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Sept. 19, 2006

The Real Barriers for Women in Science

Women are seriously underrepresented on academic science and engineering faculties because of a mix of “unintentional” biases and outdated institutional policies and structures, a National Academies committee said in a report Monday.

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The report, the latest in a recent drumbeat of studies and papers documenting perceived problems and advocating aggressive steps to fix them, puts it to colleges, higher education groups, scholarly societies, federal agencies and others to alter their policies to help improve the climate for women in academic science.

“Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering,” was prepared by the academies’ Committee on Maximizing the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering, which is made up of college presidents and provosts, professors, scientists and policy makers and headed by Donna E. Shalala, president of the University of Miami and former U.S. secretary of health and human services.

The report lays out a series of findings that rebut the notion — offered most famously of late in a controversial speech by Lawrence H. Summers early last year — that a lack of talent and/or motivation play a large role in explaining the relative underrepresentation of women in science and engineering fields.

Among the panel’s findings:

  • A series of cognitive and other studies “have not found any significant biological differences between men and women in performing science and mathematics that can account for the lower representation of women in academic faculty and scientific leadership positions in these fields.”
  • Although women fall out of academic science at nearly every stage of the pipeline, women are underrepresented on faculties even in fields in which they have reached relative parity. They make up only 15.4 percent of full professors in the social and behavioral sciences and 14.8 percent in the life sciences, despite having earned more than 30 percent and 20 percent of the doctorates in those fields, respectively, over more than 30 years.
  • Women are “very likely” to face discrimination — sometimes deliberately but often inadvertently — in “every field of science and engineering. (Minority women, the panel notes throughout the report, often face a double whammy.) The discrimination results from a combination of built-in biases that make them less likely to hire a woman than a man with identical accomplishments, of evaluation criteria that “contain arbitrary and subjective components that disadvantage women.” For instance, “characteristics that are often selected for and believed ... to relate to scientific creativity — namely assertiveness and single-mindedness —” are both given greater weight in hiring and promotion than traits such as flexibility, diplomacy and curiosity, and “stereotyped as socially unacceptable traits for women.”

“The United States can no longer afford the underperformance of our academic institutions in attracting the best and brightest minds to the science and engineering enterprise,” the panel says in its report. “Nor can it afford to devalue the contributions of some members of that workforce through gender inequalities and discrimination.”

The committee asks a wide range of players in and around higher education to do their part to in its “large scale and interdependent” set of recommendations. It asks:

  • Trustees and presidents to “provide clear leadership in changing the culture and structure of their institutions to recruit, retain and promote women,” including setting goals for hiring and promotion requiring “evidence of a fair, broad and aggressive search before approving appointments,” and holding departments “accountable for the equity of their search process and outcomes.”
  • Deans, department chairs and tenured faculty to undertake a full discussion of “climate issues,” and to adopt policies that “take into account the flexibility that faculty need across the life course and do not sacrifice quality in the process of meeting rigid timelines.”
  • Higher education groups to “consider forming an inter-institution monitoring organization” that would set norms, collect data, and track compliance and accountability in hiring.
  • Scholarly societies to adopt guidelines aimed at ensuring reasonable representation of women on journal editorial boards and among invited speakers at their events.
  • Federal agencies and foundations to ensure that their standards and rules “support the full participation of women and do not reinforce a culture that fundamentally discriminates” against them.
  • Congress to ensure adequate enforcement of antidiscrimination laws.

“The fact that women are capable of contributing to the nation’s scientific and engineering enterprise but are impeded in doing so because of gender and racial/ethnic bias and outmoded ‘rules’ governing academic success is deeply troubling and embarrassing,” the report concludes. “It is also a call to action.”

— Doug Lederman

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Comments

I empathise totally with the previous commentary: I too am a Stanford graduate, a female, and a person with an above average scientific track record in terms of both funding and papers who after 12 years of one temporary contract after another now finds myself unemployed with a whole bunch of male friends/peers in science who got permanent jobs years ago. Perhaps I am too stupid to have left science already, as hypothesized by one of the previous commentators, but I prefer to think that it is more a case of wishful thinking and gullibility: I absolutely loved the job to the point where I still can’t think of anything else I would rather do and am quite depressed about my current circumstances; I also believed what I was told when doing my degree, namely that because there was such a need for women in science, a good job was effectively guaranteed if I stayed highly productive. This is still the mantra that is being chanted by authorities (politicians, chancellors, even women in science advocacy groups)- and even louder now than when I started in science. I am definitely guilty of gullibility but I think it is a complete cop-out to suggest that the reason women are not in science is because they are smart. I am also tired of hearing about “family issues” as an excuse for the sorry profile of women in science. Science is one of the most flexible jobs that exists- there is absolutely no tangible reason why it should be family unfriendly compared to, say, other professions which are female dominated (and therefore, according to the argument, presumably “family friendly”) such as school teaching where a whole bunch of people rely on you turning up fresh, motivated and exactly on time every single day and if you can’t because e.g. your child is sick, it causes massive disruption: cell cultures or rats or plants or equations or instruments are generally a bit more tolerant and easy to deal with than a group of 10 year olds. Moreover, many of the tasks performed by senior researchers can be done from home: just a bit different to being a teller at a bank or a nurse in a dental practice. Similarly, I know a lot of women who have left science and NOT A SINGLE ONE of them left because of family priorities. They have left because they had no choice, because they felt (and were!) isolated and excluded, because they were bullied, and for a whole spectrum of related reasons that will never be addressed as long as the main focus is on “family issues”. I realize that my personal experiences do not a statistically robust study make. However the fact that “family unfriendly” workplace is starting to become the catchall explanation as to why women leave science is a real concern. It is a convenient label that does nothing but contribute to perception that women are not as serious about their science as men; thus perpetuating the unconscious discrimination against women that is the real reason for the tragic profile of women in science.

