AWIS, Marking Its 25th Anniversary, Eyes Changed But Unfinished Tasks

Unfinished Tasks Author: Lee KattermanSidebar:Nobelists Help Celebrate AWIS AnniversaryPercentage of Bachelor's Degrees in Science and Engineering Going to WomenThe Association for Women in Science (AWIS), the largest multidisciplinary organization of women scientists in the United States, turns 25 years old in 1996, and its members are making plans to celebrate the victories of the past and look ahead to future challenges.Founded in 1971, AWIS has grown from 500 members in its first year to more than 6,000 members and 66 local chapters today. Women who have been involved in AWIS since the beginning agree that much has improved for women scientists in that time. Anti-discrimination and affirmative action laws combined with the efforts of groups like AWIS have made it possible for more women to enter careers in science and engineering.Still, these activists also believe that the organization's basic feminist purpose -- to remove the barriers facing women in science -- remains nearly the same after 25 years. Only the nature of the barriers and the methods used to combat problems have changed. STRONG NETWORK: New AWIS president Jaleh Daie calls the group "ideally suited" to helping women advance. This shift in emphasis between the early years and the present is captured in the difference between the organization's original mission statement and a new statement recently adopted, notes Jaleh Daie, president of AWIS as of January 1. In 1971, AWIS aimed to "promote opportunities for women to enter the sciences and achieve their career goals." Today, the AWIS mission is more expansive: "to achieve equity and full participation for women in all aspects of science and technology."The obstacles that confronted women in science in the early 1970s are exemplified by an incident involving AWIS and an anatomy textbook for first-year medical students, The Anatomical Basis of Medical Practice (R. Frederick Becker et al., Baltimore, Williams and Wilkins). The publisher touted the book for making a boring subject exciting, recounts Estelle Ramey, retired professor of physiology and biophysics from Georgetown University and a long-time AWIS activist. After the book was introduced in the summer of 1972, Ramey, then AWIS president-elect, remembers getting several telephone calls from women teaching at various schools complaining about an anatomy book just on the market.Ramey, who hadn't seen the book, sought out a copy from a colleague in the anatomy department, who warned her, "You may be put off a little by it." What she found were several anatomy "illustrations" that featured Playboy-type photographs of nude women.Notations about the pictures were similar in nature. In one, says Ramey, the authors wrote, "'Don't bother to send for the names of our models, boys. Our wives have burned our little black book.' And one of the captions read, 'Unfortunately, gentlemen, none of your patients will look as good as this.' Anyone reading this book would have to absorb a certain contempt for women."Ramey took action immediately, writing to the publisher on her medical school stationery. She explained that she was president-elect of AWIS, the largest organization of women scientists -- then with about 1,000 members -- and had seen the text and found it disgusting and puerile. Furthermore, her letter said, she would recommend to all AWIS members that they boycott all Williams and Wilkins textbooks, not just the offending anatomy book.The publisher's president later visited Ramey to discuss the matter, although she stood firm on her original threat. About two weeks later, Williams and Wilkins announced it was withdrawing the book from the market and would thoroughly revise it for the next printing. Ramey still wrote to the AWIS membership to describe the entire affair. She closed her letter with, "Keep the faith and pay your dues and our strength shall be as the strength of ten."According to a statement from Edward B. Hutton, Jr., president and CEO of Waverly Inc., the parent company of Williams and Wilkins, "All of the people involved at that time have retired, and therefore we do not have the facts surrounding the publication of this book. Today, we would not publish this book under the Williams and Wilkins imprint.""It would be impossible to distribute books like that one today," Ramey agrees, because societal attitudes toward women are changing and publishers know groups such as AWIS or the National Organization for Women would publicly ridicule such a book.In contrast to battling a lewd and insulting medical text many years ago, the more recent accomplishments of AWIS have thrust the organization into prominence in an international movement promoting science and engineering education and career opportunities for women. Catherine Didion, AWIS executive director, points to an association delegation that participated in the United Nations Conference on Women in China last August and September (C. Didion, The Scientist, Nov. 13, 1995, page 11), where it made many contacts with like-minded organizations from other parts of the world."The situation for women in science in a lot of other countries is not as good as it is [in the U.S.]," observes Didion. "In Beijing, you could see how excited [women from other countries] were to learn about our activities. They wanted to take home and implement all kinds of ideas that we talked about," such as the mentoring programs AWIS has developed and its efforts to boost young women's interest in science.A report about the platform for action adopted at the U.N. Conference on Women is being organized by Didion and Dominique Homberger, a professor of zoology at Louisiana State University, to be presented February 10, as part of the upcoming American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Baltimore. (AWIS is also sponsoring another AAAS