Smith College Overrules Department, Denies Tenure To Female Chemist

Tenure To Female Chemist Colleagues 'Dismayed' By Decision 'SOMEWHAT SURPRISED': Sharon Palmer, who will have to leave next year, says "I thought it couldn't quite happen." When C. Pauline Burt was hired by Smith College to teach chemistry, the periodic table numbered 86 elements. The neutron had yet to be discovered. Pluto, too, was unknown. United States President Woodrow Wilson presided over the first meeting of the League of Nations. Babe Ruth still played for the Boston Red Sox. Burt was hired in 1919, the year after her colleague Jessie Cann. Both women became tenured professors of chemistry and taught into the 1950s, with Burt retiring in 1958. No woman hired since 1919 has won tenure in the chemistry department of the selective women's college in Northampton, Mass. And that record will continue for at least another year. Physical-inorganic chemist and assistant professor Sharon Palmer was recently denied tenure by the college despite the unanimous recommendation of her department. Palmer is the third woman denied tenure in the department since 1985. All three male chemistry faculty considered in the past 11 years have received tenure. The 10-member department consists of five professors and one associate professor-all men, all tenured-two assistant professors-both women, without tenure-and two women in non-tenure-track positions. Palmer, who will have one more year at Smith before having to leave, has filed a grievance. The grievance committee, she says, can consider only whether Smith's administrative procedures were followed. If it determines they were not, it can send the case back to the Committee on Tenure and Promotion, which overruled the department in denying tenure to Palmer. ALUMNA: UCLA chemist Joan Valentine calls Smith's record or tenuring women "distressing and embarassing." The irony that this dubious record of tenuring female chemists belongs to an elite women's college is not lost on anyone involved. The chemistry department is "demoralized and dismayed," according to George Fleck, a professor and Palmer's most vocal champion in the chemistry department. The pattern "is extremely distressing and embarrassing," says alumna Joan Valentine, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles. SENSE OF IRONY: Smith chemist George Fleck says the department is "demoralized" by the ruling. Palmer has reacted with conflicting emotions. "I'm very disappointed and somewhat surprised, since approval of a unanimous recommendation is typical. On the other hand, I'm not the sort of person who makes history, and Smith has never given tenure [in chemistry] to a married woman or one with children," says the 37-year-old Palmer, who is married with one child. "In the back of my mind, I thought it couldn't quite happen." Chemistry majors are "mad, but sad," reports college senior Linda Columbus, who is headed for graduate school in chemistry at UCLA. Palmer teaches physical chemistry, one of the hardest courses majors take, notes Columbus, and she does it "without ever making us feel stupid. It's sad she can't stay here, because she's so good at teaching women chemistry." The decision to reject the department's recommendation was made in February by the college's seven-member Committee on Tenure and Promotion, composed of president Ruth Simmons, dean of the faculty John Connolly, and five faculty members. Simmons, in her letter notifying Palmer of the decision, wrote, "In your particular case, the varied sources of information presented a very mixed picture, with serious questions being raised about your rate of scholarly productivity." Citing committee rules on confidentiality, neither Connolly nor any of the faculty members will discuss the specifics of the case. "I am concerned by the absence of tenured women in the chemistry department," Connolly states, but "I wouldn't want to speculate [about the reason for the absence]." According to Palmer, her scholarship in general was criticized. The committee "was not just counting publications, but looking at other evidence, including that I wasn't traveling [to scientific meetings] much lately," she remarks. Of Palmer's 13 publications, only three date from after her 1987 hire by Smith, one in 1989 and two in press. Although members of the chemistry department note that this was a concern for them, they say they felt that Palmer's overall strength overrode a publication record that might be perceived as thin. Additionally, while so few publications would be fatal to the tenure aspirations of any chemist at a major research university, Palmer's record is not significantly different from that of other assistant professors in chemistry at small colleges. Associate professor David Bickar, the last person to be tenured by Smith's chemistry department, observes that his publication record might have looked slightly better than Palmer's, but he thinks the "real difference is maybe one paper." Palmer's travel to meetings and research productivity have been hampered, she acknowledges, by her family situation: Her daughter is four years old. During the time when she was pregnant and nursing, she limited her time in the laboratory, since much of her research involves organic chemicals that might be hazardous to a developing fetus or child. Over that period she continued to advise her undergraduate honors students on their lab work and concentrated on other professional duties, such as serving on a National Science Foundation review committee and chairing a departmental search committee. "My water broke when I was interviewing a candidate," she recalls. Other department members praise Palmer for her teaching ability and her strong commitment to advising senior honors projects. She has "as strong a dossier on teaching as I have ever seen," comments Fleck. In another irony of her case, this devotion to students may also have hindered Palmer in building an impressive publication record. At Smith and other small colleges, faculty members do not have graduate students to shoulder much of the experimental work. If they have any research help, it is in the form of undergraduate honors students, who typically do lab work over the summer or for one academic year. The students often need more help than graduate students do, and when they finally become proficient, they graduate. Palmer says she tried to develop projects appropriate for undergraduates, but also let the students pick their own projects to work on. As a result, she points out, only bits and pieces of student data have been relevant to her own research. "The fact is," she says, "taking on a lot of honor students means you don't have time to do the work yourself. To some extent, the more students you take on, the less you can publish." 