Survey: Schools Discourage Women Scientists

The fiercely competitive atmosphere in introductory courses is said to cause more females than males to drop out of science WASHINGTON--College professors are too eager to weed out students enrolled in introductory science classes, say two sociologists from the University of Colorado, Boulder. And women, disproportionately more than men, appear to fall victim to the rigid practice. Thus, the sociologists say, many women are abandoning their interest in pursuing careers in science not because they can't do the work, but because they have been prematurely discouraged. Science faculty "have developed the dysfunction of over- pruning," write Nancy M. Hewitt and Elaine Seymour, researchers who recently completed a study of why science students switch to nonscience majors. They presented the results of their study in a recent report to the New York- based Alfred P. Sloan Foundation entitled "Factors Contributing to High Attrition Rates Among Science and Engineering Undergraduate Majors." Hewitt and Seymour interviewed 149 current or former science, mathematics, and engineering students at four institutions of varying sizes in the southwestern United States. They concluded that women undergraduates who drop out of science are as capable as their male counterparts who persist. But the type of "cut-throat competition" that goes on in introductory science courses is especially demoralizing to those female students "who felt less secure in their own abilities" and whose "self-confidence depended upon the extrinsic reassurance" of a grade, say the authors. The notion that the path toward career achievement is steeper and rockier for women scientists than for men is, of course, not a new concept. Mary Esther Gaulden, at age 71 still going strong as a radiation biologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, recalls that women constituted a tiny percentage of the undergraduate science majors when she attended the University of Virginia in the early 1940s. "I decided at some point that I was going to ignore some discrimination and keep my eyes on the goal," she remembers. "Those of us who got through showed great determination, and became tough as a result. I was also fortunate to work with men who had liberal attitudes about women." A colleague in her 50s, immunologist Ellen Vitetta, credits "a high persistence index" for helping her survive. "I never wanted to do anything but science," says Vitetta. "I learned not to be sensitive to the problems and the obstacles. Failures are not a deterrent to the final goal. Nothing could kill my love for science, for figuring out how things work." The study by Hewitt and Seymour is part of a growing body of material that examines why the number of women who pursue science studies in college is so much smaller than the corresponding number of men. Despite considerable effort over the past decade to increase their numbers, women receive only 30 percent of the B.S. degrees awarded in the physical sciences, according to the latest figures from the National Science Foundation. A Challenge To Schools Last fall the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) issued a report, "Investing in Human Potential: Science and Engineering at the Crossroads." The AAAS study challenges universities to back up their repeatedly stated commitments to recruit and retain more women and minorities in the sciences with institution-wide reform. Among other findings, the report noted that it is impossible to calculate precisely the number of women dropping out of science because schools do not monitor the persistence or attrition rates of their students. The National Academy of Sciences also has recently published a report, "Women in Science and Engineering: Increasing Their Numbers in the 1990s," which lays out a plan for how the academy should address the problem. Although men as well as women encounter conditions that cause them to leave science, the Colorado researchers found, many of the obstacles appear to have a more damaging effect on women than on men. For example, Hewitt and Seymour found that while men tend to react to a hostile, hotly competitive academic climate by accepting and finding a way to cope with the added pressure, many women are turned off by an attitude that the authors compare to "the apprenticeships of the medieval guilds and military boot camp." These "essentially male" systems, they say, are also self-sustaining and resistant to "external probing and radical internal review." Hostile Environment Sexism contributes to this hostile environment for women, according to the Colorado researchers as well as other reports. The AAAS study, for example, found that faculty and students in science classes treat women differently from and more negatively than the way they treat men. And of the women polled in the Colorado study, "nearly all complained about the daily irritation of dealing with open, or thinly veiled, sexist remarks from their male peers, and with the inner stresses of feeling unwelcome and pressured," the authors reported. Women study subjects told the Colorado researchers that they often felt like "outsiders in a male- dominated culture." Weeding Out Women Hewitt and Seymour present an array of reasons that students drop out of science. They found that the weed-out practices separate the men from the women, but are not indicative of the ability or character of students. Students who remained in science, math, or engineering majors--termed "non-switchers" by the authors--were not better students and did not have better science preparation than the students (dubbed "switchers") who changed from a science major to a discipline outside of science. According to the sociologists, however, female switchers tended to blame themselves for their decision to leave science, while male switchers tended to blame poor teaching. Discouragement and loss of self-esteem were reported by 78 percent of the women compared with 43 percent of the men as the major reason for their switch to a nonscience major. The most frequently mentioned problems by students, both male and female, who switched from a science major to a nonscience major were: better educational opportunities offered by, and greater interest in, another major (93 percent); incorrect initial choice of major (92 percent); and poor teaching within that major (88 percent). The most frequently mentioned problems by students who remained in science were: poor teaching (65 percent); inadequate preparation by faculty (59 percent); and poor advising and an inability to find help with academic problems (51 percent). The weed-out method, according to Hewitt and Seymour, operated in all the schools they visited. The practice was "officially denied," they said, "but unofficially legitimated." Faculty and administrators told the authors that the system was meant to be benign, and to operate "on the premise that those who are lost to the major are mostly unable or unsuited to pursue it further. Those who survived it," the authors noted, "were encouraged to see themselves as intellectually and morally superior to those who did not." Radical Solutions Sheila Tobias, a sociologist at the University of Arizona who has written widely on the problems facing women in science, believes that a "radical restructuring" of the way undergraduate science is taught is needed to welcome female students and foster their success. In a book entitled Programs That Work: The Implementation Challenge, to be published this spring by the nonprofit Research Corporation of Tucson, Ariz., Tobias documents programs that both successfully nurture students and "attack the gate-keeping functions of introductory courses." She believes that it's possible to teach faculty how to improve their skills as teachers, but that they must first be willing to learn. Most scientists--be they teachers, researchers, or administrators--have a tendency to look for a simple solution rather than to participate in the process of curriculum reform, Tobias says. "They want to buy an off-the-shelf package for computer-assisted instruction," she says, or treat curriculum reform as a research project, with a large grant to a group of researchers at a particular university. A more lasting approach, she says, is to embark on the slow and difficult process of changing attitudes. While some undergraduate science departments are beginning to reform their curriculum and environment, researchers in the field say that the nurturing of science students, male and female, remains more the exception than the rule. Until more institutions take on that job, say experts, women will continue to have perfectly good reasons for abandoning scientific majors. Roger Johnson is a biochemist and freelance writer living in the Washington, D.C., area.

Survey: Schools Discourage Women Scientists

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