Year of women in science
I’m declaring 2007 the year of women in science. In the wake of Larry Summers’ ass-minded comments at Harvard two years ago, several academic institutions have put the spotlight on women in science and engineering. We’ve started to see the results of that over the past few months. A National Academy of Science study called “Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering” came out in September and both Columbia and Harvard have been sponsoring conferences and lectures on women in science.
And as Kristin mentioned in her post, a great article by Cornelia Dean came out today in the New York Times about women in science. Since this article is about to go behind a subscription wall, here are some relevant exerpts from it:
At . . . the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . . . half the undergraduate science majors and more than a third of the engineering students are women. Half of the nation’s medical students are women, and for decades the numbers have been rising similarly in disciplines like biology and mathematics. Yet studies show that women in science still routinely receive less research support than their male colleagues, and they have not reached the top academic ranks in numbers anything like their growing presence would suggest. For example, at top-tier institutions only about 15 percent of full professors in social, behavioral or life sciences are women . . .
As the National Academy of Sciences noted in its report, women who are scientists publish somewhat less over all than their male colleagues — but if surveys control for the amount of support researchers receive, women publish as often as men, the report said . . .
Dr. Joan Steitz cited a study of letters of recommendation written for men and women seeking academic appointments. Though all the applicants were successful, she said, and though the letters were written by men and women, the study found that the applicant’s personal life was mentioned six times more often if the letter was about a woman . . .
She cited “Every Other Thursday: Stories and Strategies from Successful Women Scientists” (Yale University Press, 2006), a book by Ellen Daniell, a former assistant professor of molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley. In the book Dr. Daniell describes a group of female scientists who have been meeting regularly for more than 20 years to talk about their professional triumphs and travails, turning themselves into mentors and role models for one other.
There’s also a lot of great stuff in the article about how women are evaluated on the way they dress more than men are, and how difficult it is for women to be taken seriously when they are pregnant.
I’ll be reading the NAS study over the next few days, and will post here when I find interesting statistics.
December 20th, 2006 at 8:50 am
I find the part about the letters of recommendation to be extremely interesting. It illuminates the unconscious bias in the field. I think people are becoming increasingly aware of these types of problems which are just as important, if not more important than some of the sexist remarks we’ve all heard about women having less aptitude than men.
The article brings up the idea of science mentoring for women. It sounds like this has promise, but I’ve found that there is an attitude from some older female scientists that they got to where they are on their own so other women should be able to too. I wonder how we can work to overcome these barriers.