Speaking out on Gender: Reflections on Womens Advancement in the STEM Disciplines

1
Speaking out on Gender Reflections on Womens
Advancement in the STEM Disciplines

• Faye Linda Wachs, Cal Poly Pomona
• Jill Nemiro, Cal Poly Pomona

2

• In 2005, Caltechs entire chemical engineering
  doctoral class was female (all six of them)
  (Reitman, 2005)
• Will these women become faculty, and if so, what
  can they expect to find? Will they advance at
  rates similar to comparable male counterparts?
  Will academia prove to be an attractive option
  compared to industry?

3
Undergraduate STEM Degrees

• Women are closing the gender gap at the lower
  levels of education, but are not moving into
  positions of authority in equal numbers,
  especially in the STEM disciplines.
• Women earn 58 of undergraduate degrees in life
  sciences (biology, chemistry, geology), 47 of
  math degrees, and 40 of degrees in physical
  sciences.
• Still, only 19 of undergraduate degrees in
  engineering are earned by women (NSF, 2000).

4
Graduate Degrees

• For doctoral degrees, women earn over half of
  those awarded overall (Wilson, 2004).
• In 2003, in all STEM (Science, Technology,
  Engineering and Math) disciplines, women earned
  37.5 of doctoral degrees, but only 17 of
  engineering and 26.5 of mathematics doctorates
  go to women (NSF, 2006).
• Physical science - 26.9 of doctoral degrees went
  to women), and only about a third of doctoral
  degrees awarded in Earth, atmospheric and ocean
  sciences, and agricultural sciences go to women.
  By contrast women receive the majority of
  doctoral degrees in psychology (68.1), sociology
  (59.0) anthropology (61.0) and Area and ethnic
  studies (68.9) (NSF, 2006).

5
Pipeline Problems

• The Pipeline explanation is the most common one
  given for the shortage of women in STEM
  disciplines. The pipeline explanation argues
  that women in agriculture, engineering and the
  physical sciences have thus far failed to achieve
  the critical mass required to enact institutional
  change (Kulis, Sicotte, and Collins, 2002
  Etzkowitz et al., 1994).
• Fails to acknowledge a need to unclog the pipes
• Fails to account for how the pipes became
  clogged.
• Tends to put the onus on women for failing to
  enter the pipeline regardless of barriers.

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Why Pipeline Explanations are Insufficient

• Under-representation of women relative to number
  of earned doctorates
• Clustering of women in specific fields
• Climate of Discrimination
• Parity tends to filter up
• Income Inequity makes academia less appealing to
  women

7
Women in the STEM disciplines are
under-represented relative to the proportion of
women who earn doctorate degrees in many fields.

• While 17 of doctoral degrees in awarded in
  Engineering in 2003 went to women (NSF, 2006),
  only 9.5 of full time faculty and instructional
  staff in Engineering are women (DOE, 2004).
• While 42.9 of Science PhDs are women (NSF,
  2006), only 22.9 of science faculty are female
  (DOE, 2004).
• Women with doctorates are approximately three
  times more likely to be underemployed than their
  male colleagues (NSF, 1999).
• Women are even more under-represented as tenured
  professors relative to their representation in
  the labor pool (Kulis, Sciotte, and Collins,
  2002).

8

• Male assistant professors are more likely to earn
  tenure, and be named full professor, than their
  female counterparts (Wilson, 2004).
• In fields in which representation of women is
  close to parity, women are less likely to occupy
  tenure track lines (Kulis, Sciotte, and Collins,
  2002).
• This is true even in humanities disciplines, such
  as history, where only 18 of full professors are
  female, despite almost 40 of assistant
  professors being female by 1988 (Jaschik, 2005).

9
Women tend to clustered in specific fields in the
life sciences, social sciences and psychology
(Kulis, Sciotte, and Collins, 2002 NSF, 1998).

