National Science Foundation. But, the gap between the number of men and women in the life sciences widens higher up in the academic ranks. In 2003, 9,000 full-time junior faculty members with doctorates in the life sciences were female and 11,100 were male, according to NSF. But only 12,400 senior faculty members were female whereas there were 30,700 male faculty members.
"The assumption, decades ago, was that if you want to improve the number of women in science, you get them degrees. But we're realizing that the word on the street is that academic careers are not compatible with some of the ambitions of both men and women, although the differential impact on women trying to navigate academic careers is higher than men because of some of the personal obligations and personal choices they want to make," says Catherine Didion, director of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine.
When it comes to the issues affecting women in the sciences, there is no one answer to account for all of the disparities, nor one that promises to resolve them all - and the issues are full of contradictions. Even those dedicated to finding the factors contributing to the wage gap between men and women and the "leaky pipeline" admit that a comprehensive picture is just beginning to emerge. What is also becoming increasingly clear is that the reason such a small proportion of female PhD recipients wind up in applicant pools for tenure-track positions is not simply a result of institutionalized gender bias that affects the hiring process, but also a result of how difficult the academic career path has become - though improvements are being made
In 1994, the Office of Research on Women's Health at the National Institutes of Health held a workshop on women in biomedical careers, says the office's director, Vivian Pinn. During that meeting, the participants discussed what the major impediments were for women to succeed in careers in science. On that list were issues including mentors, family care-giving responsibilities, and differences in salaries and promotions. "It's been encouraging because we've continued to focus on these same issues, but also discouraging because here we are, 10 years later, and these are the same issues that we're hearing about," Pinn says. "I think the pipeline has improved - we are seeing women enter into PhD and doctoral programs at levels equal to, if not greater than, men. But where we're seeing the drop-off is in reaching top positions, or in some instances, how institutions are dealing with some of the dual responsibilities of career and family."
The phenomenon of women leaving science is a global one, though here we focus our attention on the US. We start off by taking a look at how the current climate in academia - with its unforgiving demand on researchers' time - combined with the unbending nature of the tenure track, and the current state of family policies, is not only forcing women to choose between career and family but also causing many young investigators, both men and women, to steer clear of academia altogether. In addition, we look at an area where women are making gains - in wages and in funding - as well as efforts to spread awareness of gender disparities and encourage institutes to change their policies.
"There are issues that need to be addressed that have to do with the structure of the career path that's been established with regard to the desire for children and what kind of career you want. The process has lengthened in terms of getting a secure academic job, so if you don't know [whether or not] you're going to have a permanent job until your late 40s, it might change your whole idea of which kind of career path you want to get on," the National Academy's Didion adds.
[pagebreak]
Spousal support
One of the root causes of the pipeline problem is the desire to have a family. The number of hours researchers on the tenure track are expected to log - averaging 50 or more per week - simply does not mesh with starting and maintaining a family. "Major academic health centers have become extremely competitive - to say they are money hungry is putting it mildly - and this translates into pressure on the faculty who are much more exploited than they were 30 years ago," says Phoebe Leboy, president of the Association for Women in Science. "Now you need three National Institutes of Health grants to get tenure and it has become increasingly difficult for anyone who wants to have a life."
Many researchers don't have the support at home that most academic organizational structures and policies assume that they do. In 2006, the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences published the results of a major study that found that anyone lacking the support of a stay-at-home spouse is at a serious disadvantage in terms of climbing the academic career ladder and maintaining competitiveness. According to the study, about half of the spouses of male faculty work full-time while roughly 90 percent of the spouses of female faculty are employed full-time.
"I think that the challenges of balancing family and career still fall to a very great extent on women, although there are dangers in generalizing too much," says Claire Fraser-Liggett, director of the Institute for Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. "In the 20 or so years that I've been in a leadership role, I have seen many women who are in the assistant professor phase of their career just suffer enormously with trying to do everything and do it well. I think that there is a tremendous sense of burn out. ... [Women] can often times get to a point where they ask themselves if this really was what they wanted in life or feel like they're on a treadmill that is ever-accelerating and never have time to catch their breath."
A family
Last year, the progressive think tank Center for American Progress conducted a study to follow up on the National Academies' findings. Specifically, the center wanted to determine why women are more likely to leave academia than men. The data show that married women who already have children are 35 percent less likely to even embark on the tenure track than men who are married with children. And those who do are up to 27 percent less likely to achieve tenure than their male counterparts.
There is simply not enough flexibility in the pipeline, says Mary Ann Mason, study co-author and law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. The rigidity of time caps and deadlines - such as a specific number of years that a postdoctoral position must start after graduate school, requirements for the completion of grant-funded projects, and, in particular, the tenure clock - fall right during the years when many people choose to start families.
"It's very hard for a graduate student or a postdoc to take any time off. Most 'A' universities have no policies at all for graduate students or postdocs in terms of maternity leave and other family responsibilities," Mason says.
Only 13 percent of Association of American Universities institutions offer maternity leave policies that cover grad students, postdocs, and other academic researchers. Forty-three percent offer only ad hoc paid leave or no financial support. But, this is an area that's made gains. Some -institutions, such as the University of California, Los Angeles, and Stanford University, now do provide maternity leave for graduate students, postdocs, and academic researchers, but the coverage often contains limitations on who qualifies and the length of the leave.
Faculty are better off. At 58 percent of AAU schools, faculty are entitled to a baseline policy of at least six weeks of restriction-free, paid maternity leave. In addition, many institutions and universities offer tenure-clock extensions or part-time tenure tracks, but these policies are sometimes vague or limited in scope.
"Roughly 20 percent of the -assistant professors that we surveyed for our study take advantage of the stop-the-clock policy, which is really important. But in reality what that does is add another year to the process. ... Almost all R1 institutions have a stop-the-clock policy, but the variety is tremendous in terms of how they're interpreted and how people are encouraged to use them," says the National Academy's Didion. "The challenge becomes whether or not you have to request them ... Often there is a bias towards not using them if you have to use them in a way that can be seen as not being committed to your position."
In addition, Title IX of the US Education Amendments Act of 1972 requires academic institutes to treat pregnancy as a temporary disability and provide a reasonable period of unpaid, job-protected leave if the institute has no leave policy of its own. This applies to all employees supported by federal grants. But in a 2009 survey, Mason and her colleagues found that not all AAU institutions have clear-cut policies for maternity leave. One university said it does not provide unpaid leave to postdocs and six others did not know whether their institute had one or not.
[pagebreak]
"Most younger people - graduate students and postdocs - do not qualify under FMLA. ... Even if it isn't a clear-cut violation it's a technical violation, because the spirit of Title IX is that the doors have to be open," Mason says. "That's one of the major ways - from our data and other people's - that women are held behind, and it affects the wage gap down the line because ... they're no longer on the tenure track, then ultimately you're ... less well paid."
Dropping down
Indeed, some experts say that it is not that women are dropping out of science, but rather they are "dropping down" or staying at a career altitude that is equivalent in salary and position to the assistant or adjunct professor level.
"I'm not totally convinced that that many women are leaving careers in the biological sciences. Instead, what we see is that they are not showing up in tenured and senior faculty positions or in supervisory positions, particularly in big pharma," says Leboy at the Association for Women in Science.
She says that if you look at the membership of biomedical societies, you'll still see women represented, though not in the highest echelons. "This argument that they are dropping out to have children is not entirely accurate - they are not being found in the high prestige positions in anywhere near the numbers they should be, but I wouldn't call it dropping out," she says.
"The glass ceiling has two components: implicit bias and how biomedical research careers are structured these days. It's not so much anti-women as it is anti-family, anti-having a life, if you want to be successful," Leboy adds.
Implicit bias and the wage gap
Leboy and her colleagues looked into implicit bias - in which individuals make decisions based on prejudices they are not aware they hold - by studying how seven major disciplinary societies in science and math select their prize and award recipients. The seven societies give out about 200 awards, and Leboy and her colleagues found that women are being recognized with teaching awards and with service awards to the societies and the discipline - but not for research and scholarship. It's a big difference, she adds. According to the study, in each society, between the non-scholarly awards and the scholarly awards, there's a roughly 50 percent drop in the number of women recognized. "It's not that the women are not in the discipline; they're just not getting the recognition for research and scholarship," Leboy says. "This has an effect on their jobs, their promotions, their recruitment to more high-prestige places, and everything associated with status and research."
Catherine Hill, director of research at the American Association of University Women, describes bias as the "unexplained portion" of the pay gap after all other factors - such as experience, training, education, and personal characteristics - are entered into the equation.
Here, women in the sciences are doing better than those in other fields. On average, an American woman makes 77 cents for every dollar a man makes, though that number is smaller for Hispanic and African-American women. According to a 2008 study by the US Census Bureau, women in the biological sciences make roughly 89 percent of the annual salary that men do and make up 53 percent of the workers in the field. Female computer scientists, software engineers, and IT and database managers make, on average, 86 percent of what their male counterparts take home every year and represent less than 25 percent of the workforce.
"The majority of men and women still associate science and math with men," Hill says. "Our data suggests that there may be some ways that employers are making assumptions about women and child rearing - that is not proven, but it is something we're led to believe as you look at a portion of the [wage] difference that doesn't get explained."
[pagebreak]
Some biases may be due to cultural conditioning and learned gender roles. There is a significant amount of sociological research indicating that when women step outside of what is considered the norm, they are viewed as aggressive or unpleasant. "Women who are competent in male fields are not viewed as likable - and likability is viewed as just as important as your skill set," Hill says. "When you have women behaving in a way that is not 'typical,' the normal response ... is discomfort. It may not be dislike, but a discomfort that may lead to a dislike. Women in many of these fields end up being in a double bind, because if they're too competent and assertive, then they're viewed as being not likable."
Hill suggests that the best way for women to battle the wage gap is to know where they stand in comparison to their colleagues. "Most people don't know if they're being paid fairly. They will share more about their sex lives than they will about their salaries in the workplace," she says, though she adds that "It's very hard to find something that's perfectly comparable - no two jobs are exactly the same."
One way to address the wage gap would be to have more transparency at the workplace. For the US federal government, transparency is a matter of policy and the gap is much smaller. Openness in the form of clearly regimented salary increases, it seems, could make a big difference, Hill says.
Promoting equality
When it comes to grants, there are discernible differences in the amount and frequency with which women are awarded funding. At the beginning of their careers, women actually receive more awards than men do. According to NIH and NSF accountability reports, pre-doctoral women receive more awards than men do - 63 percent more at NIH and 54 percent more at NSF. But at the -faculty level, women are awarded only
25 percent and 23 percent of NIH and NSF faculty grants, respectively. "We at the NIH have to try to look at what we're doing in terms of awarding funding to researchers and we've been able to show that success rates for first-time applicants are equal for men and women, but there are more -applications from men than women," Pinn says.
Men also appear to have a higher success rate on their grant renewal applications. "We don't know all the factors for that, it's something we hope is going to come out in our studies that we're currently funding," Pinn adds.
In addition, she says she hopes that these studies will address the growing concern that centers around men receiving larger awards than women do. However, Pinn notes that men and women receive the same percentage of what they ask for. "The best conclusion we can draw is that men are either applying for and getting the higher-dollar grants or that women are asking for less money than men," she says.
Pinn also co-chairs the NIH's working group Women in Biomedical Careers, which in 2009 awarded 14 grants totaling roughly $16.8 million over four years to fund a range of research projects aimed at nailing down the issues associated with challenges for women in the biomedical field.
