Women Scientists' Group Launches Effort To Probe The Plight Of Female Researchers

Plight Of Female Researchers Date:January 10, 1994, pp.1 Through campus `site visits,' AWIS will investigate the prevalence of gender bias in academia The Association for Women in Science (AWIS) is planning an ambitious project to assess the climate for female researchers in academia--by visiting several United States colleges and universities and talking with the women themselves. The effort will take AWIS representatives into several schools for "site visits," during which they will discuss women's concerns with faculty, administrators, and students, reporting their findings to school officials. AWIS will also collect samples of institutional policy statements and other documents that women scientists feel either help or deter their advancement, which will be evaluated for inclusion in an upcoming publication. The Washington, D.C.-based organization will ultimately "develop a model program that offers workable options for enhancing the academic climate for women science faculty" for dissemination to schools that were not visited, according to a draft proposal for the project. Through this program, AWIS is trying to grapple with the question of why "women don't seem to move up in academia as readily as men," says AWIS past president Ellen Weaver, a retired professor of plant physiology from San Jose State University. "Women are hired in good faith, but somewhere on the climb to tenure, they don't make it." A 1991 National Research Council study Women in Science and Engineering: Increasing Their Numbers in the 1990s, Washington, D.C., National Academy Press), for example, found that 66 percent of the women Ph.D.'s on science and engineering faculties either were not tenured or were not tenure-track, compared with 40 percent of their male counterparts. "The time has come to not just collect more data about how poorly women do," says Weaver, a co-principal investigator (PI) on the project. "It's time to go in and find out what's happening. "We've been concentrating on teaching the women what they need to know to succeed, but maybe there's something the institution can do to be more accommodating to women." The AWIS effort is modeled on a program now being conducted under the sponsorship of the American Physical Society (APS) and the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT), both of College Park, Md., and funded by the National Science Foundation. In the physics project, groups of women physicists conduct day-long site visits to departments that have requested help in improving the climate for women. AWIS aims to expand the effort, spending a longer time at each institution and looking at all its science departments. AWIS is currently soliciting funding for its project and expects to clarify the funding status in March; in the meantime, it has begun collecting policy documents from various schools on an ad hoc basis. In the project's initial phase, expected to take a year and a half, the organization will visit one institution--probably a liberal arts college, according to Weaver--and make recommendations for changes. In the second phase, AWIS will expand its visits to six schools, including a major research university and a historically black institution, "looking for institutional differences as well as departmental differences," says AWIS executive director Catherine Didion, a co-PI on the project. The program's final phase involves the creation of "regional training centers," where academics will attend seminars, receive diversity training, and learn how to adapt such programs for their own schools. Materials and methods used in these centers will be developed from information gathered in the site visits. Key to the success of the project--and a crucial component of the physics program after which it is modeled--is that site-visit teams go only to institutions that invite them, and where high- level administrators communicate the importance of the visit to the faculty, AWIS officials say. "There has to be a commitment in order to get anywhere on these issues," says Didion. "This program only works if you have support from the top." Didion acknowledges that the idea of a site visit may be daunting to some administrators--"none of us would want someone to come in and tell us, `This is what you could be doing better'"--but notes that the goal is to reach "the institutions that recognize that they want to change and that they need to change." And, indeed, there are male administrators at such schools who will welcome the visitors, Didion says. "Men know they have to be part of the solution" to the problem of an unfriendly climate for women, she says, "but they don't know how to go about it. There's not a recognition of what the barriers are and how to address them." The experience of the women physicists, who have been conducting site visits since 1990, bears this out. In fact, says Judy Franz, a professor of physics at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and a co-PI on the physics site-visit project, the effort was born out of a meeting of physics department heads--an overwhelmingly male group. "They passed a resolution that more should be done by them to encourage women and minorities to enter physics, and wanted help from APS and AAPT," she recalls. "We can get as many invitations as we need" to conduct site visits, says Mildred Dresselhaus, Institute Professor of Electrical Engineering and Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-PI along with Franz. "Fifteen years ago, there were a lot of individuals who would consider [climate issues for women] a non-problem. Now they are in the minority." While the site-visit reports are addressed to a department chairman, the team tries to meet with the provost, the president, and other senior administrators when possible; chairmen may share the team's report with faculty, students, and administrators. Only 3 percent of physics faculty in U.S. universities are women, according to APS's Committee on the Status of Women in Physics. At the undergraduate and graduate levels, women physics students are a small minority, as well. As a result, some problems women physics students face are less common in disciplines such as biology, in which the numbers of women are greater, says Bunny Clark, University Professor of physics at Ohio State University and a site-visit