• While some have argued this clustering reflects
  innate abilities, it is far more likely that a
  combination of social structural variables
  account for such differences.
• Further, while blatant discrimination appears
  less frequently, more subtle forms of bias limit
  womens access to top institutions (Wilson,
  2004).
• Lack of mentoring, subtle forms of discrimination

10
Climate of Discrimination

• MIT (1999) reported that gender had probably
  caused their professional lives to differ
  significantly from those of their male
  colleagues. (P.5)
• Vast disparity in how women are treated
  department to department- While the new forms of
  discrimination were difficult to quantify as the
  report states, Once you get it, it seems
  almost obvious. (MIT, 1999, p.11).
• Interestingly, dissatisfaction, marginalization
  and exclusion appeared more as women progressed
  in their careers.
• Valian (2004) suggests that put simply, men have
  an easier time accumulating advantages than
  women. Over time, they are advantaged in the rtp
  process. Ie. Teaching small specialty courses
  versus large intro sections.

11
Parity appears to filter up.

• As women make inroads, it is at the least
  prestigious institutions and in the lowest level
  positions.
• In 2001-2, while 15 of full professors, 31.2 of
  associate professors, and 41.5 of assistant
  professors are women at research level
  universities, at community colleges, 37.3 of
  full professors, 49.1 of associate professors,
  and 54.8 of assistant professors are female
  (Jacobson, 2004).
• The greater the prestige of the University, the
  fewer women it is likely to employ as faculty.
  The higher one goes within each university, the
  fewer women appear as well.

12
Pay Gap By Gender

• Female assistant professors teaching at doctoral
  degree granting institutions earn 5,687 less
  annually than their male colleagues.
• Gap in pay actually increased by about 1,000
  from ten years ago when calculated in todays
  dollars (Wilson, 2004).
• The pay gap holds steady as women advance.
• Median earnings of assistant professors by gender
  was approximately 6,000 (With men earning 1.1
  times as much as women).
• Associates lost about 6000 for being female with
  men earning about 1.08 times what women earn.
• Full professor level - about 15,000 gap with men
  earning 1.15 times their female counterparts.
• The difference for administrators was 45,000
  (with men earning 1.6 times what women earn).

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Explaining the Pay Gap

• Discrimination- parity filters up-
• Within the sciences, natural sciences, where
  women have come the closest to achieving equity,
  are the lowest paid of the group (DOE, 2004).
• Women are also more likely to teach at community
  colleges and teaching universities, places where
  the pay is usually lower.
• Further, mentoring is crucial for salary and
  benefit negotiation and women are less likely to
  have meaningful mentors, leaving them
  disadvantaged in this process (Leggon, 2006).

14
Work Family Conflict

• The NSF reports that women in academia in the
  STEM disciplines are more likely to be employed
  in non-tenured positions, take longer to achieve
  tenure and are less likely to earn tenure,
  especially if they have children prior to earning
  tenure (NSF, 2004).
• 1) The real demands of family and community are
  more salient for women than men
• 2) Perceptions of womens greater responsibility
  for family lead to a subtle form of mommy
  tracking.

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Women have greater responsibility for Household
Labor

• Women continue to be responsible for a
  disproportionate amount of home and childcare
  relative to their male counterparts.
• Though women do slightly less and men do slightly
  more than in the past, women still do more than
  double the housework and childcare than male
  partners (Coltrane, 2000).

16
Stay at Home Spouse

• Women were far less likely than men to have a
  full time homemaker or part-time worker as
  spouse.
• Women with doctorates in STEM disciplines were
  reported to be twice as likely as their male
  counterparts to have employed spouses.
• Only 13 of married females with STEM doctorates
  had unemployed spouses, while 38 of male STEM
  discipline doctorate holders had spouses who were
  not employed outside the home (NSF, 2004b).

17
Mommy Tracking

• Women as mothers and potential mothers face bias
  and discrimination in the workplace (Cummins,
  2005).
• Female scholars productivity assumed to be
• Simple strategies, such as a tenure-clock-stop
  policies for people taking maternity or paternity
  leave were employed by only 32 of universities
  (Sullivan, Hollenshead Smith, 2005).
• Women without children face mommy tracking and
  that gender schemas result in women having
  different, feminized expectations for service
  foisted upon them (Cummins, 2005).

18
Hierarchy, Gender and Power

• One response was a celebration of the number of
  women who have opted out of top level research
  careers for community colleges or teaching
  centered universities.
• Cited as reflecting improved teaching and as
  being a way for female academics to find
  balance.
• It is extremely disturbing that the response to
  the speed up in work and the second shift for
  women, is to opt out of competitive research
  environments for more marginalized, but
  emotionally fulfilling work.
• It is equally disturbing to have the
  normalization of devalued feminized labor
• Two tiered system of teaching PhDs, and research
  PhDs.
• Did the Second Wave even happen?