While it is too early to know whether the data from these studies will have any impact, Pinn and her colleagues have been making slow and steady progress with small wins along the way. They have been able to secure an extension of the Early Stage Investigator status for researchers who have taken a leave of absence. There's also the Supplements to Promote Reentry into Biomedical and Behavioral Research Careers program, a trans-NIH initiative to help both women and men reenter research careers. In addition, the working group has amended NIH conference grant applications so that applicants are required to describe their plans for childcare at conference sites. These changes sound simple enough, but Pinn says they were hard won.
[pagebreak]
"I think we've made progress in terms of both women and men being more aware of the issues of family responsibilities and we've seen progress - maybe not total progress, but some - in terms of flexibility in the work settings," she says. "I hope that out of these causal factor grants, we will learn about new programs. We're also taking a look at all of our current programs to promote more gender equality."
Large-scale funding efforts such as NSF's Advancement of Women in Academic Science and Engineering Careers, or ADVANCE, program has invested more than $130 million in universities and colleges since 2001, to support and promote women in the academic sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers. The NSF ADVANCE's Institutional Transformation awards support a range of programs such as career counseling and faculty advancement workshops. According to ADVANCE program director Kelly Mack, the initiative's Institutional Transformation awardees have reported that in addition to the benefits for women in terms of retention, recruitment, and promotion, the support has also led to an improved situation for the male faculty looking to balance work and life as well.
"One of the biggest accomplishments of the ADVANCE Program has been that most ADVANCE Institutional Transformation projects ultimately impact the entire institution, as opposed to only the [science, technology, and engineering] departments targeted by the NSF program," Mack says. "There is some evidence that peer institutions of ADVANCE grantees are voluntarily undertaking some institutional transformation activities without external funding. We see this as an indication that the ADVANCE Program is impacting the larger culture of science in a way that will make academic science and engineering careers more attractive to future generations of academicians."
The importance of mentors
The most commonly cited way to help women navigate the challenges of a career in science is through ready access to a mentor, whether through a one-on-one relationship with an established PI or through programs, such as the workshops hosted by the NIH Office on Women's Health. "We believe that learning how to negotiate the academic environment, the environment in industry, and even the environment at the NIH is crucial, and we feel that mentoring is an extremely important component of that - especially for women, where they can have unique instances or experience related to science or personal kinds of issues that have to be dealt with," Pinn says.
A recent NIH workshop focused on improving mentoring efforts for women, Pinn says. The agency brought in people who have active programs at their institutions and came up with recommendations for mentoring programs such as the need for adjusting mentoring programs to better suit women of color and the implementation of protocols or guidelines for accountability in the mentoring process. "Now we're looking to see what we can build out of the recommendations of that workshop," she says.
As effective as mentoring programs and online resources are, it is hard to match the effect of one-on-one mentoring, which can often plug a potential leak in the pipeline. Maryland's Fraser-Liggett says that she has on more than one occasion talked a young, stressed-out female researcher down from an attack of self-doubt that can result from the stresses of child rearing, harsh criticism from a grant review application, or just balancing it all.
"Science can be really tough. You're only as good as the last thing that you did, and in order to really be able to do well, you have to be able to develop a thick skin. ... It's just been my experience that a number of women have a somewhat harder time doing that," Fraser-Liggett says. "That's why I feel having mentors for young women is very important, because if you don't have somebody to talk to, to put things in perspective, it can be tremendously demoralizing. ... But it's tough for both women and men alike, so if you really want to do this, you keep plugging along and take advantage of opportunities to do things well when you can because it's just too easy to dwell on the negative."
October 2010
By Matthew Dublin
It's a situation familiar to many in science: within the first few years after graduate school, women begin to disappear from the field. For several years now, women have made up roughly half of all life sciences PhD recipients, yet they only comprise a small percentage of the upper ranks of academia - and women from minority backgrounds are nearly absent from those ranks.
Men do outnumber women in the upper echelons of academia, but it doesn't start out that way. In 2001, 36.5 percent of science and engineering doctoral degrees were awarded to women and that percentage was higher and nearing parity - 45.8 percent - for doctoral degrees in molecular biology, according to statistics from the US National Science Foundation. But, the gap between the number of men and women in the life sciences widens higher up in the academic ranks. In 2003, 9,000 full-time junior faculty members with doctorates in the life sciences were female and 11,100 were male, according to NSF. But only 12,400 senior faculty members were female whereas there were 30,700 male faculty members.
"The assumption, decades ago, was that if you want to improve the number of women in science, you get them degrees. But we're realizing that the word on the street is that academic careers are not compatible with some of the ambitions of both men and women, although the differential impact on women trying to navigate academic careers is higher than men because of some of the personal obligations and personal choices they want to make," says Catherine Didion, director of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine.
When it comes to the issues affecting women in the sciences, there is no one answer to account for all of the disparities, nor one that promises to resolve them all - and the issues are full of contradictions. Even those dedicated to finding the factors contributing to the wage gap between men and women and the "leaky pipeline" admit that a comprehensive picture is just beginning to emerge. What is also becoming increasingly clear is that the reason such a small proportion of female PhD recipients wind up in applicant pools for tenure-track positions is not simply a result of institutionalized gender bias that affects the hiring process, but also a result of how difficult the academic career path has become - though improvements are being made
In 1994, the Office of Research on Women's Health at the National Institutes of Health held a workshop on women in biomedical careers, says the office's director, Vivian Pinn. During that meeting, the participants discussed what the major impediments were for women to succeed in careers in science. On that list were issues including mentors, family care-giving responsibilities, and differences in salaries and promotions. "It's been encouraging because we've continued to focus on these same issues, but also discouraging because here we are, 10 years later, and these are the same issues that we're hearing about," Pinn says. "I think the pipeline has improved - we are seeing women enter into PhD and doctoral programs at levels equal to, if not greater than, men. But where we're seeing the drop-off is in reaching top positions, or in some instances, how institutions are dealing with some of the dual responsibilities of career and family."
The phenomenon of women leaving science is a global one, though here we focus our attention on the US. We start off by taking a look at how the current climate in academia - with its unforgiving demand on researchers' time - combined with the unbending nature of the tenure track, and the current state of family policies, is not only forcing women to choose between career and family but also causing many young investigators, both men and women, to steer clear of academia altogether. In addition, we look at an area where women are making gains - in wages and in funding - as well as efforts to spread awareness of gender disparities and encourage institutes to change their policies.
"There are issues that need to be addressed that have to do with the structure of the career path that's been established with regard to the desire for children and what kind of career you want. The process has lengthened in terms of getting a secure academic job, so if you don't know [whether or not] you're going to have a permanent job until your late 40s, it might change your whole idea of which kind of career path you want to get on," the National Academy's Didion adds.
[pagebreak]
Spousal support
One of the root causes of the pipeline problem is the desire to have a family. The number of hours researchers on the tenure track are expected to log - averaging 50 or more per week - simply does not mesh with starting and maintaining a family. "Major academic health centers have become extremely competitive - to say they are money hungry is putting it mildly - and this translates into pressure on the faculty who are much more exploited than they were 30 years ago," says Phoebe Leboy, president of the Association for Women in Science. "Now you need three National Institutes of Health grants to get tenure and it has become increasingly difficult for anyone who wants to have a life."
Many researchers don't have the support at home that most academic organizational structures and policies assume that they do. In 2006, the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences published the results of a major study that found that anyone lacking the support of a stay-at-home spouse is at a serious disadvantage in terms of climbing the academic career ladder and maintaining competitiveness. According to the study, about half of the spouses of male faculty work full-time while roughly 90 percent of the spouses of female faculty are employed full-time.
"I think that the challenges of balancing family and career still fall to a very great extent on women, although there are dangers in generalizing too much," says Claire Fraser-Liggett, director of the Institute for Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. "In the 20 or so years that I've been in a leadership role, I have seen many women who are in the assistant professor phase of their career just suffer enormously with trying to do everything and do it well. I think that there is a tremendous sense of burn out. ... [Women] can often times get to a point where they ask themselves if this really was what they wanted in life or feel like they're on a treadmill that is ever-accelerating and never have time to catch their breath."
A family
Last year, the progressive think tank Center for American Progress conducted a study to follow up on the National Academies' findings. Specifically, the center wanted to determine why women are more likely to leave academia than men. The data show that married women who already have children are 35 percent less likely to even embark on the tenure track than men who are married with children. And those who do are up to 27 percent less likely to achieve tenure than their male counterparts.
There is simply not enough flexibility in the pipeline, says Mary Ann Mason, study co-author and law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. The rigidity of time caps and deadlines - such as a specific number of years that a postdoctoral position must start after graduate school, requirements for the completion of grant-funded projects, and, in particular, the tenure clock - fall right during the years when many people choose to start families.
"It's very hard for a graduate student or a postdoc to take any time off. Most 'A' universities have no policies at all for graduate students or postdocs in terms of maternity leave and other family responsibilities," Mason says.
Only 13 percent of Association of American Universities institutions offer maternity leave policies that cover grad students, postdocs, and other academic researchers. Forty-three percent offer only ad hoc paid leave or no financial support. But, this is an area that's made gains. Some -institutions, such as the University of California, Los Angeles, and Stanford University, now do provide maternity leave for graduate students, postdocs, and academic researchers, but the coverage often contains limitations on who qualifies and the length of the leave.
Faculty are better off. At 58 percent of AAU schools, faculty are entitled to a baseline policy of at least six weeks of restriction-free, paid maternity leave. In addition, many institutions and universities offer tenure-clock extensions or part-time tenure tracks, but these policies are sometimes vague or limited in scope.
"Roughly 20 percent of the -assistant professors that we surveyed for our study take advantage of the stop-the-clock policy, which is really important. But in reality what that does is add another year to the process. ... Almost all R1 institutions have a stop-the-clock policy, but the variety is tremendous in terms of how they're interpreted and how people are encouraged to use them," says the National Academy's Didion. "The challenge becomes whether or not you have to request them ... Often there is a bias towards not using them if you have to use them in a way that can be seen as not being committed to your position."
In addition, Title IX of the US Education Amendments Act of 1972 requires academic institutes to treat pregnancy as a temporary disability and provide a reasonable period of unpaid, job-protected leave if the institute has no leave policy of its own. This applies to all employees supported by federal grants. But in a 2009 survey, Mason and her colleagues found that not all AAU institutions have clear-cut policies for maternity leave. One university said it does not provide unpaid leave to postdocs and six others did not know whether their institute had one or not.
[pagebreak]
"Most younger people - graduate students and postdocs - do not qualify under FMLA. ... Even if it isn't a clear-cut violation it's a technical violation, because the spirit of Title IX is that the doors have to be open," Mason says. "That's one of the major ways - from our data and other people's - that women are held behind, and it affects the wage gap down the line because ... they're no longer on the tenure track, then ultimately you're ... less well paid."
Dropping down
Indeed, some experts say that it is not that women are dropping out of science, but rather they are "dropping down" or staying at a career altitude that is equivalent in salary and position to the assistant or adjunct professor level.
"I'm not totally convinced that that many women are leaving careers in the biological sciences. Instead, what we see is that they are not showing up in tenured and senior faculty positions or in supervisory positions, particularly in big pharma," says Leboy at the Association for Women in Science.
She says that if you look at the membership of biomedical societies, you'll still see women represented, though not in the highest echelons. "This argument that they are dropping out to have children is not entirely accurate - they are not being found in the high prestige positions in anywhere near the numbers they should be, but I wouldn't call it dropping out," she says.
"The glass ceiling has two components: implicit bias and how biomedical research careers are structured these days. It's not so much anti-women as it is anti-family, anti-having a life, if you want to be successful," Leboy adds.