symposium and a reception as part of its 25th anniversary celebration; see accompanying story.)The stark difference between the textbook incident and the international admiration expressed in Beijing of current AWIS activities are echoed in other changes in the organization over the last 25 years. Efforts that used to go to fighting overt discrimination against women in science now go to encouraging more women to study science and engineering, or to finding ways to boost the prospects for mid-career women scientists. "It's now respectable to be a woman in science," says Ellen Weaver, a retired professor of biological sciences from San Jose State University and a former AWIS president. "Women in science are no longer considered freaks." GAINING GROUND: Former AWIS president Ellen Weaver says women sxcientist are "no longer considered freaks."The numbers appear to bear this out. In the early 1970s, few women were graduating with science or engineering degrees, especially at the Ph.D. level. By the 1990s, according to National Science Foundation data, women were substantially represented -- in undergraduate biology, by almost half -- in graduating classes in science and engineering (see tables).The number of women employed in science is also rising. A 1994 report from the U.S. Census Bureau ("Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Mathematics: 1994") indicated that, as of 1990, about 22 percent of the science and engineering labor force was composed of women, compared with just over 12 percent in 1980.Women scientists also show signs of assuming an increasing share of influential positions in the science community. For instance, when AWIS was born, almost no women served on National Institutes of Health study sections, the committees that review grant applications and decide whose science deserves funding. Today, according to the study-section rosters posted by NIH on the World Wide Web, about one-third of the reviewer slots are held by women.Margaret Rossiter, Marie Underhill Noll Professor of History of Science at Cornell University, says AWIS is probably the most prominent of all of the caucuses of women in science. She calls the last 25 years a "golden age" for women in science."Compared to the dark ages prior to the '70s, things are going well for women in science today," contends Rossiter, author of Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940-1972 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). She adds that AWIS has been an effective force during this golden age -- by lobbying for passage and stricter enforcement of antidiscrimination legislation, such as Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, portions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Act; and in urging universities, companies, and the U.S. government to seek qualified women candidates.Virginia Upton, a neuroendocrinologist and director of clinical research for Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories in Radnor, Pa., laid the foundation for AWIS in the late 1960s. From 1966 through 1970, Upton organized an annual gathering for women scientists during the yearly meetings of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. The financial sponsors of these AWIS -- precursor meetings were Kontes Glass Co. (now Kimble/Kontes) of Vineland, N.J., and Charles River Laboratories Inc., a supplier of laboratory animals in Wilmington, Mass. By 1970, Upton felt the time was right to organize a formal group of women scientists, which became AWIS.Upton was motivated by her belief (and personal experience) that women scientists were being stymied by attitudes and stereotypes that said women can't or shouldn't be scientists. "We were interested in fairness," Upton says of AWIS charter members. "We wanted to be able to follow our careers to the fullest, with equal pay and opportunities for advancement. And what we needed was a 'biddy-biddy' network just like the 'buddy-buddy' network the men had."During the 1970s, AWIS focused on building its membership into a national network of women scientists who could share information and support. "The organization has tried to spread the word about women's capabilities," says Weaver. "We set up networks of women, tried to make it possible to identify women in science, so the people who organize [scientific] meetings, or set up panels, wouldn't be able to say they can't find any women to invite."That called for AWIS members to keep alert for position vacancies or other opportunities and then spread the word through the organization, explains Ramey. Also, AWIS has maintained a database of women scientists that can be used to identify qualified women candidates. With information from this database, AWIS members can write or talk to search committees or panel organizers about qualified women candidates and lobby for the need to increase the representation of women scientists.Another early activity involved legal actions against government agencies and universities to force institutions to adhere to antidiscrimination and affirmative-action legislation. "We [AWIS] joined the first lawsuit when we were three months old and only had $300 in the bank," recalls Anne Briscoe, a biochemist retired from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.The class-action suit, AWIS et al. v. Richardson and Marston, was filed in 1971 in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The lawsuit requested that the federal court order the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW, since split into the Departments of Health and Human Services and of Education) and NIH to assign more women to NIH's public advisory committees, the groups that helped set goals and policies for federal biomedical research. It was filed against Eliot Richardson, then secretary of HEW, and Robert Marston, director of NIH at the time.This suit and a number of others were successful