19
Methods- Focus Groups

• Conducted six 2 hour focus groups during the
  Fall 2004 and Winter 2005 Quarters.
• 1) six tenured female faculty in the STEM
  disciplines 2) six new tenure track female
  faculty in the STEM disciplines 3) seven female
  tenure track faculty in the STEM disciplines who
  were approaching their tenure review 4) 9 chairs
  of programs in STEM disciplines 5) five female
  chairs from a range of disciplines and 6) Five
  Bigwigs- high ranking female administrators.
• Held on campus.
• Participants were offered a box lunch as
  compensation.
• Data was aggregated and identifying markers have
  been deliberately excluded or altered to protect
  the identity of the participants.

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Three Key Areas of Analysis

• The Speed Up
• Work Family Conflict and Solutions
• Climate as Key Determinant of Satisfaction

21
Workload

• Across the board, administrators and faculty
  agreed that junior faculty were asked to do more
  research and service, with no reduction in
  teaching.

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• Big Wig The work load is a problem. Its too
  heavy. For the junior faculty, we keep adding on
  responsibilities, but expect them to keep
  teaching as much.
• Big Wig- Overall, we need to do something about
  the work load. Its just too much pressure. We
  are adding research pressure, but not reducing
  teaching, and theres more service. Theres not
  enough release time for people who have families,
  Its just not easy.
• Faculty- The work load is increasing. Class
  size is increasing, theres less release time,
  theres no longer any research release time, all
  the reports we have to write take to much time.

23
Increasing Workload Means Tough Choices

• Faculty- I can only do two out of three things
  well (teaching, research, service). I cannot do
  my research during the week. Just a little in
  short breaks I have from teaching. That leaves
  evenings and weekends for research. I am scared
  for research.

24
Representation

• Because of the dearth of women in some fields, to
  provide representation (on search committees etc)
  the few female faculty had to do a
  disproportionate amount of service.
• As one Big Wig put it, I think part of the
  problem is that when there are many fewer women,
  and you want to have female representation on al
  l the committees, then the women end up having to
  do more. Sometimes there was only one woman
  available, so shes on everything...
• Much of the literature framed this as a
  responsibility. This is troubling as once again
  the onus is put on the marginalized to carve out
  a space for itself.
• Time constraint that limits more valued
  activities.

25
Women Do the Scut Work

• Advising- women did the disproportionate amount
  of student advising, regardless of the gender of
  the students.
• Service and Reports- chairs noted that a
  disproportionate amount of department service was
  done by female faculty.
• Chairs noted they knew women were more likely to
  volunteer, and to get the work done.
• Cummins (2005) notes that women without children
  were often expected to do the mommy work of the
  department.
• Feminized labor- Gender Schemas- Valian 2004 uses
  the concept of gender schemas to account for
  this. The culture of femininity makes
  volunteering to help seem more obligatory to
  women.

26
Like Family

• As noted by Valian (2004), gender schemas come
  into play in the work place such that women take
  on additional unrecognized labor. This is
  normalized as a female attribute, undermining
  its status as work.
• One Big Wig noted, I think women are more likely
  to see the department like family. They treat it
  like family, they invest in it. Her colleague
  added, And the students treat us that way too.
  They see us as more nurturing, as mothers, they
  come and tell us their problems. That workload
  alone cant be underestimated.

27
Missed Opportunities

• The primary way that junior faculty deal with the
  increasing workload is to stop attending
  functions on campus, and to cut down on faculty
  development activities.
• Negative affect on mentoring. Ironically, senior
  faculty and big wigs noted the critical
  importance of this type of networking for
  building campus relationships and networking.
• Effective mentoring is eliminated by the time
  crunch.

28

• Keim and Erikson (1998) reported the importance
  of interdisciplinary teaching groups as a source
  of support and of ideas for improvement, and our
  participants confirmed this, while lamenting
  their inability to continue participation.
• While faculty reported that many such groups
  existed on campus, their participation was
  severely limited by increasing workloads.
• Others noted that their research suffered from
  the lack of time to confer with colleagues and to
  find others with similar research interests in
  the region or even on campus.

