Her College Experience Is Not His

September 26, 2008
Chronicle of Higher Education

Her College Experience Is Not His
By Linda Sax

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Women in Science, Beyond the Research University: Overlooked and Undervalued

By KERRY K. KARUKSTIS
The underrepresentation of women in almost all science and engineering fields is a well-documented statistic. The National Academies have issued four significant reports since 2001 examining the status and challenges of women in academic science and engineering and offering recommendations to broaden the participation and advancement of women in those fields. It released its most recent report, "Gender Differences at Critical Transitions in the Careers of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Faculty," last month following a study mandated by Congress.
While those prominent studies focus attention and resources on an important issue, much of the emphasis is on those institutions described as Research I universities, using the former designations of the Carnegie classification system of institutions of higher education. Universities with less-extensive levels of research support, such as master's (comprehensive) universities and undergraduate liberal-arts colleges, are widely overlooked.
The primary consideration of Research I campuses might initially appear logical. The importance of basic research science to the American economy as well as the substantial amount of federal support for research on Research I campuses are compelling reasons for gender-equity studies focused on those institutions. The large student enrollments and faculty sizes of Ph.D.-granting institutions further justify making those campuses the focal point of efforts to improve the status of female scientists and engineers. Certainly any issues associated with a given institutional type are also best dealt with through analyses that concentrate on similar populations.
But overlooking other institutions of higher education is shortsighted and potentially harmful to the American scientific enterprise.
The belief that gender disparities are most likely to occur at research universities is itself questionable. The quantitative analysis provided by the American Association of University Professors in the "AAUP Faculty Gender Equity Indicators 2006" report demonstrates conclusively that, even using only a basic assessment of equity in terms of employment, salary, and rank, academic women face gender inequities and challenges at all career stages and at all types of institutions, including non-research-intensive campuses. In fact, seemingly exclusive attention to the challenges of one type of institution may serve to minimize the critical situation at other institution types and even suggest the existence of gender equality.
For example, data in a 2008 report of the National Science Foundation, "Thirty-Three Years of Women in S&E Faculty Positions," indicate that women with science backgrounds at research-intensive institutions have reached percentages at the full-professor level comparable to female scientists at liberal-arts colleges. But such parity was achieved only as the percentage of female scientists at the full-professor level at liberal-arts colleges stagnated (16.9 percent, 16.2 percent, and 15.8 percent in 1999, 2001, and 2003, respectively) while the percentage of female full professors at research institutions rose significantly (11.2 percent in 1999, 13.4 percent in 2001, and 15.6 percent in 2003). Those trends will need to be further examined when more current data are available.
Three immediate suggestions come to mind to better balance the assessment of the status of female scientists and engineers in academe. A key first step is for the programs, professional societies, and organizations that deal with aspects of academic culture and institutional structure that may affect female science and engineering professors to continue and expand their financial support. The Advance program of the National Science Foundation is an outstanding example of a vital program that seeks to develop systemic approaches to increase the representation and advancement of women in academic science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers. A second suggestion is to commission separate studies of gender-equity issues for each type of postsecondary institution. Finally, as research studies, panels, conferences, and other committees of experts are assembled to examine the challenges and successes of academic women in science and engineering, organizing bodies should seek inclusion of people from all institutional types.
Additional mechanisms for determining potential experts to analyze the status of academic women in science and engineering, especially in liberal-arts colleges, should be pursued, including surveying college and university administrators for suggestions of leading female faculty members in science and engineering, and tapping the database of Advance grant recipients. For example, the female full professors in chemistry and physics at 20 distinct liberal-arts colleges who participate in the project "Collaborative Research for Horizontal Mentoring Alliances" are one group with experience in promoting the leadership and visibility of women in science and engineering. That project, for which I am principal investigator, involves the formation of five-member alliances of senior female faculty members at different liberal-arts institutions to test a mentorship strategy that tries to enhance the advancement of academic women in science and engineering careers. Many other talented and extraordinary female scientists and engineers beyond the research university are also available to contribute.
Let's use all of our resources to improve the future of the scientific and technological enterprise and enhance America's global competitiveness.
Kerry K. Karukstis is a professor of chemistry at Harvey Mudd College.
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Section: Commentary
Volume 55, Issue 41, Page A23

Chronicle of Higher Education

May 18, 2009
New Study Ponders the Effect of Professors' Gender on Students' Success in Science
Female students — or, more specifically, female Air Force cadets — are more likely to succeed in introductory-level science courses if those courses are taught by female professors, according to a study by a trio of economists.
The researchers examined the academic records of every student who graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy from 2000 to 2008 — more than 9,000 students in all. They found that women, and especially those with high mathematics-SAT scores, performed significantly better in introductory science courses if the courses were taught by women. Over all, the study found, “having a female professor reduces the gender gap in course grades by approximately two-thirds.”
The economists also wondered whether having female professors in introductory-level courses would affect students’ odds of eventually graduating with a science major. Among female students as a whole, the team found no such effect. But among female students with math-SAT scores above 700 — in other words, exactly those who might be likeliest to succeed in science — the study found a strong professor-gender effect.
The study estimates that female students with strong math skills were 26 percentage points more likely to graduate with a science major if all of their intro-level science professors were women than if all of their intro-level science professors were men.
And was there a reverse effect? Did male students abandon science if their intro-level science courses were taught by women? Apparently not. For male students of all abilities, the study did not find any significant professor-gender effects.
You might wonder how safe it is to generalize those findings across higher education, given the Air Force Academy’s military culture and its fraught history of gender politics.
Those are legitimate concerns. But the authors of the paper argue that the academy is unusually fertile ground for a study like this: All of its students are required to take a sequence of introductory science courses, the design of those courses is highly standardized, and students cannot choose which sections they will enroll in.
Because of that uniformity, the study was able to avoid some of the complications that often make it difficult to interpret classroom data. (At a typical college, the researchers would have had to ponder whether the most highly motivated female science students were sorting themselves into class sections taught by female professors.)
The paper’s authors are Scott E. Carrell, an assistant professor of economics at the University of California at Davis; Marianne E. Page, a professor of economics at Davis; and James E. West, a professor of economics at the Air Force Academy. The paper, which was released last week by the National Bureau of Economic Research, has not yet been peer-reviewed for publication. —David Glenn

In Science and Technology, Efforts to Lure Women Back

It will come as no surprise that many career re-entry programs, designed to help at-home mothers return to the work force, are disappearing, victims of hard times among the Wall Street firms and banks that led the so-called on-ramping trend.

