Large-Scale Mentoring Program Succeeds For Women Scientists

The AWIS project's organizers say their three-year effort toward attracting more women to science has paid off When women in science talk about the problems they have overcome, they frequently mention feelings of isolation and self-doubt-- both of which, they say, are exacerbated by the underrepresentation of women in scientific careers. "These are issues all of us have experienced," says Stephanie J. Bird, special assistant to the associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Women scientists who look around them and see that "there aren't any other women," Bird says, may get the wrong impression that "there must be something conflicting about being a scientist and being a woman." "Young women get so many messages that `This [science] is not for you,' " says Laurie McNeil, an associate professor of physics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. But negative messages can be minimized through positive feedback from an experienced colleague, McNeil says: "You need someone to tell you, `This is for you, and this is how to go about it.' " Over the past three years, the Washington, D.C.-based Association for Women in Science (AWIS) has implemented a mentoring program aimed at surmounting such problems. The goal, says Bird, AWIS's immediate past president and project coordinator for the program, has been to "integrate young women into the community so they don't feel isolated"--as well as to offer career advice to young women and, ultimately, to increase the number of women entering scientific professions. The project has been funded by the New York-based Alfred P. Sloan Foundation with a three-year, $400,000 grant, which expired at the beginning of this month. Regional AWIS chapters applied to the organization's national office for funding for their individually designed mentoring programs. Funds given to the chapters ranged from $500 to more than $3,000, with an average award of $1,500, according to AWIS executive director Catherine Didion. The only requirement the chapters had to fill was to offer "a setting where exchange of information can be provided" and "let us [the national AWIS office] know how it worked along the way," says Bird. Chapters submitted proposals to the national AWIS office outlining what activities they planned and how they intended to involve female students. AWIS selected students as the beneficiaries, Didion says, because of the group's desire to "focus on women who have expressed an interest in science but have a high attrition rate." The concept of "mentoring" varied from chapter to chapter along parameters such as: who was mentored (high school students, undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, or some combination); how they were referred to (as "protges" or, less grammatically, as "mentees"); and how the mentoring occurred (through one-on-one pairings of mentor and student, through "group mentoring" sessions--panel discussions in which groups of experienced scientists shared their views with groups of students--or in some combination of the two methods). AWIS is now evaluating the success of the program--with a summation document expected to be available by summer's end--and is applying for funding to continue it. For its evaluation, the organization examined the mentoring activities of four chapters, selected for their geographic diversity and different approaches to mentoring: the Philadelphia; Palo Alto, Calif.; West Virginia; and Gulf Coast/Houston chapters. While it will take years to learn whether the program was successful in reducing the attrition rate for women in science, a preliminary assessment shows that all mentoring approaches were appreciated by the protges. "They found just about all of them helpful as long as they provided an opportunity for exchange," Bird says. AWIS's Gulf Coast/Houston chapter has implemented three types of mentoring. In addition to one-on-one matchups (in which female graduate students are paired with more experienced mentors), it has hosted group mentoring programs on such topics as sexual harassment and applying for grants and has sponsored an annual poster session. For undergraduate women, the chapter has offered what it calls a "shadow program," in which undergrads are invited to spend a day following women scientists as they work. Penelope Kegel-Flom, an associate professor at the University of Houston College of Optometry and past president of the Gulf Coast/Houston chapter, says one measure of success is the rise in the number of young women who have joined the local chapter. "Our membership has increased over 240 percent in the last two years," says Kegel-Flom, who is president-elect of the national AWIS organization. "To me, having one-on-one contacts wasn't as important as group mentoring," says Barbara Williams, a graduate student in the pharmacology department at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston. On issues such as when to have a family, for which "there's no right answer," says Williams, it is useful to hear many women describe their experiences. Also, she says, in a panel-and-audience situation, "different people will bring up different things that I've never even thought about." On the other hand, Lisa Struck, a graduate student in chemistry at Rice University in Houston, says the one-on-one mentoring has been more beneficial for her because it offers her the opportunity to describe her situation in detail to a professional woman scientist. Struck says that, when applying for a postdoctoral position, she appreciated having a mentor available to review her cover letters and c.v. "In my family, there's no professionals," says Struck. Before she got involved in the mentoring program, she says, she was at a loss as to how to approach someone for advice: "For me, there's more