in beginning to overturn official policies and modify informal attitudes in government and at universities, observes Briscoe."We're really most interested in the opportunities for the average women. After all, most of the men and women in science are average; they're hard-working, and if well-trained, are pretty equal. And yet the opportunities are always better for the white males," says Briscoe, who served as AWIS's first newsletter editor, its president from 1975-76, and chairwoman or cochairwoman of the affirmative action committee ever since. In this last capacity, Briscoe has advised women who are facing difficulties with graduate school admissions and employment or promotion obstacles.Yet for all of the effort AWIS has devoted to challenging the science establishment through filing lawsuits or supporting anti-discrimination legislation, its methods for fostering the opportunities for individual women -- mentoring and advising -- has been to work within the system. "Our focus has been more how to salvage careers, not create martyrs," Briscoe states.Briscoe reports that the number of affirmative-action consultations she conducts has been consistent throughout her involvement -- about two dozen serious cases a year. She notes, however, that she has not received any sexual harassment-related calls since the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas that took place in October 1991. She attributes the decline in such cases to the wide publicity the hearings brought to sexual harassment and the "education" it gave to supervisors about such behavior.Upton says AWIS has been successful in establishing mentoring relationships for women in school or early in their careers, an activity developed with funding from NSF. AWIS has promoted mentoring because it found that the most successful men and women in science usually had one or more strong relationships with a senior person during the early stages of their careers, explains Daie, a professor of botany at the University of Wisconsin (UW), Madison, and science adviser to the vice provost for academic affairs for the UW system. RELATIVITY: Women scientists abroad face bigger problems, reports Catherine Didion. AWIS executive director Didion adds, "We hope that [mentoring] will become part of the definition of a scientist." To promote this ethic, she relates, AWIS is helping its local chapters identify and work with the local chapters of other scientific societies with interests in mentoring.Daie says that one of the future challenges for her organization is helping women overcome mid-career obstacles: "The worst situation now is the lack of career advancement for women scientists, especially at higher levels. Many of us have reached the tenure milestone only to encounter the oft- mentioned glass ceiling." TRAILBLAZER: Virginia Upton organized early meetings of the group that would become the AWIS. Weaver points to the relative paucity of women who are deans of medical or engineering schools, science department chairs, journal editors, or leaders of scientific societies as indicative of the continued need for AWIS and other women in science organizations. "We're still working for a time when gender is of no consequence in advancing one's career," she says. Or, as Upton puts it: "You hear about the exception, the woman who is appointed to [department] chair or dean, but what is the rule? I don't think women's status has finally achieved a position where you can leave it alone."Daie says AWIS is "ideally suited" to help women advance. "We're well known enough [and] often consulted by search committees for names of women." AWIS has also sponsored leadership-training conferences. Now, Daie asserts, AWIS needs to push universities, government agencies, and professional societies to provide women scientists with opportunities to gain experience in strategic and budget planning that today's leaders need. "If one has had the opportunity to chair an important committee, that's a powerful training tool, to be able to build consensus among a group of very independent- minded people."Ramey adds, however, that AWIS still has a strong women's advocacy role to play beyond fine-tuning the way women scientists expand their career opportunities. For example, with a shortage of openings for Ph.D.'s in many disciplines, hiring decisions take on extra importance, she explains. One way AWIS can combat this, she notes, is to join other scientific organizations in fighting federal cuts in research- grant budgets that underlie much of the shortage.Furthermore, Ramey believes women still face greater obstacles than men to being hired because search committees still evaluate a woman candidate differently from the way they evaluate a man: "They wonder, 'If she's not married, she'll probably get married. Then she'll get pregnant and want leave time.'"Women also face a climate in which support for affirmative action is diminishing, notes Ramey, so universities may feel less pressure to add women (and minority) faculty. The way to fight this, she says, is to "make it more difficult for people to act on these [discriminatory] impulses." AWIS (World Wide Web: http://www.awis.org/ ~awis) can help by mobilizing its members to write letters, make phone calls, and talk to decision-makers, letting them know that someone is watching their hiring records.What makes a difference in these efforts, emphasizes Ramey, is being able to say one is a member of AWIS: "If you have a big organization behind you, it gives you more clout."Lee Katterman, a writer based in Ann Arbor, Mich., is editor of Research News, a publication of the University of Michigan.

AWIS, Marking Its 25th Anniversary, Eyes Changed But Unfinished Tasks

Association for Women in Science members are making plans to celebrate the victories of the past and look ahead to future challenges.

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