'DEVASTATING BLOW': Junior colleague Petra Turowski says that Palmer is her mentor at Smith College. Palmer's failure to win tenure "has been a devastating blow to me," declares Petra Turowski, the other assistant professor in the department, who is eligible for tenure review in two years. "Sharon is my only mentor in the college. [Her fate] has increased the stress I feel as a woman in a predominantly male field. I think Sharon is an exemplary woman in her field. . . . When someone like her is turned down, then there isn't much hope." The geology department at Smith is also all male in the tenured ranks; its five professors were all hired before 1979. In biological sciences, three of 10 professors and two of three associate professors are women. In physics, one of the two professors and both associate professors are women. CHANGING TIMES: Chemist Nina Roscher notes that small colleges are hiring more women. Palmer's fate and the difficulties for women chemists at Smith are not completely surprising to researchers studying trends of women in science. Smith is "not the least bit unusual" in not having tenured women, notes Nina Roscher, professor and chairwoman of the chemistry department at American University, who has been studying women in chemistry for more than a decade. Women are poorly represented in chemistry departments generally, Roscher notes. At small colleges, however, the trend is improving, she adds: At these schools, 35 percent of faculty hired in the last five years have been women, nearly 10 times the figure 25 years ago. INEQUITIES REMAIN: Sociologist Mary Frank Fox notes that "collegial opportunities and rewards are different for men and women. And while women are faring better in science than years ago, there are still inequities, according to Mary Frank Fox, a professor of sociology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "My work suggests that within the same setting, collegial opportunities and rewards are different for men and women," says Fox, who has been studying women in science and academia for 20 years. "Academic rank is probably the area where we see the greatest disparity between the sexes," she observes. After controlling for research productivity, "promotion rates from assistant to associate professor and, particularly, from associate professor to professor are lower and slower for women than for men," according to Fox. She concludes that it is not the individual characteristics alone of women that account for these differences, but workplace features as well. In one of her surveys of social scientists, women reported higher teaching loads than men, said fewer resources were available to them, and reported less interaction with colleagues. Fox has also looked at the impact of marriage and children on women scientists. She has found, as have others, that whatever effects exist are not consistently negative: Married women publish as much as unmarried women, and having children is also not a significant negative factor. But, she cautions, the data are for "survivors"-women who persist in science. She has no data on women who have been driven out of science by family demands. Other research on women scientists has suggested gender differences in style. Women, write sociologist Gerhard Sonnert and historian of science Gerald Holton of Harvard University in the January-February issue of American Scientist (84:63-71, 1996), may be "more cautious and careful in their methods, and . . . pay more attention to details." Palmer suggests that the hypothesized conservatism of women scientists may play a role in her own research style. "I need to get a series of students working on the same project to be able to bring anything to publication," she says. "I have had a series of students working on a project, but have had conflicting data and am not sure what is true. I have finally got some money to buy better instruments that I think will help me untangle the results." The embarrassment felt by Smith's chemistry department is all the more acute because of the inevitable comparisons with departments at other elite small women's colleges, such as the other "Seven Sisters" schools that have their own faculties: Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Vassar (no longer all-female), and Wellesley. (Radcliffe College shares faculty with Harvard University.) Taken together, the sister schools have more tenured women than men in their chemistry departments. "It is surprising to me that at any female college, females aren't represented in large numbers in every department," maintains Janice Smith, professor and chairwoman of chemistry at Mount Holyoke. She says it is important for students to have female role models. "I never saw a woman give a chemistry lecture until I came to Mount Holyoke," she comments. Now, "some of us are married, some have children. It's important for students to see there are a variety of things you can do with your life in chemistry Billy Goodman, a freelance science writer based in Montclair, N.J., is online at goodmanb@styx.ios.com.

Smith College Overrules Department, Denies Tenure To Female Chemist

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