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[olddocpossum]

Regarding the recent article on Sue Rosser, dean of the Ivan Allen College of the Georgia Insitute of Technology, I am less than overwhelmed with her accomplishments in promoting women in academia. (Of course, she is dean of Liberal Arts, and not Sciences, at Tech -- but the numbers of women on the tenure track within the departments that comprise Ivan Allen College are not impressive.) With the exception of Modern Languages and Literature (traditionally female dominated disciplines), the record is thus for the percentage of women tenured or on tenure track:
Economics -- 23%
History -- 33%
Public Policy -- 44%
International Affairs -- 21%

[herophilus]

What were the percentages before Rosser got there?

[jonesey]

What were the percentages of qualified applicants?

I hate this sort of thing.  If there were 200 applicants, and only 20 women, is it unreasonable to thing that maybe, just maybe, GTech hired the most qualifed person and that person just happened to be a man?

Or is it all the continuing dominance of the patriarchal society trying to Keep Womyn Down?

[inthelab]

I hate not having a free link to the article.

[Here's the free link: http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i37/37a03001.htm]

[sciencephd]

Well, I'm tired of 'diversity' meaning 'women', or some other subset of a pre-approved diverse environment.

[kedves]

The link is free now.  (Thanks, moderators.)

Is working to get more women into science controversial?

[sciencephd]

Is working to get more women into science controversial?

Well, why women specifically ?  Among the "minorities" (?) that might contributed to diversity they are the best represented.

[kedves]

Is working to get more women into science controversial?

Well, why women specifically ?  Among the "minorities" (?) that might contributed to diversity they are the best represented.

I don't have an answer.  It's an interesting question, but my familiarity with it is very superficial--that's why I ask.  There seem to be ongoing efforts to increase the membership of women in the sciences (undergrad majors through Ph.D.), but I don't know what the levels are now, what the targets are, what rationales are used, or how much consensus there is about the goals.

[inthelab]

The link is free now.  (Thanks, moderators.)

Is working to get more women into science controversial?

Only if you're Larry Summers.

[locutus]

Is working to get more women into science controversial?

Well, why women specifically ?  Among the "minorities" (?) that might contributed to diversity they are the best represented.

Mind you, this is at Gatech where women may actually be the most underrepresented group.

[dismalist]

Women are underrepresented in coal mining, too.

[polly_mer]

I'm with Sciencephd on the annoyance of having diversity in the sciences usually meaning "We gotta get an equal numerical representation of women".

Personally, I hate the quota aspect.  I object to the presumption that lack of a numerically correct value for women or minorities means that those heterosexual white males have driven away the other groups or refused to hire them.

I am in favor of better outreach programs targeted specifically at the pre-college level to get students from a variety of backgrounds excited about STEM fields and induce them to major in them.  I am in favor of making a conscious effort to be more inclusive of people in life circumstances other than middle-class white heterosexual males of the appropriate age.  However, the quotas and special diversity programs that just concentrate on numbers rather than doing something worthwhile to support people in various stages of their careers who don't fall into the stereotypical category of a traditional scientist are wrong and often are worse than having no programs at all.

If nothing else, the people running the diversity programs usually are not trained in STEM fields so their recommendations often ignore the distinctions between aspects of being a scientist that are fundamental to being a scientist and prevalent habits that may be unwelcoming to certain groups, but could be changed with conscious effort.  For example, watering down the curriculum is unacceptable.  However, encouraging students to form better study groups as common practice rather than the special thing that those unprepared diversity students have to do would help. 

Having the support in place for women to do part-time work (whether as a graduate student, postdoc, or faculty member) would help.  Most women scientists I know don't want to stop doing research.  They just want to cut back for a few months during the time of late pregnancy and infancy when physical demands are the greatest.  Unfortunately, as it stands now, women are usually at the mercy of the department and often only have the option of full load or taking a semester off from teaching.  That's ok as an established faculty member.  However, often reducing the research load for awhile as a grad student or postdoc is not an option.  So the choices become have a baby as a young woman and deal with the lack of departmental support, put off the baby until the career is comfortably established with the risk of not having the desired family size for biological reasons, or leave academia.  I'm not surprised that smart women usually choose the early baby or early careers outside of academia.