But a new bright spot is emerging. Small, innovative return-to-work programs are springing up in other sectors -- specifically in science, engineering and technology. Prospects for long-term job growth in these fields are relatively good, and many employers expect a talent shortage, partly because of high quit rates among experienced women.
Honeywell, General Electric, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and even the British government have all launched programs to provide women scientists, engineers and technicians the tools they need to jump-start stalled careers. Some of the new programs provide only training, coaching, networking and referrals, while others offer actual jobs with lower return-to-work barriers through special training or mentoring.
"Even in this troubled labor market, their prospects are good," says Carol Fishman Cohen, a career re-entry consultant, of women in these fields. Government contractors, engineering-related businesses and other employers that stand to benefit from the government's economic-stimulus plan, in particular, are faring relatively well, adds Ms. Cohen, co-founder of iRelaunch.com, a Web site for professionals, employers and universities.
Rachelle Berk, Northborough, Mass., a nuclear engineer and a student in a "Career Reengineering" retraining program offered by MIT, is among those who stand to gain. The MIT program, now in its third year, is instilling the confidence she needs to return to work after four years at home with her children, now 3 and 6, says Ms. Berk, who hopes to find work developing sustainable-energy sources. "It was exactly what I needed," she says of the MIT program. Dawna Levenson, director of the 10-month program, sees enrollment expanding to 24 as early as next fall, up from 10 currently.
The new efforts aim to counteract a "brain drain" caused by the exodus of large numbers of women from these fields in the prime of their careers. While 41% of highly qualified scientists, engineers and technicians in lower-tier jobs are female, more than half eventually quit midcareer, based on research by the Center for Work-Life Policy's Sylvia Hewlett and others, published last year in the Harvard Business Review. Women in these fields face isolation, extreme job pressures and long hours; they often become most discouraged about 10 years into their careers -- just as family pressures also tend to intensify.

Still, after years at home, many women scientists and engineers yearn to return to research and development. Last November, Honeywell launched a hiring program with an extensive training and mentoring component for engineers who have been out of the work force, in partnership with the Society of Women Engineers. The company has received hundreds of resumes and plans to begin hiring soon, says Lee Woodward, a vice president. Among the applicants: Karen English, an Alpharetta, Ga., product-development scientist. After six years at home with her daughter, now 12, Ms. English is excited about her prospects; "everything looks possible," she says.
BBN Technologies, a 700-employee research concern in Cambridge, Mass., is stepping up recruiting efforts to lure at-home professionals back to work, with plans to start holding luncheons for ex-employees this year, says Susan Wuellner, vice president, human resources. The networking seems to be working: Barbara MacKay, an engineer who rejoined BBN in 2007 after five years at home, now is recruiting another at-home mom to the company, Ms. MacKay says.
On a larger scale, IBM offers an extended-leave program that enabled Tami Garneau, a software product manager in Research Triangle Park, N.C., to return to work there amid the economic gloom of last October, after an extended leave with her two children.
Despite the sagging economy, "IBM was fully receptive," allowing her to work from home, she says. "That transition back in was great."
Internationally, General Electric has launched a program called Restart in its Bangalore, India, research center, offering flexible work and other incentives to lure female technologists back to work after having children, a spokesman says. And the British government is funding a 12-week on-ramping program in Bradford, England, and recently began handing out re-training grants, says Annette Williams, director.
Write to Sue Shellenbarger at sue.shellenbarger@wsj.com Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page D1
Copyright 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Men and Mothering

February 24, 2009
BALANCING ACT
Men and Mothering
University policies and academic culture continue to discourage men from being active parents

By MARY ANN MASON
It's no secret that more than 40 years after Title VII guaranteed them equal treatment in the workplace, women with children still go home from work and begin their second shift. Our study of faculty members at the University of California revealed that mothers, on average, worked 95 hours a week, with 43 percent of those hours devoted to child care and housework and the rest to professional activities. Fathers worked 80 hours a week, with only 31 percent devoted to their domestic duties.
Some might dismiss that as a phenomenon of an older generation that is on the wane. But the 8,000 doctoral students we surveyed at the university revealed the same pattern — except they worked longer hours. Graduate students who were mothers, on average, worked 101 hours a week and spent about half of that time on child care and housework. Student fathers worked 89 hours, with 37 percent spent on home duties.
Before we point fingers at fathers, let's acknowledge that they are, in fact, contributing a significant number of hours to child care and housework. Let's also acknowledge the social and institutional barriers that may prevent them from doing more. Consider the following comment from a scientist who responded to my column, "Do Babies Matter in Science?" (The Chronicle, October 17, 2008):
"For our daughter's (a special-needs child) first couple of years," he wrote, "I took her to physical therapy three times a week, losing about seven hours of work time. I was pre-tenure at that point. Everyone assumed that my wife (also a tenure-track scientist) was the primary caregiver, including the male chair and female dean and provost, so she was offered special consideration on scheduling classes and such. She had to tell them that I was the primary caregiver with respect to physical therapy, since our daughter wanted to nurse, not work, when my wife was there. No special scheduling was then offered to me. I think their minds simply couldn't get around the idea of a man being the primary caregiver."
Andrea Doucet, in her thoughtful book, Do Men Mother? Fathering, Care, and Domestic Responsibility, examines the lives of more than 100 fathers, mostly single ones, who consider themselves the primary parent. Doucet found that men do take over the primary role of protective care when there is no mother, but that their overall style of nurturing tends to emphasize fun, playfulness, and physical activity, while mothers tend toward cuddling, holding, and emotional sympathy.
The book shows it was not easy for those single fathers because, just as in the scientist's case, American society is not always willing to accept them as the primary caregivers. Particularly tricky is being accepted by other parents in social situations and at schools. As one father commented in the book, "There's a lot of networks for moms and there isn't a network for guys, and I think a huge part of that is it isn't easy for a guy. I've been out to the library, and I've seen a guy pushing a baby carriage. But it's just not so easy for a guy to go up to another guy and say, 'Hey, how old is she? Do you want to be friends?'"
Our colleges and universities are not always welcoming to men as active parents, either. Among the members of the Association of American Universities (the 62 top-ranked research institutions), only a handful offer paid parental leave to fathers after their children are born — the majority offer it to mothers — and none offer graduate-student fathers paid parental leave (a few offer it to mothers).
Over the years I have sat around many conference tables arguing with colleagues about whether new fathers should be allowed to stop the tenure clock, or should receive special accommodations in teaching and other work. The opposition is always the same: "Men won't use the time for parenting; they'll use it to write another book or publish more articles." Fathers, for their part, even if they are full participants in parenting, don't often use parental accommodations, because, like many mothers, they fear they will be considered less committed by their institutions.
Father as breadwinner is a deeply held cultural stereotype within the society and the university; despite many instances in which women, particularly professional women, earn salaries larger than their husbands'. In Doucet's study, the married fathers who had chosen to be stay-at-home parents included those whose wives made a much higher salary and those in couples who had decided that the father was the better choice for stay-at-home parent. In virtually all of those cases, the father returned to work within three years. Most of them attributed it to the social stigma they had experienced by not being the breadwinner.
In the university world, we've found that women are more likely than men to marry a fellow student. Bargains are struck about whose career takes precedence and who will earn more money. They may cling to the ideal of equality and agree to take turns when it comes time to move careers — his choice now, hers later. The possibility of starting a family can play an important part in that bargaining process. But our research shows that, ultimately, the woman is likelier to defer to her partner's career — a decision that the culture applauds.
A common explanation for a couple's decision to have the father be the main breadwinner and the mother to work mainly at home is that fathers can't nurse an infant. Ironically, as women have moved into the workplace, breast-feeding has become not just popular but a requirement of good motherhood. In an article in the February 19 issue of The New Yorker called "Baby Food," Jill Lepore chronicles the long, strange story of breast-feeding through history. Over the past two centuries, it has gone in and out of fashion every few generations. As recently as the 1950s in this country — my mother's generation — formula milk was considered far more healthy for an infant. The women who nursed their babies were poor ones who could not afford formula.
Whatever the merits of breast-feeding, it imposes a short leash on mother and infant. An adaptive consequence for modern women in the workplace, according to Lepore, has been an exploding industry of breast pumps: "Today, breast pumps are such a ubiquitous personal accessory that they're more like cellphones than like catheters."
Universities rarely provide on-campus infant-care centers, or lactation rooms for nursing and pumping, as many progressive corporations now do. Such accommodations would benefit both academic parents and would allow fathers to share more equally in the early months, when caretaking patterns are often set.
If we want fathers to become equal participants in child raising, we must encourage them to do so. Family-friendly policies must include fathers as well as mothers. Cultural change occurs with participation; only then will the strongly held gender stereotypes against men as committed caregivers dissipate. In Sweden the government changed its generous 18-month parental-leave policy to insist that fathers take at least six months of the total; otherwise the leave is reduced to 12 months. The intention was not to save money but to make fatherly participation in raising children an accepted norm. And as it becomes the norm, the culture will no longer look upon family-friendly policies as a "mommy trap."
Mary Ann Mason is a professor and co-director of the Berkeley Law Center on Health, Economic & Family Security and the author (with her daughter, Eve Ekman), of Mothers on the Fast Track. She writes regularly on work and family issues for our Balancing Act column and invites readers to send in questions or personal concerns about those issues. She will answer your questions in a future column. E-mail your comments to careers@chronicle.com or to mamason@law.berkeley.edu. To read previous Balancing Act columns, see http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/archives/columns/balancing_act.

