The New York Times
By KATE ZERNIKE
Published: March 21, 2011
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — When the Massachusetts Institute of Technology acknowledged 12 years ago that it had discriminated against female professors in “subtle but pervasive” ways, it became a national model for addressing gender inequity.
Now, an evaluation of those efforts shows substantial progress — and unintended consequences. Among other concerns, many female professors say that M.I.T.’s aggressive push to hire more women has created the sense that they are given an unfair advantage. Those who once bemoaned M.I.T.’s lag in recruiting women now worry about what one called “too much effort to recruit women.”
Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/21/us/21mit.html?_r=1
Showing posts with label MIT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MIT. Show all posts
Monday, March 21, 2011
Friday, January 15, 2010
MIT faculty study finds diversity is lacking
The Boston Globe
By Tracy Jan
Globe Staff / January 15, 2010
MIT must do a better job recruiting and retaining black and Hispanic faculty, who have a harder time getting promoted than their white and Asian colleagues, if the university expects to remain competitive, according to a strikingly candid internal study released yesterday by the university.
In some departments - such as chemistry, mathematics, and nuclear science and engineering - no black and Hispanic professors have been hired in the last two decades, according to the report, which was more than two years in the making.
MIT’s first comprehensive study of its faculty’s racial diversity and the experience of underrepresented minority professors highlights a national problem across academia: the need to improve the pipeline of black and Hispanic scholars, especially in the fields of science and engineering.
The report urges the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to become more self-reflective and to better appreciate the challenges facing minority faculty, who feel that their qualification to be at the institute is sometimes questioned and who are more likely to leave MIT in their first three to five years.
“There is a tension between the ideas of maintaining high excellence and including a broader range of groups,’’ said Paula Hammond, an African-American chemical engineering professor, who chaired MIT’s Initiative on Faculty Race and Diversity. “But we believe that inclusiveness can lead to excellence, rather than impede it.’’
Blacks and Hispanics make up only 6 percent of MIT’s 1,013-member faculty, an increase from 4.5 percent since 2000 but far below the university’s goal of achieving parity with the nation, where underrepresented minorities constitute 30 percent of the population. MIT’s rate is comparable to research universities such as Harvard and Stanford.
The report indicates that the university needs to provide more mentoring and expand professional opportunities to make the climate at MIT more welcoming to underrepresented groups, which include blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans.
Asian faculty, which make up nearly 13 percent of MIT professors, are not underrepresented, but share some of the same concerns about MIT’s racial climate.
Full Story: http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/01/15/mit_faculty_study_finds_diversity_is_lacking/
By Tracy Jan
Globe Staff / January 15, 2010
MIT must do a better job recruiting and retaining black and Hispanic faculty, who have a harder time getting promoted than their white and Asian colleagues, if the university expects to remain competitive, according to a strikingly candid internal study released yesterday by the university.
In some departments - such as chemistry, mathematics, and nuclear science and engineering - no black and Hispanic professors have been hired in the last two decades, according to the report, which was more than two years in the making.
MIT’s first comprehensive study of its faculty’s racial diversity and the experience of underrepresented minority professors highlights a national problem across academia: the need to improve the pipeline of black and Hispanic scholars, especially in the fields of science and engineering.
The report urges the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to become more self-reflective and to better appreciate the challenges facing minority faculty, who feel that their qualification to be at the institute is sometimes questioned and who are more likely to leave MIT in their first three to five years.
“There is a tension between the ideas of maintaining high excellence and including a broader range of groups,’’ said Paula Hammond, an African-American chemical engineering professor, who chaired MIT’s Initiative on Faculty Race and Diversity. “But we believe that inclusiveness can lead to excellence, rather than impede it.’’
Blacks and Hispanics make up only 6 percent of MIT’s 1,013-member faculty, an increase from 4.5 percent since 2000 but far below the university’s goal of achieving parity with the nation, where underrepresented minorities constitute 30 percent of the population. MIT’s rate is comparable to research universities such as Harvard and Stanford.