Implicit bias and the wage gap
Leboy and her colleagues looked into implicit bias - in which individuals make decisions based on prejudices they are not aware they hold - by studying how seven major disciplinary societies in science and math select their prize and award recipients. The seven societies give out about 200 awards, and Leboy and her colleagues found that women are being recognized with teaching awards and with service awards to the societies and the discipline - but not for research and scholarship. It's a big difference, she adds. According to the study, in each society, between the non-scholarly awards and the scholarly awards, there's a roughly 50 percent drop in the number of women recognized. "It's not that the women are not in the discipline; they're just not getting the recognition for research and scholarship," Leboy says. "This has an effect on their jobs, their promotions, their recruitment to more high-prestige places, and everything associated with status and research."
Catherine Hill, director of research at the American Association of University Women, describes bias as the "unexplained portion" of the pay gap after all other factors - such as experience, training, education, and personal characteristics - are entered into the equation.
Here, women in the sciences are doing better than those in other fields. On average, an American woman makes 77 cents for every dollar a man makes, though that number is smaller for Hispanic and African-American women. According to a 2008 study by the US Census Bureau, women in the biological sciences make roughly 89 percent of the annual salary that men do and make up 53 percent of the workers in the field. Female computer scientists, software engineers, and IT and database managers make, on average, 86 percent of what their male counterparts take home every year and represent less than 25 percent of the workforce.
"The majority of men and women still associate science and math with men," Hill says. "Our data suggests that there may be some ways that employers are making assumptions about women and child rearing - that is not proven, but it is something we're led to believe as you look at a portion of the [wage] difference that doesn't get explained."
[pagebreak]
Some biases may be due to cultural conditioning and learned gender roles. There is a significant amount of sociological research indicating that when women step outside of what is considered the norm, they are viewed as aggressive or unpleasant. "Women who are competent in male fields are not viewed as likable - and likability is viewed as just as important as your skill set," Hill says. "When you have women behaving in a way that is not 'typical,' the normal response ... is discomfort. It may not be dislike, but a discomfort that may lead to a dislike. Women in many of these fields end up being in a double bind, because if they're too competent and assertive, then they're viewed as being not likable."
Hill suggests that the best way for women to battle the wage gap is to know where they stand in comparison to their colleagues. "Most people don't know if they're being paid fairly. They will share more about their sex lives than they will about their salaries in the workplace," she says, though she adds that "It's very hard to find something that's perfectly comparable - no two jobs are exactly the same."
One way to address the wage gap would be to have more transparency at the workplace. For the US federal government, transparency is a matter of policy and the gap is much smaller. Openness in the form of clearly regimented salary increases, it seems, could make a big difference, Hill says.
Promoting equality
When it comes to grants, there are discernible differences in the amount and frequency with which women are awarded funding. At the beginning of their careers, women actually receive more awards than men do. According to NIH and NSF accountability reports, pre-doctoral women receive more awards than men do - 63 percent more at NIH and 54 percent more at NSF. But at the -faculty level, women are awarded only
25 percent and 23 percent of NIH and NSF faculty grants, respectively. "We at the NIH have to try to look at what we're doing in terms of awarding funding to researchers and we've been able to show that success rates for first-time applicants are equal for men and women, but there are more -applications from men than women," Pinn says.
Men also appear to have a higher success rate on their grant renewal applications. "We don't know all the factors for that, it's something we hope is going to come out in our studies that we're currently funding," Pinn adds.
In addition, she says she hopes that these studies will address the growing concern that centers around men receiving larger awards than women do. However, Pinn notes that men and women receive the same percentage of what they ask for. "The best conclusion we can draw is that men are either applying for and getting the higher-dollar grants or that women are asking for less money than men," she says.
Pinn also co-chairs the NIH's working group Women in Biomedical Careers, which in 2009 awarded 14 grants totaling roughly $16.8 million over four years to fund a range of research projects aimed at nailing down the issues associated with challenges for women in the biomedical field.
While it is too early to know whether the data from these studies will have any impact, Pinn and her colleagues have been making slow and steady progress with small wins along the way. They have been able to secure an extension of the Early Stage Investigator status for researchers who have taken a leave of absence. There's also the Supplements to Promote Reentry into Biomedical and Behavioral Research Careers program, a trans-NIH initiative to help both women and men reenter research careers. In addition, the working group has amended NIH conference grant applications so that applicants are required to describe their plans for childcare at conference sites. These changes sound simple enough, but Pinn says they were hard won.
[pagebreak]
"I think we've made progress in terms of both women and men being more aware of the issues of family responsibilities and we've seen progress - maybe not total progress, but some - in terms of flexibility in the work settings," she says. "I hope that out of these causal factor grants, we will learn about new programs. We're also taking a look at all of our current programs to promote more gender equality."
Large-scale funding efforts such as NSF's Advancement of Women in Academic Science and Engineering Careers, or ADVANCE, program has invested more than $130 million in universities and colleges since 2001, to support and promote women in the academic sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers. The NSF ADVANCE's Institutional Transformation awards support a range of programs such as career counseling and faculty advancement workshops. According to ADVANCE program director Kelly Mack, the initiative's Institutional Transformation awardees have reported that in addition to the benefits for women in terms of retention, recruitment, and promotion, the support has also led to an improved situation for the male faculty looking to balance work and life as well.
"One of the biggest accomplishments of the ADVANCE Program has been that most ADVANCE Institutional Transformation projects ultimately impact the entire institution, as opposed to only the [science, technology, and engineering] departments targeted by the NSF program," Mack says. "There is some evidence that peer institutions of ADVANCE grantees are voluntarily undertaking some institutional transformation activities without external funding. We see this as an indication that the ADVANCE Program is impacting the larger culture of science in a way that will make academic science and engineering careers more attractive to future generations of academicians."
The importance of mentors
The most commonly cited way to help women navigate the challenges of a career in science is through ready access to a mentor, whether through a one-on-one relationship with an established PI or through programs, such as the workshops hosted by the NIH Office on Women's Health. "We believe that learning how to negotiate the academic environment, the environment in industry, and even the environment at the NIH is crucial, and we feel that mentoring is an extremely important component of that - especially for women, where they can have unique instances or experience related to science or personal kinds of issues that have to be dealt with," Pinn says.
A recent NIH workshop focused on improving mentoring efforts for women, Pinn says. The agency brought in people who have active programs at their institutions and came up with recommendations for mentoring programs such as the need for adjusting mentoring programs to better suit women of color and the implementation of protocols or guidelines for accountability in the mentoring process. "Now we're looking to see what we can build out of the recommendations of that workshop," she says.
As effective as mentoring programs and online resources are, it is hard to match the effect of one-on-one mentoring, which can often plug a potential leak in the pipeline. Maryland's Fraser-Liggett says that she has on more than one occasion talked a young, stressed-out female researcher down from an attack of self-doubt that can result from the stresses of child rearing, harsh criticism from a grant review application, or just balancing it all.
"Science can be really tough. You're only as good as the last thing that you did, and in order to really be able to do well, you have to be able to develop a thick skin. ... It's just been my experience that a number of women have a somewhat harder time doing that," Fraser-Liggett says. "That's why I feel having mentors for young women is very important, because if you don't have somebody to talk to, to put things in perspective, it can be tremendously demoralizing. ... But it's tough for both women and men alike, so if you really want to do this, you keep plugging along and take advantage of opportunities to do things well when you can because it's just too easy to dwell on the negative."
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Seeking Congruity Between Goals and Roles: A New Look at Why Women Opt Out of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Careers
A very interesting article in the Association for Psychological Sciences:
Seeking Congruity Between Goals and Roles: A New Look at Why Women Opt Out of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Careers
Seeking Congruity Between Goals and Roles: A New Look at Why Women Opt Out of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Careers
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Why 'Female' Science Professor?
Read the recent post in the Chronicle of Higher Education made by Female Science Professor. She tells a really funny (but actually, depressing) story about meeting a fellow scientist and describing her research. Also, visit her blog at: http://science-professor.blogspot.com.
Friday, April 2, 2010
Taking Initiative:Re-tooling for an Economy that can Handle Curves
Women in Science Summit
May 21, 2010
8:30 AM – 4:00 PM
The Conference Center at Mercer
1200 Old Trenton Road West Windsor, NJ
Keynote Speaker: Sarita Felder
Executive Leadership Coaching and
Branding Development Consultant
Authors: Sandi Webster & Peggy McHale
Of Black and White Strike Gold
REGISTER NOW!
www.cww.rutgers.edu
Lunch Included~Registration Required~No Fee
Breakout Sessions
Cultivating a Circle of Advisors:
Who, What, When, Where, How, & Why
Discovering and
Marketing Who You Are
Shaping Your Personal
Curves (Managing Change)
Entrepreneurship
and ‘Intra’preneurship:
Being your own Driver
Students Leading the Way into
the Future of Networking
May 21, 2010
8:30 AM – 4:00 PM
The Conference Center at Mercer
1200 Old Trenton Road West Windsor, NJ
Keynote Speaker: Sarita Felder
Executive Leadership Coaching and
Branding Development Consultant
Authors: Sandi Webster & Peggy McHale
Of Black and White Strike Gold
REGISTER NOW!
www.cww.rutgers.edu
Lunch Included~Registration Required~No Fee
Breakout Sessions
Cultivating a Circle of Advisors:
Who, What, When, Where, How, & Why
Discovering and
Marketing Who You Are
Shaping Your Personal
Curves (Managing Change)
Entrepreneurship
and ‘Intra’preneurship:
Being your own Driver
Students Leading the Way into
the Future of Networking
Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics
AAUW Presentation of Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Now Available Online
AAUW's newest research report, Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, was featured in an event at George Washington University on March 25. The research findings were presented by co-authors Catherine Hill, Andresse St. Rose, Christianne Corbett, and scholar Shelley Correll, whose work was profiled in the report. In addition, AAUW Executive Director Linda Hallman moderated a panel discussion that featured leaders in a variety of STEM-related fields and focused on how to move this research to practice. Although some technical difficulties interrupted parts of the live streaming, a clean feed is now available at http://www.aauw.org/research/whysofew.cfm.
AAUW's newest research report, Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, was featured in an event at George Washington University on March 25. The research findings were presented by co-authors Catherine Hill, Andresse St. Rose, Christianne Corbett, and scholar Shelley Correll, whose work was profiled in the report. In addition, AAUW Executive Director Linda Hallman moderated a panel discussion that featured leaders in a variety of STEM-related fields and focused on how to move this research to practice. Although some technical difficulties interrupted parts of the live streaming, a clean feed is now available at http://www.aauw.org/research/whysofew.cfm.
Women in Academic Medicine: Equal to Men, Except in Pay
By Katherine Mangan
Chronicle of Higher Education
Women in academic medicine earn significantly less than men do, even when their professional activities and qualifications are comparable, according to a study whose results are being published in the April issue of Academic Medicine.
The study, conducted by the Mongan Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital, also found that those women take on different roles over their professional careers, publishing fewer articles and serving on more committees. But that pattern alone does not explain the pay gap.
"One of the explanations you hear for the lower pay is that women work fewer hours and don't publish as much in the early years because they have more family responsibilities," said Catherine M. DesRoches, the lead researcher and an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. "So we wanted to find out what happens when we hold all of that constant" and compare men and women with comparable professional productivity.
The result? Female researchers earned $6,000 to $13,000 less per year than comparably qualified men. The gap widened to $15,000 a year for faculty members in departments of medicine. Over a 30-year career, the average female faculty member with a doctorate would earn $215,000 less than a similarly qualified man, Ms. DesRoches said.
The study was based on a 2007 survey of 3,080 randomly selected researchers in life-science departments at the 50 academic medical centers receiving the most money from the National Institutes of Health in 2004. About three-quarters of them responded to an anonymous questionnaire that asked about leadership positions they had held at their universities, on scientific journals, and on federal panels; their recent and total publishing history; the number of hours they had spent on teaching, patient care, research, and other professional activities; and their total pay.
