Exodus Of Women From Science Is Jeopardizing Recent Gains

ACADEMIC EROSION: Although neither males nor females approach NSF's goals for attracting students to science and engineering careers (represented by dotted line), women tend to flee the sciences faster than men--particularly after high school. First came the age of intrepid female pioneer researchers. Then came the epoch of "supermom" scientists. So where do women in science stand today? Many presenters at the Conference on Women, Science, and Engineering held last month at the New York Academy of Sciences uneasily describe the present as the "leaky pipe" era. The metaphor was inspired by a trend: Women are leaving all levels of academic science at higher rates than men. The development of that trend troubles many participants of the conference, which was designed, in part, as a look at inroads women have made in science since the academy's first meeting on the topic in 1972. Those gains appear to be in jeopardy. SECOND THOUGHTS: Radcliffe's Paula Rayman maintains some women are having second thoughts about making the sacrifices their female predecessors did to pursue science careers. "We have a lot of women saying, 'Forget it. You can't be a woman scientist and have a life,'" Paula M. Rayman, director of the Radcliffe Public Policy Institute at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Mass., tells The Scientist. High attrition rates threaten to undermine the successes of the pioneers--who in 1972 made up only 8.7 percent of all doctoral scientists and engineers--and the supermoms--who by 1996 juggled careers and children to make up 22 percent of the United States' scientists and engineers, according to National Science Foundation (NSF) data. The current climate can be viewed as a painful dialogue, with the pioneers and supermoms on one side and aspiring young women scientists on the other. Rayman notes that the old guard is tempted to say: "Toughen up. We made the sacrifices," while the younger women question the necessity for sacrifice. Such debate, according to Rayman and others, obscures the real need: institutional change. That will have to come from a combination of efforts from individuals, organizations, and the government, she adds. To Increase Leverage There's strength in numbers. MORE PRESSURE: WISTA founder Jaleh Daie hopes the strategic alliance will provide more lobbying power for women scientists. That's why Jaleh Daie, a professor of biology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, formed the Women in Science and Technology Alliance (WiSTA) late last year. The Washington, D.C.-based organization will provide more lobbying leverage for women's issues by serving as an umbrella institution representing scores of smaller professional societies in science, math, engineering, medicine, and technology (J. Daie, The Scientist, 11[23]:8, Nov. 24, 1997). The organization will include institutional members such as women's professional societies, universities, foundations, and corporations. Daie emphasizes that all members will be on equal footing. She declines to provide a list of members thus far, explaining that many other organizations are still considering joining; however, she says the organization already represents about 200,000 people. That size will give WiSTA greater lobbying power on Capitol Hill than the member organizations could achieve independently, Daie explains. "Numbers count," she adds, and WiSTA's numbers will help effect institutional reform because the organization can present a unified message to Washington policymakers. "The overarching goal of all this is to help impact policy," Daie notes. She anticipates the organization will focus on policies in education, job creation, and equal opportunity for women scientists. --P.S. Women have made progress in science despite --not because of--their academic institutions, remarks Cecily C. Selby, trustee of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Mass., who chaired the conference. "The individuals are successful, but the institutions are not," Selby explains. "Academic structures are still back in the 19th century." Those structures are characterized by competition rather than development of new talent, she notes. Selby emphasizes that individual companies or organizations can put pressure on institutions by citing their own advancements. Universities or academic departments with a high percentage of female professors could make that known, she says. Ideally, news magazines that already rank colleges and graduate schools would add some description of the ratio of male to female faculty, she adds. High-profile individuals like Nobel laureate Dudley Herschbach, a professor of science at Harvard University, can also use their stature to campaign for change, Selby adds. However, individual efforts only go so far, Herschbach remarks. Each institution needs to carefully examine its policies, he says. Apparent advances sometimes are the status quo in disguise. "The last few years Harvard has hired five women professors," he explains. "That sounds great--but when you see that they are just replacing women who are retiring, it isn't." Within academia, scientists should also be aware of trends that hurt science as a whole by discouraging male and female students from pursuing advanced degrees. Herschbach theorizes that change may be more palatable if it benefits men and women. He points to the time many young scientists take to get a full-time job as one possible area of academic reform. "We've evolved into a system where our graduate students are practically in bondage for seven years," he says. "Then they're trapped in postdoc holding patterns for three years." He notes that, while shorter graduate and postgraduate terms would be desirable for men and women, they might have more positive impact on women, who might be tempted to forgo science for other careers that don't wreak havoc on their childbearing years. Shortening Ph.D. programs to four years would cause less resistance than affirmative action measures would, he contends. However, putting such a reform into place might require more than the efforts of a university or individual, Herschbach acknowledges. Success depends on altering the way science is funded. Now the system rewards researchers who contribute to a principal investigator's (P.I.'s) research. This system actually encourages longer graduate school stints, he contends, because under these arrangements P.I.'s benefit from the experience of the graduate students working for them. Organizations such as the Washington, D.C.-based Association for Women in Science (AWIS) or the newly formed Women in Science and Technology Alliance (see accompanying story) can help push for such changes, Herschbach says. "The existence of AWIS brings attention to the issues." Catherine J. Didion, executivedirector of AWIS,agrees, adding that the climate for such changes may be better now than a few years ago, when science funding seemed more at risk. "A couple of years ago, people didn't ask these questions; they just wanted to hunker down and survive." Grants funding graduate students should be independent of support for principal investigators, Didion argues. She points to training grants attached to the National Institutes of Health's R01 (investigator-initiated) grants as an example. Because the two are attached, the lead investigator can indirectly dictate the length of a graduate student's stay. Organizations like AWIS can also push for reforms in "re-entry" policies that make it easier for scientists to return to graduate programs after they have left to start families or pursue other career interests, Didion notes. "Re-entry is an issue for people who want to have a family--both men and women." GOVERNMENT LEADERSHIP: NSF's Daryl Chubin suspects that government leadership in policies that help researchers return to academia may be necessary. Daryl Chubin, director of NSF's division of research evaluation and communication for education and human resources, suspects that government leadership in policies that help researchers return to academia may be necessary. "Universities would promulgate their own [re-entry] policies if federal R&D agencies recognized that one career path on a fixed six-to-10-[year] timeline should not fit all faculty researchers and educators," Chubin explains. Pilot programs exist through both NSF and NIH, but they need to be expanded if they are to have any impact, Chubin argues. Foundations have already offered programs, including endowing professorships that also pay for child-care expenses (P. Smaglik, The Scientist, 11[23]:1, Nov. 24, 1997). Those programs, which can drive a wedge of reform into institutions, remain small and scattered. To create broader institutional change, individuals and organizations must push for it, Selby maintains. She hopes the conference helped provide an impetus. "People left very galvanized to make more noise," she concludes.

Exodus Of Women From Science Is Jeopardizing Recent Gains

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