Sex Discrimination Controversies Continue To Plague Health Agency

if (n == null) The Scientist 7[20]:1, Oct. 18, 1993 News Sex Discrimination Controversies Continue To Plague Health Agency By Franklin Hoke "The [NIH] administration has been very responsive," Kleinman says, citing Lance A. Liotta, the deputy director for intramural research, as particularly so. "But I would say that when you get down to the scientific directors, there's been less accountability." Changes in place as of late last month that are intended to improve the professional prospects of NIH's women scientists include a new tenure policy--NIH tenures scientists much as academia does--designed to ease conflicts between family obligations and the tenure-track schedule; the appointment of a woman scientist adviser to the scientific director of each institute to confer on gender issues; and a sharp rise in the representation of women as speakers at NIH-sponsored scientific meetings. At this point, the administration "has implemented or is in the process of implementing every single recommendation" of the task force report, according to NIH spokes- woman Anne Thomas. To be sure, however, a number of high-profile, unresolved cases of sex discrimination at NIH cloud this view. Women scientists who say they have been victimized speak of a deeply entrenched hierarchical, sexist culture at the institutes. And they say the sexism tends to target the best and the brightest of young women, effectively pushing them out of research. The loss to science--as well as to the individual women--is substantial, they say. Kleinman herself, although encouraged by the response from the NIH administrators, acknowledges that the problems run deep. She concurs with a widely held view that the culture of science is generally discriminatory against women, but she says that NIH does not differ greatly from many universities in that respect. She does, however, see unique organizational differences between universities and NIH that serve to exacerbate difficulties for women at the health agency. "At NIH, the system doesn't depend on grants," Kleinman says. "It depends on your relationship with your boss. At a university, women have the basis of their grants to help them hold their positions and to help them move up. The more grants they get, the more promotions they're going to get. And you can't take lab space away from someone who's got a grant." Administrators, too, acknowledge that the hierarchical structure of NIH labs may serve to stymie improvement in the status of women scientists there. But they insist that, even so, the situation is no worse at the institutes than in university-based biomedical research settings. And they say they are committed to improving conditions for women. "Something like 40 to 50 percent of the graduate students in biological sciences are women these days," says Ruth Kirschstein, acting director of NIH, speaking of the universities. "And in medical schools, something in the order of 30 to 40 percent are women. So the issue is not getting them interested and having them go through their programs to get advanced degrees." The issue, she suggests, is that women scientists in university settings have difficulty being promoted to senior positions, with ever-declining representation at higher rungs on the career ladder. "And it's sort of the same thing here," Kirschstein says. "They go through postdoctoral training, and then the question is, what happens to them as they move into independent careers, as they move into tenure track and being tenured? And that's where the entire system, for women, falls apart. There are far fewer women in tenure track at NIH--and at universities and medical schools. There are far fewer women in tenured positions, and there are very few women who are in high-level administrative positions." The New Numbers One of Kleinman's contributions to the debate over sexism at the institutes was to enlist the help of Michael Fordis, director of the NIH's three-year-old Office of Education, in assembling hard new data to inform discussions about pay, tenure, promotion, and visibility. One of Fordis's primary responsibilities is recruitment of young scientists into the intramural program. "You can't recruit the best and the brightest if there are perceived barriers," Fordis says. "And we felt that we should make certain that we had numbers to see where the problems are, because there are very different solutions [possible]." For example, to assess the pay levels of men and women scientists, Fordis matched pairs of scientists on the basis of their educational degrees, the number of years since graduation, and other factors. From the overall pool of about 1,200 individuals, he identified 77 matched pairs--although in some cases in which three individuals could be matched, the information for all three was included in the "pair." In 77 pairings, men earned $3,300 more than women, on average. The new view provided by Fordis's number-crunching had an important impact on the NIH community. "People are very angry about the pay issue, very angry," says Kleinman. "You just look at the pay data, and you get ill." The problem now facing the agency administration is how to respond to this information. Because of the difficulties he had in matching pairs, Fordis suggests that assessing comparable pay levels will be problematic. It will involve looking closely at each institute and, ultimately, each individual and making judgments. "There's not an across-the-board formula that can be applied," Fordis says, "but surely people can look and rectify any areas in which there are inequities." The numbers assembled by Fordis, largely a statistical portrait of women scientists' problems at the institutes, also show a few encouraging signs. For example, although tenured women represent only about 18 percent of the total tenured scientists at NIH, 45 percent of scientists granted tenure in 1992 were women, a figure much closer to--even a bit above--their representation in the pool of candidates. The 1992 number was a sharp jump