Across all ranks, women had fewer publications than men did. The study also noted differences in work schedules. As assistant professors, women generally worked fewer hours than did comparably qualified men, mostly because they did less research. By the time they were full professors, they worked longer hours than their male counterparts did, mostly on administrative tasks rather than on patient care or research.
Ms. DesRoches noted that many female full professors juggled more committee assignments because committees seek gender balance and there are fewer women to pick from in the upper echelons of academic medicine.
Gender-based pay differences aren't confined to academic medicine. A survey last year by the American Association of University Professors found that, at every type of institution, male academics continued to earn more, on average, than did women with the same jobs.
Chronicle of Higher Education
Women in academic medicine earn significantly less than men do, even when their professional activities and qualifications are comparable, according to a study whose results are being published in the April issue of Academic Medicine.
The study, conducted by the Mongan Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital, also found that those women take on different roles over their professional careers, publishing fewer articles and serving on more committees. But that pattern alone does not explain the pay gap.
"One of the explanations you hear for the lower pay is that women work fewer hours and don't publish as much in the early years because they have more family responsibilities," said Catherine M. DesRoches, the lead researcher and an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. "So we wanted to find out what happens when we hold all of that constant" and compare men and women with comparable professional productivity.
The result? Female researchers earned $6,000 to $13,000 less per year than comparably qualified men. The gap widened to $15,000 a year for faculty members in departments of medicine. Over a 30-year career, the average female faculty member with a doctorate would earn $215,000 less than a similarly qualified man, Ms. DesRoches said.
The study was based on a 2007 survey of 3,080 randomly selected researchers in life-science departments at the 50 academic medical centers receiving the most money from the National Institutes of Health in 2004. About three-quarters of them responded to an anonymous questionnaire that asked about leadership positions they had held at their universities, on scientific journals, and on federal panels; their recent and total publishing history; the number of hours they had spent on teaching, patient care, research, and other professional activities; and their total pay.
Across all ranks, women had fewer publications than men did. The study also noted differences in work schedules. As assistant professors, women generally worked fewer hours than did comparably qualified men, mostly because they did less research. By the time they were full professors, they worked longer hours than their male counterparts did, mostly on administrative tasks rather than on patient care or research.
Ms. DesRoches noted that many female full professors juggled more committee assignments because committees seek gender balance and there are fewer women to pick from in the upper echelons of academic medicine.
Gender-based pay differences aren't confined to academic medicine. A survey last year by the American Association of University Professors found that, at every type of institution, male academics continued to earn more, on average, than did women with the same jobs.
Friday, March 12, 2010
3 Women Sue Alabama State U., Saying It Condoned Harassment
March 11, 2010
Chronicle of Higher Education
By Andrea Fuller
Three women who say they experienced sexual and racial harassment on their jobs at Alabama State University have filed a federal lawsuit against the institution. They have named John F. Knight Jr., a top university administrator and state legislator, among the defendants.
The complaints date back to 2008, when all three women worked in the Office of the Special Assistant to the President. Mr. Knight was special assistant to the president and executive director for marketing and communications at the time. He is now the university's executive vice president and chief operating officer.
The women—Jacqueline Weatherly, Cynthia Williams, and Lydia Burkhalter—contend in their lawsuit, filed last week in the U.S. District Court in Montgomery, Ala., that the university intentionally discriminated against them on the basis of their race and gender.
The plaintiffs say that they were repeatedly harassed by Lavonette Bartley, who worked under Mr. Knight, and sometimes by Mr. Knight himself. Ms. Bartley created a hostile work environment, they allege, by frequently using offensive racial and sexual language, and making sexually suggestive comments.
Read the full text.
Chronicle of Higher Education
By Andrea Fuller
Three women who say they experienced sexual and racial harassment on their jobs at Alabama State University have filed a federal lawsuit against the institution. They have named John F. Knight Jr., a top university administrator and state legislator, among the defendants.
The complaints date back to 2008, when all three women worked in the Office of the Special Assistant to the President. Mr. Knight was special assistant to the president and executive director for marketing and communications at the time. He is now the university's executive vice president and chief operating officer.
The women—Jacqueline Weatherly, Cynthia Williams, and Lydia Burkhalter—contend in their lawsuit, filed last week in the U.S. District Court in Montgomery, Ala., that the university intentionally discriminated against them on the basis of their race and gender.
The plaintiffs say that they were repeatedly harassed by Lavonette Bartley, who worked under Mr. Knight, and sometimes by Mr. Knight himself. Ms. Bartley created a hostile work environment, they allege, by frequently using offensive racial and sexual language, and making sexually suggestive comments.
Read the full text.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Gender Bias Lawsuit
February 9, 2010
Chronicle of Higher Education
William Paterson U. Pays $1-Million to Settle Gender-Bias Lawsuit
By Robin Wilson
A lawyer for two female chemists says William Paterson University of New Jersey has agreed to pay more than $1-million to settle a gender-discrimination lawsuit in which the women allege that male professors in their department consistently treated them with "condescension and derision" and ran them out of the university.
The women now have tenure-track jobs on other campuses, but they contend that the discrimination they experienced at William Paterson slowed their careers and made their work lives miserable. A university spokesman said on Tuesday that he could not comment on the allegations or the settlement because "we do not discuss legal matters." But one of the professors who was named in the lawsuit called the charges "unfair."
The two women—Anita J. Brandolini and Amber Charlebois—were hired as tenure-track professors by William Paterson in 2002. According to the women's lawyer, Samuel J. Samaro, the chemistry department had had no other tenured or tenure-track women since the 1990s. The complaint, which was filed in 2007, says that as soon as the two women started working there, two male professors in the department made it known "that they did not respect female scientists and women were not welcome in the department."
The men named in the suit are Gary J. Gerardi, who was chairman of chemistry when the women were hired and has worked at William Paterson since 1977, and Gurdial M. Sharma, a professor of chemistry who has worked there since 1980.
Accusations of Being Silenced
The suit says the men told the women to be quiet or talked over them at meetings and yelled at them in the department's hallways and classrooms. The women also allege that they were denied the ability to vary their own course content, were assigned larger classes than their male colleagues, were denied the instruments they needed to conduct research, and were given clean-up tasks in laboratories that were not assigned to male professors.
When the two women complained to administrators about the men's behavior, administrators sympathized with them, says the complaint, but did nothing to change the situation.
In October of 2005, the university informed Ms. Brandolini that she would not be reappointed the following year. According to Mr. Samaro, the university said Ms. Brandolini was not adept at using instruments in the laboratory and did not do a good job of teaching higher-level courses. Ms. Brandolini left William Paterson and is now an assistant professor of chemistry at Ramapo College of New Jersey.
After Ms. Brandolini was informed that her appointment would not be renewed, Ms. Charlebois filed a complaint with the university in December 2005, alleging that the two men in her department had created a hostile work environment. But nothing changed after she filed the complaint, the lawsuit contends, and Ms. Charlebois left for a tenure-track job at Fairleigh Dickinson University in April 2006. She later received a letter from William Paterson, saying her allegations of a hostile environment were not substantiated.
While Mr. Samaro says the university acknowledged that Professors Gerardi and Sharma could be brusque, he says it argued that the way the two men treated the women had nothing to do with their gender. But in December, says Mr. Samaro, the university agreed to settle the lawsuit by paying each of the women $250,000, and this month it agreed to pay Mr. Samaro $541,000 in lawyer's fees.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Gerardi said the university had told him not to comment on the settlement. "I feel very strongly that I want to explain the situation, because it's very unfair," he said, "but the university feels it's best we don't say anything."
Mr. Sharma did not respond to attempts to contact him.
Chronicle of Higher Education
William Paterson U. Pays $1-Million to Settle Gender-Bias Lawsuit
By Robin Wilson
A lawyer for two female chemists says William Paterson University of New Jersey has agreed to pay more than $1-million to settle a gender-discrimination lawsuit in which the women allege that male professors in their department consistently treated them with "condescension and derision" and ran them out of the university.
The women now have tenure-track jobs on other campuses, but they contend that the discrimination they experienced at William Paterson slowed their careers and made their work lives miserable. A university spokesman said on Tuesday that he could not comment on the allegations or the settlement because "we do not discuss legal matters." But one of the professors who was named in the lawsuit called the charges "unfair."
The two women—Anita J. Brandolini and Amber Charlebois—were hired as tenure-track professors by William Paterson in 2002. According to the women's lawyer, Samuel J. Samaro, the chemistry department had had no other tenured or tenure-track women since the 1990s. The complaint, which was filed in 2007, says that as soon as the two women started working there, two male professors in the department made it known "that they did not respect female scientists and women were not welcome in the department."
The men named in the suit are Gary J. Gerardi, who was chairman of chemistry when the women were hired and has worked at William Paterson since 1977, and Gurdial M. Sharma, a professor of chemistry who has worked there since 1980.
Accusations of Being Silenced
The suit says the men told the women to be quiet or talked over them at meetings and yelled at them in the department's hallways and classrooms. The women also allege that they were denied the ability to vary their own course content, were assigned larger classes than their male colleagues, were denied the instruments they needed to conduct research, and were given clean-up tasks in laboratories that were not assigned to male professors.
When the two women complained to administrators about the men's behavior, administrators sympathized with them, says the complaint, but did nothing to change the situation.
In October of 2005, the university informed Ms. Brandolini that she would not be reappointed the following year. According to Mr. Samaro, the university said Ms. Brandolini was not adept at using instruments in the laboratory and did not do a good job of teaching higher-level courses. Ms. Brandolini left William Paterson and is now an assistant professor of chemistry at Ramapo College of New Jersey.
After Ms. Brandolini was informed that her appointment would not be renewed, Ms. Charlebois filed a complaint with the university in December 2005, alleging that the two men in her department had created a hostile work environment. But nothing changed after she filed the complaint, the lawsuit contends, and Ms. Charlebois left for a tenure-track job at Fairleigh Dickinson University in April 2006. She later received a letter from William Paterson, saying her allegations of a hostile environment were not substantiated.
While Mr. Samaro says the university acknowledged that Professors Gerardi and Sharma could be brusque, he says it argued that the way the two men treated the women had nothing to do with their gender. But in December, says Mr. Samaro, the university agreed to settle the lawsuit by paying each of the women $250,000, and this month it agreed to pay Mr. Samaro $541,000 in lawyer's fees.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Gerardi said the university had told him not to comment on the settlement. "I feel very strongly that I want to explain the situation, because it's very unfair," he said, "but the university feels it's best we don't say anything."
Mr. Sharma did not respond to attempts to contact him.
The Academic-Motherhood Handicap
February 12, 2010 Chronicle of Higher Education
The Academic-Motherhood Handicap
By Amy Kittelstrom
One afternoon in the spring of 2005, after coming up dry in my second year of pursuing a tenure-track position, I typed the following words into Google: "female academic second child effect career." My firstborn was about to turn 2, I wanted him to have a sibling, and I needed guidance on this choice.
What Google made clear: Having children can devastate the career prospects of female academics, but the academic profession seems remarkably complacent about this handicap.
Although some research universities have instituted important family-friendly initiatives (which are economically out of reach for the majority of colleges and universities, especially now), even the most well-endowed universities practice hiring and promotion policies that actively—yet not deliberately—discriminate against academic mothers. Should the best-educated people on the planet simply accept unequal career prospects that clash with academics' own stated values of fairness?
Biology is real. Discrimination against academic mothers differs from other forms of discrimination in important ways. Children and "motherhood" have always been celebrated in American culture in ways that members of minority groups, for example, have decidedly not been. No department that I've ever heard of has any official or tacit policy against hiring or promoting mothers, who are often welcome to bring their children to departmental parties or meetings. In fact, academic mothers are treated no differently than academic fathers on this social level.
