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[lux__]

Women in science and engineering are hindered not by lack of ability but by bias and “outmoded institutional structures” in academia, an expert panel reported today.

The panel, convened by the National Academy of Sciences, said that in an era of global competition the nation could not afford “such underuse of precious human capital.” Among other steps, the report recommends that universities alter procedures for hiring and evaluation, change typical timetables for tenure and promotion, and provide more support for working parents.

“Unless a deeper talent pool is tapped, it will be difficult for our country to maintain our competitiveness in science and engineering,” the panel’s chairwoman, Donna E. Shalala, said at a news conference at which the report, “Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering,” was made public.

Dr. Shalala, a former secretary of health and human services who is now president of the University of Miami, said part of the problem was insufficient effort on the part of college and university administrators. “Many of us spend more energy enforcing the law on our sports teams than we have in have in our academic halls,” she said.

The panel dismissed the idea, notably advanced last year by Lawrence H. Summers, then the president of Harvard, that the relative dearth of women in the upper ranks of science might be the result of “innate” intellectual deficiencies, particularly in mathematics.

If there are any cognitive differences, the report says, they are small and irrelevant. In any event, the much-studied gender gap in math performance has all but disappeared as more and more girls enroll in demanding classes. Even among very high achievers, the gap is narrowing, the panelists said.

A spokesman for Mr. Summers said he was out of the country and could not be reached for comment.

Nor is the problem a lack of women in the academic pipeline, the report says. Though women leave science and engineering more often than men “at every educational transition” from high school through college professorships, the number of women studying science and engineering has sharply increased at all levels.

For 30 years, the report says, women have earned at least 30 percent of the nation’s doctorates in social and behavioral sciences, and at least 20 percent of the doctorates in life sciences. Yet they appear among full professors in those fields at less than half those levels. Women from minorities are “virtually absent,” it adds.

The report also dismissed other commonly held beliefs — that women are uncompetitive or less productive, that they take too much time off for their families, and so on. Their real problems, it says, are unconscious but pervasive bias, “arbitrary and subjective” evaluation processes, and a work environment in which “anyone lacking the work and family support traditionally provided by a ‘wife’ is at a serious disadvantage.”

Along with Dr. Shalala, the panel included Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard who has long challenged the “innate differences” view, and Ruth Simmons, the president of Brown University, who established a widely praised program for aspiring engineers when she was president of the all-female Smith College.

The report was dedicated to another panelist, Denice Denton, an electrical engineer who until her suicide this summer was chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a forceful advocate for women, gays and minority members in science and engineering.

The 18-member panel had only one man: Robert J. Birgeneau, chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. But Dr. Shalala noted that the National Academy of Sciences committee that reviewed the report had 10 men.

“Nothing was a foregone conclusion,” she said, adding that the committee was surprised at the strength of evidence supporting the report’s conclusions. In an interview, Dr. Simmons of Brown said: “The data don’t lie. There are lots of arguments one could have mounted 30 years ago, but 30 years later we have incontrovertible data that women do have the ability to do science and engineering at a very high level.”

She said the more relevant question is, “Why aren’t they electing these fields when the national need and the opportunities in the fields are so great?”

Leveling the playing field does not mean giving women an unfair advantage, another panelist, Maria Zuber said. Dr. Zuber, a geophysicist at M.I.T., said for example that scholarly journals might eliminate the identify of authors when they send manuscripts out for pre-publication review. That way, she said, work would be judged on its merits, rather than by the prominence of its authors.

Ana Maria Cauce, a psychologist at the University of Washington and another panelist, said at the news conference, “This is about more excellence, this is not about changing the bar or lowering the bar.”.

Ben A. Barres, a neuroscientist at Stanford who was not connected to the effort, but who published a commentary on women in science last summer in the journal Nature, said echoed the report’s assertion that small administrative changes could produce big differences for women in science.

He pointed to the Pioneer award program for young researchers run by the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Barres, who has been a judge for the awards, said even making it known that scientists could nominate themselves helped make the pool of winners more diverse.

