Living and Studying Together

Caitilyn Allen The dearth of women in science and engineering has spawned programs on college campuses to redress the balance and encourage women to stay in science. According to the National Science Foundation,1 a little more than 22 percent of the scientists and engineers in the United States in 1995 (the date of the most recent figures) were women. Though women make up about half of the social scientists, they are noticeably underrepresented among the "hard sciences." The NSF reports that 20 percent of the physical scientists, 9 percent of engineers, 40 percent of biological scientists, and about 33 percent of mathematicians were women. One attempt to boost these numbers involves housing female science majors together for at least their freshman year on college campuses. The rationale is simple and straightforward. "Give them a built-in and easily accessible group of peers for support," says Caitilyn Allen, assistant professor of plant pathology and women's studies and faculty director of the Women in Science and Engineering Program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. At Wisconsin and in similar programs, women are recruited through brochures about the living arrangement. Barbara Clark "Men naturally find that they're living near other students who are taking courses similar to the ones they're taking," says Barbara Clark, director of the Women in Science Program at Purdue University. Women may not have neighbors who are taking the courses they are. "So they would have to go to another [residence] hall to find someone to study with, and that would be difficult to do. By grouping them together, we're more naturally simulating the situation the men find themselves in," she says. The program began in 1995 with about 50 women living in one section of a residence hall. Currently there are about 90. The Rationale Allen notes that fewer women than men enter college planning to major in science, and disproportionately more drop out of science majors even though their grade point averages are higher. In her survey of the literature on women in science, Allen sees a common theme behind this phenomenon. "Women heading into the sciences feel they are different. They feel they are abnormal women because they are interested in science and engineering, and they feel they are abnormal scientists because they are women," she explains. One key feature of the program is lab sections composed only of women in introductory chemistry courses. "The thing that really drew me is that I knew I would be having classes with people that I would be living with. The support network was something that I was really looking for," says Ellen Mallman, a third-year student at Wisconsin majoring in geology and physics. Fourth-year genetics major Monica Awe maintains she "never would have made it through freshman chemistry" without the study groups of women students taking the course and living in the same residence hall. Such programs also offer a more subtle form of support. "Women science students often complain they are isolated because there are so few women science and engineering students. They can be years into their program before they find other women that are interested in chemical engineering or whatever it is," says Cinda-Sue Davis, director of the Women in Science and Engineering Program at the University of Michigan. The program there houses 120 women on a floor of a residence hall. The lack of women in the science faculty can lead women science majors to wonder why they are in science in the first place, remarks Clark. "On our campus about 10 percent of the faculty members in science and engineering are women. It would be very possible for a female student to go all the way through her career at an institution such as this and never have a female faculty member stand in front of [her]. They look around and say, 'No one here looks like me. What am I doing here?'" Consequently, they drop out. Being with other women is important in helping Rupa Sheth, a second-year industrial engineering major at Wisconsin, decide if she really wants to stay in that field. "I wanted to make sure I had the support and wouldn't decide not to go on in engineering because there were no women," she states. Different Ideas, Similar Goals The concept of housing women science and engineering students together dates to the mid-1980s, when the first such effort began at Douglass College in New Brunswick, N.J. Douglass is a 3,000-student women's college on the campus of Rutgers, New Jersey's state university. Though the unifying factor in these programs is a chance to live with peers, each has unique aspects. At Douglass, where 100 science undergraduates live in a dorm, science majors also teach science to neighborhood elementary school students. "I see it as a way [for students to feel] confident in their understanding of science, because they have to teach it," says Ellen F. Mappen, director of the Douglass Project for Rutgers Women in Math, Science, and Engineering. The project also began a two-year program with the Girl Scouts. Last year, says Mappen, 24 senior-level Girl Scouts were on campus for four days for an introduction to career opportunities in science and technology. Each