But that's the problem. Academic mothers are different than academic fathers. The differences are both sex-specific and time-limited, significant only during the intense years of childbearing and early caregiving—the years that matter most for academic careers.
Research by scholars such as Mary Ann Mason at the University of California at Berkeley paints a grim picture. If a woman wants to get hired as an assistant professor, she is much less likely to succeed if she is a mother. But fathers are actually much more likely to land a position and achieve tenure, even more likely than childless men.
Most academic mothers get stuck in what Mason calls the "second tier"—the low-pay, low-security, low-status, and zero-opportunity part-time and adjunct positions that now constitute a majority of college teaching. Female Ph.D.'s with children are more than twice as likely as men with children to work in this second tier. Therefore, although women are now equally represented in the academic pipeline, men will continue to dominate the senior ranks unless something changes.
Why exactly do the careers of academic fathers advance while academic mothers' stall? Does the difference stem from hiring committees' perceptions? Parental choices? Institutional discrimination? None of the above.
Academic fathers get a tailwind because they can be what the legal scholar Joan Williams calls "ideal workers." The ability of ideal workers to devote long hours and weekends to professional advancement, to attend conferences, to move for both short-term fellowships and jobs, and to drop everything to meet deadlines literally depends on the work of what Williams calls "marginalized caregivers," the supportive partners behind the scenes.
When male academics have children, their partners almost always pause their careers in order to be the main caregiver for periods ranging from three months to years.
Three months is long enough to write a book chapter and a conference paper. Maybe more.
For the duration of a full-time caregiver's occupation of the domestic sphere, not only are the children taken care of, but so most likely are meals, laundry, shopping, trip planning, and other domestic work to which the academic father likely used to contribute more when his partner worked as much as he did.
When a hiring committee expects to see a published book before it will even consider a job candidate for an assistant-professor position, only the childless and parents with full-time caregivers at home are eligible. When a tenure committee expects two books, academic mothers had better start looking for a new job unless they have been extremely lucky with fellowships and helpful grandparents. Even fathers who are committed to gender equity in the division of domestic work simply cannot compensate in the early years for mammary glands and uteri. Academic men shouldn't be penalized for lacking reproductive organs, but neither should academic women be penalized for having—and using—those organs.
Sex versus gender. Current academic policy in pursuit of gender equity rests on a faulty syllogism: Because women are equal to men, academic mothers should be treated the same as academic fathers.
But women during the years—years!—between planning for conception and weaning really are professionally inferior to men. Yes, I wrote inferior—simply unable to work as hard, as long, or as well as childless professors or academic fathers.
Here, the intellectual progress we've made by replacing the concept of sex with that of gender turns out to be an overcorrection. It is not social conditioning that creates this inferiority. It is not institutional discrimination either, although flexible parental-leave policies, tenure-clock stoppage, and child-care accommodations are indeed important. But this inferiority is a biological fact. It is about sex, not gender.
I'm talking about the vita gap. It's somewhat ironic that the name of the document by which academics represent their work has "life" at its root, because when academic women create life they starve their vitas. Time spent on reproduction is time away from scholarship, so mothers' competitors outproduce them on the most-important measure used by hiring committees in this buyers' market: quantity. Given two equally capable teachers with good recommendation letters, the fatter vita wins every time.
The faulty syllogism has led to a widely accepted practice of silence on child-related matters in hiring. For legal reasons, committees are not supposed to ask applicants any questions regarding marital or reproductive status; they are supposed to volunteer information regarding leave policies, local schools, and general family-friendliness to all applicants as a universal standard.
But the vita gap is only compounded by that policy of silence. I see three main problems with it.
Problem No. 1: Silence at the institutional level means that academic women enter their childbearing years blind. They do not know what obstacles they face, and Google is their only guide to surmounting them. Fortune may provide them with a good role model—an assistant professor who bears a child or two in plain view—but that role model has her own problems. As a new mother, she is taxed to capacity and, therefore, unable to be a consistent mentor, for which she gets no professional credit. If she is employed on the tenure track at a research institution, she is likely to get a full semester of paid leave. That is hardly the situation for most female academics of childbearing age.
For example, when I went ahead and had my second child during my third year of teaching in the "second tier" as an adjunct, I got ... a bouquet. That's all. Most new Ph.D.'s, male and female, now spend several years in the second tier, during which they have to work hard to fatten their vitas while teaching more courses than their tenure-track competitors simply in order to survive.
Many of the cash-strapped state universities and teaching-heavy colleges that provide the majority of tenure-track positions don't offer any paid parental leave at all. Academic women who give birth in such tenuous circumstances cannot follow in the footsteps of their wonderful role models. They have to keep teaching, even when their babies are tiny, or else their vitas will be not only skinny but stillborn. And as long as they are combining teaching with the intense care of early childhood, they are not producing scholarship.
Problem No. 2: Silence is hard to enforce. Who is going to blow the whistle on a hiring committee? Who is going to punish that committee for discrimination? How? On my road to the tenure track, I had four on-campus interviews. At three of them, members of the hiring department asked in a friendly way about my family status. I knew that violated protocol, but the code of silence meant that no one had trained me to deal with such questions. I answered honestly in the same friendly tone.
Did I get offered any of those three jobs? No. But I had no way to know whether that was due to discrimination of any sort, and I had no recourse for the ethical breach.
Problem No. 3: Silence makes the vita gap look merely like lesser competence. Academic mothers cannot tell hiring committees that they would have produced more scholarship, been more prepared for their interviews, and polished their job talks more if not for children. No matter how hard academic mothers work, at just the moment when their career potential is being evaluated, they appear less promising than fathers or people without children.
A recent president of the American Historical Association overcame the vita gap with a full-time nanny (who died in her kitchen), four hours of sleep a night, two days a week without lunch, and frequent bouts of bronchitis and pneumonia.
Silence as complicity. Not speaking of family status perpetuates the handicap of academic motherhood, which shouldn't hinder women's careers at all. So let's actually give academic mothers a handicap sticker to paste onto their vitas. Make the work of motherhood visible in women's academic records. By pinpointing only the strictly biological work that belongs to sex instead of gender, this handicap would function like replacing doorknobs with levers. It would make academic success accessible to mothers without creating a barrier for fathers or people without children.
Academic mothers should unblushingly total up the time spent on reproduction and credit it on their vitas. Give it its own category; call it "reproductive allowance." For my two "easy" pregnancies conceived exactly when I planned them with complication-free deliveries, quick recoveries, and no lactation problems, my conservative estimate is 1,810 hours spent. Each. That's a book, right there, and then some.
And that's exactly how it should appear on a vita: "Work that would otherwise be complete: a manuscript and an article." Hiring committees should see the real professional potential of academic mothers whose sex had prevented them from realizing that potential—yet.
For this handicap system to work, it is important to limit allotments to strictly sex-specific expenditures of time. Some tasks related to reproduction belong to the private decision-making of each family. Who does the research on child-care options, who takes the child to the pediatrician, and who mashes the baby food are not academe's responsibility. In other words, women who want to put in a "second shift" at home in perpetuity probably belong in the second tier.
But it is time for academe to acknowledge that women's productivity is slowed by reproduction. No one in the profession wants women to be hampered in their career advancement, so we should stop acting like having children is a problem. And silence is complicity. I daresay few if any male colleagues of mine have spent time Googling "male academic second child effect career." Acknowledging exactly how motherhood affects productivity in ways that fatherhood does not—acknowledging it openly, systematically, and professionwide—will cost nothing, hurt no one, and help thousands.
By the skin of my teeth, I made it onto the tenure track after four years on the job market, and thanks to my first teaching relief in seven years, it looks like I'll finish my first book, too. But for every successful academic mother, there are a good dozen hidden women who have either sacrificed their family plans for their careers or sacrificed their careers for their children. Choicelessly. To end that cycle of unequal academic motherhood, we have to make the personal not only political, but professional, too.
Amy Kittelstrom is an assistant professor of history at Sonoma State University and a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University.
The Academic-Motherhood Handicap
By Amy Kittelstrom
One afternoon in the spring of 2005, after coming up dry in my second year of pursuing a tenure-track position, I typed the following words into Google: "female academic second child effect career." My firstborn was about to turn 2, I wanted him to have a sibling, and I needed guidance on this choice.
What Google made clear: Having children can devastate the career prospects of female academics, but the academic profession seems remarkably complacent about this handicap.
Although some research universities have instituted important family-friendly initiatives (which are economically out of reach for the majority of colleges and universities, especially now), even the most well-endowed universities practice hiring and promotion policies that actively—yet not deliberately—discriminate against academic mothers. Should the best-educated people on the planet simply accept unequal career prospects that clash with academics' own stated values of fairness?
Biology is real. Discrimination against academic mothers differs from other forms of discrimination in important ways. Children and "motherhood" have always been celebrated in American culture in ways that members of minority groups, for example, have decidedly not been. No department that I've ever heard of has any official or tacit policy against hiring or promoting mothers, who are often welcome to bring their children to departmental parties or meetings. In fact, academic mothers are treated no differently than academic fathers on this social level.
But that's the problem. Academic mothers are different than academic fathers. The differences are both sex-specific and time-limited, significant only during the intense years of childbearing and early caregiving—the years that matter most for academic careers.
Research by scholars such as Mary Ann Mason at the University of California at Berkeley paints a grim picture. If a woman wants to get hired as an assistant professor, she is much less likely to succeed if she is a mother. But fathers are actually much more likely to land a position and achieve tenure, even more likely than childless men.
Most academic mothers get stuck in what Mason calls the "second tier"—the low-pay, low-security, low-status, and zero-opportunity part-time and adjunct positions that now constitute a majority of college teaching. Female Ph.D.'s with children are more than twice as likely as men with children to work in this second tier. Therefore, although women are now equally represented in the academic pipeline, men will continue to dominate the senior ranks unless something changes.
Why exactly do the careers of academic fathers advance while academic mothers' stall? Does the difference stem from hiring committees' perceptions? Parental choices? Institutional discrimination? None of the above.
Academic fathers get a tailwind because they can be what the legal scholar Joan Williams calls "ideal workers." The ability of ideal workers to devote long hours and weekends to professional advancement, to attend conferences, to move for both short-term fellowships and jobs, and to drop everything to meet deadlines literally depends on the work of what Williams calls "marginalized caregivers," the supportive partners behind the scenes.
When male academics have children, their partners almost always pause their careers in order to be the main caregiver for periods ranging from three months to years.
Three months is long enough to write a book chapter and a conference paper. Maybe more.
For the duration of a full-time caregiver's occupation of the domestic sphere, not only are the children taken care of, but so most likely are meals, laundry, shopping, trip planning, and other domestic work to which the academic father likely used to contribute more when his partner worked as much as he did.
When a hiring committee expects to see a published book before it will even consider a job candidate for an assistant-professor position, only the childless and parents with full-time caregivers at home are eligible. When a tenure committee expects two books, academic mothers had better start looking for a new job unless they have been extremely lucky with fellowships and helpful grandparents. Even fathers who are committed to gender equity in the division of domestic work simply cannot compensate in the early years for mammary glands and uteri. Academic men shouldn't be penalized for lacking reproductive organs, but neither should academic women be penalized for having—and using—those organs.
Sex versus gender. Current academic policy in pursuit of gender equity rests on a faulty syllogism: Because women are equal to men, academic mothers should be treated the same as academic fathers.
But women during the years—years!—between planning for conception and weaning really are professionally inferior to men. Yes, I wrote inferior—simply unable to work as hard, as long, or as well as childless professors or academic fathers.
Here, the intellectual progress we've made by replacing the concept of sex with that of gender turns out to be an overcorrection. It is not social conditioning that creates this inferiority. It is not institutional discrimination either, although flexible parental-leave policies, tenure-clock stoppage, and child-care accommodations are indeed important. But this inferiority is a biological fact. It is about sex, not gender.