up from rates over the previous decade, which had hovered between 15 and 25 percent. Of course, the potential long- term significance of a one-year improvement remains to be seen. On the visibility issue, too, Kleinman notes that historically women were rarely invited to deliver the important sponsored lectures on campus. The prestigious Dyer Lecture, for example, was given by a woman only once in the 37 times it was delivered between 1951 and 1990. This year, however, women received nearly all of the lectureships, Kleinman says, in response to complaints from her group. The Best And Brightest The importance of confronting sexism in the laboratories of the nation's top biomedical research organization, in order to keep talented women scientists in science, is emphasized by all parties--administration officials, women scientists, and critics of NIH. Those most critical of the environment confronting women at NIH charge that, in fact, it is precisely the most talented women who are most victimized at NIH, the ones whose research is most likely to be appropriated, for example, without proper credit. "If you are not an efficient or inspired [female] researcher, they leave you alone, and you can work for years undisturbed," says one congressional committee staffer, on condition of anonymity. Her committee has been investigating scientific misconduct at NIH, including possible links to sexism, racism, and other discriminatory behavior. "It's only the ones who really accomplish something who have anything to fear." Viola Young-Horvath, executive director of the Federation of Organizations for Professional Women in Washington, D.C., agrees. "It's often the best and the brightest of the women who are discriminated against," she says. "I think there is more of it at NIH simply because you have a concentration of some of the most brilliant, competitive people in the world of science at NIH." Young-Horvath points to the case of Margaret Jensvold as a prime example. With especially strong academic credentials--she was selected by the Association for Academic Psychiatry as one of the six most promising residents in the country--Jensvold came to the National Institute of Mental Health in 1987 to study premenstrual syndrome. There, she says, as the only woman researcher in her area, she was denied important professional opportunities made available to male fellows. On Feb. 28, 1994, Jensvold's case will go to trial in U.S. District Court in Baltimore. Jensvold, now director of the Institute for Research on Women's Health in Washington, says that, as a result of the problems, she was forced to abandon her research. "My career was taken from me, my research was taken from me, and promising work wasn't done, because of the way they viewed me as a woman," Jensvold says. Jensvold is one of several women with sex discrimination complaints against NIH who believe that the problems are linked to the hierarchical power structure of the labs there. "There is a gender problem here," says Jensvold. "But, once you scratch beneath the surface, we're really talking about much bigger stuff having to do with the whole misuse of power in the workplace." Young-Horvath concurs, suggesting that the predation of more powerful, usually senior, male scientists on the creativity of other scientists viewed as less powerful is not unusual. "And who would you choose to do it to?" she asks. "You'd choose the scientists that, in your mind, you conceived of as being weakest or most vulnerable, and that's frequently women." "That's the way it is at NIH," says Maureen Polsby, a neurologist with a sex discrimination and research fraud case against NIH that has gone from U.S. District Court in Baltimore to the Supreme Court and back over the past five years. "If you are a woman, you are perceived as easy to take advantage of and someone who can be exploited." Billie Mackey, president of SelfHelp for Equal Rights, an informal employment rights group at NIH, calls appropriation of research one of the most devastating aspects of sex discrimination at NIH for women scientists. "These young, bright women bring a lot of their creative ideas into the laboratory, and many times these ideas are stolen," Mackey says. "Many of them are so discouraged that they leave NIH and they leave research." Saru Devi is a former NIH researcher from India who is struggling not to be pushed out of science. This year, she filed complaints with the NIH's Office of Equal Opportunity for discrimination on the bases of sex and ethnicity and the Department of Health and Human Service's Office of Research Integrity for theft of research. She says that, despite the skepticism and resistance of her supervisors at NIH, she successfully developed a vaccine for cryptococcal meningitis, a fungal disease that kills approximately 10 percent of people with AIDS. After the vac- cine's success was demonstrated, she says--a patent application has been submitted by NIH for the discovery--she was pushed out of the lab and the work turned over to others. In May, at the American Society for Microbiology meeting in Atlanta, she says she watched from the audience as another researcher presented her data as his own--including showing a graph she herself had prepared. She was given only an acknowledgment, she says, for work on which she feels she should be first author. Since then, she has fought to receive the credit she feels she should have, but she says the experience has been traumatic. "Coming from a foreign country, looking at NIH as the best place and NIH scientists as the role models and then working so hard, being a mother of a small child, working over the weekends and 10 hours a day to achieve something, and then to undergo all these things is something very terrible," Devi says. "If they take my patent away and make money out of it, it doesn't bother me at all. But my work--it's my whole life."

Sex Discrimination Controversies Continue To Plague Health Agency

Sex Discrimination Controversies Continue To Plague Health Agency

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