I don't see that necessarily as discrimination by the men so much as a cultural idea by scientists that research is so engrossing that anyone wanting to cut back for any reason is suspect.  I had that idea, too, until I hit the physical limitations of being 9 months pregnant and later trying to work a 14 hour day with a nursing infant.  In that respect, the feminists with their "pregnancy and childbirth are normal life activities, not disabilities requiring accommodation" mantra hurt women's careers.  Reliable, affordable, quality childcare is good, but it doesn't negate any of the physical aspects.

In terms of diversity, I think getting more people of various types into the faculty pool is becoming easier as demographics change and culture changes.  With more men, including the scientists and engineers I know, taking a more active role in childcare, the idea that a good scientist must be at the bench 80 hours a week is waning.  Most of my graduate classes were a mix of nationalities, ethnicities, ages, and other diversity checkboxes so that heterosexual white males of traditional age were usually not in the majority. 

Thus, I'm with Jonesey that the departments should continue hiring the most qualified people with diversity not being a key factor.  I'm ok with diversity considerations being one of the factors considered for candidates that otherwise have comparable qualifications.  But diversity should not move the person 15th on the list by a consideration of reasonable qualifications for the job (e.g., experience, publications, research area fit, teaching ability) to the top. 

Doing numerical quota diversity is harmful all around.  I have a policy of doing some extra scrutiny on places that tout their commitment to diversity because I, as a woman in science and engineering, don't want to be somewhere that is stupid enough to hire to meet checkbox obligations instead of qualified people of whatever category.  I know that HR often adds their own little twist to the ads that the departments send so I don't immediately ditch any ad with "Minorities and women especially are encouraged to apply".  But I will ditch the ad after checking on the departmental webpages for evidence of diversity foolishness.  An all-white male department worries me much less than an extensive paragraph under pictures of their diversity workshops.  One could just be chance.  The other is purposeful by some idiot.

[kamiakin]

This reminds me that I need to write a laudatory press release about myself and convince the Chronicle to publish it as an article under on of their author's bylines.

[polly_mer]

This reminds me that I need to write a laudatory press release about myself and convince the Chronicle to publish it as an article under on of their author's bylines.

Be sure to put it on your CV.  In fact, list it twice: once under non-peer-reviewed publications and once as an award.

[doctor_torrseal]

Increasing diversity of faculty in the sciences is hard and years of efforts have shown that making real change takes work, but it can be done if you get enough people on board.  Increasing diversity of under-represented minorities as faculty or even graduate students in the sciences is also hard.  It's even harder because the current pool of candidates (even for grad admissions) is small, and obviously if you have few grad students representing a group, you're not going to have many potential faculty members from that group in the future.

It's important to avoid tokenism, as was mentioned upthread, and one possible manifestation of tokenism is institutions fighting each other to hire from a small number of good candidates from an under-represented minority group.  One would like to increase the number of candidates.  This means increasing diversity in the grad students, and to do that you also have to increase outreach at the undergrad and pre-college levels.  In at least some sciences, we can see where this has had an effect for women, as disciplines that once had few women now have near 50% women in the grad student population (although retention is still a problem, so the percentage decreases from grad student to postdoc to faculty).

I'm not going to claim that efforts to get more women into the sciences will also directly increase the number of under-represented minorities.  I don't think they would directly, because outreach and structural change are more important than tokenism or hiring quotas (at the faculty level, I don't really think hiring quotas are common or significant anyway).  However, I also think that a department, university, or discipline that cannot increase the representation of women will also fail at increasing the representation of minorities, because the latter is a harder problem.