PS. I would really love to get in touch with Bonnie and would appreciate if you could forward my email address.

Really time for a change, Dr at none, at 4:10 am EST on February 29, 2008

Free Choice

Has anyone ever considered that women are exercising their right to choose? Just maybe, women are highly intelligent, and they aren’t impeded because of their gender and/or racial/ethnic bias. Just maybe they are choosing other career paths because they want to.

A Woman in STEM, at 1:55 pm EDT on September 19, 2006

Women Aren’t In Science Because Women Aren’t Stupid

From http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

“Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States.”

“This article explores this fourth possible explanation for the dearth of women in science: They found better jobs.”

“Does this make sense as a career for anyone? Absolutely! Just get out your atlas.

Imagine that you are a smart, but impoverished, young person in China. Your high IQ and hard work got you into one of the best undergraduate programs in China. The $1800 per month graduate stipend at University of Nebraska or University of Wisconsin will afford you a much higher standard of living than any job you could hope for in China. The desperate need for graduate student labor and lack of Americans who are interested in PhD programs in science and engineering means that you’ll have no trouble getting a visa. When you finish your degree, a small amount of paperwork will suffice to ensure your continued place in the legal American work force. Science may be one of the lowest paid fields for high IQ people in the U.S., but it pays a lot better than most jobs in China or India. “

Jon Steiner, at 2:25 pm EDT on September 19, 2006

Science is anti-woman and anti-family because the entire society is basically anti-woman and anti-family (specifically anti-child). When a female scientist values her family/children enough to take a leave from the mostly mundane, ethically questionable science that goes on nowadays (not to mention the political jockeying that goes on during company mergers), she is despised and derided as unprofessional, uncompetitive and anti-intellectual. If she exercised the “choice” to leave the work force and provide biological and intellectual nurturing to her own children (hopefully to develop their scientific intellectual potential, not leaving them to the care of cheap undocumented alien caretakers), they encounter an immovable wall of rejection in the science field when they try to return. It is as if their brains have melted away in the few short years; female human resource specialists (hiring personnel) are the worst — “How dare you care for your kids fulltime when I did not. No wonder you are a washout!!” We monitor the progress of our gender by using the masculine model as our yardstick. We will never win that way. Men support each other in science and in most other fields. Women tend to tear each other down. Not even God Himself can help us if we continue doing this to each other!!

cynthia gonzalez, at 1:55 pm EDT on October 3, 2006

bias at work

Not only are smart women in science facing a bias for caring for their families, they are also facing a bias against smart women who stand up for themselves. As a survivor of a federal resource agency sexual harassment lawsuit, I assist smart women who are harassed at work just for being competent. Their male supervisors say ignorant things like “they harass you because you make them look bad". Now how is that for smart logic in a gov’t supervisor? Yes, some of the female supervisors are just as bad-they have to be hard on females to look good in their male supervisor’s eyes. By the way, no one works for the gov’t for the low pay and federal lawsuits only make the attorneys rich.

Jenny Jones, biologist/educator, at 12:35 pm EDT on October 14, 2006

Women Out of Science NOT by Choice

Anyone who thinks the dwindling numbers of women as they climb the educational and then postdoctoral ladder toward science careers, is due in part to merely ‘choice’ is

in denial.

When I come from Stanford with many more publications than a guy from some local state college with few if any research publications, and only he gets a response to a the job opening we both applied for, “we are looking for a nice young man starting a family to hire for this position", what do you think is going on?

Or how about going on interviews where they stop and stare at you because you are the only woman who has ventured into that back room with all the guys; and they just look right through you and refuse to respond to your questions, because in their eyes you are ‘invisible’.

Women ultimately wind up unemployed or only given temporary positions: extra postdocs, as fill-ins while a search committee seek a qualified (male) individuals...

All those out there who say we don’t need affirmative action in the 21st century are in denial.

No woman winds up at Stanford without smarts, talent, motivation and dedication to a career. But all those women I knew at Stanford are now years later, dead in their tracks because they weren’t ‘man enough’ to be considered hot stuff in science. You gotta be able to pound your chest just like those other male primates to be viewed as a good scientist.

Nothing has changed in 30, 40, 50 years or more. Women’s contributions are still being stolen by male colleagues who then get rewarded for that contribution with a Nobel Prize.....

Let’s move beyond testosterone as a requirement for scientific savvy and aptitude.

Dr Bonnie Males, at 4:50 pm EDT on June 7, 2007

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