The report indicates that the university needs to provide more mentoring and expand professional opportunities to make the climate at MIT more welcoming to underrepresented groups, which include blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans.
Asian faculty, which make up nearly 13 percent of MIT professors, are not underrepresented, but share some of the same concerns about MIT’s racial climate.
Full Story: http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/01/15/mit_faculty_study_finds_diversity_is_lacking/
Friday, October 16, 2009
Science and the female brain: Take that, Larry Summers
The Seattle Times
Thursday, October 15, 2009 - Page updated at 03:01 PM
Froma Harrop / Syndicated columnist
The recent award of Nobel Prizes in biology and chemistry to three women dredges up Larry Summers' suggestion in 2005 that differences in the female brain may account for the dearth of top women scientists. Now President Obama's economic adviser, Summers was then speechifying as president of Harvard.
Carol Greider, who just won a Nobel for biology, recalls being astounded by the remark. "I thought he couldn't possibly say that," the Johns Hopkins biologist told me. "I looked up the transcript, and he really said that."
Summers' defenders attacked Nancy Hopkins, the MIT biologist who walked out in protest when he made the controversial statement. Writing in The Harvard Crimson, professor of government Harvey Mansfield accused Hopkins of committing a "scandalous act of obscurantist intolerance."
Whatever. Hopkins now feels a certain vindication. And she traces the Nobel Prizes for Greider and Elizabeth Blackburn, a biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, to a 1971 law that required universities to hire women onto their faculties or risk losing federal dollars.
Shortly after the regulations went into effect, Hopkins received calls from MIT and Harvard asking her to apply for a job.
"I was a true affirmative-action hire," she told me. In the late '60s, places like Harvard, Cal Tech and MIT had virtually no women teaching the sciences. Today, women account for just under 15 percent of MIT's science faculty.
Full Story: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2010072517_harrop16.html
Thursday, October 15, 2009 - Page updated at 03:01 PM
Froma Harrop / Syndicated columnist
The recent award of Nobel Prizes in biology and chemistry to three women dredges up Larry Summers' suggestion in 2005 that differences in the female brain may account for the dearth of top women scientists. Now President Obama's economic adviser, Summers was then speechifying as president of Harvard.
Carol Greider, who just won a Nobel for biology, recalls being astounded by the remark. "I thought he couldn't possibly say that," the Johns Hopkins biologist told me. "I looked up the transcript, and he really said that."
Summers' defenders attacked Nancy Hopkins, the MIT biologist who walked out in protest when he made the controversial statement. Writing in The Harvard Crimson, professor of government Harvey Mansfield accused Hopkins of committing a "scandalous act of obscurantist intolerance."
Whatever. Hopkins now feels a certain vindication. And she traces the Nobel Prizes for Greider and Elizabeth Blackburn, a biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, to a 1971 law that required universities to hire women onto their faculties or risk losing federal dollars.
Shortly after the regulations went into effect, Hopkins received calls from MIT and Harvard asking her to apply for a job.
"I was a true affirmative-action hire," she told me. In the late '60s, places like Harvard, Cal Tech and MIT had virtually no women teaching the sciences. Today, women account for just under 15 percent of MIT's science faculty.
Full Story: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2010072517_harrop16.html
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Creating a Sustainable Pipeline
Diverse Issues in Higher Education
by Calvin Hennick
Feb 18, 2009, 05:12
When Dr. James L. Sherley began a hunger strike outside the Massachusetts Institute of Technology provost’s office in February 2007 alleging racism in his tenure denial, the then-associate professor of biological engineering re-ignited, in a very public way, concerns about the institution’s commitment to diversity.
The lack of diversity has been a recurring problem at MIT. At the time of Sherley’s protest, just 27 of MIT’s 740 tenured faculty members were American Indian, Black and Hispanic. Today, there are 34 underrepresented minorities out of 767 tenured faculty members.