Swimming Against the Tide

African American Girls and Science Education
Sandra L. Hanson

"Swimming Against the Tide" addresses a crucial lacunae in the body of literature on women in science, particularly women of color. This is a ‘new’ and innovative approach, since very few book publications on women in science have addressed the subject of African American women in science and from an age specific and culturally relevant perspective. Theoretically and methodologically strong, this is an example of feminist scholarship at its best." —Josephine Beoku-Betts, Professor of Women’s Studies and Sociology, Florida Atlantic University

“They looked at us like we were not supposed to be scientists,” says one young African American girl, describing one openly hostile reaction she encountered in the classroom. In this significant study, Sandra Hanson explains that although many young minority girls are interested in science, the racism and sexism in the field discourage them from pursuing it after high school. Those girls that remain highly motivated to continue studying science must “swim against the tide.”
Hanson examines the experiences of African American girls in science education using multiple methods of quantitative and qualitative research, including a web survey and vignette techniques. She understands the complex interaction between race and gender in the science domain and, using a multicultural and feminist framework of analysis, addresses the role of agency and resistance that encourages and sustains interest in science in African American families and communities.

A Measure of Equity: Women's Progress in Higher Education

Judy Touchton with Caryn McTighe Musil and Kathryn Peltier Campbell
ISBN/ISSN: 978-0-9796181-6-1
SKU: EQUITY
Year Published: 2008
Pages: 37

A Measure of Equity: Women’s Progress in Higher Education presents the only current comprehensive overview of data on women’s status in higher education. It documents areas of progress and identifies needed action to move even further down the path towards equity for women in higher education. This publication details specific areas of concern and actions that would advance gender equity in colleges and universities. The research examines women’s access to college, areas of study in undergraduate and post-graduate work, and women’s status as faculty, administrators, and college presidents.

In ‘Geek Chic’ and Obama, New Hope for Lifting Women in Science

By NATALIE ANGIER
Published: January 19, 2009

With the inauguration of an administration avowedly committed to Science as the grand elixir for the nation’s economic, environmental and psycho-reputational woes, a number of scientists say that now is the time to tackle a chronic conundrum of their beloved enterprise: how to attract more women into the fold, and keep them once they are there.
Researchers who have long promoted the cause of women in science view the incoming administration with a mix of optimism and we’ll-see-ism. On the one hand, they said, the new president’s apparent enthusiasm for science, and the concomitant rise of “geek chic” and “smart is the new cool” memes, can only redound to the benefit of all scientists, particularly if the enthusiasm is followed by a bolus of new research funds. On the other hand, they said, how about appointing a woman to the president’s personal Poindexter club, the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology? The designated leaders so far include superstars like Harold Varmus, a Nobel laureate, and Eric Lander, genome meister.
The Rosalind Franklin Society, a group devoted to “recognizing the work of prominent women scientists,” has suggested possible co-chairwomen for the panel. Its candidates include Shirley Ann Jackson, a nuclear physicist and president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Shirley Tilghman, a molecular biologist and president of Princeton University. Others have proposed Jacqueline Barton, a chemist and MacArthur fellow at the California Institute of Technology. Or, given the increasing importance of brain research, how about a prominent female neuroscientist like Nancy Kanwisher of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Carla Shatz of Stanford University?
“People say, oh, we shouldn’t have quotas, but diversity is a form of excellence, and there are plenty of outstanding women out there,” Jo Handelsman, president of the Franklin society and a microbiologist at the University of Wisconsin, said in an interview. “You don’t have to lower your standards in the slightest — you just have to pay attention.”
Some would like to see novel approaches to treating systemic problems that often work against women’s scientific ambitions. Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden of the University of California, Berkeley, have gathered extensive data showing stark male-female differences in the family structure and personal lives of academic researchers at the top tiers of the profession.
Surveying outcomes for 160,000 Ph.D. recipients across the United States, the researchers determined that 70 percent of male tenured professors were married with children, compared with only 44 percent of their tenured female colleagues. Twelve years or more after receiving their doctorates, tenured women were more than twice as likely as tenured men to be single and significantly more likely to be divorced. And lest all of this look like “personal choice,” when the researchers asked 8,700 faculty members in the University of California system about family and work issues, nearly 40 percent of the women agreed with the statement, “I had fewer children than I wanted,” compared with less than 20 percent of the men. The take-home message, Dr. Mason said in a telephone interview, is, “Men can have it all, but women can’t.”
From a purely Darwinian point of view, expecting a young woman to sacrifice her reproductive fitness for the sake of career advancement is simply too much, and yet the structure of academic research, in which one must spend one’s 20s and early 30s as a poorly compensated and minimally empowered graduate student and postdoctoral fellow, and the remainder of one’s 30s and into the low 40s working madly to earn tenure, can demand exactly that.
Nor do all young men in science accept the notion that their lab bench must double as a sleeping cot while their wives take care of the kids. In a new survey of 19,000 doctoral students at the University of California, Dr. Mason and her colleagues found that while two-thirds of the respondents either had or planned to have children, 84 percent of the women and 74 percent of the men expressed worry about the family-unfriendliness of their intended profession, and many had changed their plans accordingly. While 40 percent of the male science graduate students and 31 percent of the women said they had begun their Ph.D. programs intent on pursuing an academic career — still considered the premier path to science glory — a year or more into their studies, only 28 percent of the men and 20 percent of the women still hoped to become research scientists at a university.
Dr. Mason and other legal experts suggest that President Obama might be able to change things significantly for young women in science — and young men — by signing an executive order that would provide added family leave and parental benefits to the recipients of federal grants, a huge pool of people that includes many research scientists.
Whatever the impediments, women have made great strides in most areas of science. According to Joan Burrelli of the National Science Foundation, whereas 50 years ago women earned a piddling 8 percent of the science and engineering doctorates, by 2006 they claimed a 40 percent share. In 1973, only 6 percent of the Ph.D. scientists employed full time in academia, business or elsewhere were women; by 2006 the number had risen to 27 percent. Over that same time frame, women’s share of full professorships in the sciences quadrupled, to about 20 percent. Yet the stats vary sharply from field to field: 26 percent of full professors in the life sciences are women, but in physics, 6 percent.
For many female physicists, the mystery of women’s slow progress through their ranks is nearly as baffling as the research mysteries they confront in the lab. Of course, only 6 percent of physics professors are female; only 4 to 6 percent of the matter in the universe is visible. “Sound familiar?” Evalyn Gates, the assistant director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, said wryly.
She has urged her colleagues to attack the problem of low female numbers as they would any scientific problem, by systematically gathering data, checking their detectors, factoring out background noise. Yes, girls and women leak out of the pipeline in comparatively greater numbers than males for every scientific discipline, she said, but they fall out of physics first and fastest. Why should it be, she said, that almost half of high school students in Advanced Placement physics classes are girls, but women earn only a fifth of bachelor’s degrees in physics? What turns girls away from physics so early?
Some have suggested that girls just can’t handle the advanced math of physics. Yet in an analysis of high school students’ performance on standardized math tests, published last summer in the journal Science, Janet Hyde and her colleagues found no gender differences in average performance, and even at the uppermost tails of achievement the discrepancies were minor and inconsistent: among whites who scored in the top 1 percent, there were two boys for every girl, whereas among Asian top scorers, there was one full girl for every nine-tenths of a boy. Besides, said Dr. Gates, female students earn half of the bachelor’s degrees in another math-heavy discipline called — mathematics.
Others have insisted that women just don’t like physics, perhaps because it seems cold and abstract, concerned with things rather than the flesh-and-blood focus of female-friendly fields like biology. But such reasoning, Dr. Gates said, cannot account for the fact that women earn half of the undergraduate degrees in chemistry, which is not quite plush toy material. “Something different is going on with physics, and we don’t know what it is yet,” she said. The culture? Bubble-headed television shows like “The Big Bang Theory,” with its four nerdy male physics prodigies and the fetching blond girl next door?
The difficulties are not confined to America. Surveying some 1,350 female physicists in 70 countries, Rachel Ivie and Stacy Guo of the American Institute of Physics found that, worse than family balance issues or lack of day care options, was the problem of public perception. The women were passionate about their work. They didn’t choose physics; physics chose them. Yet 80 percent agreed that attitudes about women in physics needed a serious overhaul.
As long as we’re making geek chic, let’s lose the Einstein ’do and moustache.