Dr. Shalala began the report’s preface by recalling that when she was in graduate school in political science the 1960’s and as a young professor she was told that fellowships or tenure would never be hers because she was a woman.

Overt discrimination like that is now rare, she wrote, but progress has been too slow. “We need overarching reform now,” she said.

[lux__]

How the Tenure Track Discriminates Against Women
By Joan C. Williams

Balancing ActHow to find a balance between work and family

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Thirty years ago, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild predicted that the proportion of tenured female faculty members would rise at a snail's pace, despite a sharp increase in the number of women earning advanced academic degrees.

She was right. In 1995, according to the most recent federal statistics available, women held only 26 percent of tenured academic posts. Studies also show that women are less likely to receive tenure than men: while the rate at which men earn tenure has climbed sharply since 1975, the rate for women has not.

What's going on here? The problem lies in the way we define the ideal worker in academe: as someone who can move anywhere from Massachusetts to New Mexico, and can work like a fiend until tenure is granted -- or denied -- at around age 35.

In the old days, these job requirements did not bar advancement of the men and women who took academic jobs. Men were not affected because male academics had wives without careers who cared for the children and moved from place to place as their husband's job required. Female academics back then were not hurt either, because, by in large, they were single and childless.

Then came the fly in the ointment: working wives. Suddenly the system did not work. For years women have been graduating from many Ph.D. programs in roughly equal numbers to men, but so many drop out before they get tenure, or are denied it, that the percentage of tenured women rises very slowly. Why?

Let's first consider why women drop out. Take a woman who toils through eight years of post-graduate education and gets a coveted tenure-track position at age 30. Then she hears her biological clock ticking louder than her tenure clock: she has a baby. She's under pressure to publish her first book. She comes home at 5 p.m., plays with the baby, and sits down again at her computer after the baby goes to bed at 7:30. But then she is asked onto committees, to run a speaker series, to join a prestigious reading group.

She does it all: she's a superstar. Gradually she finds herself committed to professional activities three to four nights a week. Now the baby is two, and she's beginning to think about having another. Meanwhile, the department has hired a young man who works every waking minute: his wife is at home with the kids. She knows she can't compete with that, so she makes the rational choice. She quits the tenure track.

If this example tells us why women are more likely to quit before tenure, it also helps explain their lower tenure rates. Suppose she had stayed, and refused to run the speaker series. Or turned down committee assignments. Or decided to take on both, and made up for time away from her family by rushing home at 3 p.m. to spend "quality time" with the kids. Suppose she got pregnant again, and found herself confined to bed. Her colleagues were glad to pitch in, but once the baby is born they feel she "never really bounced back." She is hurried, always in a rush -- not as collegial as she used to be. Perhaps that's enough to be denied tenure. Even if it's not, perhaps she finds she simply doesn't have enough time to write. Or suppose she grows demoralized by the perception that she's "not living up to her promise." There are so many ways in which work and family conflicts can end up fueling a denial of tenure.

Mothers in academe are disadvantaged by the way we define the ideal worker as someone who can move at will and needs no time off for childbearing or child-rearing. That definition disadvantages women in three basic ways, the most straightforward of which is that most women need time off for childbirth.

Most also need time off for child-rearing, because American women still do the bulk of the child care. We judge a mother -- and she judges herself -- by whether she is there for her children. That's why, according to Suzanne Bianchi, a sociologist at the University of Maryland at College Park who is conducting research on how Americans use their time, 92 percent of mothers ages 25 to 45 work less than 50 hours a week -- the key years of career (and child) development.

Last but not least, the ideal academic is someone who can make the right moves at the right time, quite literally. This describes many men but few women. One poll found that 71 percent of women thought they should relocate if their husband received a very good job in a different city; another found that half of women, and two-thirds of men, put the husband's career first.

Designing our work ideals around men's bodies, and their life patterns -- their relative immunity from child care, their felt entitlement to move their families to take a better job -- discriminates against mothers. And, because 90 percent of women become mothers during their working lives, discrimination against mothers reflects discrimination against women as a group.