Sherley never won tenure, and a Black faculty member and a Black former trustee broke their ties to MIT as well in protest over the manner in which the school handled the Sherley incident as well as its seeming lack of commitment to diversity. Two years later, the administration is taking steps to ensure the school is welcoming to faculty members of color — an effort some say is moving too slowly.
‘Something Widespread’
Many of Sherley’s supporters say they were not in a position to know if he should have been granted tenure based on his scientific credentials. However, former MIT professor Frank Douglas and former trustee Bernard Loyd, who both left the university as a result of how Sherley was treated, say the case was symptomatic of an unwillingness to grapple with diversity issues, a problem they had witnessed during their relationships with the school.
“I was not insisting that James should get tenure because I was not present at the university when [the tenure denial] happened,” says Douglas. “I didn’t know the case. My issue was, ‘Is there an environment which led him to believe that he was treated unfairly?’ And, in fact, I think there were things that gave him reason to believe he was treated unfairly.”
In a letter circulated at the beginning of Sherley’s hunger strike, 11 MIT faculty members (Douglas was not one of them) outlined what they said were a number of problems with the case. Supporters pointed out what they said were problems with the mentoring and lab space that Sherley received, felt that the school had failed to adequately acknowledge Sherley’s achievements, and asserted that Sherley’s racial discrimination complaint was mishandled.
The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission rejected Sherley’s racial discrimination complaint in February 2008, saying in its ruling that MIT had articulated legitimate, nondiscriminatory reasons for denying tenure. Last June, the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination also rejected Sherley’s complaint.
In his interaction with other faculty, Douglas says, “what I discovered … is that many of the young [minority] faculty were unsure as to how they would be evaluated and what type of career they would have.”
“What I also discovered is that there were a number of individuals who left MIT, either because they did not receive tenure or because they felt unwelcome. James Sherley is a symbol of something that is more widespread than you would think,” adds Douglas, who is now a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, a partner at PureTech Ventures, and a senior scientific adviser for Bayer Healthcare.
Former MIT trustee Loyd, who finished his five-year trustee stint in 1995 but stayed active on university committees, says the Sherley case was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
“We had been told by senior leaders within MIT that these were important issues, but they needed time,” Loyd says. “Time came and went.”
Full Story: http://diverseeducation.com/artman/publish/article_12312.shtml
by Calvin Hennick
Feb 18, 2009, 05:12
When Dr. James L. Sherley began a hunger strike outside the Massachusetts Institute of Technology provost’s office in February 2007 alleging racism in his tenure denial, the then-associate professor of biological engineering re-ignited, in a very public way, concerns about the institution’s commitment to diversity.
The lack of diversity has been a recurring problem at MIT. At the time of Sherley’s protest, just 27 of MIT’s 740 tenured faculty members were American Indian, Black and Hispanic. Today, there are 34 underrepresented minorities out of 767 tenured faculty members.
Sherley never won tenure, and a Black faculty member and a Black former trustee broke their ties to MIT as well in protest over the manner in which the school handled the Sherley incident as well as its seeming lack of commitment to diversity. Two years later, the administration is taking steps to ensure the school is welcoming to faculty members of color — an effort some say is moving too slowly.
‘Something Widespread’
Many of Sherley’s supporters say they were not in a position to know if he should have been granted tenure based on his scientific credentials. However, former MIT professor Frank Douglas and former trustee Bernard Loyd, who both left the university as a result of how Sherley was treated, say the case was symptomatic of an unwillingness to grapple with diversity issues, a problem they had witnessed during their relationships with the school.
“I was not insisting that James should get tenure because I was not present at the university when [the tenure denial] happened,” says Douglas. “I didn’t know the case. My issue was, ‘Is there an environment which led him to believe that he was treated unfairly?’ And, in fact, I think there were things that gave him reason to believe he was treated unfairly.”