awkwardness; it's harder to strike up a conversation with a professor [when] they're all male." Members of AWIS's Philadelphia chapter say that, because their group covers a wide geographic area and its members represent many institutions and scientific disciplines, it is not practical for them to attempt one-on-one mentoring. "It's difficult to establish one-on-one mentoring when you have different schedules," says Cynthia D'Ambrosio, manager of international regulatory affairs for Merck Research Laboratories in Blue Bell, Pa. Instead, D'Ambrosio says, the Philadelphia chapter's strategy has been to "sponsor [group mentoring] programs and let people find each other. If one-on-one relationships develop, that's great, and you help them along." The chapter hosts "monthly meetings on topics that would perform a mentoring function," such as a panel discussion on the glass ceiling and a rsum-writing workshop, says Edyth Malin, a research chemist and lead scientist at the United States Department of Agriculture's facility in Wyndmoor, Pa. The highlight of the year is the chapter's student poster session, at which cash prizes are offered. "Having the opportunity to present your poster for the first time represents a quantum leap into professional activity," says Malin. One-On-One In Palo Alto AWIS's Palo Alto chapter, by contrast, has focused most of its efforts on one-on-one matchups. The chapter opted to go this route because its board members, putting themselves in the place of the protges, felt that "when problems come up, you want to deal with them right away--you don't want to wait till the next meeting," says mentoring committee chairwoman Cherrill Spencer, an elementary particle physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. "I find [being a mentor] highly enjoyable," says Nancy King, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in Menlo Park, Calif. King says her protge "tells me what's going on and what she thinks about it, and I tell her what I think about it." The chapter supplements its one-on-one mentoring with panel discussions and special events, such as a hike in the California foothills and skills-development workshops. King says the chapter's protges are poised to do well. "They're obviously taking their careers very seriously," she says, "or they wouldn't be taking that step [to join the program]. It may be that women who are truly lost may not seek a mentor." West Virginia Network AWIS's West Virginia chapter doesn't need to teach young women such advanced skills as choosing a postdoc or applying for faculty positions, says Susan DeMesquita, a professor of physiology at Marshall University School of Medicine in Huntington, W.Va. "We're trying to get them to go to college," DeMesquita says. In her rural state, she says, there is "a tradition of unemployment, welfare, and teenage pregnancies. We're trying to break that cycle." Further compounding the difficulties, says DeMesquita, is that in West Virginia there are "simply not enough women scientists" to do one-on-one mentoring. To compensate, she says, "we networked all the women in the state." The result is a traveling program that aims to expose youngsters to science and women scientists. Activities have included field trips to see female researchers at work and mentoring luncheons at which women discuss "how they got into science, what made them stay in science, and how they're coping with career and family," DeMesquita says. Typically, she notes, these events represent "the first time many of these young women saw a woman scientist." Not everyone in the state agrees that such programs are a good thing, DeMesquita points out, recalling that at a recent mentoring luncheon, "one girl admitted that she was there against her mother's wishes." To compensate for the scarcity of potential mentors, chapter members have made themselves available to answer students' questions via electronic mail. "These ways of communicating haven't been seen as men- toring before," says AWIS's Didion. The West Virginia women's mentoring efforts are not entirely limited to precollege students. As an African-American, Thomasina Redd, chairwoman of the natural science division and a professor of biology at Alderson-Broaddus College in Philippi, W.Va., is particularly interested in the factors that cause young African- American women to drop out of college science programs or to "settle for a lesser dream." "Young ladies, at least in this area, appear to think of science only in terms of nursing, teaching at the secondary level, or, sometimes, medical school," she says. Thus, her strategy has been "to flood them with engineers, physicists, researchers--just to open up some other options." While she's found that in a mixed group of students, minorities' questions are the same as their peers', Redd says, "in private, I find, minorities are much more concerned with [the question of] `Can I do it?' In general, there's a feeling that there's more on the line--that community, family, friends are all expecting these great things." A lot of her efforts, therefore, are directed toward "getting them to a level of self-confidence," she says. Being A Mentor Women scientists say it's not particularly taxing to be a mentor. "The time commitment is real flexible," says Heidi Kaplan, an assistant professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at U. Texas Medical School in Houston who is Lisa Struck's mentor. "Students seem to sometimes need a lot of attention, then they'll go off and not need so much attention." Proteges , says Kaplan, who is in charge of the matchups for her chapter, "generally want to know how an outside person views the situation they're in." When the circumstances are emotionally charged--for example, if a protege is thinking of leaving her thesis adviser--the mentor's role is to "calm the situation