‘Beyond the Glass Ceiling’

A special report on Naturejobs.com looks at why there are still so few minorities and women on the faculties of science departments in the United States when record numbers of them are earning science Ph.D.‘s. Kendall Powell, a freelance science writer who wrote the article for the magazine, notes that …

In 2003, 51% of the U.S. population was female and more than 25% of the population was from a minority group under-represented in science: African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans. Women earned well over one-third of the science and engineering doctorates awarded in 2003-4 and African American and Latino doctorates have steadily increased during the past ten years.

But women hold fewer than one-third of all science and engineering faculty posts, and just 18% of full professorships. For minorities, the numbers are below 10% and 6.7%, respectively. When the numbers are dissected at the disciplinary level, many fields find they are doing far worse in hiring talented women and minorities than should be expected, given the numbers of doctorates they award to those groups.

He suggests that economics is largely to blame for the low numbers of minority science professors. He quotes Aaron Velasco, a Latino seismologist at the University of Texas at El Paso who — for financial reasons — almost didn’t become an academic:

“I honestly could not afford to become a postdoctoral fellow,” says Velasco, recalling how the enormous debt he had built up during almost 10 years of studying beyond high school forced him to seek something better than a postdoc’s salary. In search of financial security, Velasco went straight into industry after graduate school, then found his way back to academia.

And he’s just one of many talented minority graduates who “cite economic disadvantage as a major reason for why they don’t end up in academic positions,” Powell writes.

Isiah Warner, a chemistry professor at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge who has overseen the transformation of his department into the top producer of African-American chemistry Ph.D.‘s, told Powell during an interview that he’s not at all surprised:

“They see me work 8-12 hours a day, seven days a week for a job that pays only two-thirds of your salary, meanwhile you have to hustle the other third of your salary and grant money constantly,” says Warner. That’s compared with an industry job offering a $90,000 salary out of graduate school and a 40-hour work week. “Which would you choose?” he asks.

For women, the clash between academic work and family is still the biggest obstacle to getting ahead in academe, though the problem of “implicit bias” — people’s tendency to hire those who look like them — is also a major barrier for both women and minorities, Powell writes.

Those few who manage to overcome that bias can expect to feel isolated “once they enter the upper ranks of academia,” which continues to be a bastion for white males, he adds.

So what should search committees do to attract and retain women and minority scientists?

Start touting the “positive aspects of academia, including intellectual freedom and flexibility, and ultimately higher salaries and stability” and stop expecting women and minority candidates to just come a knockin’, and, instead, take a page from company recruiters, Powell writes. “Diversity leaders say that if members of faculty-search committees were to talent spot” at annual meetings “like industry recruiters, they would see that, despite myths to the contrary, there are enough women or minority candidates to go around,” he concludes.

Naturejobs.com also has an article about similar problems at European universities.

(Thanks to Women in Science for the pointer.)