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.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Math, Tech and the Women Who Don't Love Them
By GERRY SHIH
December 28, 2009, 9:35 pm
Gerry Shih/The New York Times
Sally K. Ride, a former astronaut, is now promoting a federal science and math education initiative.
It's no secret to anyone in Silicon Valley that math, science and technology fields remain dominated by men, despite some progress by women in recent years. Women make up 46 percent of the American workforce but hold just 25 percent of the jobs in engineering, technology and science, according to the National Science Foundation.
To Sally K. Ride, a former astronaut, that persistent gender gap is a national crisis that will prove to deeply detrimental to America's global competitiveness.
In recent months, Dr. Ride has served as a visible emissary for President Obama's broad push to improve science and math education, including the $4.35 billion "Race to the Top" initiative announced in July. The program would identify and fund effective education programs with the aid of corporate partners.
In an interview earlier this month, Dr. Ride said that hard money is needed to attract more qualified teachers and apply data-driven analyses of education programs.
But she also suggested that much of the problem lies with social and cultural expectations. "There are subtle stereotypes," she said. "There are unsubtle effects of the lowered expectations that we surround our kids with."
At a California Institute of Technology science festival in 2007, a mother approached Dr. Ride with her 12-year-old daughter in tow and bragged for several minutes, Dr. Ride recalled.
According to Dr. Ride, the mother was sending an unconscious message to her daughter that her interest in science wasn't normal. "She was saying, 'I don't know where she got this, she's so different from everyone else,'" Dr. Ride said. Girls "internalize the message that scientists are geeky-looking guys with labcoats and pocket protectors who never see the light of day."
Dr. Ride said children ages 10 to 12, especially girls, are the most susceptible to being "pushed off the track" of pursuing science by negative stereotypes. Ten years down the line, at the gates of colleges and graduate schools, the effects are stark: Today, more than half of the students in American graduate programs in the physical sciences and engineering are foreign-born, Dr. Ride said.
At Stanford University - where Dr. Ride double-majored in physics and creative writing and found time to play on the formidable tennis team - 408 men and 208 women undergraduates enrolled in the college of engineering at the start of the 2008-2009 school year. The math department had 70 men and 19 women, the computer science department, 122 men and 19 women. (The complete breakdown by gender and department at Stanford is found here. We'll post the numbers for the University of California, Berkeley, when we get them.)
Since leaving the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the late 1980s, Dr. Ride has been steadily advocating for science education.
Leveraging her enormous name recognition at the time, Dr. Ride immediately wrote several books for children about space after leaving N.A.S.A. In 2001, she formed an educational company, Sally Ride Science, to attract - and crucially, retain - children interested in science and engage their parents through festivals, science camps and programs that involve engineering challenges with toys.
With her involvement in the new federal initiative, Dr. Ride has recently become more vocal, challenging schools to subject their performance to quantitative measures and compete for federal money.
"We need higher expectations for our students," she said. "Schools need to expect their kids to be taking science and math and we need to measure how they're doing."
And now, with her involvement in the Obama administration's program, Dr. Ride speaks like someone ready to move in policy circles. "We need politicians to appreciate how important this is for the future of our country," she said.
• Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
December 28, 2009, 9:35 pm
Gerry Shih/The New York Times
Sally K. Ride, a former astronaut, is now promoting a federal science and math education initiative.
It's no secret to anyone in Silicon Valley that math, science and technology fields remain dominated by men, despite some progress by women in recent years. Women make up 46 percent of the American workforce but hold just 25 percent of the jobs in engineering, technology and science, according to the National Science Foundation.
To Sally K. Ride, a former astronaut, that persistent gender gap is a national crisis that will prove to deeply detrimental to America's global competitiveness.
In recent months, Dr. Ride has served as a visible emissary for President Obama's broad push to improve science and math education, including the $4.35 billion "Race to the Top" initiative announced in July. The program would identify and fund effective education programs with the aid of corporate partners.
In an interview earlier this month, Dr. Ride said that hard money is needed to attract more qualified teachers and apply data-driven analyses of education programs.
But she also suggested that much of the problem lies with social and cultural expectations. "There are subtle stereotypes," she said. "There are unsubtle effects of the lowered expectations that we surround our kids with."
At a California Institute of Technology science festival in 2007, a mother approached Dr. Ride with her 12-year-old daughter in tow and bragged for several minutes, Dr. Ride recalled.
According to Dr. Ride, the mother was sending an unconscious message to her daughter that her interest in science wasn't normal. "She was saying, 'I don't know where she got this, she's so different from everyone else,'" Dr. Ride said. Girls "internalize the message that scientists are geeky-looking guys with labcoats and pocket protectors who never see the light of day."
Dr. Ride said children ages 10 to 12, especially girls, are the most susceptible to being "pushed off the track" of pursuing science by negative stereotypes. Ten years down the line, at the gates of colleges and graduate schools, the effects are stark: Today, more than half of the students in American graduate programs in the physical sciences and engineering are foreign-born, Dr. Ride said.
At Stanford University - where Dr. Ride double-majored in physics and creative writing and found time to play on the formidable tennis team - 408 men and 208 women undergraduates enrolled in the college of engineering at the start of the 2008-2009 school year. The math department had 70 men and 19 women, the computer science department, 122 men and 19 women. (The complete breakdown by gender and department at Stanford is found here. We'll post the numbers for the University of California, Berkeley, when we get them.)
Since leaving the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the late 1980s, Dr. Ride has been steadily advocating for science education.
Leveraging her enormous name recognition at the time, Dr. Ride immediately wrote several books for children about space after leaving N.A.S.A. In 2001, she formed an educational company, Sally Ride Science, to attract - and crucially, retain - children interested in science and engage their parents through festivals, science camps and programs that involve engineering challenges with toys.
With her involvement in the new federal initiative, Dr. Ride has recently become more vocal, challenging schools to subject their performance to quantitative measures and compete for federal money.
"We need higher expectations for our students," she said. "Schools need to expect their kids to be taking science and math and we need to measure how they're doing."
And now, with her involvement in the Obama administration's program, Dr. Ride speaks like someone ready to move in policy circles. "We need politicians to appreciate how important this is for the future of our country," she said.
• Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
Monday, December 14, 2009
For Immediate Release November 23, 2009 President Obama Launches "Educate to Innovate" Campaign for Excellence in STEM
The White House
Office of the Press Secretary
Nationwide effort includes over $260 million in public-private investments
to move American students to the top of the pack
in science and math achievement over the next decade
President Obama today launched the “Educate to Innovate” campaign, a nationwide effort to help reach the administration’s goal of moving American students from the middle to the top of the pack in science and math achievement over the next decade.
Speaking to key leaders of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Math) community and local students, President Obama announced a series of high-powered partnerships involving leading companies, foundations, non-profits, and science and engineering societies dedicated to motivating and inspiring young people across America to excel in science and math.
“Reaffirming and strengthening America’s role as the world’s engine of scientific discovery and technological innovation is essential to meeting the challenges of this century,” said President Obama. “That’s why I am committed to making the improvement of STEM education over the next decade a national priority.”
The new partnerships, with accompanying major commitments from philanthropic organizations and individuals, mark a dramatic first wave of responses to the President’s call at the National Academy of Sciences this spring for a national campaign to raise American students “from the middle to the top of the pack in science and math over the next decade.” Each of the commitments—valued together at over $260 million in financial and in-kind support—will apply new and creative methods of generating and maintaining student interest and enthusiasm in science and math, reinvigorating the pipeline of ingenuity and innovation essential to America’s success that has long been at the core of American economic leadership.
Among the initiatives announced by the President are:
•Five public-private partnerships that harness the power of media, interactive games, hands-on learning, and 100,000 volunteers to reach more than 10 million students over the next four years, inspiring them to be the next generation of makers, discoverers, and innovators. These partnerships represent a combined commitment of over $260 million in financial and in-kind support.
