Female Faculty and the Sciences

Inside Higher Ed
insidehighered.com NEWS
October 18, 2007

During a Congressional hearing focused on the recruitment and retention of female faculty members in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields Wednesday, witnesses discussed how the federal government can combat the underrepresentation of women through targeted grants and incentives — and even the creation of a new quasi-governmental agency that would expand the enforcement of Title IX, the landmark 1972 gender equity law, to better encompass academic practices.
“The original intent of Title IX was to ensure equal educational opportunity for both sexes. Yet, relatively little has been done outside of the arena of athletics to make that mandate meaningful,” said Gretchen Ritter, director of the Center for Women and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She pointed out in her written testimony that while the Government Accountability Office did ask granting agencies to ensure that grant recipients comply with Title IX in 2004, “what this might mean in practice and whether such compliance reviews are being conducted is not entirely clear.”
“I know a lot about Title IX but more because of sports programs than educational programs and that’s something that Congress can easily fix,” said Donna E. Shalala, president of the University of Miami and chair of the National Academies committee that wrote the recent report, “Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering.”
“We need an organization like the [National Collegiate Athletic Association] that holds us accountable,” Shalala added — an entity situated somewhere between government and higher education.
Wednesday’s hearing of the House of Representatives Science Subcommittee on Research and Science Education focused on the end of the pipeline, so to speak — the representation of women within the faculty ranks. According to 2003 National Science Foundation data, women hold about 28 percent of all full-time science and engineering faculty positions — representing 18 percent of full professors, 31 percent of associate professors and 40 percent of assistant professors. Despite growth in the Ph.D. pool, faculty appointments, particularly at the senior levels, are still lagging: While women now constitute more than 50 percent of Ph.D. students in the life sciences, for instance, and, in 2003, made up 42 percent of the entire pool of life science Ph.D. recipients within the six preceding years, they represented just 34 percent of assistant professor appointments.
“What we learned [in researching the “Beyond Bias” report] was the pools are there for the first time,” Shalala said. “It’s not the pool issue anymore. It’s our behavior.”
“Entire campuses have been dozing on this issue,” Kathie L. Olsen, deputy director of the NSF, said in prefacing her remarks about the foundation’s ADVANCE Institutional Transformation awards. “Targeting funding for individuals simply did not go far enough. What we needed was a full, institution-wide shakeup to bring about results.” [To read the entire story, go to:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/18/womensci ]