Congress Hears Proposals on Boosting Number of Women in the Sciences

Higher-education leaders spoke before Congress on Wednesday about the conspicuous lack of tenured women on science and engineering faculties in the United States and proposed ideas for rectifying the situation, JJ Hermes reports today on The Chronicle’s Web site.

Hermes notes the grim statistics cited by Kathie L. Olsen, deputy director of the National Science Foundation, who said that “women have earned 23 percent of the doctoral degrees in the physical sciences since 1997, yet held only 14 percent of academic physical-science faculty positions in 2003.”

He also quotes Myron Campbell, chair of the physics department at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, as saying that the statistics are far worse in physics, where fewer than 5 percent of full professors are female.

One of the suggested remedies put forth was the idea of creating “an NCAA-style organization to monitor the hiring practices of academic departments and urge them to comply with federal laws banning gender discrimination,” Hermes writes.
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