•A commitment by leaders such as Sally Ride (the first female astronaut), Craig Barrett (former chairman of Intel), Ursula Burns (CEO, Xerox), Glenn Britt (CEO, Time Warner Cable), and Antonio Perez (CEO, Eastman Kodak) to increase the scale, scope, and impact of private-sector and philanthropic support for STEM education. This coalition, with the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, will recruit private sector leaders to serve as champions for STEM at the state level; mobilize resources to help scale successful STEM innovations; and raise awareness of the importance of STEM among parents and students.
•An annual science fair at the White House, showcasing the student winners of national competitions in areas such as science, technology, and robotics.
President Obama has identified three overarching priorities for STEM education: increasing STEM literacy so all students can think critically in science, math, engineering and technology; improving the quality of math and science teaching so American students are no longer outperformed by those in other nations; and expanding STEM education and career opportunities for underrepresented groups, including women and minorities.
The Obama Administration has already taken bold action in the STEM education arena by directing that the $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” school grant program assure a competitive preference to states that commit to improving STEM education. “The Department of Education takes the STEM competitive priority very seriously – and states should as well,” said Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
But while federal leadership is necessary, a real change in STEM education requires the participation of many elements of society, including governors, philanthropists, scientists, engineers, educators, and the private sector. That is why the President’s speech at the National Academy of Sciences challenged all Americans to join the cause of elevating STEM education as a national priority.
“America needs a world-class STEM workforce to address the grand challenges of the 21st century, such as developing clean sources of energy that reduce our dependence on foreign oil and discovering cures for cancer,” said John Holdren, President Obama’s science advisor and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “It is extremely gratifying to see this first and very robust set of responses to the President’s call to action.”
Background on Educate to Innovate: A National Campaign for Excellence in
Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Education (STEM)
Today at the White House, President Obama launched the “Educate to Innovate” campaign, a nationwide effort to help reach the administration’s goal of moving American students from the middle to the top of the pack in science and math achievement over the next decade. President Obama announced a series of partnerships involving leading companies, universities, foundations, non-profits, and organizations representing millions of scientists, engineers and teachers that will motivate and inspire young people across the country to excel in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).
President Obama believes that reaffirming and strengthening America’s role as the world’s engine of scientific discovery and technological innovation is essential to meeting the challenges of this century. A growing number of jobs require STEM skills, and America needs a world-class STEM workforce to address the “grand challenges” of the 21st century, such as developing clean sources of energy that reduce our dependence on foreign oil and discovering cures for diseases. Success on these fronts will require improving STEM literacy for all students; expanding the pipeline for a strong and innovative STEM workforce; and greater focus on opportunities and access for groups such as women and underrepresented minorities.
In a speech to the National Academies of Sciences this spring, President Obama announced a commitment to raise America from the middle to the top of the pack internationally in STEM education over the next decade. At that time President Obama also challenged governors, philanthropists, scientists, engineers, educators, and the private sector to join with him in a national campaign to engage young people in these fields. The partnerships announced today are the initial response to this “call to action.”
Additionally, to help meet this goal, the President’s $4.35 billion Race to the Top fund provides a competitive advantage to states that commit to a comprehensive strategy to improve STEM education. Race to the Top will challenge states to dramatically improve their schools and student achievement by raising standards, using data to improve decisions and inform instruction, improving teacher effectiveness, using innovative and effective approaches to turn around struggling schools and making it possible for STEM professionals to bring their experience and enthusiasm into the classroom. These reforms will help prepare America’s students to graduate ready for college and career, and enable them to out-compete any worker, anywhere in the world.
Public Private Partnerships
Time Warner Cable’s “Connect a Million Minds” Campaign: Time Warner Cable, in partnership with FIRST Robotics and the Coalition for Science After School, is launching a campaign to connect over one million students to highly-engaging after-school STEM activities that already exist in their area. Time Warner Cable will use its media platform, Public Service Announcements, 47,000 employees, and a “connectamillionminds.com” website where over 70,000 parents and community members have already pledged to connect a child to STEM. Time Warner Cable has made a commitment of $100 million over the next five years to support this campaign, and will target 80 percent of its corporate philanthropy to STEM.
Discovery Communications’ “Be the Future” Campaign: Discovery Communications, in partnership with leading research universities and federal agencies, is launching a five-year, $150 million cash and in-kind “Be the Future” campaign. This will create content that reaches more than 99 million homes, including a PSA campaign across Discovery's 13 U.S. networks, a dedicated commercial-free educational kids block on the Science Channel, and programming on the “grand challenges” of the 21st century such as their landmark Curiosity series. Discovery Education will also create rich, interactive education content that it will deliver at no cost to approximately 60,000 schools, 35 million students, and 1 million educators, and through a partnership with the Siemens Foundation, will create STEM Connect, a national education resource for teachers.
Sesame Street’s Early STEM Literacy Initiative: Celebrating its 40th Anniversary, and with First Lady Michelle Obama appearing on the first episode, Sesame Street, in partnership with PNC Bank, is announcing a major focus on science and math for young children and a $7.5 million investment in the effort. Sesame Street’s new season kicked-off with “My World is Green & Growing,” which will be part of a two-year science initiative designed to increase positive attitudes towards nature, deepen children’s knowledge about the natural world and encourage behavior that shows respect and care for the environment. Twenty of the 26 new episodes will have a focus on STEM; 13 focus on science and seven focus on math. In addition, Sesame Workshop, in partnership with PNC Bank’s Grow Up Great Program, is announcing a new math initiative for preschool children entitled Math is Everywhere.
“National Lab Day,” Bringing Hands-on Learning to Every Student: National Lab Day is a historic grassroots effort, online at nationallabday.org, to bring hands-on learning to 10 million students by upgrading science labs, supporting project-based learning, and building communities of support for STEM teachers. The effort is a partnership between science and engineering societies representing more than 2.5 million STEM professionals and almost 4 million educators, with strong financial support from the Hidary Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and industry partners. Collectively, this partnership is committed to working with more than 10,000 teachers and 1 million students within a year, and 100,000 teachers and 10 million students over the next four years.
National STEM Game Design Competitions: The MacArthur Foundation, Sony Computer Entertainment America, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) and its partners (the Information Technology Industry Council, the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, and Microsoft) are launching a nationwide set of competitions that include the design of the most compelling, freely-available STEM-related videogames for children and youth. The competitions will include the 2010 Digital Media and Learning Competition, a $2 million yearly effort supported by the MacArthur Foundation that advances the most innovative approaches to learning through games, social networks and mobile devices. One of the competitions will be open only to children, to help them develop 21st century knowledge and skills through the challenge of game design. This year Sony will participate in one segment of the competition and encourage the development of new games that build on the existing popular video game Little Big Planet.
Office of the Press Secretary
Nationwide effort includes over $260 million in public-private investments
to move American students to the top of the pack
in science and math achievement over the next decade
President Obama today launched the “Educate to Innovate” campaign, a nationwide effort to help reach the administration’s goal of moving American students from the middle to the top of the pack in science and math achievement over the next decade.
Speaking to key leaders of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Math) community and local students, President Obama announced a series of high-powered partnerships involving leading companies, foundations, non-profits, and science and engineering societies dedicated to motivating and inspiring young people across America to excel in science and math.
“Reaffirming and strengthening America’s role as the world’s engine of scientific discovery and technological innovation is essential to meeting the challenges of this century,” said President Obama. “That’s why I am committed to making the improvement of STEM education over the next decade a national priority.”
The new partnerships, with accompanying major commitments from philanthropic organizations and individuals, mark a dramatic first wave of responses to the President’s call at the National Academy of Sciences this spring for a national campaign to raise American students “from the middle to the top of the pack in science and math over the next decade.” Each of the commitments—valued together at over $260 million in financial and in-kind support—will apply new and creative methods of generating and maintaining student interest and enthusiasm in science and math, reinvigorating the pipeline of ingenuity and innovation essential to America’s success that has long been at the core of American economic leadership.