On Campus with Women

Associate of American Colleges and Universities

ISSUE TOPIC:Rethinking Scientific Pedagogies The current issue of On Campus with Women examines ways to improve student retention and engagement in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The issue explores how feminist pedagogies, by connecting academic learning and personal experience, can transform cultures and classrooms to be more inclusive and hospitable to all students, particularly women across races and ethnicities whose participation in certain fields remains low. READ MORE

Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine® (ELAM®) Program for Women

In this month’s letter, Dr. Rick Valachovic, Executive Director of the American Dental Education Association, talks with graduates of the only in-depth national program that focuses on leadership development for women faculty in academic medicine, dentistry, and public health.
From 0 to 13 in 13 Years: ELAM’s Impressive Track Record in Preparing Women for Leadership
The Hedwig van Ameringen Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine® (ELAM®) Program for Women is now in its thirteenth year preparing women faculty in academic health centers for senior executive leadership positions, and the results are striking. Thirteen U.S. dental schools, almost a quarter of the total, can boast women deans today, and close to 600 ELAM graduates are waiting in the wings, ready to move into senior leadership in U.S. and Canadian schools of dentistry, medicine, dentistry, and public health.
Headquartered at the Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the ELAM program has achieved a high level of success by maintaining a steady focus on three principal goals: to advance women to leadership positions, to support and sustain women who attain leadership positions, and ultimately to change the culture of academic health care so that the contributions of women are recognized and valued.
What makes ELAM special? According to Rosalyn Richman, the program’s co-director, ELAM is more intensive and goes into greater depth than other leadership programs. The program now focuses exclusively on medicine, dentistry, and public health. Its three-session format gives Fellows a chance to apply their learning throughout the fellowship year. Classes are broken down into geographically related peer-learning communities that communicate regularly, sometimes monthly, both during and after the fellowship year. Alumnae interact directly at ADEA and Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) meetings, through collaborative grants and projects, and at group-initiated reunions and retreats.
The program also places a heavy emphasis on ensuring that Fellows succeed once they return to their institutions. ELAM requires a commitment on the part of the sponsoring institution to provide Fellows with opportunities that can be a springboard to the next level of leadership, and supervising deans must attend a forum on emerging issues at the close of the fellowship year so that they, too, have a direct experience of the program.
“For some of these deans, it’s the first time they’ve sat in a high-level meeting where half the participants are women. It’s really a cultural immersion,” says Roz. One dean was so excited by what he saw that he is now serving on the ELAM faculty.
ELAM also gives participants insights into how administrators and policymakers think. Dr. Sharon Turner, Dean of the University of Kentucky College of Dentistry and an ELAM participant in the early years, welcomed this broader perspective.
“Before I became a dean, I never paid attention to what was going on at the state legislative level or at the national level,” says Sharon. “Now I understand that it’s not just a matter of how good the school is. The states must balance competing interests, and they need to take a pragmatic approach to funding our institutions.”
This is Sharon’s eleventh year as a dean, first at Oregon Health & Science University and now at the University of Kentucky. Sharon values the ELAM program for giving her the confidence to apply for the dean’s position and a network of women with good judgment and similar experience, which she can use as a sounding board. That continuing connection with the program has prompted Sharon to serve as both a Board member and President of SELAM, the alumnae association founded by ELAM graduates.
ELAM dental graduates have played key roles in SELAM’s leadership and have proven to be effective recruiters for ELAM. In fact, Roz Richman reports that alumnae bonds are so strong that she is in touch with all but a handful of the program’s 570 graduates.
ELAM was started in 1996 as a program for women in medical education under the leadership of our colleague Dr. D. Walter Cohen, who was then Chancellor of Drexel University College of Medicine. Women in dental education were invited to participate on a limited basis the following year, thanks in part to the efforts of Dr. Jeanne Sinkford, Associate Executive Director and Director of the ADEA Center for Equity and Diversity. She remembers well the challenges that women in our community faced at that time. “In the larger community of health sciences, women’s leadership in dental education needed to be developed. We didn’t have many women associate deans. Some women were assistants to the dean, but their titles did not represent their value to their institutions. We thought about having a separate women’s leadership program, but I felt that medical and dental education should be together so that emerging leaders could have a chance to meet and develop their skills in a competitive arena.”
ELAM agreed, and ADEA nominated two candidates for a pilot effort to include women in dental education: Dr. Lisa A. Tedesco and Professor Pamela Zarkowski. At that time, Lisa was Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the University of Michigan School of Dentistry. Today she is Dean of the Graduate School and Vice Provost, Academic Affairs-Graduate Studies, at Emory University in Atlanta. Pam, an attorney and dental hygienist by education, has been Executive Associate Dean of the University of Detroit Mercy (UDM) School of Dentistry and currently serves as Acting Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs at UDM.
Today women from dental education compete with women in medicine and public health for ELAM’s 48 available slots, almost double the number in its inaugural class. Since the program’s inception, 43 dental Fellows from 34 dental schools (or 61% of all U.S. dental schools) have participated in ELAM. Comparatively, 530 Fellows from 111 U.S. medical schools (87%) and five Canadian medical schools (29%) have taken part. We hope that all U.S. dental schools will have ELAM Fellows on campus in the not too distant future.
Although proportionally fewer women in dentistry have gone through the program, their successes have been striking. Of the first six original dental Fellows, three have made become deans and one is a provost. Today 22% percent of U.S. dental schools have women deans, compared to 12% of U.S. allopathic medical schools. And while no ELAM graduates have become the chief elected officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges, two dental Fellows, Lisa Tedesco and Pam Zarkowski, have served as President of ADEA. It’s also worth noting that 26% of all the women deans serving in U.S. schools of medicine, dentistry, and public health are ELAM alumnae. That’s an impressive track record.
Jeanne Sinkford believes that the timing of the program was fortuitous. “Ten years ago, we did not have the women with the credentials, preparation, and willingness to apply for these positions. We've had a lot of deanships open in recent years, and thanks to ELAM, many of these positions have been filled by women.”
Lisa Tedesco also credits ELAM’s efforts to foster women’s leadership with helping to create a rich pipeline of women that institutions can draw from when looking to recruit top academic talent.
“In the health professions and in academia, careers are tremendously intensive,” Lisa adds. “Over the last decade, we’ve seen the development of clinical and research ladders in health professions education. This has come about because of programs and organizations working to make academia more welcoming to women, and ELAM can take credit for part of that.” This is a promising development, especially in light of the fact that academic health centers have been slow to catch up with the corporate world when it comes to providing the kind of flexibility that might draw women and young people to academic careers.
Dr. Sandra Andrieu has been at Louisiana State University (LSU) since her days as a dental hygiene student. She was the first dental hygienist at the LSU School of Dentistry to earn a Ph.D., and in 1994, she became the first woman to be promoted to the senior ranks of the dental school when she was named Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at that institution. Although another woman served as Dean of Educational Services for a few years, today Sandra remains the only woman in her school in a senior leadership role.
Sandra learned about ELAM when she began attending ADEA meetings. There she met other women academic deans, and that’s when she says “the light bulb went off. I had the preparation and the opportunity to serve as an academic dean, but I lacked mentors and guidance.” Early on she was invited to attend a SELAM reception, and there she found role models among the ELAM alums.
“They were amazing. They opened my eyes and, without even knowing it at first, they became my mentors.” Today Sandra is also an ELAM Fellow. Despite the fact that she began her fellowship only days after being evacuated from Hurricane Gustav, she left the first session invigorated.
“I had a narrow focus regarding my future, but after meeting with my ELAM mentor, I realized I have a broad array of options in higher education.” ELAM’s superb reputation provides an entrée for its Fellows in the upper echelons of academia and government. Sandra especially looks forward to the opportunity ELAM provides to meet with senior administrators throughout her university and on the boards that oversee higher education in her state.
The relationships between ELAM alums can be transformative, not only for individual Fellows, but for their institutions as well. Jeanne Sinkford agrees. "We know that our women leaders are human capital that enrich our academic communities and contribute to a more inclusive environment for all students and faculty." Indeed, ELAM aspires to create a “critical mass” of women in high-level leadership positions in academic health centers so that the culture of those institutions will begin to evolve in ways that support women’s inclusion at the highest levels.
One campus where ELAM’s impact is very much in evidence is the Medical College of Georgia (MCG). Dr. Connie Drisko is a 2001 ELAM alum and Dean of MCG’s School of Dentistry. MCG has six ELAM alums, three in dentistry and three in medicine, with a fourth on the way. Four of the campus’s five deans are women, as are many of the vice presidents.
Many of you know that Connie is Chair of the ADEA Women’s Affairs Advisory Committee, which serves as the screening committee for ELAM dental Fellows. She tells me that ELAM alums have been extraordinarily supportive of each other during the recruitment process on her campus, but she’d like to see them do more. “We have a strong network at MCG. That has potential, but we haven't fully leveraged that potential yet.”
“Each of us in leadership has a responsibility to mentor and bring along the next generation. It’s clear that consciously promoting and mentoring women has had a positive effect. How much longer will we need to do that? I don't know, but it didn't just happen on its own.”
Of course women’s leadership does not need to stop at the decanal level. Kathy Atchison, a 2005 ELAM dental Fellow, serves as Vice Provost for Intellectual Property and Industry Relations and as Associate Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of California at Los Angeles. Sandra Andrieu is contemplating a range of possibilities in higher education, and Sharon Turner can envision a day when she might relocate to Washington, D.C., to work on health policy. Many women also choose to take advantage of other competitive programs, such as the American Council on Education (ACE) Fellows Program and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellowships Program.
For a list of other leadership programs open to women in dental education, visit the ADEA Center for Equity and Diversity website. It also includes a complete list of ADEA’s ELAM alums.
Richard W. Valachovic, D.M.D., M.P.H.Executive Directorvalachovicr@adea.org