Ideals of sex equality are not the only ideals at stake in the current conflict between work and family. Most of us believe that children need and deserve time with their parents. Although compared with other professionals, academics are less tied to their desks and have tremendous time flexibility, often they find that the overall workload is so heavy that their flexibility seems less than one might think. From graduate students to full professors, academics not married to homemakers often feel caught between a work world that expects 12-hour days and the strong cultural expectation that raising children takes time. Our jobs are sized too big to give our children the time we feel they need.

We can either change jobs or change home demands. Let's discuss home demands first.

Renegotiating with your partner. Women typically fare worse than men in the conflict between work and family. American mothers typically handle two-thirds of the child care and the housework. If this describes you, start by making a list of everything you do, and everything your partner does. Then talk turkey about how to create a fairer household. This is crucial if you want to stop a slow slide towards "choosing" to quit because "it just isn't working." Temporary conflict is better for the soul -- and the marriage -- than permanent, overburdened fury. It's also better for the children. Ellen Galinsky's 1999 book, Ask the Children: What America's Children Really Think About Working Parents found that what bothered the kids of dual-career families most was the high level of stress.

Renegotiating home demands is important, but the real problems are structural: Our work system does not fit with our family system. Reshaping work is a major project. I will mention two tools:

Job sharing. Our jobs are sized too big; one solution is to split them. Job sharing splits one job between two people, leaving each of them free to allocate the various components in whatever way they wish, so long as the whole job gets done. The key challenge of job sharing is to find someone you know and trust enough to share a position with -- remember, you will be judged by the quality of their performance as well as your own. Academics are in a particularly good position to set up job shares because they know fellow graduate students in their own fields -- they may even be married to one. We need to develop Internet sites, and hiring protocols, that make job sharing easier. And graduate students need to develop the friendships that could ease their work and family load later on in life.

Part-time tenure track. Why not let people stay on the tenure track, but work half time when they need to, letting them return to full time when they can? Given the princely level of academic salaries (sarcasm intended), such a part-time position would be used sparingly by most employees, but would be helpful in families which, say, had two toddlers or faced a serious childhood (or parental) illness. How would it work? A part-timer would teach half of the normal teaching load, take on half as many committee assignments, and be expected to produce scholarship at half the rate. In return, he or she would be paid half the salary, get a benefits package worth half as much, and proceed toward tenure at half the rate. My colleague Robert W. Drago, a professor of labor studies at Pennsylvania State University's main campus, and I are proposing in a forthcoming issue of Change magazine that academe create a "half-time tenure track."

At a more sweeping level, we need to open up two new conversations. One is about sex discrimination -- not about sexist comments by a few clueless men, but about whether the current design of the tenure track discriminates against women.

The second is about how to reshape jobs around our ideals of parenting. Cutting back may be unthinkable, but it's not impossible. A generation ago, most academic jobs didn't require a 60-hour week. The Great American Speed-Up has affected academics along with other professionals: Americans now work harder than the world's most famous workaholics, the Japanese. We need to reverse this trend. A good first step would be to go back and find out how many hours academics worked 30 years ago. How did departments limp along in the era of the 9-to-5 dad? The students got taught, the exams graded, the books written.

We may not want to replicate what existed then, but many academic families know one thing for sure: They don't want to continue the "whirling dervish" life now common among pressured dual-career families. Something has to give. We need better choices than the two we have now: to abandon our ideals of parental involvement with children, or to perpetuate the eerie absence of mothers in tenured positions.

There has to be a better way.

Joan Williams, a professor law at American University and director of its Gender, Work & Family Project, is author of Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It (Oxford University Press, 1999).

[lux__]

Women and the Tenure Track
By Sara Davis

First PersonPersonal experiences on the job market

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Not long ago, a colleague of mine was turned down for a tenure-track job because she was married. How do I know this was the reason? The head of the hiring committee said so.