of 12 Douglass students mentored a pair of 15- and 16-year-old Girl Scouts while they were on campus. That mentoring is continuing electronically as the high school students work on science projects in their hometowns. At Purdue, approximately 200 women have been involved in the Women in Science Program since its beginning in 1997. The women occupy two and a half floors of a residence hall. They are primarily first- and second-year students, notes Clark, since it's common for women in their third and fourth years to live off campus. The program aims especially to include women who are in physical and computer sciences, she says, since these are fields where the numbers of women are noticeably sparse. Preference is also given to female minority-group members. For More Information Ellen F. Mappen, Director Douglass Project for Rutgers Women in Math, Science, and Engineering www-rci.rutgers.edu/~dougproj Sue Davis, DirectorWomen in Science and Engineering ProgramUniversity of Michiganwww.umich.edu/~umwise National Science Foundation Program in Gender Equity www.ehr.nsf.gov/EHR/HRD/ge/wom-sci.htm Jane Daniels, DirectorPurdue Women in Engineeringfairway.ecn.purdue.edu/wiep Barbara Clark, DirectorPurdue Women in Science Programswww.science.purdue.edu/wisp Caitilyn Allen, Faculty DirectorWomen in Science and Engineering ProgramUniversity of Wisconsin, Madisonwww.housing.wisc.edu/wise The program pairs every woman in the residence hall with an upperclass student in the same field. "We have monthly programs where both are invited to come to a dinner in the residence hall. There'll be some opportunity for socializing and networking. We also have an outside speaker [who] talks about a topic of interest," says Clark. The program also offers formal tutoring. A graduate student in chemistry education teaches upper-level women in science and engineering how to tutor younger students and to help them form study groups. Purdue is unusual in having a separate program for women in engineering. Its 150 students also occupy three floors of a campus residence hall. It began, says program director Jane Daniels, in the face of declining enrollments in the field. Organizers found that women who started in engineering were dropping out of it; they apparently didn't have accurate conceptions and weren't getting much encouragement in high school. Consequently the university began a program to encourage high school women. "Ever since the mid-'70s the retention rate has been virtually identical for male and female students," she says. The program has expanded to include junior high school students. At Wisconsin the effort includes not only special sections of introductory chemistry, but also an explicit effort to get women involved in research. "One of the things we work hard on is making sure that every single [woman] in the program has an out-of-classroom experience in the area she's interested in--that there's a summer research project, that there's an hourly job in a laboratory, or in engineering there's a co-op job at a firm," explains Allen. Evaluating Effectiveness How successful these programs are overall is not certain. In what may be the first published study evaluating them,2 Allen found that freshman women in the Women in Science and Engineering [WISE] Pro-gram had "substantially higher" first-semester grades than the "average UW-Madison freshman." "This is especially noteworthy because WISE students tend to enroll in challenging science courses with relatively low mean grades," she writes. Other programs have also made some attempt at evaluation but don't appear to have made it a major focus. At Purdue, Clark notes that in the fifth semester, the rate at which women in the program stay in science is "significantly greater" than that of a "carefully" matched control group. "The grade point average of the women in the program is only slightly higher than that of women not in the program. The conclusion is that this is not an expensive tutoring program. What this program is providing is increased self-esteem and lack of isolation that the control group isn't getting. That's what's keeping them in," she asserts. Similarly at Douglass, by the fourth year of college, women who were in the residence hall program had a "higher persistence rate" in math and science and engineering than those who did not live in the residence hall, notes Mappen. While efforts to draw women into science--and more importantly, keep them there--abound, there seems to be relatively little effort to assess the success of the programs and to determine what works best in what setting. Do these programs indeed succeed in bringing more women into science and engineering careers? It is quite apparent that a range of programs attempting to do so is flourishing. Harvey Black (73773.2227@compuserve.com) is a freelance science writer in Madison, Wis. 1. National Science Foundation, "Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities," February 1999. 2. C. Allen, "WISER women: fostering undergraduate success in science and engineering with a residential academic program," Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, 5:265-78, 1999.

Living and Studying Together

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