Female Professors at U. of Texas-Austin Earn $9,000 Less Than Male Peers

The Chronicle of Higher Education's Daily Report
November 5, 2008

Female professors at the University of Texas at Austin earned an average of $9,028 less than their male counterparts in 2007, and senior female faculty members there feel more isolated and less recognized for their work than do their male colleagues.
Those are among the findings of a new report on gender issues affecting the faculty that was written by a 22-member panel created by the university’s provost in 2007.
In a news release issued this week, the university said the provost, Steven W. Leslie, had accepted the panel’s recommendation that the university develop a five- to 10-year plan to reduce or eliminate gender inequity on its faculty.
The panel also found that more women than men at Texas left before winning tenure, and of those who stayed a smaller proportion of women than men achieved tenure within seven years. Thirty-six percent of women hired as assistant professors in 1997 had earned tenure and been promoted to associate professor within seven years, compared with 56 percent of men. The task force also conducted a survey of faculty members that found that 14 percent of female professors said they had been sexually harassed.
Gender inequities in the professoriate have been a major concern for other prominent universities — most notably Harvard University, which has had a poor record of offering tenure to women, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which nearly a decade ago conducted a gender-equity review like the one at Texas and found similar results. —Robin WilsonPosted on Wednesday November 5, 2008 Permalink
Comments
My own experience with these studies is that the inequities are always demonstrated in the aggregate, that is, typically part of a flawed regression equation that precisely measures income and ambiguously measures productivity. When we said, fine, let’s address the individual cases where a particular woman is underpaid and the specific reasons why, the opposition melted away, presumably because the unaggregated cases didn’t seem as clear as the situation taken as a whole. The lesson I took from this is that inequities are best handled on a case-by-case basis, rather than part of a far-flung study that cannot correctly process the predictor variables.
— kp Nov 5, 12:59 PM #
“Unaggreggated cases didn’t seem as clear …” Sounds like gobbledook from the notoriously sexist economics department, where sex ratios are usually about 25:1, male to female. In 1982, I wrote a similar expose about underpaid female faculty at my university. Nothing has changed, not even the wornout arguments about “human capital,” she had a baby and wrote one less article, she failed to bargain hard upon entry (code for we took advantage of her when we hired her), she served on too many committees (which her chair required) and didn’t write enough at promotion time (while she provided gazillion hours in service) … familiar sexist CRAP. Equal pay for equal work PERIOD. No apologies. No excuses. Women are valuable and vital to academia. Indeed, without underpaying female faculty the budget might have to cut into the football department. OOOh let’s not go there. And while making less money she got little or no pay/support when she had a baby. Would have been better to have a heart attack, 6 to 12 weeks paid, supportive colleagues, in the middle of a semester no less. Class action lawsuit and enforcement of federal legislation are the only solution.
— Dr. Mo Nov 5, 04:04 PM #
Were these findings corrected for confounding variables like, oh, academic specialty?
— Take Back the U! Nov 5, 04:13 PM #
Don’t worry. Obama will fix it all.
— IG Nov 5, 04:29 PM #
Why do so many of the comments on Chronicle articles sound as if they come from cranky old white men? Are they the only ones not busy with really useful academic activities?
— johntee Nov 5, 04:47 PM #
so kp (#1)….what you are trying to say is that female professors are not as “productive” as their male counter-parts? Please give us the benefits of your analysis of black, asian & hispanic instructors too. We want to know if you’re also a bigot or just a chauvinist pig.
— Gary Nov 5, 05:04 PM #
I was expressly told that I couldn’t negotiate salary by a member of the administration. Later, I discovered that a male colleague did not receive this response and negotiated a higher starting salary. All I can say is that I learned a valuable lesson-take what they offer and add 5K to 9K to it. Then, if they reject your counter-offer, decide whether you really want the job or not. Part of the solution to gender pay inequity has to come from women standing up for their own worth and taking the risks that stance implies. Men do it all the time.
— J.D. Nov 5, 05:34 PM #
It’s always interesting to read comments from people who did not even bother to click on the link and read the report. All of your concerns are explicitly addressed therein.
Yes, they did control for discipline. No, they did not control for productivity, even though most of the wage gap was concentrated among the most productive faculty.
The gender pay gap was only statistically significant at the full professor level, and for non-tenure track instructors.
The report also speculates that female faculty use leaves of absence more than males, which extends their time to promotion. However, child care is not a significant factor.
Some of the human capital controls do reduce the wage gap.
Read the report. Unless statistically modeling is “gobbledy-gook” to you, in which case your predetermined ideological knee-jerk response is probably the best you can muster.
— tb Nov 5, 05:51 PM #
As my kindegarten teacher used to say, let’s play nice boys and girls!
— Innocent By-Stander Nov 6, 08:34 AM #
Ditto #2 and #6…#7 so true, but when I did negotiate like a man I was told that people would see me as a department destroying shrew…I decided I needed the money (and I only got half of what I asked for). I am very productive, still underpaid, and apparently a shrew.
— DJ Nov 6, 08:51 AM #
I would find it hard to believe that within a given discipline there was any department where women were earning anything less than men.
I don’t find any comparisons withing disciplines within this study. Could it be that these comparisons destroy the conclusions.
More fair studies are cited at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GenderSalaryDifferences
— Robert E. Jensen Nov 6, 09:17 AM #
Get DOWN, Dr. Mo!Tell it like it is.
— Ginger Nov 6, 09:52 AM #
The study is very vague about controlling for differences by discipline. It would have been much better had the study showed us differences is in starting salaries between men and women by discipline. If there were differences here it’s time to get a pit bull lawyer.It would’ve been nice to make similar gender comparisons among full professors after factoring out the super-salaried endowed professorships. Where there may be differences is in the associate professor ranks, especially if there are “permanent” associate professors who are tenured but have not been promoted for ten or more years. I think it might be more fair in this case to compare salary differences between men and women by discipline in the year of promotion to full professorships. If there are differences here it would be very disturbing.