Among the initiatives announced by the President are:
•Five public-private partnerships that harness the power of media, interactive games, hands-on learning, and 100,000 volunteers to reach more than 10 million students over the next four years, inspiring them to be the next generation of makers, discoverers, and innovators. These partnerships represent a combined commitment of over $260 million in financial and in-kind support.
•A commitment by leaders such as Sally Ride (the first female astronaut), Craig Barrett (former chairman of Intel), Ursula Burns (CEO, Xerox), Glenn Britt (CEO, Time Warner Cable), and Antonio Perez (CEO, Eastman Kodak) to increase the scale, scope, and impact of private-sector and philanthropic support for STEM education. This coalition, with the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, will recruit private sector leaders to serve as champions for STEM at the state level; mobilize resources to help scale successful STEM innovations; and raise awareness of the importance of STEM among parents and students.
•An annual science fair at the White House, showcasing the student winners of national competitions in areas such as science, technology, and robotics.
President Obama has identified three overarching priorities for STEM education: increasing STEM literacy so all students can think critically in science, math, engineering and technology; improving the quality of math and science teaching so American students are no longer outperformed by those in other nations; and expanding STEM education and career opportunities for underrepresented groups, including women and minorities.
The Obama Administration has already taken bold action in the STEM education arena by directing that the $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” school grant program assure a competitive preference to states that commit to improving STEM education. “The Department of Education takes the STEM competitive priority very seriously – and states should as well,” said Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
But while federal leadership is necessary, a real change in STEM education requires the participation of many elements of society, including governors, philanthropists, scientists, engineers, educators, and the private sector. That is why the President’s speech at the National Academy of Sciences challenged all Americans to join the cause of elevating STEM education as a national priority.
“America needs a world-class STEM workforce to address the grand challenges of the 21st century, such as developing clean sources of energy that reduce our dependence on foreign oil and discovering cures for cancer,” said John Holdren, President Obama’s science advisor and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “It is extremely gratifying to see this first and very robust set of responses to the President’s call to action.”
Background on Educate to Innovate: A National Campaign for Excellence in
Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Education (STEM)
Today at the White House, President Obama launched the “Educate to Innovate” campaign, a nationwide effort to help reach the administration’s goal of moving American students from the middle to the top of the pack in science and math achievement over the next decade. President Obama announced a series of partnerships involving leading companies, universities, foundations, non-profits, and organizations representing millions of scientists, engineers and teachers that will motivate and inspire young people across the country to excel in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).
President Obama believes that reaffirming and strengthening America’s role as the world’s engine of scientific discovery and technological innovation is essential to meeting the challenges of this century. A growing number of jobs require STEM skills, and America needs a world-class STEM workforce to address the “grand challenges” of the 21st century, such as developing clean sources of energy that reduce our dependence on foreign oil and discovering cures for diseases. Success on these fronts will require improving STEM literacy for all students; expanding the pipeline for a strong and innovative STEM workforce; and greater focus on opportunities and access for groups such as women and underrepresented minorities.
In a speech to the National Academies of Sciences this spring, President Obama announced a commitment to raise America from the middle to the top of the pack internationally in STEM education over the next decade. At that time President Obama also challenged governors, philanthropists, scientists, engineers, educators, and the private sector to join with him in a national campaign to engage young people in these fields. The partnerships announced today are the initial response to this “call to action.”
Additionally, to help meet this goal, the President’s $4.35 billion Race to the Top fund provides a competitive advantage to states that commit to a comprehensive strategy to improve STEM education. Race to the Top will challenge states to dramatically improve their schools and student achievement by raising standards, using data to improve decisions and inform instruction, improving teacher effectiveness, using innovative and effective approaches to turn around struggling schools and making it possible for STEM professionals to bring their experience and enthusiasm into the classroom. These reforms will help prepare America’s students to graduate ready for college and career, and enable them to out-compete any worker, anywhere in the world.
Public Private Partnerships
Time Warner Cable’s “Connect a Million Minds” Campaign: Time Warner Cable, in partnership with FIRST Robotics and the Coalition for Science After School, is launching a campaign to connect over one million students to highly-engaging after-school STEM activities that already exist in their area. Time Warner Cable will use its media platform, Public Service Announcements, 47,000 employees, and a “connectamillionminds.com” website where over 70,000 parents and community members have already pledged to connect a child to STEM. Time Warner Cable has made a commitment of $100 million over the next five years to support this campaign, and will target 80 percent of its corporate philanthropy to STEM.
Discovery Communications’ “Be the Future” Campaign: Discovery Communications, in partnership with leading research universities and federal agencies, is launching a five-year, $150 million cash and in-kind “Be the Future” campaign. This will create content that reaches more than 99 million homes, including a PSA campaign across Discovery's 13 U.S. networks, a dedicated commercial-free educational kids block on the Science Channel, and programming on the “grand challenges” of the 21st century such as their landmark Curiosity series. Discovery Education will also create rich, interactive education content that it will deliver at no cost to approximately 60,000 schools, 35 million students, and 1 million educators, and through a partnership with the Siemens Foundation, will create STEM Connect, a national education resource for teachers.
Sesame Street’s Early STEM Literacy Initiative: Celebrating its 40th Anniversary, and with First Lady Michelle Obama appearing on the first episode, Sesame Street, in partnership with PNC Bank, is announcing a major focus on science and math for young children and a $7.5 million investment in the effort. Sesame Street’s new season kicked-off with “My World is Green & Growing,” which will be part of a two-year science initiative designed to increase positive attitudes towards nature, deepen children’s knowledge about the natural world and encourage behavior that shows respect and care for the environment. Twenty of the 26 new episodes will have a focus on STEM; 13 focus on science and seven focus on math. In addition, Sesame Workshop, in partnership with PNC Bank’s Grow Up Great Program, is announcing a new math initiative for preschool children entitled Math is Everywhere.
“National Lab Day,” Bringing Hands-on Learning to Every Student: National Lab Day is a historic grassroots effort, online at nationallabday.org, to bring hands-on learning to 10 million students by upgrading science labs, supporting project-based learning, and building communities of support for STEM teachers. The effort is a partnership between science and engineering societies representing more than 2.5 million STEM professionals and almost 4 million educators, with strong financial support from the Hidary Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and industry partners. Collectively, this partnership is committed to working with more than 10,000 teachers and 1 million students within a year, and 100,000 teachers and 10 million students over the next four years.
National STEM Game Design Competitions: The MacArthur Foundation, Sony Computer Entertainment America, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) and its partners (the Information Technology Industry Council, the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, and Microsoft) are launching a nationwide set of competitions that include the design of the most compelling, freely-available STEM-related videogames for children and youth. The competitions will include the 2010 Digital Media and Learning Competition, a $2 million yearly effort supported by the MacArthur Foundation that advances the most innovative approaches to learning through games, social networks and mobile devices. One of the competitions will be open only to children, to help them develop 21st century knowledge and skills through the challenge of game design. This year Sony will participate in one segment of the competition and encourage the development of new games that build on the existing popular video game Little Big Planet.
Women Hold More Jobs than Ever But Salaries Still Lag
Pottsville (PA) Republican (Monday, Nov. 28)
Former AAUW Fellow Heather Boushey, a leading economist who co-edited The Shriver Report — A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything, shares her view about the current job climate, “The labor market is highly segregated, with women and men in different jobs.” Boushey continued, observing that, “there’s a lingering gender pay gap. It’s really a residual, most likely discriminatory, effect.” The article elaborates, reporting that average female workers in Pennsylvania earned 79 percent of the median income of their male counterparts in 2008.
Former AAUW Fellow Heather Boushey, a leading economist who co-edited The Shriver Report — A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything, shares her view about the current job climate, “The labor market is highly segregated, with women and men in different jobs.” Boushey continued, observing that, “there’s a lingering gender pay gap. It’s really a residual, most likely discriminatory, effect.” The article elaborates, reporting that average female workers in Pennsylvania earned 79 percent of the median income of their male counterparts in 2008.