My colleague, Jenny, applied for a tenure-track position in history at a respected public university. After a brilliant on-campus interview and a few days of lively conversation with colleagues, Jenny thought she had the gig nailed. On the last day, the hiring committee, as a group, sat her down. The chair -- a woman -- told Jenny that she was their top candidate, but added: "We've been trying to figure out what your family situation is. What's the story?"

Jenny hemmed and hawed. Faced with a circle of people who had the power to decide her future, she decided to tell the truth: her husband is a biochemist, and he recently applied for a job on the same campus.

"Let us know if he gets the job," said the hiring committee chair. "It will be a major factor in our decision."

A month later, Jenny got an e-mail message from the university. The committee had decided to offer the job to someone else -- a man, as it happened. "However," the chair wrote, "if your husband does get the position here, we'd be happy to hire you as an adjunct."

Jenny says that she will be an adjunct in that department when Satan puts on figure skates. I thought this story was some kind of horrifying flashback to the 1950's. Yet when I spoke to other women on the job market, I found that there were a lot of similar stories out there. This made me think a little more carefully about the role of women in higher education.

When I started graduate school, I thought academe looked pretty progressive, compared with my very brief experience in the business world. My professors seemed sensitive to the politics of gender and race -- they talked about it in the classroom all the time. The obnoxious sexist joking and racist humor that were widely accepted at business meetings and parties were missing from department gatherings. My boss in advertising hit on me and my female co-workers constantly, but my adviser at the University of Pennsylvania propped his door open whenever we met to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. I almost never felt that my professors in graduate school treated me differently from the guys in my classes. In fact, smart, outspoken female students dominated the classrooms.

Yet after only a couple of years on the job market, the balance is beginning to shift. More of my male than female peers seem to be getting tenure-track jobs. And despite the questionable office climate in my advertising firm, there were actually a lot more women and people of color in top jobs at the company than there are today in the tenured ranks of academe.

To gather some data, I first decided to conduct a very scientific survey of my address book. After leafing through, I added up the names of 30 male and 40 female friends and acquaintances with Ph.D.'s. A quarter of the women have already dropped out of the academic job market and taken jobs with businesses or nonprofit organizations. A few have shifted into what looks like terminal adjunct mode.

On the other hand, only a sixth of the men have left academe, and none are adjuncts. There are twice as many men with tenure in my phone book as there are women. It has only been two years since my dissertation defense, but I foresee my phone book showing greater female attrition over time.

Some of you may say that my phone-book survey has a high margin of error. However, reports from the American Association of University Professors and other professional associations and universities bear me out. An A.A.U.P. fact sheet on the status of women shows that in academic 2000-1, women made up only 31 percent of the faculty at doctoral-level institutions and 40 percent of the faculty at baccalaureate institutions. Women did, of course, make up 50 percent of the faculty at institutions without ranks.

The numbers are even worse in the sciences: A 1999-2000 report from the Association of American Medical Colleges shows that the percentage of tenured women on the faculty at medical schools has stayed exactly the same for several years: 15 percent. At my current employer, Yale University, only 11 percent of the tenured professors are women. And a 1998 report from the Higher Education Research Institute of the University of California at Los Angeles says that female faculty members "continue to serve in the lower academic ranks more often than do men" and are "less likely to be tenured."

Everyone seems to agree that there are plenty of outstanding female graduate students: "The problem is not in the pipeline," they say. But somewhere between the pipeline and the tenure track, tons of women get discouraged and bail out.

And if we are honest, some of us are discouraging each other. For instance, rather than rushing to support Jenny, a lot of my female colleagues blamed her for the whole debacle: "She messed up," said one friend. "She should have underscored her commitment to the job, no matter what." "Jenny should have told them her marital status was irrelevant," said another. "Jenny shouldn't have worn her wedding ring to the job interview in the first place," said a third.

Maybe they're right. No doubt Ms. Mentor can offer some good advice about how Jenny could have better handled the situation.