Do Babies Matter in Science?

A true measure of gender equity in academe would look at both the career and family outcomes of female Ph.D.'s
The Chronicle of Higher Education

By MARY ANN MASON
Federal investigators of Title IX, the law that forbids sexual discrimination in education, have only recently discovered that there may be a problem for women in science.
Investigators for the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Department of Energy have been inspecting several campuses for potential Title IX violations in mathematics, science, and engineering departments (The Chronicle, January 20, 2006). The New York Times revisited the issue this summer and found that, "So far, these Title IX compliance reviews haven't had much visible impact on campuses beyond inspiring a few complaints from faculty members."
Evidence of the problems women face pursuing careers in academic science shouldn't be hard to find.
Look around the campus of any large research university. In most humanities and social-science disciplines, departments are blooming with female graduate students where there would have been few 30 years ago. But in math, engineering, and the physical sciences, the numbers remain embarrassingly low. In 2006, women received 28 percent of the doctorates awarded in the physical sciences, including computer science and math, and only 20 percent of those awarded in engineering. But that is great progress compared with 20 years ago when the numbers were often too small to register statistically.
The great loss is the absence of women on the faculty in those fields, because those are the women who have walked the whole walk.
Only 10 percent of faculty members in physics are women, the American Institute of Physics found in 2005, in a study that prompted the Title IX investigation. Less than half of the women who earn Ph.D's. in these challenging fields continue through to positions in academic research.
So far, as the Times article reported this summer, scientists seem to be telling Title IX investigators that the problem in academe is not so much discrimination as a lack of interest.
While proponents of women in science say there is evidence of discrimination in certain fields, the article said, "The quality of that evidence is disputed. Critics say there is far better research showing that on average, women's interest in some fields isn't the same as men's."
Some researchers quoted in the article found that "information technology workers (more often men) especially enjoyed manipulating objects and machines, whereas workers (more often women) in other occupations preferred dealing with people." Susan Pinker, in her book, The Sexual Paradox, argues that "the campaign for gender parity infantilizes women by assuming that they don't know what they want." She said her interviews with women who had abandoned successful careers in science and engineering convinced her that they chose other careers because they lost interest in science.
I would invite Title IX investigators to talk directly to graduate students and postdocs in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering to find out what discrimination looks like.
You will find women like Jennifer Mitchell, a Ph.D. in neuroscience and a postdoc at the University of California at Berkeley. When Eve Mason Ekman (my daughter) and I interviewed Mitchell for our 2007 book, Mothers on the Fast Track, Mitchell told us, "I don't think I'll ever do a tenure-track job, and people were very upfront about that when I had my child."
You'll also find women like Sherry M.J. Towers, a particle physicist and a postdoctoral fellow, who had a baby and was effectively blacklisted by her adviser (The Chronicle, November 11, 2005). When she was pregnant, she said, her adviser refused to write a letter of recommendation for her unless she returned to work almost immediately. She did return, and he still refused. She received no interviews for any of the positions to which she applied.
Discrimination against job candidates who are pregnant or have children is a very real part of gender discrimination. Some scientists may believe that women who have families cannot be serious scientists because academic science demands exclusive attention to research. But they do not hold the same beliefs about male scientists with kids. In fact, research shows that male scientists are far more likely to have children than female scientists; two years after their Ph.D.'s, nearly 50 percent of men, but only 30 percent of women, had children.
Women in science and math learn that truth early on. When I was dean of the graduate division at Berkeley, my staff members and I studied thousands of graduate students and faculty members to learn more about the effects of family formation on the careers of Ph.D.'s. Our project — "Do Babies Matter?" — traced the career tracks of academic men and women through their doctoral years to retirement. We found firm evidence that the lack of family-friendly policies turns away both men and women, but far more often the women, from careers in academic research.
That is true across all disciplines, but more notably in the physical sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics, where the number of women is small to begin with.
Women who do pursue careers in academic science pay a high price for playing the game. Nationally, "married with children" is the academic-success formula for men, but the opposite is true for women, for whom there is a serious "baby gap." Among scientists who achieved tenure, 72 percent of the men are married with children as opposed to only 50 percent of women. Is that gender equity?
Federal investigators, when counting heads, shouldn't just consider the number of women who have succeeded in academic research. A true measure of gender equity in academe would look at both the career and family outcomes of female Ph.D.'s. We call that two-pronged measure the "baby-gap test," because it takes into account both the gap in professional outcomes for women with children compared with men and the gap in family formation for academically successful women.
Investigators need to ask not only how many women are professors and deans relative to their male counterparts, but also how many women with children are in high places compared with men with children. Viewing the situation in that way reveals that women have much further to go to achieve gender equity than we think.
Subtle maternal discrimination is difficult to deal with, but concrete measures, such as parental leave, child care, and other support at both the student and faculty levels, would go far to reduce this unnecessary loss.

