Bias Is Hurting Women
in Science,
Panel Reports
By CORNELIA DEAN,
NYTimes on the Web, September 19, 2006
Women in science and engineering are
hindered not by lack of ability but by bias and “outmoded institutional
structures” in academia, an expert panel reported yesterday. The panel,
convened by the National Academy of Sciences, said that in an era of global
competition the nation could not afford “such underuse of precious human
capital.” Among other steps, the report recommends altering procedures for
hiring and evaluation, changing typical timetables for tenure and promotion, and
providing more support for working parents.
“Unless a deeper talent pool is tapped, it will be difficult for our country to
maintain our competitiveness in science and engineering,” the panel’s
chairwoman, Donna E. Shalala, said at a news conference at which the report was
made public. The report, “Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the
Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering,” is online at
www.nationalacademies.org.
Dr. Shalala, a former secretary of health and human services who is now
president of the University of Miami, said part of the problem was insufficient
effort on the part of college and university administrators. “Many of us
spend more energy enforcing the law on our sports teams than we have in our
academic halls,” she said.
The panel dismissed the idea, notably advanced last year by Lawrence H. Summers,
then the president of Harvard, that the relative dearth of women in the upper
ranks of science might be the result of “innate” intellectual deficiencies,
particularly in mathematics.
If there are cognitive differences, the report says, they are small and
irrelevant. In any event, the much-studied gender gap in math performance
has all but disappeared as more girls enroll in demanding classes. Even
among very high achievers, the gap is narrowing, the panelists said.
A spokesman for Mr. Summers said he was out of the country and could not be
reached for comment.
Nor is the problem a lack of women in the academic pipeline, the report says.
Though women leave science and engineering more often than men “at every
educational transition” from high school through college professorships, the
number of women studying science and engineering has sharply increased at all
levels.
For 30 years, the report says, women have earned at least 30 percent of the
nation’s doctorates in social and behavioral sciences, and at least 20 percent
of the doctorates in life sciences. Yet they appear among full professors in
those fields at less than half those levels. Women from minority groups
are “virtually absent,” it adds.
The report also dismisses other commonly held beliefs — that women are
uncompetitive or less productive, that they take too much time off for their
families. Instead, it says, extensive previous research showed a pattern
of unconscious but pervasive bias, “arbitrary and subjective” evaluation
processes and a work environment in which “anyone lacking the work and family
support traditionally provided by a ‘wife’ is at a serious disadvantage.”
Along with Dr. Shalala, the panel included Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of
psychology at Harvard who has long challenged the “innate differences” view, and
Ruth J. Simmons, the president of Brown University, who established a widely
praised program for aspiring engineers when she was president of the all-female
Smith College.
The report was dedicated to another panelist, Denice Denton, an electrical
engineer who until her suicide this summer was chancellor of the University of
California, Santa Cruz, and a forceful advocate for women, gay men and lesbians,
and minority members in science and engineering.
The 18-member panel had one man: Robert J. Birgeneau, chancellor of the
University of California, Berkeley. But Dr. Shalala noted that the
National Academy of Sciences committee that reviewed the report had 10 men.
“Nothing was a foregone conclusion,” she said, adding that the committee was
surprised at the strength of evidence supporting the report’s conclusions.
In an interview, Dr. Simmons of Brown said: “The data don’t lie.
There are lots of arguments one could have mounted 30 years ago, but 30 years
later we have incontrovertible data that women do have the ability to do science
and engineering at a very high level.”
She said the more relevant question was, “Why aren’t they electing these fields
when the national need and the opportunities in the fields are so great?”
Leveling the playing field does not mean giving women an unfair advantage,
another panelist, Maria Zuber said yesterday. Dr. Zuber, a geophysicist at
M.I.T., said for example that scholarly journals might eliminate the identity of
authors when they sent out manuscripts for pre-publication review. That
way, she said, work would be judged on its merits, rather than by the prominence
of its authors.
Ana Mari Cauce, a psychologist at the University of Washington and another
panelist, said at the news conference, “This is about more excellence; this is
not about changing the bar or lowering the bar.”
Ben A. Barres, a neuroscientist at Stanford who was not connected to the effort
but who published a commentary on women in science last summer in the journal
Nature, echoed the report’s assertion that small administrative changes could
produce big differences for women in science.
He pointed to the Pioneer award program for young researchers run by the
National Institutes of Health. Dr. Barres, who has been a judge for the
awards, said that even making it known that scientists could nominate themselves
helped make the pool of winners more diverse.
Dr. Shalala began the report’s preface by recalling that when she was in
graduate school in political science in the 1960’s and as a young professor, she
was told that fellowships or tenure would never be hers because she was a woman.
Overt discrimination like that is now rare, she wrote, but progress has been too
slow. “We need overarching reform now,” she said yesterday.
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