In a letter circulated at the beginning of Sherley’s hunger strike, 11 MIT faculty members (Douglas was not one of them) outlined what they said were a number of problems with the case. Supporters pointed out what they said were problems with the mentoring and lab space that Sherley received, felt that the school had failed to adequately acknowledge Sherley’s achievements, and asserted that Sherley’s racial discrimination complaint was mishandled.
The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission rejected Sherley’s racial discrimination complaint in February 2008, saying in its ruling that MIT had articulated legitimate, nondiscriminatory reasons for denying tenure. Last June, the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination also rejected Sherley’s complaint.
In his interaction with other faculty, Douglas says, “what I discovered … is that many of the young [minority] faculty were unsure as to how they would be evaluated and what type of career they would have.”
“What I also discovered is that there were a number of individuals who left MIT, either because they did not receive tenure or because they felt unwelcome. James Sherley is a symbol of something that is more widespread than you would think,” adds Douglas, who is now a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, a partner at PureTech Ventures, and a senior scientific adviser for Bayer Healthcare.
Former MIT trustee Loyd, who finished his five-year trustee stint in 1995 but stayed active on university committees, says the Sherley case was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
“We had been told by senior leaders within MIT that these were important issues, but they needed time,” Loyd says. “Time came and went.”
Full Story: http://diverseeducation.com/artman/publish/article_12312.shtml
Monday, December 10, 2007
Tenure at MIT still largely a male domain
By Linda K. Wertheimer, Globe Staff December 6, 2007
Just one out of 25 faculty members granted tenure this year at MIT is female, a gender imbalance that appears to contrast with the university's decade-old effort to boost the status of women.
Women have been achieving tenure at a lower rater than men at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the past 10 years, according to an MIT analysis of junior faculty. Of the tenured faculty, 16 percent are women, up from 10.5 percent a decade ago, but still too big a gap, several professors said.
The point was brought home recently when the school's in-house newspaper published a portrait gallery of the faculty members granted tenure this year; among the sea of male faces was the lone woman.
"The truth is what we're looking for is 50 percent parity," said tenured professor Ruth Perry, who has taught literature at the university since 1972. "There has been a slacking off. People aren't paying enough attention."
MIT President Susan Hockfield, who became the university's first woman president in 2004, said the photo of just one woman was "unsettling," but not a sign of MIT backing off its pledge to hire more women and improve their tenure rate. Tenure, which provides professors life-time job protection as well as prestige, can take four to seven years to earn depending on their talent, experience, and field.
"We are absolutely committed to accelerating our progress, and we want to be able to show that progress every single year," Hockfield said. "But all of the variables that go into this mean some years, it's not going to look as good as we want it to look."
MIT's appointment this year of engineering professor Barbara Liskov as a new associate provost for faculty equity is an example of the university's commitment, Hockfield said.
The school emphasizes that the tenure data are preliminary because more faculty may win promotions during the remainder of the academic year. Between 1997 and now, the number of junior faculty women granted tenure has ranged from zero to eight a year, according to data provided by MIT at the Globe's request. The number of junior faculty men granted tenure ranged from 10 to 24 a year over the same period.
An MIT analysis of junior faculty who could have vied for tenure during the last decade found that 41 percent of 104 women were granted tenure, compared with 48 percent of the 372 men hired.
Liskov and Hockfield said the university will investigate impediments to women receiving tenure.
"It's very hard to know whether you're making progress or standing still," Liskov said. "One year is not really the issue. It's over time. I would like to see the rate for men and women be equal."
MIT set off a national examination of gender equity in higher education in 1999 when the university published a report on gender bias in its School of Science. The group, led by Nancy Hopkins, a tenured biology professor and longtime leader on gender equity issues at the university, said in the report that the school routinely underpaid, marginalized, and disrespected female faculty in numerous ways, including providing less lab and office space and giving them scant representation on hiring and funding committees.
At the urging of then President Charles Vest, who agreed with the report's findings, MIT created committees to study gender bias at each of its schools. In 2002, reports from those committees reached the same conclusion about their individual schools: gender bias was pervasive.
