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May 8, 2008

Congressional Panel Considers Call for More Female Science Professors

Washington — For women contemplating careers as science professors, the numbers are daunting. More than half of the bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering these days go to women, but they run into a high hurdle when it comes to securing academic jobs. Fewer than one in three science and engineering professors are female, and the numbers for full professors drop to one in five. So Congress held a hearing today to consider how to raise those odds.

A draft bill introduced by Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, a Texas Democrat, would promote the use of workshops “to increase awareness of implicit gender bias in grant review, hiring, tenure, promotion, and selection for other honors based on merit,” according to a news release issued by the House Science Committee’s Subcommittee on Research and Science Education. The committee has not yet released the proposed legislation, and the details of such workshops remain unclear. The workshops would be based, at least partly, on ones organized by academic chemists and by the American Physical Society, which have in the past two years convened gatherings of federal officials and the chairs of top university departments.

The legislation, titled “Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering Act of 2008,” would also seek to gather better demographic data from federal grant-making agencies. But that may be a difficult endeavor. Lynda T. Carlson, director of the division of science-resource statistics at the National Science Foundation, told committee members that scientists who receive grants “are not, nor can they be, required to provide demographic information because of the Privacy Act.” Many scientists who win grants do not indicate the race and gender of the people working under their grants, she said. “NSF cannot support the proposed legislation as its requirements will be excessive as they exceed current data-collection capabilities,” according to a statement submitted by Ms. Carlson.

Although the hearing was devoted to the issue of female academic scientists, the witness list contained no practicing scientists, male or female. The lone academic was Donna K. Ginther, an associate professor of economics at the University of Kansas, who has studied gender differences in academic science. In her statement, she endorsed the idea of gender-bias workshops for academics and grant reviewers, but she cautioned that the sessions should be tested for effectiveness. While past workshops have focused on department chairs, Ms. Ginther said that it would be important to reach principal investigators who oversee postdoctoral fellows. Her data indicate that most women leave academic science during the postdoctoral years.

The best way Congress could help women in academic science, she said, would be to improve their access to child care. She proposed allowing universities to support child-care facilities with the indirect costs that they take from research grants made to faculty members.

At today’s hearing, Congress itself inadvertently showed how far the nation has to go in promoting the success of women in academe. Rep. Vernon J. Ehlers of Michigan, the top Republican on the subcommittee, said in a statement that “effective institutional change must be systemic since bias may hide behind even the simplest language used in recommendation letters.”

His Republican colleague Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett of Maryland demonstrated the power of language while smiling at the trio of female Ph.D.’s who were testifying. Mr. Bartlett hailed them as “effective representatives,” but then proceeded to call them “three very attractive women.” —Richard Monastersky

Comments

1. Maybe there are good reasons that women don’t want to be science professors. Maybe they are just too smart to take that career path. Read this article and you’ll know what I mean.

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

   — Woman who left science for a more fulfilling career    May 8, 08:10 PM    #

2. This is yet one more example of the socialst nonsense upon which our congressional representatives waste their time and our money. Am I the only person who’s tired of donating money to a government which wastes it in this manner?

   — Joseph Spretnjak    May 9, 09:44 AM    #

3. Woman who left: So we should just accept that state of affairs as the status quo and not try to improve it (for everyone, not just women)?

   Joseph: Yeah, wouldn’t it be great if our government didn’t waste its time and money worrying about equality and fair treatment?

   — A woman who stayed    May 9, 09:59 AM    #

4. Look at it this way. There is a huge national investment in PhD and postdoc education. It’s a waste of resources to let those people get away. Let’s maximize the return on our investment.

   — Biosciprof    May 9, 11:03 AM    #

5. Maybe we need to rethink that huge investment “Biosciprof” refers to. My sense of the research that is not conflicted in some way on is that there is a glut of people trained in science and tech, so we need fewer and (on average) better people working in these fields to maximize the return, regardless of gender.

   — economist    May 9, 11:22 AM    #

6. And just what is female science?

   — original marci    May 9, 12:43 PM    #

7. “Woman who left science for a more fulfilling career” — thank you so much for that link! That article is very interesting and insightful. :)

   — Another Woman who is Happy to have Left Academia    May 9, 01:37 PM    #

8. Didn’t Bill Gates and others say we need to do more to encourage people to study science and engineering or the US risks losing its innovative edge in business? If you don’t maintain the quality of universities, you can’t do that. So we need people to stay and it would be better to have a diverse workforce for a variety of reasons. I think the comment about providing childcare would help.

   — JustaMSguy    May 9, 01:41 PM    #

9. To Woman Who Stayed: Yes, it would be nice if we could improve the situation. Providing child care on campus would be nice. But that doesn’t change the nature of the career. The fact is, there are more science PhDs than there are good jobs for them. Seven out of 8 grant applications to NIH are rejected. (See today’s Chronicle article titled “NIH Mulls Ways to Lure Back Veteran Peer Reviewers.”) It’s a very competitive field, and if you are going to survive, you are going to work 80 hours per week and spend most of your 20’s and 30’s at low-paying jobs. The average age of a scientist when they receive their first NIH grant is 43. (See http://www.genome-technology.com/issues/2_14/careers/146571-1.html) Even after all that work and sacrifice (how do you think this lifestyle affects your family?), there’s no guarantee you are going to get tenure. (http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science). Yes, the system is broken. How do you propose that we fix it? “Economist” is right. We have trained too many people in science. Faculty members encourage students to take the PhD track because graduate students and post-docs are the cheap laborers that get most of the research done. By the time the post-docs realize that the career is not what they had been hoping for all along, they have wasted a lot of years.

   — Woman who left    May 9, 01:44 PM    #

10. #5 and #9 are on the mark. There are WAY too many PhDs out there today. I have a hypothesis that this is caused largely by second tier researchers. These scientists have too many PhD “babies” for the same reasons a farmer in a developing country has too many kids. They both need cheap labor and by virtue of the number of offspring, they can attain status, respect, and power in the community. And of course, sons bring more prestige than daughters. In both cases, when the kids mature to work on their own, there can’t possibly be enough jobs to go around. I predict a scenario in which you will see the offspring leaving the crowded and depressed country side for the city. There, they will work for cheap with less job security. Their children will desire or feel entitled to more and then soon the cities are glutted with unemployed PhD’s. Some will form violent, alienated gangs who spend most of their time making irreverent comments on academic blogs and make people wonder where they get the time to comment when they SHOULD be in the lab. The conservatives will criticize them about the “choices” they’ve made in life and the liberals will give them grants so they can spend all day on the computers writing unproductive comments on blogs.

    — Cy Yentz Gangsta    May 9, 02:48 PM    #

11. yup yup yup, CY – in the immortal words of Pogo: we have seen the enemy, and he is us!

    — newly minted phd    May 11, 05:22 PM    #

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