Nobel Prize Winning Member Talks about Women in Science on NPR
The Diane Rehm Show (Thursday, Dec. 3)
Nobel Prize Winner Carol Greider, Ph.D., the Johns Hopkins University molecular and genetic biologist and AAUW member, participated in a conversation about women in science. AAUW members across the nation are using their wealth of social capital to get girls involved in math and science through the National Girls Collaborative Project.
To learn more, visit: http://www.aauw.org/education/ngcp/
Nobel Prize Winner Carol Greider, Ph.D., the Johns Hopkins University molecular and genetic biologist and AAUW member, participated in a conversation about women in science. AAUW members across the nation are using their wealth of social capital to get girls involved in math and science through the National Girls Collaborative Project.
To learn more, visit: http://www.aauw.org/education/ngcp/
Longtime Advocate for Women in Medicine Leads Diversity Effort at Weill Cornell
The Chronicle of Higher Education
December 6, 2009
By Abby Brownback
Debra Leonard could paint her medical career with two broad strokes.
Weill Cornell Medical College's first chief diversity officer is both a molecular pathologist and a longtime advocate for women in medicine. This past summer she became director of the college's new Office of Faculty Diversity in Medicine and Science.
The office's goal is "to change the Weill Cornell environment to a diverse and inclusive community, so all people feel welcomed, accepted, and part of the team," says Dr. Leonard, who is 54.
Differences in the demographic characteristics of American physicians and their patients can cause misunderstandings that result in a lower standard of care, she says. "If you don't understand that the cultural background of your patients influences how they cooperate with and respond to treatment, then you won't be able to treat them as effectively."
To train doctors from diverse nationalities, races, religions, ages, and sexual orientations, medical-school faculties must themselves model diversity, she believes. And they still have a long way to go.
About two-thirds of the country's medical faculty members are male, and almost 70 percent of them are non-Hispanic and white, the Association of American Medical Colleges found in 2007. African-American and Hispanic professors made up just 3 percent and 4 percent, respectively, of the American medical faculty. And women on medical faculties are far less likely than men to reach the ranks of associate or full professor.
Dr. Leonard's first challenge is to better train a diverse student body by recruiting professors from more-varied backgrounds.
Carla Boutin-Foster, the office's director of diversity, says each of the office's three directors contributes her own expertise in pursuit of that goal, and Dr. Leonard's expertise lies in developing leaders from underrepresented populations, especially women.
Last fall, Dr. Leonard harnessed what Dr. Boutin-Foster calls her "direct dedication and passion" to push for her beliefs. Separately, the two women approached David P. Hajjar, dean of the graduate school and executive vice provost of the medical school, about the need for a program focused on faculty diversity. Rache M. Simmons, now the office's director of women in medicine and science, proposed a similar idea to Antonio M. Gotto Jr., dean of the medical school.
The perspectives of each professor strengthened their collective argument for establishing a diversity office, Dr. Boutin-Foster said. After hearing from the women, Mr. Hajjar convened a committee to generate suggestions, and less than a year later, with Dr. Gotto's backing, the Office of Faculty Diversity in Medicine and Science was created.
Dr. Leonard was a natural choice to direct it, Mr. Hajjar says, thanks to her leadership of a mentorship program for women pursuing combined doctoral and medical degrees while she taught at the University of Pennsylvania. But Mr. Hajjar wanted more than just mentors for junior female professors at Weill Cornell. He wanted a formalized structure for recruiting and supporting women, and faculty members from distinct backgrounds.
As chief diversity officer, Dr. Leonard would like all faculty members to be happy to work at the college. Through faculty surveys, town-hall meetings, and seminars, she hopes to foster a "diverse, inclusive, and equitable" environment to ensure faculty retention.
Though she knows she may face some opposition in confronting the problems her efforts identify, Dr. Leonard is no stranger to an uphill battle. Her first applications to medical schools were met with rejection—something she calls "the first major failure of my life." She was admitted five years later to the New York University School of Medicine, where she specialized in molecular pathology. Dr. Leonard started in that field in 1992 and has watched as it evolved from identifying pathogens and researching genetic diseases through DNA and RNA to using what she calls "CSI-style methods" to learn about cancers and transplants.
Between the end of her undergraduate education and the beginning of medical school, Dr. Leonard studied the inner ear in auditory-physiology laboratories and completed one year of a bachelor of science program in nursing. After medical school, she moved from New York to the University of Pennsylvania, where she was tapped to run the mentorship program for female students. She guided the women along the narrow career paths open to minorities in the medical profession at the time.
"The focus of my career for the last 12 years has been … to make it a better world for those coming behind me," Dr. Leonard says.
Abby Brownback is a graduate student at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland at College Park.
December 6, 2009
By Abby Brownback
Debra Leonard could paint her medical career with two broad strokes.
Weill Cornell Medical College's first chief diversity officer is both a molecular pathologist and a longtime advocate for women in medicine. This past summer she became director of the college's new Office of Faculty Diversity in Medicine and Science.
The office's goal is "to change the Weill Cornell environment to a diverse and inclusive community, so all people feel welcomed, accepted, and part of the team," says Dr. Leonard, who is 54.
Differences in the demographic characteristics of American physicians and their patients can cause misunderstandings that result in a lower standard of care, she says. "If you don't understand that the cultural background of your patients influences how they cooperate with and respond to treatment, then you won't be able to treat them as effectively."
To train doctors from diverse nationalities, races, religions, ages, and sexual orientations, medical-school faculties must themselves model diversity, she believes. And they still have a long way to go.
About two-thirds of the country's medical faculty members are male, and almost 70 percent of them are non-Hispanic and white, the Association of American Medical Colleges found in 2007. African-American and Hispanic professors made up just 3 percent and 4 percent, respectively, of the American medical faculty. And women on medical faculties are far less likely than men to reach the ranks of associate or full professor.
Dr. Leonard's first challenge is to better train a diverse student body by recruiting professors from more-varied backgrounds.
Carla Boutin-Foster, the office's director of diversity, says each of the office's three directors contributes her own expertise in pursuit of that goal, and Dr. Leonard's expertise lies in developing leaders from underrepresented populations, especially women.
Last fall, Dr. Leonard harnessed what Dr. Boutin-Foster calls her "direct dedication and passion" to push for her beliefs. Separately, the two women approached David P. Hajjar, dean of the graduate school and executive vice provost of the medical school, about the need for a program focused on faculty diversity. Rache M. Simmons, now the office's director of women in medicine and science, proposed a similar idea to Antonio M. Gotto Jr., dean of the medical school.
The perspectives of each professor strengthened their collective argument for establishing a diversity office, Dr. Boutin-Foster said. After hearing from the women, Mr. Hajjar convened a committee to generate suggestions, and less than a year later, with Dr. Gotto's backing, the Office of Faculty Diversity in Medicine and Science was created.
Dr. Leonard was a natural choice to direct it, Mr. Hajjar says, thanks to her leadership of a mentorship program for women pursuing combined doctoral and medical degrees while she taught at the University of Pennsylvania. But Mr. Hajjar wanted more than just mentors for junior female professors at Weill Cornell. He wanted a formalized structure for recruiting and supporting women, and faculty members from distinct backgrounds.
As chief diversity officer, Dr. Leonard would like all faculty members to be happy to work at the college. Through faculty surveys, town-hall meetings, and seminars, she hopes to foster a "diverse, inclusive, and equitable" environment to ensure faculty retention.
Though she knows she may face some opposition in confronting the problems her efforts identify, Dr. Leonard is no stranger to an uphill battle. Her first applications to medical schools were met with rejection—something she calls "the first major failure of my life." She was admitted five years later to the New York University School of Medicine, where she specialized in molecular pathology. Dr. Leonard started in that field in 1992 and has watched as it evolved from identifying pathogens and researching genetic diseases through DNA and RNA to using what she calls "CSI-style methods" to learn about cancers and transplants.
