International Dialogue Grows Among Women

A six-week "debate" on women in science that began Sept. 9 on the Nature Web site is the latest illustration of how media technology is helping to turn the long struggle for female parity with male colleagues into an internationally shared experience. Helen C. Davies "I can't help contrasting this with what has gone before," comments Helen C. Davies, president of the Association for Women in Science and a microbiology professor at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center. Recalling efforts to gather national information on women in science over past decades, she observes, "To extend this beyond the [United States] wasn't easy. American women scientists at international congresses would call informal meetings to discuss this matter but [would] discover most of our posters and meeting notices being removed or defaced, except the ones we taped to the mirrors in the ladies' rooms. To have an international dialogue on the Internet--to have instant, interactive communication around the globe--could make a profound difference." Among invited contributors to the Internet debate are four women at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who were key figures in a report on a study of work conditions for tenured women scientists at MIT. The study spurred important changes at the institute, and the report garnered national and overseas media coverage after its release in March. Biology professor Nancy H. Hopkins, who sparked the examination of gender inequalities in the School of Science at MIT, is a coauthor of a contribution to the online dialogue. In it, she and colleagues Mary Lou Pardue, Mary C. Potter, and Sylvia Ceyer affirm that a two-year effort at MIT to collect data on such issues as salaries, lab space and resources, teaching and committee assignments, and awards, revealed bias toward men over women. Although the study led to improvements in pay and other conditions for senior women scientists, the authors conclude, "We know that this problem will not have a fast permanent solution. Bias is subtle and largely unconscious." Nancy H. Hopkins Davies notes, "The significance of the MIT report to me is, it goes beyond counting numbers of women scientists, to measuring the fairness of how the women are treated, and the relative power they achieve .... We feel proud of the distance we have come, but it is a long way out of the Ice Age. The MIT report could well be the exothermic reaction we need." Hopkins remembers that when this process began at MIT in 1994, the 15 tenured women science faculty (compared to 194 men) were concerned that righting wrongs might interfere with continuing to do good work. "It's still true that speaking up on these issues can be very costly to women," she says. "Getting good information is so hard," she adds. "I spent 30 to 40 hours per week for two years on this project." The necessary data had not been compiled previously, because no one had looked at the problem from these perspectives. Hopkins believes that women should take the lead in such research, but their universities must provide funding for it. "Many institutions have told our president, and dean, and me, that they're very afraid of legal issues. So they just don't want to find the truth." Plans are now under way to set up investigative committees in MIT's other four schools, but redressing inequalities in salary and space is the easy part, she suggests. The MIT study showed that the main concern of young women scientists is the difficulty of balancing work and home responsibilities. "Unless we fix the family problem, there won't be a huge number of women in science," she says. "And I now see it [affecting] young men also." Gender roles have changed in society, she observes, but the workplace has not adjusted to that change. women in science online debate: helix.nature.com/debates For the report "A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT": web.mit.edu/fnl/women/women.html Nancy J. Lane, a senior research associate in zoology at Cambridge University and prominent activist in female scientists' issues, is moderating the online debate. In an E-mail interview, Lane wrote that conditions for women in science are worse in the United Kingdom than in the United States. She could not name a single country in Europe where the situation is significantly better, and she noted that the sparsity of minority women in science makes the opportunities even more dire for them. Lane added that if she could implement one change in the United Kingdom, she would "ensure that there was at least one woman on every appointments board or committee, so that a 'level playing field' was in place." Among other invited contributors to the Nature debate are Nicole Dewandre, head of the women and science sector of the European Commission, based in Brussels; Sybille Krummacher, an experimental physicist at Research Center Jülich, in Jülich, Germany; and Helga Ebeling, head of women in education and research at the Federal Ministry of Education and Research in Bonn, Germany. Dewandre's essay points out that the European Commission is now promoting dialogue between member states on actions to promote women in science, and a report is due in October from an expert working group identifying challenges to achieving gender balance in national research policies. A seminar and a conference on women in science also are being planned, to be followed by a report to the European Parliament in the summer of 2001. Steve Bunk (sbunk@uswest.net) is a contributing editor for The Scientist.

International Dialogue Grows Among Women

Sep 26, 1999

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