MIT passed policies designed to attract more female applicants and retain women faculty. Since 2001, for example, the school has automatically stopped the tenure clock for up to a year after a woman has her first child. In the past, if faculty members had not reached tenure by the seventh year at the school, they would lose out on the opportunity.
To achieve tenure, a junior faculty member has to win approval from several committees, starting with a group within the professor's department, then a school-wide committee, and finally a committee of all five of MIT schools' deans chaired by the university president.
Robert Brown, MIT's provost from 1998 to 2005 and now the president of Boston University, oversaw the bulk of MIT's work on women's issues. After the 2002 reports, he said, MIT wanted "to become the leader in mentoring young female faculty and monitoring the careers of tenured women, and working more aggressively to increase their numbers."
Universities nationwide, particularly those with a scientific focus like MIT, are struggling to achieve gender parity in tenure, said John Curtis, director of research and public policy at the American Association of University Professors.
The association's 2006 study on faculty gender equity reported that at doctoral universities, on average, a quarter of tenured faculty are women. MIT's rate is comparable to schools with a more scientific bent, like the California Institute of Technology, where 11 percent of tenured faculty last year were women, Curtis said. At Harvard, 20 percent of the tenured faculty were women.
"This is really slow progress, and it will take decades before women are on more equal footing with men," Curtis said.
Brown said he continues to believe that tenure rates for women will improve if universities hire more junior women faculty, and make it easier for them to juggle family responsibilities.
MIT has made strides in hiring more women, increasing their percentage on the faculty from 14.7 percent in 1998 to 19.3 percent today. And in the past two years, Hockfield said, roughly a third of the hires have been women.
MIT, though, is at a disadvantage because the bulk of its professors are in such male-dominated fields as computer science, physics, math, and other scientific disciplines, and fewer women are entering the pipeline for jobs in those areas. BU faces similar issues when it recruits for certain disciplines, Brown said.
Hopkins, an outspoken critic of former Harvard president Lawrence Summers for his remarks about women's ability in the sciences, said it was unnerving to see only one woman among the newly tenured professors featured in last month's Tech Talk newspaper.
"It's a shock. I don't have a thousand words as good as that picture," said Hopkins. "It's a good reminder. We learned a lot about this problem, but good will and time do not solve that problem."
Hopkins and other professors said that despite the latest figures, they want MIT to continue primarily promoting from within to improve tenure rates, rather than adopt other universities' practice of recruiting other colleges' stars to rapidly increase the proportion of tenured women.
[To read the entire article, go to: http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2007/12/06/tenure_at_mit_still_largely_a_male_domain/]
Just one out of 25 faculty members granted tenure this year at MIT is female, a gender imbalance that appears to contrast with the university's decade-old effort to boost the status of women.
Women have been achieving tenure at a lower rater than men at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the past 10 years, according to an MIT analysis of junior faculty. Of the tenured faculty, 16 percent are women, up from 10.5 percent a decade ago, but still too big a gap, several professors said.
The point was brought home recently when the school's in-house newspaper published a portrait gallery of the faculty members granted tenure this year; among the sea of male faces was the lone woman.
"The truth is what we're looking for is 50 percent parity," said tenured professor Ruth Perry, who has taught literature at the university since 1972. "There has been a slacking off. People aren't paying enough attention."
MIT President Susan Hockfield, who became the university's first woman president in 2004, said the photo of just one woman was "unsettling," but not a sign of MIT backing off its pledge to hire more women and improve their tenure rate. Tenure, which provides professors life-time job protection as well as prestige, can take four to seven years to earn depending on their talent, experience, and field.
"We are absolutely committed to accelerating our progress, and we want to be able to show that progress every single year," Hockfield said. "But all of the variables that go into this mean some years, it's not going to look as good as we want it to look."