down, and give them a perspective they can't see," she says. Over in California, USGS's King says of having a protege, "From my point of view it was pretty risk-free--it's not like I had a lot to lose." However, she acknowledges, one-on-one mentoring "is a bit contrived, because you're paired up without knowing each other. It is a little odd to have someone you've never met before be introduced to you as your protege." Spencer emphasizes that mentoring "is not a one-way street." Mentors grow from the experience, she says, because "they realize that they do know a lot and they can be helpful to other people. It makes them think about situations they've not tried to analyze before." Spencer says she is always amazed when she makes an offhand comment that turns out to be welcome advice: "Sometimes you20say something it seems20like they would have already thought of--and they haven't. That's what 10 years or 20 years of experience can do." Personal questions about husbands and children that would be illegal if asked, for example, during a job interview are standard in the context of a mentoring relationship, says Katherine Borkovich, an assistant professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at U. Texas Medical School and chairwoman of the Gulf Coast/Houston chapter's mentor program committee. "We expect them to ask those kinds of questions," she says. A mentor and protege do not necessarily have to share a research interest, AWIS members say. Molecular biologist Kaplan, for example, finds she has no trouble advising Struck, a surface chemist. "She needed help looking for a postdoc, and that's kind of universal--you identify people in your field, then you write to them," Kaplan says. A Mentor's Mission Merck's D'Ambrosio says that, in certain respects, mentoring may be more crucial for those in industry than for their counterparts in academia. "In academia, there are a set number of titles, and within a discipline there are set departments," she says. "But in industry, there's a whole spectrum of positions and career paths one can take. The people you relied on to get through your academic experience aren't necessarily the people who can help you in industry." Likewise, Eleanor Brown, a USDA research chemist and lead scientist in Wyndmoor, Pa., says that, in talking with young women, she and her colleague Malin try to "make them aware that there are opportunities for women scientists other than in academia--broader opportunities than they may have thought of." This includes making them familiar with the procedures for applying for a government job, she says. It's important for protege to remember that not everything a mentor says is gospel, veteran mentors say. A protege, says AWIS's Bird, should be aware that the advice she gets from a mentor "is only one additional perspective. You have to take the advice you get and fit it into your own life." Mentoring is "a relationship that has that family flavor," says North Carolina physicist McNeil. And, she notes, "in the same way that you can have dysfunctional families, you can have dysfunctional professional relationships." In such cases, McNeil says, one should feel empowered to leave the unsatisfactory mentor and "to go out and find the people who can give you the help you need, and to know that that's acceptable." Bird says that, while the chapters haven't had any mentoring experiences that could be considered failures per se, in some cases "they changed what they did" when it became clear that their approach wasn't working. One of the most common problems with one-on-one mentoring, she says, results when the responsibility of making the initial contact is put on the protges rather than the mentors. "It's not surprising," she says, noting that young women might feel "somewhat intimidated about contacting someone senior. It's the added component of self-doubt that made it not work." Although the typical view of a mentor is of a much older person assisting a younger individual over many years, Bird says, "all along, people do have something to contribute to other people. We use [the term] `mentoring' in a broad sense. It can be long-term, but also short-term." U. Texas grad student Williams says she has no trouble mentoring undergraduates in the Gulf Coast/Houston chapter's shadow program. "The types of questions the undergraduates ask [relate to] things I've already gone through," such as applying to grad school, she says. "I feel I can at least spark their interest and get them started." A Source Of Help The national AWIS office has assisted mentors, protege, and chapters through the process. AWIS staff regularly sent packets to chapter mentoring coordinators to facilitate discussions with proteges on issues such as sexual harassment and career advancement. The national office was also a source of programming ideas and advice on setting up a mentoring project. For proteges, AWIS has published a book, A Hand Up: Women Mentoring Women in Science (Washington, D.C., AWIS, 1993). "We envision it as a `paper mentor, ' " says Didion (R. Kaufman, The Scientist, Feb. 22, 1993, page 3). The book contains interviews with women scientists ranging from undergraduates to members of the National Academy of Sciences, advice on getting ahead, and contact names and numbers. "Every woman we interviewed agreed to be contacted" by readers seeking advice, says Didion. AWIS's mentoring effort has proved so successful that several scientific societies and universities are instituting similar programs, and have contacted AWIS for assistance. In such cases, says Didion, the organizations are invited to "do joint work with a local AWIS chapter. "We want to leverage [AWIS's efforts] rather than have them rein- vent the wheel," she says.

Large-Scale Mentoring Program Succeeds For Women Scientists

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