Between the end of her undergraduate education and the beginning of medical school, Dr. Leonard studied the inner ear in auditory-physiology laboratories and completed one year of a bachelor of science program in nursing. After medical school, she moved from New York to the University of Pennsylvania, where she was tapped to run the mentorship program for female students. She guided the women along the narrow career paths open to minorities in the medical profession at the time.
"The focus of my career for the last 12 years has been … to make it a better world for those coming behind me," Dr. Leonard says.
Abby Brownback is a graduate student at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland at College Park.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
The Bi-College News
Liberal Arts for Science Majors
By Anna Giarratana
Recently, people have asked me why I chose to attend a liberal arts college. A liberal arts college may seem like an odd destination for a pre-med science major involved in research. Often questioners wave off my answer, replying with a smile, “Yes, yes, you deal with the liberal arts classes because Bryn Mawr has a good academic reputation.” Or sometimes the questioner is more cynical and replies, “Oh yes, you want the breadth of classes so you don’t have to deal with the depth.” Both of these responses fall so short of the reason any person should chose to attend a liberal arts college. So maybe it’s time we discuss why we all actually chose to do so.
The traditional notion is that a liberal arts college gives students the opportunity to broaden their minds with the study of varied topics. As Albert Einstein said, “It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education at a liberal arts college is not learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.” While Einstein had a valid point, I think a liberal arts education today offers something even more vital to students—freedom.
At Bryn Mawr and Haverford, we enjoy what is possibly our last four years of absolute freedom. We come here with the chance to study whatever strikes our fancy, so to speak. We have to ensure that we take enough classes in one subject to earn a degree, but determining that path is our choice. For me, that ability to choose is the essence of a liberal arts education.
Proponents of liberal arts colleges love to expound upon their advantages. However, sadly, many overlook science as a part of the liberal arts program. For example, the Bryn Mawr divisional requirement of just two natural science courses is lost in a sea of social sciences, languages and humanities. While some people will claim the purpose of a liberal arts college is not to teach facts but rather skills, I don’t necessarily agree. While I agree teaching skills is important, I think a well-rounded education is even more vital. I believe science majors should learn languages to use in the future; take English classes to learn vital communicational skills; and take sociology, anthropology, or history courses to learn more about human cultures. But many of these skills and facts science majors continue to nurture. We read for fun, travel and practice languages, and learn about cultures: it’s human nature. However, after many students take their required natural science classes, they never think about science again. I believe our liberal arts experience fails us in this case.
The ignorance even-well educated people display about science shocks and dismays me. Perhaps this ignorance is due to the fact that even with the increasingly large number of books being published on science, few people want to teach themselves the subject. But just as English, languages, and social sciences are vital to everyday life, so is science. People who tell you differently just don’t understand science. By avoiding the truth about science—biology, physics, chemistry, and others—we are keeping generations of decision makers and world movers in the dark about the very essence of our world. So while we have these four years of freedom at our respective liberal arts institutions, let’s take full advantage of them, learning the science that will broaden our education and inform our worldviews.
Giarratana, a senior chemistry major, can be reached at agiarratan@brynmawr.edu
By Anna Giarratana
Recently, people have asked me why I chose to attend a liberal arts college. A liberal arts college may seem like an odd destination for a pre-med science major involved in research. Often questioners wave off my answer, replying with a smile, “Yes, yes, you deal with the liberal arts classes because Bryn Mawr has a good academic reputation.” Or sometimes the questioner is more cynical and replies, “Oh yes, you want the breadth of classes so you don’t have to deal with the depth.” Both of these responses fall so short of the reason any person should chose to attend a liberal arts college. So maybe it’s time we discuss why we all actually chose to do so.
The traditional notion is that a liberal arts college gives students the opportunity to broaden their minds with the study of varied topics. As Albert Einstein said, “It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education at a liberal arts college is not learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.” While Einstein had a valid point, I think a liberal arts education today offers something even more vital to students—freedom.
At Bryn Mawr and Haverford, we enjoy what is possibly our last four years of absolute freedom. We come here with the chance to study whatever strikes our fancy, so to speak. We have to ensure that we take enough classes in one subject to earn a degree, but determining that path is our choice. For me, that ability to choose is the essence of a liberal arts education.
Proponents of liberal arts colleges love to expound upon their advantages. However, sadly, many overlook science as a part of the liberal arts program. For example, the Bryn Mawr divisional requirement of just two natural science courses is lost in a sea of social sciences, languages and humanities. While some people will claim the purpose of a liberal arts college is not to teach facts but rather skills, I don’t necessarily agree. While I agree teaching skills is important, I think a well-rounded education is even more vital. I believe science majors should learn languages to use in the future; take English classes to learn vital communicational skills; and take sociology, anthropology, or history courses to learn more about human cultures. But many of these skills and facts science majors continue to nurture. We read for fun, travel and practice languages, and learn about cultures: it’s human nature. However, after many students take their required natural science classes, they never think about science again. I believe our liberal arts experience fails us in this case.
The ignorance even-well educated people display about science shocks and dismays me. Perhaps this ignorance is due to the fact that even with the increasingly large number of books being published on science, few people want to teach themselves the subject. But just as English, languages, and social sciences are vital to everyday life, so is science. People who tell you differently just don’t understand science. By avoiding the truth about science—biology, physics, chemistry, and others—we are keeping generations of decision makers and world movers in the dark about the very essence of our world. So while we have these four years of freedom at our respective liberal arts institutions, let’s take full advantage of them, learning the science that will broaden our education and inform our worldviews.
Giarratana, a senior chemistry major, can be reached at agiarratan@brynmawr.edu
AAUW
AAUW's Position on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Education
Since its founding in 1881, the American Association of University Women has been committed to making the dream of higher education a reality for women. AAUW's 2009-2011 Public Policy Program reaffirms our commitment to "a strong system of public education that promotes gender fairness, equity, and diversity….and advocates increased support for, and access to, higher education for women and other disadvantaged populations."1
The shortage of American scientists threatens our nation's ability to compete and innovate in the coming years, especially as the outsourcing of jobs to, and importing of science from, other nations continues to grow. By 2014, the U.S. will have added more than one million additional information technology jobs to the workforce.2 However, women still lag far behind in earning computer technology degrees and working in computer technology-related professions. High school girls represent only 17 percent of computer science Advanced Placement (AP) test takers.3
College-educated women earned only 18 percent of computer and information sciences bachelor's degrees (down from 37 percent of computer science degrees in 1985).4 In 2006, women earned only 21 percent of doctorate degrees in computer science.5 Overall, women comprise 24.8 percent of computer and mathematical professionals, down from 27 percent in 2006.6
AAUW's Tech Savvy (2000) and Women at Work (2003) have documented the troubling shortage of girls and women preparing to work in STEM fields. In order to close this gap, AAUW supports efforts that train teachers to encourage girls and other underrepresented groups to pursue STEM careers.
AAUW supports promoting and strengthening science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, especially for girls and other underrepresented populations. These efforts will help increase America's competitiveness by reducing gender barriers that deter women from pursuing academic and career goals in STEM fields.
For more information, call 202/785-7793 or e-mail VoterEd@aauw.org.
AAUW Public Policy and Government Relations Department
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 American Association of University Women. (June 2009). 2009-11 AAUW Public Policy Program. Retrieved July 9, 2009, from http://www.aauw.org/advocacy/issue_advocacy/principles_priorities.cfm.
2 National Center for Women and Information Technology. (2007). NCWIT Scorecard 2007: A Report on the Status of Women in Information Technology. Retrieved June 26, 2009, from http://www.ncwit.org/pdf/2007_Scorecard_Web.pdf.
3 National Center for Women & Information Technology. (2009). By the Numbers. Retrieved June 22, 2009, from http://www.ncwit.org/pdf/BytheNumbers09.pdf.
4Ibid.