But here is what Jenny says: Her application was undermined by a chairwoman, not a chairman. Jenny points out that if she hadn't married an academic, she might well have gotten the job. On the other hand, her husband's decision to marry an academic will never affect his job prospects. She also says that academe expects her to live the life of a monk, but that she's pretty displeased with the quality of work she sees produced by famous senior scholars who have chosen to do just that. In sum, she's getting turned off by the whole business.

She hasn't dropped out of the academic job market yet, but she recently had an interview with a private company. And why not? The pay can only get better.

Under the circumstances, it is heartening to read that Princeton University recently appointed an eminent molecular biologist, Shirley Tilghman, as its 19th president. Ms. Tilghman has been an outspoken critic of the situation facing junior female scholars in the academy. (See an article from The Chronicle, May 18.)

Maybe it's time for more senior scholars to bring this problem out into the public and take a stronger stance about the treatment of women on their own campuses and across academe.

As for us young Ph.D.'s on the job market, can we use these experiences to make us stronger, to do work that is twice as good, to set better standards for our profession? That's what I keep arguing to Jenny, but I'm not sure she's convinced.

Sara Davis is a postdoctoral fellow at the U.C.L.A.'s Center for Southeast Asian Studies. She had previously written about her experiences on the academic job market for The Chronicle.

[lux__]

The NAS panel found that the disproportionate advancement of men contrasted with women in tenure track sciences and engineering positions is due to "bias" and "outmoded institutional structures" rather than to "ability." The NYT published the findings in the last month.

[larryc]

Lux, it appears that you have begun 4 or 5 different threads on this same topic in the last hour.  Isn't this an act of bad faith and an abuse of these boards? A good discussion was proceeding in the thread you began yesterday, all of these articles you are posting could have been added to that conversation.

[lux__]

I find that question offensive. I always behave in good faith. Quite frankly, running away from counterexamples that demonstrate the opposite of what you've said shows intellectual bad faith. You're ignoring substantive evidence of a national problem to gripe about the style of the post. That's overlooking the larger point. 

[dr_stones]

Who are hu?

A quarter of your posts are thread-starters on the same topic, and would better serve a compact thread . . . I'm with my critical colleague . . .

[voxprincipalis]

Mmmm, yep, as usual, I'm with larryc, who was not at all offensive but rather far more polite than he needed to be.

You, on the other hand, lux, have been rude and dismissive, and not willing to concede flaws in your logic and assumptions.

Repeating your assertions more loudly does not make them any more true. Nor does sticking your fingers in your ears so as not to hear anything that might disturb you.

That reminds me, where are my Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses?

VP

[supernumerary]

I think Lux should get together with C-Cut'n'Paste Guy. They have the same reasoning and arguing style.

[voxprincipalis]

I think Lux should get together with C-Cut'n'Paste Guy. They have the same reasoning and arguing style.

Perhaps lux is hoping that when we see hu's moniker, we will automatically supply "et veritas" and therefore take everything hu says as unquestionable truth.

Don't get me wrong; I'm all for Latin phrases, obviously. But if we are playing the subliminal completion game, though, I'm about ready to re-name hu "ad___".  There are just so many choices!

My goodness, I have been snarky today. I think I chalked up Snarky Posts #25-30, counting this one. Still, I maintain a snarkiness percentage of only 4%. Ot-nay Ad-bay.

VP

[prytania3]

Vox said:

Perhaps lux is hoping that when we see hu's moniker, we will automatically supply "et veritas" and therefore take everything hu says as unquestionable truth.

Wow. I immediately thought of Lux Interior of the old punk band, The Clash.

[larryc]

For you, Pry, London Calling:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiVbkHhJUzw

[prytania3]

For you, Pry, London Calling:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiVbkHhJUzw

Loved it! Loved it!

Why didn't the moderators move this to the punk rock thread?

[lux__]

What are the logical flaws in the National Academy of Science's report or in my citation of the panel's report as evidence that there's sexism in tenure track decisions?

Was my logical flaw in expecting posters read what I wrote or read the Chronicle of Higher Education?

[supernumerary]

Is that you, thinkuniversity? If not, it's truly uncanny. The pattern is exactly the same, but we've moved from CIA reports to NAS reports.