I'm talking about the vita gap. It's somewhat ironic that the name of the document by which academics represent their work has "life" at its root, because when academic women create life they starve their vitas. Time spent on reproduction is time away from scholarship, so mothers' competitors outproduce them on the most-important measure used by hiring committees in this buyers' market: quantity. Given two equally capable teachers with good recommendation letters, the fatter vita wins every time.
The faulty syllogism has led to a widely accepted practice of silence on child-related matters in hiring. For legal reasons, committees are not supposed to ask applicants any questions regarding marital or reproductive status; they are supposed to volunteer information regarding leave policies, local schools, and general family-friendliness to all applicants as a universal standard.
But the vita gap is only compounded by that policy of silence. I see three main problems with it.
Problem No. 1: Silence at the institutional level means that academic women enter their childbearing years blind. They do not know what obstacles they face, and Google is their only guide to surmounting them. Fortune may provide them with a good role model—an assistant professor who bears a child or two in plain view—but that role model has her own problems. As a new mother, she is taxed to capacity and, therefore, unable to be a consistent mentor, for which she gets no professional credit. If she is employed on the tenure track at a research institution, she is likely to get a full semester of paid leave. That is hardly the situation for most female academics of childbearing age.
For example, when I went ahead and had my second child during my third year of teaching in the "second tier" as an adjunct, I got ... a bouquet. That's all. Most new Ph.D.'s, male and female, now spend several years in the second tier, during which they have to work hard to fatten their vitas while teaching more courses than their tenure-track competitors simply in order to survive.
Many of the cash-strapped state universities and teaching-heavy colleges that provide the majority of tenure-track positions don't offer any paid parental leave at all. Academic women who give birth in such tenuous circumstances cannot follow in the footsteps of their wonderful role models. They have to keep teaching, even when their babies are tiny, or else their vitas will be not only skinny but stillborn. And as long as they are combining teaching with the intense care of early childhood, they are not producing scholarship.
Problem No. 2: Silence is hard to enforce. Who is going to blow the whistle on a hiring committee? Who is going to punish that committee for discrimination? How? On my road to the tenure track, I had four on-campus interviews. At three of them, members of the hiring department asked in a friendly way about my family status. I knew that violated protocol, but the code of silence meant that no one had trained me to deal with such questions. I answered honestly in the same friendly tone.
Did I get offered any of those three jobs? No. But I had no way to know whether that was due to discrimination of any sort, and I had no recourse for the ethical breach.
Problem No. 3: Silence makes the vita gap look merely like lesser competence. Academic mothers cannot tell hiring committees that they would have produced more scholarship, been more prepared for their interviews, and polished their job talks more if not for children. No matter how hard academic mothers work, at just the moment when their career potential is being evaluated, they appear less promising than fathers or people without children.
A recent president of the American Historical Association overcame the vita gap with a full-time nanny (who died in her kitchen), four hours of sleep a night, two days a week without lunch, and frequent bouts of bronchitis and pneumonia.
Silence as complicity. Not speaking of family status perpetuates the handicap of academic motherhood, which shouldn't hinder women's careers at all. So let's actually give academic mothers a handicap sticker to paste onto their vitas. Make the work of motherhood visible in women's academic records. By pinpointing only the strictly biological work that belongs to sex instead of gender, this handicap would function like replacing doorknobs with levers. It would make academic success accessible to mothers without creating a barrier for fathers or people without children.
Academic mothers should unblushingly total up the time spent on reproduction and credit it on their vitas. Give it its own category; call it "reproductive allowance." For my two "easy" pregnancies conceived exactly when I planned them with complication-free deliveries, quick recoveries, and no lactation problems, my conservative estimate is 1,810 hours spent. Each. That's a book, right there, and then some.
And that's exactly how it should appear on a vita: "Work that would otherwise be complete: a manuscript and an article." Hiring committees should see the real professional potential of academic mothers whose sex had prevented them from realizing that potential—yet.
For this handicap system to work, it is important to limit allotments to strictly sex-specific expenditures of time. Some tasks related to reproduction belong to the private decision-making of each family. Who does the research on child-care options, who takes the child to the pediatrician, and who mashes the baby food are not academe's responsibility. In other words, women who want to put in a "second shift" at home in perpetuity probably belong in the second tier.
But it is time for academe to acknowledge that women's productivity is slowed by reproduction. No one in the profession wants women to be hampered in their career advancement, so we should stop acting like having children is a problem. And silence is complicity. I daresay few if any male colleagues of mine have spent time Googling "male academic second child effect career." Acknowledging exactly how motherhood affects productivity in ways that fatherhood does not—acknowledging it openly, systematically, and professionwide—will cost nothing, hurt no one, and help thousands.
By the skin of my teeth, I made it onto the tenure track after four years on the job market, and thanks to my first teaching relief in seven years, it looks like I'll finish my first book, too. But for every successful academic mother, there are a good dozen hidden women who have either sacrificed their family plans for their careers or sacrificed their careers for their children. Choicelessly. To end that cycle of unequal academic motherhood, we have to make the personal not only political, but professional, too.
Amy Kittelstrom is an assistant professor of history at Sonoma State University and a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University.
Women, Birth, Death, and Mathematics
February 7, 2010
Chronicle of Higher Education
Women, Birth, Death, and Mathematics
By Susan D'Agostino
When I decided to become a mathematician, I assumed that my greatest challenge would be intellectual. That was before the Christmas Eve my father made shrimp scampi in a Pyrex dish under the broiler. When he opened the oven and added cold lemon juice to the sizzling prawns, shards of glass flew 15 feet in every direction. Normally a fastidious cook, he had been distracted by my mother, who, at that moment, was telling my very young children—because none of the adults would listen—what she wanted for Christmas: for the family to acknowledge that it was time for her to die.
Nothing in my graduate program had trained me for this. I am a doctor, but not that kind of doctor. Not that being an oncologist would have helped at that point. With Stage 4 kidney cancer, my mother had no more than months to live. I was not at all surprised when my father picked up the shrimp and ate it; it was an earnest, if dangerous, attempt to show the power of mind over matter.
The message was that none of this was happening: The shrimp was not infused with glass, and my mother was not dying. At the time, I might have added that, in spite of my decision to take time away from formal employment to care for my babies and mother, my intelligence and training still had currency in the world of academe.
The day of the exploding shrimp seems like ages ago. My children are now in grade school, my mother has passed away, and I am an assistant math professor at an institution that makes me extremely happy. Still, I can remember the confusion that resulted from following my heart rather than toeing the feminist line.
Discussing this topic does not come easy. Having earned my doctorate right on schedule—with a baby on my hip, no less—and landing an assistant professorship in the geographic region of my choice, I could easily portray myself as some sort of mathematical, feminist superhero. In particular, I could gloss over the fact that there was a period in which I took time away from academe to change a lot of diapers and serve as a nurse to my terminally ill mother.
But just as I tell my daughter that she has more options than "witch" or "princess" for Halloween, I want to exist somewhere between "nun for science" and "stay-at-home mom." I have tremendous gratitude for the feminists who blazed the path before me. However, I respectfully reject the notion that my desire to engage in these so-called female activities is a 1950s-era can of worms that is better left unopened.
I am compelled to write because when I was thinking about family planning and end-of-life issues, it was the rare woman in math who revealed any ambivalence about how personal choices affected her professional life. Were there women who, in the absence of maternity leave or affordable child care, dropped out of their math graduate programs upon the births of their children? Or women who delayed childbearing only to struggle later with age-related infertility? Or women who were racked with guilt when a parent died alone in a hospital bed because they could not afford the time away from research?
As a math graduate student, I attended many women-in-math conferences, but those were not the stories I heard. There was casual mention of finding a "work-life balance," but most of the discussion concerned achieving equity. And when it came to equity, the messages converged around a central theme: "Work more," "Hire a nanny," or, my favorite, "That's what hospice volunteers are for."
Something changed for me during my hiatus from academe. No, I did not, as some had either feared or predicted, lose my ambition. Yet I am no longer the woman who, as a graduate student, took pride in the fact that I returned to work just days after having given birth. Of course, with no formal maternity leave, I felt that I had little choice. Still, my former self happily spun my postpartum math research as proof that I was making it in the old boys' network. My present self, on the other hand, is no longer concerned with the old boys' network. Rather, my present self strives to live the life that I want, which includes both family and work.
During my time away from academe, I realized that the world is much bigger than those in academe would lead you to believe. I came to realize that if academe did not see my merits, then I could still find work that was both stimulating and satisfying outside of it. As my mother's early death poignantly illustrates, life is fleeting. Too fleeting, in fact, to have only one definition of success.
This change of heart has made all of the difference in my life. Like businesswomen who ultimately rejected oversized shoulder pads as a superficial, not to mention odd, attempt to mimic their male counterparts, I am no longer trying to be the archetypal male mathematician who has a wife to birth his babies and a sister to care for his dying mother.
Today I am a mathematician who willingly participates in the nurturing surrounding birth and death. The fact that I can state that proudly is not just good for me but is also good for math. Just as biodiversity is vital to an ecosystem, diversity of experience and perspective is crucial in academic research. Research involves asking questions, and the kinds of questions an individual is predisposed to ask are constrained by his or her gender, language, and cultural background.
The Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock described the uniquely feminine and, at the time, revolutionary approach that motivated her research in Evelyn Fox Keller's biography of her, A Feeling for the Organism. McClintock treated individual corn plants as if they were distinct children she had reared from birth. She used words like "patience" and "listening" as she gained an "intimate" knowledge of what distinguished one corn plant from another. In doing so, she cultivated what she referred to as a "feeling for the organism" that most people develop only with humans or pets.
And Dian Fossey's groundbreaking research methods were decidedly feminine, writes Sy Montgomery in Walking With the Great Apes, because of her intense focus on nurturing relationships with individual gorillas. Fossey broke the previously undisputed rule of maintaining a distance from her subjects, much to the benefit of science.
Who is to say that any marginalization I experienced as a woman or mother in math did not influence my decision to study nonlinear codes as opposed to the more mainstream linear codes? Only later did I learn of a connection between nonlinear codes and the hot topic of quantum error-correcting codes.
When the math community recognizes that some women not only pace their careers differently from the archetypal man but may want to allow room for some (dare I say it?) stereotypically female endeavors, the groundwork will be laid for equity. In the meantime, if you are a young woman establishing yourself as a mathematician while at the same time contemplating family planning or elder care, take heart. Being a woman attempting to combine birth, death, and mathematics is a great challenge—greater, I think, than doing math in a vacuum. However, there is nothing I would change about the path I have followed. And if I ever run into you at a conference, I will very likely tell you as much.
Susan D'Agostino is an assistant professor of mathematics at Southern New Hampshire University.
Chronicle of Higher Education
Women, Birth, Death, and Mathematics
By Susan D'Agostino
When I decided to become a mathematician, I assumed that my greatest challenge would be intellectual. That was before the Christmas Eve my father made shrimp scampi in a Pyrex dish under the broiler. When he opened the oven and added cold lemon juice to the sizzling prawns, shards of glass flew 15 feet in every direction. Normally a fastidious cook, he had been distracted by my mother, who, at that moment, was telling my very young children—because none of the adults would listen—what she wanted for Christmas: for the family to acknowledge that it was time for her to die.
Nothing in my graduate program had trained me for this. I am a doctor, but not that kind of doctor. Not that being an oncologist would have helped at that point. With Stage 4 kidney cancer, my mother had no more than months to live. I was not at all surprised when my father picked up the shrimp and ate it; it was an earnest, if dangerous, attempt to show the power of mind over matter.