5 National Science Foundation. Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering. Table 2. http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/wmpd/pdf/tabf-2.pdf
6 Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2008). Current Population Survey, Table 11. Employed persons by detailed occupation, sex, race, and Hispanic or Latino ethnicity. Retrieved June 29, 2009, from http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.pdf.
Since its founding in 1881, the American Association of University Women has been committed to making the dream of higher education a reality for women. AAUW's 2009-2011 Public Policy Program reaffirms our commitment to "a strong system of public education that promotes gender fairness, equity, and diversity….and advocates increased support for, and access to, higher education for women and other disadvantaged populations."1
The shortage of American scientists threatens our nation's ability to compete and innovate in the coming years, especially as the outsourcing of jobs to, and importing of science from, other nations continues to grow. By 2014, the U.S. will have added more than one million additional information technology jobs to the workforce.2 However, women still lag far behind in earning computer technology degrees and working in computer technology-related professions. High school girls represent only 17 percent of computer science Advanced Placement (AP) test takers.3
College-educated women earned only 18 percent of computer and information sciences bachelor's degrees (down from 37 percent of computer science degrees in 1985).4 In 2006, women earned only 21 percent of doctorate degrees in computer science.5 Overall, women comprise 24.8 percent of computer and mathematical professionals, down from 27 percent in 2006.6
AAUW's Tech Savvy (2000) and Women at Work (2003) have documented the troubling shortage of girls and women preparing to work in STEM fields. In order to close this gap, AAUW supports efforts that train teachers to encourage girls and other underrepresented groups to pursue STEM careers.
AAUW supports promoting and strengthening science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, especially for girls and other underrepresented populations. These efforts will help increase America's competitiveness by reducing gender barriers that deter women from pursuing academic and career goals in STEM fields.
For more information, call 202/785-7793 or e-mail VoterEd@aauw.org.
AAUW Public Policy and Government Relations Department
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 American Association of University Women. (June 2009). 2009-11 AAUW Public Policy Program. Retrieved July 9, 2009, from http://www.aauw.org/advocacy/issue_advocacy/principles_priorities.cfm.
2 National Center for Women and Information Technology. (2007). NCWIT Scorecard 2007: A Report on the Status of Women in Information Technology. Retrieved June 26, 2009, from http://www.ncwit.org/pdf/2007_Scorecard_Web.pdf.
3 National Center for Women & Information Technology. (2009). By the Numbers. Retrieved June 22, 2009, from http://www.ncwit.org/pdf/BytheNumbers09.pdf.
4Ibid.
5 National Science Foundation. Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering. Table 2. http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/wmpd/pdf/tabf-2.pdf
6 Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2008). Current Population Survey, Table 11. Employed persons by detailed occupation, sex, race, and Hispanic or Latino ethnicity. Retrieved June 29, 2009, from http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.pdf.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
TheScientist.com
Pioneering protein chemist dies
Posted by Jef Akst
[Entry posted at 3rd November 2009 04:07 PM GMT]
View comment(1) | Comment on this news story
Mildred Cohn, a renowned chemist who battled sexual discrimination for much of her career, died last month (October 12) at age 96, succumbing to pneumonia at a hospital in Philadelphia. Combining chemistry, biology, and physics, Cohn opened up new avenues for interdisciplinary biology and helped found the emerging fields of biochemistry and biophysics.
Image: Erica P. Johnson
"Mildred was a pioneer in many ways," Joshua Wand of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, a former student of Cohn's, wrote in an email to The Scientist. "She surmounted great structural barriers (for women) and was essentially forced to work outside jobs to pay for equipment and chemicals during her PhD."
Cohn's research spanned from isotopes to ATP to oxidative phosphorylation. She was one of the first to take meaningful pictures of proteins using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), Wand said, and applied this technique to a variety of biochemical problems, such as the mechanisms of enzymes.
Cohn's work identifying the structure of ATP was a particularly exciting time for her, she shared with The Scientist during an interview in 2003. "In 1958, using nuclear magnetic resonance, I saw the first three peaks of ATP. That was exciting," she recalled. "[I could] distinguish the three phosphorous atoms of ATP with a spectroscopic method, which had never been done before." Her findings about ATP's structure were published in two papers in 1960 and 1962 that together accrued over 600 citations, according to ISI. Over her career, Cohn published more than 160 papers, including several that she co-authored with six different Nobel Laureates.
After receiving her bachelor's degree from Hunter College in New York City at age 17, Cohn enrolled in a chemistry doctoral program at Columbia. When she found she couldn't get a teaching assistantship because she was a woman, she turned to babysitting to support herself until she received her master's in physical chemistry the next year.
Out of money, Cohn accepted a job at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the forerunner of NASA. She was the only woman among 70 men and was banned from working in the lab for that reason. She worked there for two years until she saved up enough money to return to Columbia to work with future Nobel Laureate Harold Urey and complete her PhD.
After graduate school, Cohn took a postdoc at George Washington University Medical School with another future Nobel winner, Vincent duVigneaud. There, she met physicist Henry Primakoff, whom she married in 1938. The duo eventually settled at the University of Pennsylvania, where she worked until she retired in 1982.
Even after her official retirement, she maintained her office and still kept in touch with the scientific community. "At the age of 95, she was still coming to departmental seminars, still asking those deeply penetrating questions and generally keeping the department on its toes," Wand recalled.
Over the course of her career, Cohn was honored with a number of awards, including the National Medal of Science and election to the National Academy of Sciences. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame the day before she died.
Related stories:
• Mildred Cohn
[6th October 2003]
• Elite Society Celebrates Scholarship In All Disciplines
[1st November 1993]
• Magnetic Resonance Imaging Captures Brain In Action
[12th October 1992]
Posted by Jef Akst
[Entry posted at 3rd November 2009 04:07 PM GMT]
View comment(1) | Comment on this news story
Mildred Cohn, a renowned chemist who battled sexual discrimination for much of her career, died last month (October 12) at age 96, succumbing to pneumonia at a hospital in Philadelphia. Combining chemistry, biology, and physics, Cohn opened up new avenues for interdisciplinary biology and helped found the emerging fields of biochemistry and biophysics.
Image: Erica P. Johnson
"Mildred was a pioneer in many ways," Joshua Wand of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, a former student of Cohn's, wrote in an email to The Scientist. "She surmounted great structural barriers (for women) and was essentially forced to work outside jobs to pay for equipment and chemicals during her PhD."
Cohn's research spanned from isotopes to ATP to oxidative phosphorylation. She was one of the first to take meaningful pictures of proteins using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), Wand said, and applied this technique to a variety of biochemical problems, such as the mechanisms of enzymes.
Cohn's work identifying the structure of ATP was a particularly exciting time for her, she shared with The Scientist during an interview in 2003. "In 1958, using nuclear magnetic resonance, I saw the first three peaks of ATP. That was exciting," she recalled. "[I could] distinguish the three phosphorous atoms of ATP with a spectroscopic method, which had never been done before." Her findings about ATP's structure were published in two papers in 1960 and 1962 that together accrued over 600 citations, according to ISI. Over her career, Cohn published more than 160 papers, including several that she co-authored with six different Nobel Laureates.
After receiving her bachelor's degree from Hunter College in New York City at age 17, Cohn enrolled in a chemistry doctoral program at Columbia. When she found she couldn't get a teaching assistantship because she was a woman, she turned to babysitting to support herself until she received her master's in physical chemistry the next year.
Out of money, Cohn accepted a job at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the forerunner of NASA. She was the only woman among 70 men and was banned from working in the lab for that reason. She worked there for two years until she saved up enough money to return to Columbia to work with future Nobel Laureate Harold Urey and complete her PhD.
After graduate school, Cohn took a postdoc at George Washington University Medical School with another future Nobel winner, Vincent duVigneaud. There, she met physicist Henry Primakoff, whom she married in 1938. The duo eventually settled at the University of Pennsylvania, where she worked until she retired in 1982.
