The Iron Ring

Last week the National Academy of Sciences released a study entitled; Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the potential of women in academic science and engineering. The report investigated many reasons why women are underrepresented in science and engineering faculties. The following bullet points describe their findings:

1. Women have the ability and drive to succeed. (Lawrence Summer’s-type hypotheses hold no water).
2. Women who are interested in science and engineering careers are lost at every educational transition. (fewer of us in grad school than undergrad, fewer women postdocs than grad students, and very few faculty)
3. The problem is not simply the pipeline. (Although there may be fewer women than men applying for faculty positions, this is not enough to explain the discrepancy)
4. Women are very likely to face discrimination in every field of science and engineering. (self explanatory?)
5. A substantial body of evidence establishes that most people- men and women- hold implicit biases.
6. Evaluation criteria contain arbitrary and subjective components that disadvantage women. (faculty are evaluated based on the opinions of senior faculty, and also on characteristics such as assertiveness and single-mindedness. Other characteristics, flexibility, diplomacy, motivation, etc are not taken into consideration)
7. Academic organizational structures and rules contribute significantly to the under use of women in academic science and engineering. (the whole tenure system is built around the concept that a faculty member has a spouse at home to take of ‘home life’ so they can focus on research and scholarship- this is an outdated model, for women as well as men)
8. The consequence of not acting will be detrimental to the nation’s competitiveness.

Whenever I read these types of reports I am always discouraged by the whole ‘so what do we do about it?’ There is no real answer- the system is old, and universal, and not likely to change anytime soon. And one inescapable fact is that the academic job market is extremely competitive, and there will always be sacrifices made for the job. In fact, this is true across the board for women in a variety of fields.

Nothing will change until the society as a whole begins to value the family, and parenthood, more. On the whole, we should have more vacation and be working fewer hours. We should have more infrastructures such as daycare at work, or money towards daycare for women who choose to go back to work.

I read a great article today in the Times about a book that is coming out called The Female Brain. Apparently, many differences between the sexes cannot be explained by socialization alone. Anecdotal evidence presented in the book describes a little girl who was given a truck to play with and her mother found her cuddling the truck in a blanket, soothing it. And babies, even tiny 4 month old ones, vary greatly in what they love to observe. Little tiny girls seek faces, they study expressions and begin to learn about human responses and emotions and little boys love to observe objects, lights and toys.

It seems that at some point during development, the male brain is bathed in testosterone and the female brain is not, leading our brains down extremely specific paths to widely varying skill sets.

I guess this is some of the reasoning behind Lawrence Summer’s outrageous suggestion of differences in ‘intrinsic aptitude’ between the sexes. Consider the SAT bias; women just don’t do as well as men on the math section, despite little to no differences in math grades. And yet, despite the stats I can’t help but ask, how exactly can a test be biased against women? A test of mathematics?

To be honest, I’m not disturbed by Summers comments, and I do agree that it is likely that men and women have distinct biological differences in their brains. But what scares me is not that difference, but the attitude that women who do succeed in the sciences were simply held to a lower standard. I’ve heard on more than one occasion following a graduate school admission, an NSF award or other accolade: she received it because she is a woman. This, to me, is scarier than sexism, because this attitude strips the female scientist of the validity of all her awards. While sexism can be overcome, a woman can never explicitly disprove the hypothesis that she was held to a lower standard.

An article I read recently in The Scientist asks the question that probably keeps some of us graduate students awake at night; are we training too many scientists? Apparently, statistics show that the number of PhDs holding tenure track positions four years after graduation has dropped from 25% to 15% in the past ten years. And as many fewer of us enter academia, the number of postdocs has doubled in the past twenty years. Anecdotal evidence certainly suggests this trend; The Scientist spoke with a host of frustrated postdocs and I can think of a few myself. But I can’t help wonder if the situation is the same across fields, or schools.

As with an undergraduate degree, the wax and wane of job flow affects different schools differently, and I would be interested to see if this is true for a PhD. Quite honestly, does my program place graduates better than others? Are more Penn Bioengineers in tenure track positions four years out? I never asked these types of questions when I started graduate school because I figured that if I wanted to be a professor, the best way would be to choose the correct Postdoctoral position. If (and that is a major ‘if’ now) I wanted to be a Professor, I would seek a Postdoc in a lab with a track record of placing postdocs in faculty positions.

Do we need to be worrying about this earlier?