The message was that none of this was happening: The shrimp was not infused with glass, and my mother was not dying. At the time, I might have added that, in spite of my decision to take time away from formal employment to care for my babies and mother, my intelligence and training still had currency in the world of academe.
The day of the exploding shrimp seems like ages ago. My children are now in grade school, my mother has passed away, and I am an assistant math professor at an institution that makes me extremely happy. Still, I can remember the confusion that resulted from following my heart rather than toeing the feminist line.
Discussing this topic does not come easy. Having earned my doctorate right on schedule—with a baby on my hip, no less—and landing an assistant professorship in the geographic region of my choice, I could easily portray myself as some sort of mathematical, feminist superhero. In particular, I could gloss over the fact that there was a period in which I took time away from academe to change a lot of diapers and serve as a nurse to my terminally ill mother.
But just as I tell my daughter that she has more options than "witch" or "princess" for Halloween, I want to exist somewhere between "nun for science" and "stay-at-home mom." I have tremendous gratitude for the feminists who blazed the path before me. However, I respectfully reject the notion that my desire to engage in these so-called female activities is a 1950s-era can of worms that is better left unopened.
I am compelled to write because when I was thinking about family planning and end-of-life issues, it was the rare woman in math who revealed any ambivalence about how personal choices affected her professional life. Were there women who, in the absence of maternity leave or affordable child care, dropped out of their math graduate programs upon the births of their children? Or women who delayed childbearing only to struggle later with age-related infertility? Or women who were racked with guilt when a parent died alone in a hospital bed because they could not afford the time away from research?
As a math graduate student, I attended many women-in-math conferences, but those were not the stories I heard. There was casual mention of finding a "work-life balance," but most of the discussion concerned achieving equity. And when it came to equity, the messages converged around a central theme: "Work more," "Hire a nanny," or, my favorite, "That's what hospice volunteers are for."
Something changed for me during my hiatus from academe. No, I did not, as some had either feared or predicted, lose my ambition. Yet I am no longer the woman who, as a graduate student, took pride in the fact that I returned to work just days after having given birth. Of course, with no formal maternity leave, I felt that I had little choice. Still, my former self happily spun my postpartum math research as proof that I was making it in the old boys' network. My present self, on the other hand, is no longer concerned with the old boys' network. Rather, my present self strives to live the life that I want, which includes both family and work.
During my time away from academe, I realized that the world is much bigger than those in academe would lead you to believe. I came to realize that if academe did not see my merits, then I could still find work that was both stimulating and satisfying outside of it. As my mother's early death poignantly illustrates, life is fleeting. Too fleeting, in fact, to have only one definition of success.
This change of heart has made all of the difference in my life. Like businesswomen who ultimately rejected oversized shoulder pads as a superficial, not to mention odd, attempt to mimic their male counterparts, I am no longer trying to be the archetypal male mathematician who has a wife to birth his babies and a sister to care for his dying mother.
Today I am a mathematician who willingly participates in the nurturing surrounding birth and death. The fact that I can state that proudly is not just good for me but is also good for math. Just as biodiversity is vital to an ecosystem, diversity of experience and perspective is crucial in academic research. Research involves asking questions, and the kinds of questions an individual is predisposed to ask are constrained by his or her gender, language, and cultural background.
The Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock described the uniquely feminine and, at the time, revolutionary approach that motivated her research in Evelyn Fox Keller's biography of her, A Feeling for the Organism. McClintock treated individual corn plants as if they were distinct children she had reared from birth. She used words like "patience" and "listening" as she gained an "intimate" knowledge of what distinguished one corn plant from another. In doing so, she cultivated what she referred to as a "feeling for the organism" that most people develop only with humans or pets.
And Dian Fossey's groundbreaking research methods were decidedly feminine, writes Sy Montgomery in Walking With the Great Apes, because of her intense focus on nurturing relationships with individual gorillas. Fossey broke the previously undisputed rule of maintaining a distance from her subjects, much to the benefit of science.
Who is to say that any marginalization I experienced as a woman or mother in math did not influence my decision to study nonlinear codes as opposed to the more mainstream linear codes? Only later did I learn of a connection between nonlinear codes and the hot topic of quantum error-correcting codes.
When the math community recognizes that some women not only pace their careers differently from the archetypal man but may want to allow room for some (dare I say it?) stereotypically female endeavors, the groundwork will be laid for equity. In the meantime, if you are a young woman establishing yourself as a mathematician while at the same time contemplating family planning or elder care, take heart. Being a woman attempting to combine birth, death, and mathematics is a great challenge—greater, I think, than doing math in a vacuum. However, there is nothing I would change about the path I have followed. And if I ever run into you at a conference, I will very likely tell you as much.
Susan D'Agostino is an assistant professor of mathematics at Southern New Hampshire University.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Help Girls in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math
On Nov. 23, President Barack Obama announced the establishment of National Lab Day, an effort supported by AAUW and more than 200 other organizations representing over 6.5 million science, technology, engineering and math professionals and teachers. Now is the time to get involved!
Are you a math, science, or engineering teacher? Are you a professional scientist, engineer, college student, or professor? If so, National Lab Day is for you. Visit the National Lab Day website at www.nationallabday.org/groups/aauw to join in this exciting new initiative.
While National Lab Day is tentatively scheduled for early May 2010, it is more than just a day. It's a nationwide movement to bring together science, technology, engineering, and math professionals and teachers to provide high-quality, hands-on, lab experiences for students. It's about all of us working together to give children access to well-equipped labs and to the professionals who can inspire them.
AAUW members and supporters are critical to the success of National Lab Day. These projects will be teacher driven. Teachers can partner with outside experts to work to assess current labs, update or refurbish lab equipment, conduct equipment and materials inventory, or clean and repair equipment. Or you can elect to have professionals work with you to:
• implement hands-on projects
• start a fundraising effort to buy needed supplies
• help with science fairs
• mentor a student
• coordinate and host field trips
• provide internship opportunities
• donate materials
• assist with lesson plans
Projects can also center on computer or outdoor labs-anywhere where hands-on lessons in these subjects can come alive. These are just a few of the suggestions, and many more can be found at www.nationallabday.org/projects/all.
In addition, we will need the help of professional scientists, engineers, and college students and professors. These volunteers will engage in activities with teachers. There are many ways for professionals to be involved such as:
• find, donate, or repair equipment
• implement hands-on projects
• help with science fairs
• mentor a student
• chaperone field trips
• provide internship opportunities
• donate materials
• help with lesson plans
• be an advisor for an after-school program
Take Action!
To participate, simply visit www.nationallabday.org/groups/aauw and click on "teachers" or "scientists and engineers." Then fill out the form. Please select American Association of University Women (AAUW) as the professional organization. You can also see what projects have already been entered at www.nationallabday.org/projects/all. If you are a volunteer, this is a great way to sign up for already existing projects. If you are a teacher, click on projects to get ideas about the types of projects teachers are doing.
Attracting women and girls to these fields is critical to U.S. competitiveness.
If women and members of other traditionally underrepresented groups joined the science, engineering, technology, and math workforce in proportion to their representation in the overall labor force, the shortage of these professionals would disappear. Although women make up half of the workforce, they only comprise 25 percent of the labor force in science, engineering and technology fields.
AAUW urges you to join the cause at www.nationallabday.org/groups/aauw to help break through barriers for women and girls in science, technology, enigeering, and math.
For more information on women and girls in these fields, visit AAUW or the AAUW-led National Girls Collaborative Project.
Questions? Contact VoterEd@aauw.org.
________________________________________
The grassroots liaisons in AAUW's Leadership Corps program will be reaching out to AAUW branch leaders to provide mentoring and assistance. Whether you are a member of an AAUW branch (an officer or not) or a member-at-large interested in becoming involved with other AAUW members, please fill out the online form here to indicate areas of branch programming or administration for which you would like assistance.
Washington Update is AAUW's free, members-only weekly e-bulletin offering an insider's view on the legislative process, the latest policy news, resources for advocates, programming ideas, and updates from the Public Policy and Government Relations Department. Subscribe today!
Read the 2009-2011 AAUW Public Policy Program.
Become part of the AAUW national community and break through barriers for women and girls. Join now.
Strengthen AAUW's voice with policy-makers! Donate now.
Connect with AAUW online via our website and blog, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
Are you a math, science, or engineering teacher? Are you a professional scientist, engineer, college student, or professor? If so, National Lab Day is for you. Visit the National Lab Day website at www.nationallabday.org/groups/aauw to join in this exciting new initiative.
While National Lab Day is tentatively scheduled for early May 2010, it is more than just a day. It's a nationwide movement to bring together science, technology, engineering, and math professionals and teachers to provide high-quality, hands-on, lab experiences for students. It's about all of us working together to give children access to well-equipped labs and to the professionals who can inspire them.
AAUW members and supporters are critical to the success of National Lab Day. These projects will be teacher driven. Teachers can partner with outside experts to work to assess current labs, update or refurbish lab equipment, conduct equipment and materials inventory, or clean and repair equipment. Or you can elect to have professionals work with you to:
• implement hands-on projects
• start a fundraising effort to buy needed supplies
• help with science fairs
• mentor a student
• coordinate and host field trips
• provide internship opportunities
• donate materials
• assist with lesson plans
Projects can also center on computer or outdoor labs-anywhere where hands-on lessons in these subjects can come alive. These are just a few of the suggestions, and many more can be found at www.nationallabday.org/projects/all.
In addition, we will need the help of professional scientists, engineers, and college students and professors. These volunteers will engage in activities with teachers. There are many ways for professionals to be involved such as:
• find, donate, or repair equipment
• implement hands-on projects
• help with science fairs
• mentor a student
• chaperone field trips
• provide internship opportunities
• donate materials
• help with lesson plans
• be an advisor for an after-school program
Take Action!
To participate, simply visit www.nationallabday.org/groups/aauw and click on "teachers" or "scientists and engineers." Then fill out the form. Please select American Association of University Women (AAUW) as the professional organization. You can also see what projects have already been entered at www.nationallabday.org/projects/all. If you are a volunteer, this is a great way to sign up for already existing projects. If you are a teacher, click on projects to get ideas about the types of projects teachers are doing.
Attracting women and girls to these fields is critical to U.S. competitiveness.
If women and members of other traditionally underrepresented groups joined the science, engineering, technology, and math workforce in proportion to their representation in the overall labor force, the shortage of these professionals would disappear. Although women make up half of the workforce, they only comprise 25 percent of the labor force in science, engineering and technology fields.
AAUW urges you to join the cause at www.nationallabday.org/groups/aauw to help break through barriers for women and girls in science, technology, enigeering, and math.
For more information on women and girls in these fields, visit AAUW or the AAUW-led National Girls Collaborative Project.
Questions? Contact VoterEd@aauw.org.
________________________________________
The grassroots liaisons in AAUW's Leadership Corps program will be reaching out to AAUW branch leaders to provide mentoring and assistance. Whether you are a member of an AAUW branch (an officer or not) or a member-at-large interested in becoming involved with other AAUW members, please fill out the online form here to indicate areas of branch programming or administration for which you would like assistance.
Washington Update is AAUW's free, members-only weekly e-bulletin offering an insider's view on the legislative process, the latest policy news, resources for advocates, programming ideas, and updates from the Public Policy and Government Relations Department. Subscribe today!
Read the 2009-2011 AAUW Public Policy Program.
Become part of the AAUW national community and break through barriers for women and girls. Join now.
Strengthen AAUW's voice with policy-makers! Donate now.
Connect with AAUW online via our website and blog, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Carrer Pipeline is not leaking but pouring
January 13, 2010, 09:00 AM ET
Chronicle of Higher Education
Career Pipeline (a guest commentary by Katherine Sender)
By John L. Jackson Jr.