Even after her official retirement, she maintained her office and still kept in touch with the scientific community. "At the age of 95, she was still coming to departmental seminars, still asking those deeply penetrating questions and generally keeping the department on its toes," Wand recalled.
Over the course of her career, Cohn was honored with a number of awards, including the National Medal of Science and election to the National Academy of Sciences. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame the day before she died.
Related stories:
• Mildred Cohn
[6th October 2003]
• Elite Society Celebrates Scholarship In All Disciplines
[1st November 1993]
• Magnetic Resonance Imaging Captures Brain In Action
[12th October 1992]
Professors of the Year Are Celebrated for Innovative Teaching
Tracey McKenzie
professor of sociology,
Collin County Community College
Tracey McKenzie wants her students in her classes to see connections between academic disciplines. To highlight them, she has co-taught classes with instructors from computer science, statistics, Spanish, and political science.
It makes particular sense for her to teach across disciplines, Ms. McKenzie says, because sociology is about social problems, and some solutions to those problems are studied in other parts of academe. For example, Ms. McKenzie teaches a class on the power of the media with a political-science faculty member. The teachers ask students in the courses to analyze political propaganda and then create their own. Using political history to demonstrate ideas from sociology enriches students' understanding of both disciplines, she says.
For a class on sexuality, co-teaching with a political-science professor means the students examine the roles of women in politics, Ms. McKenzie says.
The diversity of students in her classes mirrors the diversity of disciplines that she has worked with. Working at a community college means students come with different levels of college readiness, from different ethnic backgrounds, and at different times in life. Ms. McKenzie says she has had students as young as 18 and as old as 76. That means they bring a range of experience that enriches class discussions, she says. "Whatever I'm talking about, there's always one student who's had that experience."
professor of sociology,
Collin County Community College
Tracey McKenzie wants her students in her classes to see connections between academic disciplines. To highlight them, she has co-taught classes with instructors from computer science, statistics, Spanish, and political science.
It makes particular sense for her to teach across disciplines, Ms. McKenzie says, because sociology is about social problems, and some solutions to those problems are studied in other parts of academe. For example, Ms. McKenzie teaches a class on the power of the media with a political-science faculty member. The teachers ask students in the courses to analyze political propaganda and then create their own. Using political history to demonstrate ideas from sociology enriches students' understanding of both disciplines, she says.
For a class on sexuality, co-teaching with a political-science professor means the students examine the roles of women in politics, Ms. McKenzie says.
The diversity of students in her classes mirrors the diversity of disciplines that she has worked with. Working at a community college means students come with different levels of college readiness, from different ethnic backgrounds, and at different times in life. Ms. McKenzie says she has had students as young as 18 and as old as 76. That means they bring a range of experience that enriches class discussions, she says. "Whatever I'm talking about, there's always one student who's had that experience."
Chronicle of Higher Education
Title IX Includes Maternal Discrimination
By Mary Ann Mason
Barack Obama, in the month before his election, promised an audience of members of the Association for Women in Science and the Society of Women Engineers that he would do more to enforce Title IX, which prevents sexual discrimination in educational programs and activities receiving federal funds. He also vowed to significantly increase the number of women in science and technology.
On the 37th anniversary of Title IX, the Obama administration recommitted to women's advancement in the sciences when Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Valerie Jarrett, a White House senior adviser, issued a statement that said the law was integral "to encourage women to pursue their aspirations in fields in which they have been historically underrepresented, such as science and technology."
President Obama should be aware that Title IX does not just cover blatant gender discrimination—such as a bias that women are not as competent as men in science or math. It also protects women against sex discrimination on the basis of marital, parental, or family status, and on the basis of pregnancy. Those provisions come into play over the issue of retaining female scientists in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, the STEM fields.
Our research group at the University of California at Berkeley this month published a major report, "Staying Competitive: Patching America's Leaky Pipeline in the Sciences." Our conclusions were based on four years of original research, including a study of work-life policies at all of the institutions in the Association of American Universities and at 13 federal grant agencies.
Where is the biggest leak? It's at the point at which women who have received their Ph.D.'s or are working as postdoctoral scholars are making the critical decision of whether to continue their careers in academic research. Too many of them are deciding not to, primarily because of their interest in starting a family.
Our study found that married female scientists with young children who have received their Ph.D.'s are 35 percent less likely to enter a tenure-track position than are married men with children. We found little difference between single childless women and married men with young children in terms of their likelihood to enter the tenure track. A similar pipeline leak occurs at the point of granting tenure: Married women with young children are 27 percent less likely, on a yearly basis, to earn tenure than are married men with young children.
Job candidates in the sciences who are pregnant or have children may face very real gender discrimination. Some scientists may believe that women who have families cannot be serious scholars, because academic science demands exclusive attention to research.
Women in science and math learn that bias early on. When I was dean of the graduate division at Berkeley, my research team and I studied thousands of graduate students and faculty members to learn more about the effects of family formation on the careers of doctoral students. Our project, "Do Babies Matter?," traced the academic careers of men and women from their doctoral years to retirement. We found firm evidence that a lack of family-friendly policies and a lack of support for academic parents on the part of senior professors turn away both men and women—but far more often women—from careers in academic research.
It bears repeating: Unfriendly family policies—not lack of interest or commitment—are what turn many women away from academic science.
Title IX protects against unfriendly family policies. It makes clear that "a recipient shall treat pregnancy, childbirth, false pregnancy, termination of pregnancy, and recovery therefrom as a justification for a leave of absence without pay for a reasonable period of time, at the conclusion of which the employee shall be reinstated to the status which she held when the leave began or to a comparable position, without decrease in rate of compensation or loss of promotional opportunities, or any other right or privilege of employment."
But it's possible that those legal requirements are not being met at all universities. In our study of AAU institutions—the 62 pre-eminent research universities that receive the bulk of federal science money—we found that 43 percent provided either no leave policies for graduate-student mothers or very limited, ad hoc policies. Only 13 percent offered a baseline of at least six weeks of guaranteed paid leave. For postdoctoral fellows, 15 percent of universities offered no leave or had very limited policies, while a mere 23 percent provided at least six weeks of guaranteed paid leave. Few of those young scientists are eligible for the job-protected 12-week leave provided under the Family Medical Leave Act.
Faculty mothers fared much better, with 58 percent of institutions providing a baseline paid leave, but by this time many women have already decided against careers in scientific research.
Our inadequate benefits policies for doctoral students and postdocs make no economic sense. In the world of federal grants, people who drop out of science after years of training represent a huge economic loss and are a detriment to our nation's future excellence. Given the Obama administration's interest in maintaining America's competitive advantage, federal stimulus efforts and money should be focused on retaining our highly skilled female scientists.
Our report recommends that colleges and universities:
•Promote clear, well-communicated, family-responsive policies for all classes of researchers. Researchers in the United States do not receive nearly enough family-friendly benefits, particularly junior researchers. Together, federal agencies and universities can make headway in solving this systemic problem.
•Federal agencies—particularly the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation—along with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which oversees federally supported research fellows for many agencies, can help by setting equitable, clearly communicated baseline policies for those fellows. At the same time, universities need to adopt supportive policies for all classes of researchers, not just faculty members. Graduate-student researchers and postdoctoral scholars receive the most limited benefits and are arguably the most important people affecting the future of U.S. science.
•Supplement benefits for academic parents with additional money provided by federal agencies or universities. Without those supplements, faculty members who are principal investigators—those with primary responsibility for the design, execution, and management of a research project—will continue to bear the brunt of supporting family-related absences using their own research dollars. That is unfair to the principal investigators and may create a situation in which they will find it to their advantage to avoid hiring young researchers who might eventually need family-friendly policies, an unintended form of discrimination against women. To avoid that structural difficulty, supplementary financing needs to be provided when researchers paid via grants take necessary leaves.
•Work collaboratively to build a family-friendly package of policies and resources. Sharing and wide-scale adoption of proven practices are necessary.