MIT's appointment this year of engineering professor Barbara Liskov as a new associate provost for faculty equity is an example of the university's commitment, Hockfield said.
The school emphasizes that the tenure data are preliminary because more faculty may win promotions during the remainder of the academic year. Between 1997 and now, the number of junior faculty women granted tenure has ranged from zero to eight a year, according to data provided by MIT at the Globe's request. The number of junior faculty men granted tenure ranged from 10 to 24 a year over the same period.
An MIT analysis of junior faculty who could have vied for tenure during the last decade found that 41 percent of 104 women were granted tenure, compared with 48 percent of the 372 men hired.
Liskov and Hockfield said the university will investigate impediments to women receiving tenure.
"It's very hard to know whether you're making progress or standing still," Liskov said. "One year is not really the issue. It's over time. I would like to see the rate for men and women be equal."
MIT set off a national examination of gender equity in higher education in 1999 when the university published a report on gender bias in its School of Science. The group, led by Nancy Hopkins, a tenured biology professor and longtime leader on gender equity issues at the university, said in the report that the school routinely underpaid, marginalized, and disrespected female faculty in numerous ways, including providing less lab and office space and giving them scant representation on hiring and funding committees.
At the urging of then President Charles Vest, who agreed with the report's findings, MIT created committees to study gender bias at each of its schools. In 2002, reports from those committees reached the same conclusion about their individual schools: gender bias was pervasive.
MIT passed policies designed to attract more female applicants and retain women faculty. Since 2001, for example, the school has automatically stopped the tenure clock for up to a year after a woman has her first child. In the past, if faculty members had not reached tenure by the seventh year at the school, they would lose out on the opportunity.
To achieve tenure, a junior faculty member has to win approval from several committees, starting with a group within the professor's department, then a school-wide committee, and finally a committee of all five of MIT schools' deans chaired by the university president.
Robert Brown, MIT's provost from 1998 to 2005 and now the president of Boston University, oversaw the bulk of MIT's work on women's issues. After the 2002 reports, he said, MIT wanted "to become the leader in mentoring young female faculty and monitoring the careers of tenured women, and working more aggressively to increase their numbers."
Universities nationwide, particularly those with a scientific focus like MIT, are struggling to achieve gender parity in tenure, said John Curtis, director of research and public policy at the American Association of University Professors.
The association's 2006 study on faculty gender equity reported that at doctoral universities, on average, a quarter of tenured faculty are women. MIT's rate is comparable to schools with a more scientific bent, like the California Institute of Technology, where 11 percent of tenured faculty last year were women, Curtis said. At Harvard, 20 percent of the tenured faculty were women.
"This is really slow progress, and it will take decades before women are on more equal footing with men," Curtis said.
Brown said he continues to believe that tenure rates for women will improve if universities hire more junior women faculty, and make it easier for them to juggle family responsibilities.
MIT has made strides in hiring more women, increasing their percentage on the faculty from 14.7 percent in 1998 to 19.3 percent today. And in the past two years, Hockfield said, roughly a third of the hires have been women.
MIT, though, is at a disadvantage because the bulk of its professors are in such male-dominated fields as computer science, physics, math, and other scientific disciplines, and fewer women are entering the pipeline for jobs in those areas. BU faces similar issues when it recruits for certain disciplines, Brown said.
Hopkins, an outspoken critic of former Harvard president Lawrence Summers for his remarks about women's ability in the sciences, said it was unnerving to see only one woman among the newly tenured professors featured in last month's Tech Talk newspaper.
"It's a shock. I don't have a thousand words as good as that picture," said Hopkins. "It's a good reminder. We learned a lot about this problem, but good will and time do not solve that problem."
Hopkins and other professors said that despite the latest figures, they want MIT to continue primarily promoting from within to improve tenure rates, rather than adopt other universities' practice of recruiting other colleges' stars to rapidly increase the proportion of tenured women.
[To read the entire article, go to: http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2007/12/06/tenure_at_mit_still_largely_a_male_domain/]
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