Katherine Sender, the associate dean of graduate studies and an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, writes:
At a recent meeting of Penn faculty members from across the university, the provost spoke with concern about “the leaky pipeline,” where large numbers of women and minority faculty drop out of the career track as they move towards senior positions. Then followed our president, announcing that Penn was moving from a position of excellence to eminence—in the 21st century university even excellence isn’t good enough anymore. I was struck by the juxtaposition. Was there a relationship between this constant push to greater levels of distinction and the leaky pipeline?
What does this leaky pipeline look like at Penn? A Gender Equity Report in 2007 found that women made up 28 percent of all faculty members. How this plays out across rank is striking: Women made up 42 percent of assistant professors, 30 percent of associate professors, and only 18 percent of full professors. This is not a case of more women coming up through the ranks because the proportion of standing women faculty members had increased by only 4 percent since 1999.
The leaky pipeline for racial minorities is as dramatic. A Minority Equity Report of 2007 found that minorities made up 17 percent of Penn’s faculty. People of color made up 27 percent of assistant professors, 17 percent of associate professors, and only 9 percent of full professors. We may take heart that the proportion of minority faculty has almost doubled since 1999, but of the current 17 percent of minority faculty members, 11 percent are Asian, meaning that the proportions of African American and Latino/a faculty are very small indeed.
Reliable career-track information on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender faculty members is impossible to come by, but my sense is that the tenure and promotion process isn’t especially kind to this group either. Expressly queer faculty -- politically irascible, non-heteronormative and even non-homonormative academics -- are likely to have an especially hard time.
I’m using Penn’s figures as an example, but Penn isn’t especially bad -- or good -- compared with its peers. I also know that some people are leaving academic careers for good, self-chosen, life-affirming reasons. But it’s worrisome that these departures are differentially distributed across gender, race, and probably sexuality. The pipeline isn’t leaking, it’s pouring.
At a recent gender-studies conference here at Penn, the leaky pipeline was addressed as a family issue: The tenure clock is hostile to women who want to have children. Indeed, nationally, women with children are half as likely to get tenure as women without. But this is only part of the problem. If it were only a fertility issue, minority men would be doing just fine.
The tenure and promotion process isn’t only inhumane for women who want and have children, it’s inhumane for everyone. Jerry Jacobs, a sociologist here at Penn, found in 2004 that both women and men faculty members work more than 50 hours per week irrespective of rank, and about a third of them work more than 60 hours per week. The expectation of increased working hours is only likely to grow. The MLA found in 2006 that not only research universities but all academic institutions have greatly increased their expectations of tenure-track faculty members to publish articles and books towards their tenure cases without reducing their teaching hours.
While expectations of productivity have increased, so too has the shift to employing more part-time faculty: In the United States, only a third of facultymembers are now full-time tenured or tenure track, down from 55 percent in 1970. This puts increasing pressure on those full-timers to do additional service work -- work that more often falls to women and that gets little credit in terms of promotions and merit pay. As we are increasingly asked to account for our productivity, I wonder how much of the intellectual and pastoral labor more often done by female and minority faculty members are recognized as productive?
These increased pressures are on everybody, but they are experienced unequally by women and minority facultymembers because of how resources are differently distributed:
Pay: In the United States, women faculty members earn 85 cents to every male dollar, this rate goes down at the higher ranks. [Couldn’t find comparable figs for minority faculty.]
Time: Women faculty members are much more likely to be partnered with another full-time worker and are more likely to be partnered with another academic - - i.e. someone also working long hours. In heterosexual couples, women are much more likely to carry more responsibilities for childcare and domestic duties.
Emotional resources: Women and minority faculty members are less likely to feel confident about their performance. Educational research suggests that girls consistently rank their sense of their own abilities much lower than do men, even though they perform better in assessments. Students of color constantly have to work against teachers’ expectations of low achievement.
Recognition: Who has a voice in the university and what are they allowed to say? Mark Anthony Neal has mentioned the chastisement of faculty members who dare to “think while Black.” Tenure and promotion discourage speaking while Black, female, and gay.
The demands on all academics escalate, but different groups have varying access to resources that make those demands bearable. This is not only an issue of pressures on junior faculty members to produce for their tenure file. Even those at the top of the ladder continue to work extraordinarily hard.
Senior faculty members and administrators need to recognize that few of their group would have met the standards currently set for tenure and promotion. They need to publicly scale back on expectations of quantity and focus more on quality. This is not only for the well-being of their junior colleagues; it is also likely to foster more careful, intellectually rigorous research. They also need to think imaginatively about different kinds of productivity than written scholarship in a changing multimedia world where monograph contracts are harder to score.
But we also need to consider our own complicity. In my research, I read about a lot of scholarly concern about how reality television shows cultivate the ideal self-governing neoliberal citizen -- someone who is adaptable, mobile, always a bit anxious, self-monitoring, and willing to work harder not only to get ahead but to stay in place. While we communication scholars worry about the effects of reality TV on its audiences, we need to look for the beam in our own eye: Academics are the most obligingly self-governing citizens of all. We can work whenever we want as long as we work all the time.
Like many universities, corporations, and governments, Penn has adopted a strategy of “sustainability.” I agree that huge communities like universities have a responsibility to environmental issues. But sustainability can’t only be a matter for nations and institutions -- we also have to think about sustainability at a human level. The demand for constant growth means that we extract more and more energy from a limited resource. How do the developing nations in the university world -- women, men of color, and part-timers -- unequally bear the brunt of overtaxed resources? And looking forward, what kind of labor legacy are we leaving for the generation of scholars we are nurturing into the profession?
Don’t get me wrong, I love my job. But I don’t want to do only my job. We need to model livable lives for our students. We need to do more than just work, and not only if we want a family. We need to consider the law of diminishing returns and the possibility that creativity comes from working less. We need to make space for political and community engagements that feed our intellectual work in other ways. We need to think about why universities matter not only for the world but for the people working within them.
Chronicle of Higher Education
Career Pipeline (a guest commentary by Katherine Sender)
By John L. Jackson Jr.
Katherine Sender, the associate dean of graduate studies and an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, writes:
At a recent meeting of Penn faculty members from across the university, the provost spoke with concern about “the leaky pipeline,” where large numbers of women and minority faculty drop out of the career track as they move towards senior positions. Then followed our president, announcing that Penn was moving from a position of excellence to eminence—in the 21st century university even excellence isn’t good enough anymore. I was struck by the juxtaposition. Was there a relationship between this constant push to greater levels of distinction and the leaky pipeline?
What does this leaky pipeline look like at Penn? A Gender Equity Report in 2007 found that women made up 28 percent of all faculty members. How this plays out across rank is striking: Women made up 42 percent of assistant professors, 30 percent of associate professors, and only 18 percent of full professors. This is not a case of more women coming up through the ranks because the proportion of standing women faculty members had increased by only 4 percent since 1999.
The leaky pipeline for racial minorities is as dramatic. A Minority Equity Report of 2007 found that minorities made up 17 percent of Penn’s faculty. People of color made up 27 percent of assistant professors, 17 percent of associate professors, and only 9 percent of full professors. We may take heart that the proportion of minority faculty has almost doubled since 1999, but of the current 17 percent of minority faculty members, 11 percent are Asian, meaning that the proportions of African American and Latino/a faculty are very small indeed.
Reliable career-track information on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender faculty members is impossible to come by, but my sense is that the tenure and promotion process isn’t especially kind to this group either. Expressly queer faculty -- politically irascible, non-heteronormative and even non-homonormative academics -- are likely to have an especially hard time.
I’m using Penn’s figures as an example, but Penn isn’t especially bad -- or good -- compared with its peers. I also know that some people are leaving academic careers for good, self-chosen, life-affirming reasons. But it’s worrisome that these departures are differentially distributed across gender, race, and probably sexuality. The pipeline isn’t leaking, it’s pouring.
At a recent gender-studies conference here at Penn, the leaky pipeline was addressed as a family issue: The tenure clock is hostile to women who want to have children. Indeed, nationally, women with children are half as likely to get tenure as women without. But this is only part of the problem. If it were only a fertility issue, minority men would be doing just fine.
The tenure and promotion process isn’t only inhumane for women who want and have children, it’s inhumane for everyone. Jerry Jacobs, a sociologist here at Penn, found in 2004 that both women and men faculty members work more than 50 hours per week irrespective of rank, and about a third of them work more than 60 hours per week. The expectation of increased working hours is only likely to grow. The MLA found in 2006 that not only research universities but all academic institutions have greatly increased their expectations of tenure-track faculty members to publish articles and books towards their tenure cases without reducing their teaching hours.
While expectations of productivity have increased, so too has the shift to employing more part-time faculty: In the United States, only a third of facultymembers are now full-time tenured or tenure track, down from 55 percent in 1970. This puts increasing pressure on those full-timers to do additional service work -- work that more often falls to women and that gets little credit in terms of promotions and merit pay. As we are increasingly asked to account for our productivity, I wonder how much of the intellectual and pastoral labor more often done by female and minority faculty members are recognized as productive?
These increased pressures are on everybody, but they are experienced unequally by women and minority facultymembers because of how resources are differently distributed:
Pay: In the United States, women faculty members earn 85 cents to every male dollar, this rate goes down at the higher ranks. [Couldn’t find comparable figs for minority faculty.]
Time: Women faculty members are much more likely to be partnered with another full-time worker and are more likely to be partnered with another academic - - i.e. someone also working long hours. In heterosexual couples, women are much more likely to carry more responsibilities for childcare and domestic duties.
Emotional resources: Women and minority faculty members are less likely to feel confident about their performance. Educational research suggests that girls consistently rank their sense of their own abilities much lower than do men, even though they perform better in assessments. Students of color constantly have to work against teachers’ expectations of low achievement.
Recognition: Who has a voice in the university and what are they allowed to say? Mark Anthony Neal has mentioned the chastisement of faculty members who dare to “think while Black.” Tenure and promotion discourage speaking while Black, female, and gay.
The demands on all academics escalate, but different groups have varying access to resources that make those demands bearable. This is not only an issue of pressures on junior faculty members to produce for their tenure file. Even those at the top of the ladder continue to work extraordinarily hard.
Senior faculty members and administrators need to recognize that few of their group would have met the standards currently set for tenure and promotion. They need to publicly scale back on expectations of quantity and focus more on quality. This is not only for the well-being of their junior colleagues; it is also likely to foster more careful, intellectually rigorous research. They also need to think imaginatively about different kinds of productivity than written scholarship in a changing multimedia world where monograph contracts are harder to score.
But we also need to consider our own complicity. In my research, I read about a lot of scholarly concern about how reality television shows cultivate the ideal self-governing neoliberal citizen -- someone who is adaptable, mobile, always a bit anxious, self-monitoring, and willing to work harder not only to get ahead but to stay in place. While we communication scholars worry about the effects of reality TV on its audiences, we need to look for the beam in our own eye: Academics are the most obligingly self-governing citizens of all. We can work whenever we want as long as we work all the time.
Like many universities, corporations, and governments, Penn has adopted a strategy of “sustainability.” I agree that huge communities like universities have a responsibility to environmental issues. But sustainability can’t only be a matter for nations and institutions -- we also have to think about sustainability at a human level. The demand for constant growth means that we extract more and more energy from a limited resource. How do the developing nations in the university world -- women, men of color, and part-timers -- unequally bear the brunt of overtaxed resources? And looking forward, what kind of labor legacy are we leaving for the generation of scholars we are nurturing into the profession?
Don’t get me wrong, I love my job. But I don’t want to do only my job. We need to model livable lives for our students. We need to do more than just work, and not only if we want a family. We need to consider the law of diminishing returns and the possibility that creativity comes from working less. We need to make space for political and community engagements that feed our intellectual work in other ways. We need to think about why universities matter not only for the world but for the people working within them.
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