team member. Clark says that male physicists' lack of experience with dealing with women professionally may contribute to what could be viewed as a sexist environment. "In some cases, [male physicists'] socialization is perhaps slower than it would be in a situation in which there were equal numbers of men and women," she says. "What we've found is less than we would hope for in the ideal world," says Dresselhaus. One issue that has come up during site visits, for example, is the presence of posters in the lab or office depicting nude or semi-clad women, say site-visit team members. "Some people who have them up don't even realize that people would find them offensive," says Franz. Another site-visit finding is that male teaching assistants (TAs) often "are not given any training" on how to behave at the front of a classroom, says Michelle Shinn, an associate professor of physics at Bryn Mawr College who has been on several site visits. "How they're going to treat their women students is just left to their upbringing." As a result, she says, often "women feel undervalued or patronized--as a woman, you become the recorder of data rather than the taker of data, or a male TA might say something demeaning or flirt with you." In a department with few women, a sense of isolation can exacerbate cases such as these, women physicists say, leading to a tendency to take personally issues that others might consider trivial. "When a woman often never sees another woman during the day, they think it's them, not the situation," says Dresselhaus. To help overcome such problems--or, at least, to bring them to the attention of an official who can do something about them-- site-visit teams have frequently recommended that a department chairman schedule regular meetings with women students. Several departments that have undergone site visits have implemented this suggestion already. "They encouraged us to try to [establish] a smaller-depart- ment kind of feeling," says David Campbell, physics department head at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Campbell, who administers nearly 300 graduate students and 66 faculty members, says that as a result of the November 1992 site visit, his department instituted a faculty-student mentoring program and revived a peer mentoring program that "had sort of sputtered." In addition, says Campbell, after he received the site-visit report, he met with women students to discuss the findings, including the need "to make the department a slightly warmer place" and the high degree of stress caused by the physics qualifying exam. "Eighty-six percent of the students who take it twice pass it, but there is a rumor that half the students fail," says Campbell. "We're working on trying to debunk that." The physicists emphasize that a number of the site-visit teams' suggestions, if implemented, should help men as well as women. "One thing we really learned is that many of these problems are not gender-specific," says Campbell. While the chairmen may enthusiastically welcome the site visitors, not every faculty member agrees that such an exercise is a good idea. "There are some individuals at these departments who would rather see us disappear off the face of the Earth--and we hear about it," says Dresselhaus. James Legg, physics chairman at Kansas State University, whose department was visited this past fall, said that the reaction of the 25 faculty members covered a "wide range of responses--`Why are you doing this?' being one of them--[ranging to] `Good; I'm glad that we're looking at this issue and taking it seriously.'" The "defense mechanisms" manifested by the faculty who reacted negatively to the visit, Legg says, included questions such as "`Why, in a time of tight employment, are you concentrating on women?'" and "`Is it really true that women are being disadvantaged by the atmosphere that we have today?'" Toh-Ming Lu, physics chairman at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, says he wanted to have his spring 1992 site visit "not because we have something really good to show, but to see how they can help us improve. "We recognize that this is a key issue and should be dealt with," he says. "We also recognize that we are historically male- dominated. We [didn't] expect a glowing report." His goals for the encounter, he says, were "to stimulate some discussion, to encourage us to talk about what other women scientists think about--bad or good; to let our students meet with other women physicists, which we always want to do; and to let our administration know about women's issues. "Because we have been male-dominated for such a long time, we lost track of realistic women's science issues," he says. In such circumstances, "you don't have in your mind how the real world is, how difficult it is for women to study physics." Didion says her organization decided to adopt the physics program because "we thought it meshed well with AWIS. Our strength is in trying to do intervention--to create change as a catalyst." Evaluations from those outside an institution can be advantageous in this respect, she says: "Sometimes external organizations can do it effectively, where internal organizations won't be heard." The goal of the AWIS project is not to solve individual women's problems, Weaver emphasizes: "We're looking at factors," she says. "We're not going to pursue anyone's individual case." One reason the physics program has been able to garner invitations from so many schools, site-visit team members and department members say, is that the teams are composed of senior, respected scientists; Dresselhaus, for example, is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. "When I put together a team, I try to get people from different areas of physics," says Franz. Usually, some faculty members [at the school being visited] would recognize at least one of our names." Kansas State's Legg says that, for him, the benefits of the visit were obvious. "Is it better to remain ignorant about the problems that you may have?" he asks rhetorically. "To me, it's a win-win situation. If they come in and point out problems and give us ways to improve them, we've got ourselves a better department. One doesn't mind being criticized if you're going to profit from it."

Women Scientists' Group Launches Effort To Probe The Plight Of Female Researchers

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