Mary Ann Mason is a professor and co-director of the Berkeley Center on Health, Economic and Family Security and author of Mothers on the Fast Track (Oxford University Press). She will write regularly on work and family issues for our Balancing Act column. She invites readers to send questions or personal concerns about those issues, and she will answer your questions in a future column.
E-mail your comments to careers@chronicle.com or to mamason@law.berkeley.edu.
To read previous Balancing Act columns, see http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/archives/columns/balancing_act

Women Accuse Rutgers Political-Science Department of Bias and Hostility

By KATE MOSER
Female faculty members and graduate students in Rutgers University at New Brunswick's political-science department feel unfairly compensated and shut out of leadership positions by their male counterparts, says an internal university report obtained by The Chronicle. In at least one case, a woman has been afraid to complain about sexual harassment because of worries about retaliation.
"We were often shocked to hear that the kind of discriminatory attitudes that, sadly, were prevalent in much of the academy decades ago and that have long been unacceptable in our own departments are apparently still prevalent in political science," concludes the July report, put together by a faculty committee convened by top administration officials. Several faculty members have taken the additional step of filing a complaint with New Jersey's Office of the Attorney General.
Historically, political science has been one of the most male-dominated disciplines among the social sciences, and observers say that may contribute to a culture of bias.
Reviewing a variety of salary data, the committee uncovered "evidence of subtle and not-so-subtle bias against women in the department," leading committee members to recommend that the university "take decisive action to remedy the departmental culture," the report says.
Douglas Greenberg, the university's new dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, told The Chronicle that the report has been at the top of his agenda since his first day on the job in August. No steps have been taken yet to deal with the report's findings. Mr. Greenberg said he wanted to fully understand the "very serious charges" in the report before he acts.
The matter surfaced officially in April 2007, when some of the female faculty members in the department lodged a formal complaint with the then-dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, citing inequalities in compensation. The school examined the complaint but found no evidence of unequal pay. Female faculty members disputed that conclusion and followed up with a letter to the university's president, Richard L. McCormick, in May 2007.
After the dean's office had analyzed the claims and concluded that they were unfounded, in December Philip Furmanski, executive vice president for academic affairs, assembled the investigative committee. Four faculty members from a variety of disciplines across the university sat on the committee, which conducted its investigation from late fall of 2007 to June 2008.
Gatherings of Men
Their report cites many acts of exclusion, such as a longstanding Tuesday dinner regularly held by male senior faculty members. The report found that many in the department considered the dinner an unofficial decision-making venue to which women were not invited. Emeriti professors, all male and some of them former chairmen, still have offices in the department and shape the culture there, the committee also says. The report describes a feeling within the department that the subdiscipline of women and politics isn't valued highly, exacerbating the gender-equity problems.
The report stops short of delving into allegations of "a long-term and persistent pattern of sexual harassment" but does describe two issues, based on interviews with faculty members: at least one graduate student who "is said to be 'terrified of retaliation' if she lodges a complaint" and at least one male faculty member described by women interviewed by the committee as a "creep."
The committee summed up a pervasive impression of behavior in the department as a culture of a cliquish group of senior men. "Members of this club apparently have no clue about modern norms of what is acceptable in the workplace," the report says.
Unhappy because the university did not immediately respond to the report, five political-science faculty members at Rutgers filed complaints of differential compensation, based on gender, with the civil-rights division of the state attorney general's office on August 13. The division was informed on September 29 that the parties involved decided to participate in private mediation, said Lee Moore, a spokesman for that office.
Mr. Greenberg said he could not comment on the question of mediation. Faculty members who lodged the complaint with the state did not respond to The Chronicle's phone and e-mail messages.
Political science and international relations, along with economics, are traditionally among the most male-dominated fields in the social sciences. Women earned 38.5 percent of total political-science and international-relations doctoral degrees granted in the United States in 2006, compared with 30.4 percent in 1996, according to the most recent survey of earned doctorates by the National Opinion Research Center, at the University of Chicago.
A Broader Pattern
Across disciplines, female faculty members continue to lag behind men in pay, particularly at doctoral universities, where their average salaries are 78.1 percent of their male colleagues', according to the most recent study on gender equity in the professoriate, which was conducted in 2006 by the American Association of University Professors (The Chronicle, November 3, 2006).
"It's an issue we've been seeing in the last couple of years again," said John W. Curtis, the AAUP's director of research and public policy and an author of that report. "There's an attitude that this is something we've taken care of already, but the data indicate otherwise."
The Rutgers committee comes to a less definitive conclusion on what the data say about the alleged gender inequity in faculty salaries, though it does conclude that the department's gender bias is reflected in salaries, particularly at the associate-professor level. In one example the report provides, female associate professors earned 82 percent of what their male counterparts made during the 2006-7 academic year. One senior female faculty member in the department was earning $113,029 after 35 years at Rutgers, the report says, compared with a senior male faculty member who was earning $123,359 after 16 years at the university.
During the 2007-8 academic year, the School of Arts and Sciences "took aggressive steps to correct several of the most blatant examples of salary inequity for women faculty members," the report says.
Many universities respond to allegations of gender inequity in pay by considering individual cases, Mr. Curtis said. But that approach doesn't change the way promotion decisions are made or how starting salaries are determined, he said: "It doesn't fix the underlying structure."

http://chronicle.com
Section: The FacultyVolume 55, Issue 8, Page A14

Prizes for women. Progress for women?