•Rid the academic career of its lock-step timing and rigid sequential deadlines. Time limits and barriers to entry—such as requiring a postdoctoral position to begin within a certain number of years following receipt of the Ph.D.—should be removed. Universities and federal agencies need to examine all of their policies and look for ways to encourage re-entry into the pipeline for academic researchers who take time off for giving birth or caring for children. Institutions must promote a more holistic concept of career patterns that honor individual needs.
•Collect and analyze the necessary data to make sure family-friendly policies and programs are effective. Decisions about family-responsive policies, programs, and benefits will continue to be made on intuition and anecdote if they are not tracked by systematic longitudinal data. Federal agencies and universities need to build and maintain the necessary data sets to assess whether their efforts are yielding positive results and whether Title IX requirements are being met. Title IX-compliance reviews should include questions on family-responsive policies.
Subtle maternal or caregiving discrimination is difficult to prove, but concrete measures at both the student and faculty levels would go far toward reducing the unnecessary loss of female Ph.D.'s in academic science. The changes our report suggests would help to stop the female brain drain and would satisfy both the letter and the spirit of Title IX.
Mary Ann Mason is a professor and co-director of the Berkeley Law Center on Health, Economic & Family Security at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, and the co-author, with Marc Goulden and Karie Frasch, of the report "Staying Competitive: Patching America's Leaky Pipeline in the Sciences." Readers may send questions or comments to her at mamason@law.berkeley.edu.
By Mary Ann Mason
Barack Obama, in the month before his election, promised an audience of members of the Association for Women in Science and the Society of Women Engineers that he would do more to enforce Title IX, which prevents sexual discrimination in educational programs and activities receiving federal funds. He also vowed to significantly increase the number of women in science and technology.
On the 37th anniversary of Title IX, the Obama administration recommitted to women's advancement in the sciences when Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Valerie Jarrett, a White House senior adviser, issued a statement that said the law was integral "to encourage women to pursue their aspirations in fields in which they have been historically underrepresented, such as science and technology."
President Obama should be aware that Title IX does not just cover blatant gender discrimination—such as a bias that women are not as competent as men in science or math. It also protects women against sex discrimination on the basis of marital, parental, or family status, and on the basis of pregnancy. Those provisions come into play over the issue of retaining female scientists in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, the STEM fields.
Our research group at the University of California at Berkeley this month published a major report, "Staying Competitive: Patching America's Leaky Pipeline in the Sciences." Our conclusions were based on four years of original research, including a study of work-life policies at all of the institutions in the Association of American Universities and at 13 federal grant agencies.
Where is the biggest leak? It's at the point at which women who have received their Ph.D.'s or are working as postdoctoral scholars are making the critical decision of whether to continue their careers in academic research. Too many of them are deciding not to, primarily because of their interest in starting a family.
Our study found that married female scientists with young children who have received their Ph.D.'s are 35 percent less likely to enter a tenure-track position than are married men with children. We found little difference between single childless women and married men with young children in terms of their likelihood to enter the tenure track. A similar pipeline leak occurs at the point of granting tenure: Married women with young children are 27 percent less likely, on a yearly basis, to earn tenure than are married men with young children.
Job candidates in the sciences who are pregnant or have children may face very real gender discrimination. Some scientists may believe that women who have families cannot be serious scholars, because academic science demands exclusive attention to research.
Women in science and math learn that bias early on. When I was dean of the graduate division at Berkeley, my research team and I studied thousands of graduate students and faculty members to learn more about the effects of family formation on the careers of doctoral students. Our project, "Do Babies Matter?," traced the academic careers of men and women from their doctoral years to retirement. We found firm evidence that a lack of family-friendly policies and a lack of support for academic parents on the part of senior professors turn away both men and women—but far more often women—from careers in academic research.
It bears repeating: Unfriendly family policies—not lack of interest or commitment—are what turn many women away from academic science.
Title IX protects against unfriendly family policies. It makes clear that "a recipient shall treat pregnancy, childbirth, false pregnancy, termination of pregnancy, and recovery therefrom as a justification for a leave of absence without pay for a reasonable period of time, at the conclusion of which the employee shall be reinstated to the status which she held when the leave began or to a comparable position, without decrease in rate of compensation or loss of promotional opportunities, or any other right or privilege of employment."
But it's possible that those legal requirements are not being met at all universities. In our study of AAU institutions—the 62 pre-eminent research universities that receive the bulk of federal science money—we found that 43 percent provided either no leave policies for graduate-student mothers or very limited, ad hoc policies. Only 13 percent offered a baseline of at least six weeks of guaranteed paid leave. For postdoctoral fellows, 15 percent of universities offered no leave or had very limited policies, while a mere 23 percent provided at least six weeks of guaranteed paid leave. Few of those young scientists are eligible for the job-protected 12-week leave provided under the Family Medical Leave Act.
Faculty mothers fared much better, with 58 percent of institutions providing a baseline paid leave, but by this time many women have already decided against careers in scientific research.
Our inadequate benefits policies for doctoral students and postdocs make no economic sense. In the world of federal grants, people who drop out of science after years of training represent a huge economic loss and are a detriment to our nation's future excellence. Given the Obama administration's interest in maintaining America's competitive advantage, federal stimulus efforts and money should be focused on retaining our highly skilled female scientists.
Our report recommends that colleges and universities:
•Promote clear, well-communicated, family-responsive policies for all classes of researchers. Researchers in the United States do not receive nearly enough family-friendly benefits, particularly junior researchers. Together, federal agencies and universities can make headway in solving this systemic problem.
•Federal agencies—particularly the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation—along with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which oversees federally supported research fellows for many agencies, can help by setting equitable, clearly communicated baseline policies for those fellows. At the same time, universities need to adopt supportive policies for all classes of researchers, not just faculty members. Graduate-student researchers and postdoctoral scholars receive the most limited benefits and are arguably the most important people affecting the future of U.S. science.
•Supplement benefits for academic parents with additional money provided by federal agencies or universities. Without those supplements, faculty members who are principal investigators—those with primary responsibility for the design, execution, and management of a research project—will continue to bear the brunt of supporting family-related absences using their own research dollars. That is unfair to the principal investigators and may create a situation in which they will find it to their advantage to avoid hiring young researchers who might eventually need family-friendly policies, an unintended form of discrimination against women. To avoid that structural difficulty, supplementary financing needs to be provided when researchers paid via grants take necessary leaves.
•Work collaboratively to build a family-friendly package of policies and resources. Sharing and wide-scale adoption of proven practices are necessary.
•Rid the academic career of its lock-step timing and rigid sequential deadlines. Time limits and barriers to entry—such as requiring a postdoctoral position to begin within a certain number of years following receipt of the Ph.D.—should be removed. Universities and federal agencies need to examine all of their policies and look for ways to encourage re-entry into the pipeline for academic researchers who take time off for giving birth or caring for children. Institutions must promote a more holistic concept of career patterns that honor individual needs.
•Collect and analyze the necessary data to make sure family-friendly policies and programs are effective. Decisions about family-responsive policies, programs, and benefits will continue to be made on intuition and anecdote if they are not tracked by systematic longitudinal data. Federal agencies and universities need to build and maintain the necessary data sets to assess whether their efforts are yielding positive results and whether Title IX requirements are being met. Title IX-compliance reviews should include questions on family-responsive policies.
Subtle maternal or caregiving discrimination is difficult to prove, but concrete measures at both the student and faculty levels would go far toward reducing the unnecessary loss of female Ph.D.'s in academic science. The changes our report suggests would help to stop the female brain drain and would satisfy both the letter and the spirit of Title IX.
Mary Ann Mason is a professor and co-director of the Berkeley Law Center on Health, Economic & Family Security at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, and the co-author, with Marc Goulden and Karie Frasch, of the report "Staying Competitive: Patching America's Leaky Pipeline in the Sciences." Readers may send questions or comments to her at mamason@law.berkeley.edu.
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