It Could Go Either WayOctober 15, 2008
Janet Stemwedel discusses three German prizes for women in science that are only open to female researchers who have children. She wonders if that requirement implies that to be fulfilled women have to be mothers, or if it shows that serious women scientists can also be mothers. Suzanne Franks weighs in, saying, "Complaining about the awards is aiming our wrath at the wrong target. The proper target is the structural inequalities that leave women mostly responsible for raising the next generation and caring for the sick and elderly, without that labor being recognized and/or valued."
Prizes for women. Progress for women?
Category: Globalizing science * Social issues * Tribe of Science * Women and sciencePosted on: October 9, 2008 12:01 PM, by Janet D. Stemwedel
2008 is the tenth year of the L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science awards to remarkable female scientists from around the world. Indeed, our sister-site, ScienceBlogs.de, covered this year's award ceremony and is celebrating women in science more generally with a For Women in Science blog. (It, like the rest of ScienceBlogs.de, is in German. Just so you know.)
In addition to the global contest, three further scholarships are given to women scientists in Germany. But, the only women eligible for these awards are women with kids. (The rationale for this is that childcare options in Germany are not as good as they should be for working mothers, so women scientists with kids need special support.)
I was chatting about these awards with some woman friends of mine with science backgrounds, and there were some mixed views of these awards.
On the one hand, children are labor-intensive (as is science), so help caring for children is a good thing. But in theory at least, this would also be an issue for male scientists with kids.
It's possible to interpret scholarships like this as saying that no woman, remarkable scientist or not, could be completely fulfilled if she is not also a mother. Is this a social pressure that really needs to be reinforced with cash prizes?
On the other hand, it is still not uncommon for women in science to feel like having kids will be taken as definitive evidence that they weren't really serious about being great scientists -- because if they were, they would never sacrifice the time and energy children require, but would devote all of that to their research. (For some reason, kids aren't counted against the seriousness of male scientists in quite the same way. Maybe it is still assumed that they have wives who will carry the burden of the care-work so their husbands can attend to the mind-work.)
In the grand scheme of things, three prizes don't accomplish much more than helping three female scientists in Germany piece together some of the additional resources they need to take care of their kids and their scientific careers. Real change would be more structural, whether in terms of societal support of childrearing more generally, societal acceptance that not having kids is a perfectly reasonable choice, scientific workplaces that recognize that even scientists might have important things in their lives beyond their scientific work, etc., etc.
But until real change comes, what kind of message does an award like this send to you? Do you think it's a step in the right direction, or does it entrench assumptions that ought to be abandoned?
http://scienceblogs.com/ethicsandscience/2008/10/prizes_for_women_progress_for.php
What's Wrong With These Scholarships?
Category: Daily Struggles * Manifestoes * Naming Experience * Why There Are No Women in SciencePosted on: October 14, 2008 9:52 PM, by Zuska
Janet at Adventures in Ethics and Science writes about prizes for women:
2008 is the tenth year of the L'Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science awards to remarkable female scientists from around the world. Indeed, our sister-site, ScienceBlogs.de, covered this year's award ceremony and is celebrating women in science more generally with a For Women in Science blog. (It, like the rest of ScienceBlogs.de, is in German. Just so you know.)
In addition to the global contest, three further scholarships are given to women scientists in Germany. But, the only women eligible for these awards are women with kids...On the one hand, children are labor-intensive (as is science), so help caring for children is a good thing. But in theory at least, this would also be an issue for male scientists with kids.
It's possible to interpret scholarships like this as saying that no woman, remarkable scientist or not, could be completely fulfilled if she is not also a mother. Is this a social pressure that really needs to be reinforced with cash prizes?
On the other hand, it is still not uncommon for women in science to feel like having kids will be taken as definitive evidence that they weren't really serious about being great scientists -- because if they were, they would never sacrifice the time and energy children require, but would devote all of that to their research...
...[W]hat kind of message does an award like this send to you? Do you think it's a step in the right direction, or does it entrench assumptions that ought to be abandoned?
Here are my thoughts in response.
I have no patience with those who would constrain the value of women's lives to their reproductive capacity. But neither do I worry about a few tiny bits of funding going to women researchers with kids. It isn't a few scholarships that support the notion that women ought to have kids. In fact you could argue the opposite, that a scholarship for a woman with kids undermines the notion that the only thing a woman ought to be doing is have kids. We need to value the choices of women who want to have kids AND a career. We might well argue that working to establish affordable, accessible daycare for all parents would be a more effective way to achieve this than to provide individual solutions for a few elite women but that's another story.The fact is that the way things are now, women still have primary responsibility for childcare, and academic science still operates in a way to disadvantage people (mostly women) who have to devote large amounts of time to childcare. The L'Oreal awards are an attempt to mitigate these circumstances. It might be cool if the award was revised to allow support for women involved in any major family care situation - elder care, say, as well as child care. But complaining about the awards is aiming our wrath at the wrong target. The proper target is the structural inequalities that leave women mostly responsible for raising the next generation and caring for the sick and elderly, without that labor being recognized and/or valued. On the one hand, we have massive societal pressure on women to have kids and to obtain their complete identity through motherhood, while on the other hand we have massive societal denial that the work of motherhood is in any way an important societal function. It is seen as a purely individual choice and private matter and therefore society has no obligation to help those who are having kids. The problem, as I see it, with something like the L'Oreal scholarships is that they are just a band-aid. They are an acknowledgment of a widespread culture that sees child-rearing, or indeed any life event requiring one's time and attention, as an undesirable infringement upon work. They don't challenge or change this norm; they merely offer a coping strategy for a few lucky individual women. Band-aids aren't bad, but they aren't transformational change, either.
Yes, it needs to be okay for women not to be mothers. But it also needs to be okay for women to be mothers AND have careers. Or, to be only mothers and have that work seen as an important part of contributing to society. All three choices need to be equally valid, equally valued, equally viable. No one of them can be truly a choice for any woman until and unless all three are really truly a choice. No matter what we do it isn't valued and we end up vilified by someone. Vilified by conservatives if we choose career and motherhood for supposedly harming the kids; vilified by some feminists if we choose only motherhood, for being retrograde and setting back the cause of women; vilified if we choose not to have children in favor of a career as somehow being unnatural women who can never really be fulfilled. There is no choice a woman can make that is neutral, or positive. Criticizing some initiative that attempts to help a subset of women navigate the impossible set of "choices" before them misses the wider problem, which is the system that sets up the impossible choices to begin with.
We absolutely have to fight for our freedom not to have kids if we don't want to, and not to be defined solely by our ability to bear children. But our antagonists in that fight are not women who chose to have children, or some foundation that throws some money their way. There isn't just one way to win this fight. Over here we battle for the right of mothers to have careers. Over there we battle for the right of women not to be defined by childbearing. Multiple strategies, multiple fronts, multiple fights going on all the time. It's a false dichotomy to think that you have to be opposed to support for working mothers if you are also for support for women not to be defined by reproductive biology.
I will say this, however. I do think that the somewhat excessive focus on childcare issues in the gender-and-science arena is not a good thing. The implication sometimes is almost as if the ONLY issue facing women in science is childcare. This completely ignores all the problems faced by women who do not have children, and all the problems women with children face that have nothing to do with them having children. It also produces the nagging feeling that if those darn women would just stop insisting upon having kids and a demanding science career, there wouldn't be an issue. You know, everything in science is good, except we have to make special accommodations for those demanding baby mamas, who don't realize they really ought to go home and stop bothering all the rest of us who've devoted our lives to science. It makes it seem like the problem is those darn reproducing women, not the structure of science, or the misplaced values of society.
In this regard it's good to see the way that some of the NSF ADVANCE programs deal with this issue. For example, the University of Washington ADVANCE program has a Transitional Support Program that is available to women and men, and that posits childcare as just one of an array of life issues for which a faculty member might need some extra help. Rather than the extremes of either ignoring or singling out childcare, it normalizes childcare as just one of many parts of life that people have to deal with while managing their careers. By being open to women and men, the program also makes clear that it does not view responsibility for such life issues as solely belonging to women. That's a good start.