29

• Because chairs and administrators in our study
  reported that they believe women are easier to
  approach to fill in the gaps, women are more
  likely to end up doing work that may be valued by
  specific individuals at the university, but do
  little to improve the curriculum vitae.
• This effectively also undercuts female faculty
  members ability to leave or to obtain other
  offers necessary to renegotiate salaries and
  support.

30
The Loss of Mentoring

• While formal mentoring programs have met with
  limited success, acquiring a portfolio of
  mentors created through informal networks is
  critical to success in academia (de Janasz and
  Sullivan, 2004 Sabatier et. al, 2006 Sheridan
  et al, 2006). Our findings were consistant with
  such research.
• While none of the faculty at any level had
  anything positive to report about formal
  mentoring programs, senior faculty and
  administrators reported that their most important
  mentoring experiences came through informal
  networks.

31
Solutions or Trickle Down Exploitation

• One interesting solution proposed by the Big Wigs
  is to create seminars that involve students in
  faculty research.
• While this would undoubtedly prove to be
  beneficial for students, it is also unpaid labor.
  
• As resources disappear, student assistantships
  that would fairly compensate students for working
  on a research project are being replaced by
  unpaid labor in the form of units or practical
  coursework.
• It also seems a bit disingenuous to turn students
  into a pool of uncompensated labor as their fees
  rise and the rewards for attaining a degree
  decline.

32
Family and Work

• This speed up was particularly difficult for
  women with children. During the chairs focus
  group, one of the two female chairs had remained
  fairly quiet, until one of the other chairs
  remarked that he thought the speed up must be
  hard on women with children as they have two
  full time jobs. (Referring to teaching and
  research). Three she interjected wryly.

33
Work and Family

• The NSF reports that for women, being married or
  having children reduces the likelihood of having
  a tenure track line, whereas, being married
  and/or having children does not similarly impact
  mens careers (NSF, 2004). The NSF similarly
  reports that having children later in ones
  career increased the likelihood of a woman
  earning tenure. This implies, having a family is
  incompatible with an academic career. On the
  other hand, Cummins (2005) noted that women with
  children actually outperformed women without
  children in the academic marketplace.

34
Wide Range of Accommodations

• Accommodations for faculty ranged widely
  department to department.
• Some departments worked with faculty to adjust
  schedules and provide a full quarter of maternity
  leave

35
Variation in Leave Policies and Climate

• One faculty member recounted being by a former
  dean that she saw no reason the person could not
  be back at work three days after having given
  birth. Another recounted feeling she could not
  take the risk of having a family prior to tenure.
  
• It depends on the chair. I had two kids and
  they wouldnt let me take the whole quarter off,
  I had to come back after six weeks and work as an
  advisor and they said I had to be there 8-5, but
  I talked to my chair and got that changed, but
  still 8-5.
• Another asked for a reduction in service for a
  short period of time after having a baby and was
  denied it on the basis that all faculty must be
  treated equally. I felt this was a mistake...
  Not to consider my situation... It showed, we
  dont care about you.

36

• Others reported a department that encouraged them
  to take maternity leave and worked with their
  schedules. For example, compressed schedules and
  maternity leave were made readily available to
  some. One was given the quarter off, and allowed
  to make up the remaining days by working on a
  report during the summer.

37
Administrative Support a Must

• Currently, maternity leave is paid out of
  department funds. This places an undue burden on
  departments. A University policy and supporting
  funds could relieve the pressure from departments
  and make some more likely to adjust schedules for
  faculty.

38
Continued Support

• One Junior faculty member noted the effect her
  long teaching days had on her family. (She was
  teaching a night class twice a week, meaning she
  often did not return home until 10 PM). One
  evening she returned home to find her
  pre-schooler sitting at the table with papers
  spread around her. When the faculty member
  inquired what her daughter was doing, the child
  stuck out her hand in a typical go away gesture
  and responded Dont bother me, Im grading
  papers.

39
What Continued Support Means

• Day Care on Campus
• More Services for faculty
• Compressed Schedules, telecommuting, flexible
  meeting times

40
Benefits of Support

• My department bent over backwards to accommodate
  me when I had my baby. They gave me a compressed
  work schedule, maternity leave. They made my
  schedule work for me. By accommodating me, I was
  happier and therefore more productive.
• Flexibility was precisely what made academia
  appealing to them compared to the jobs in
  industry. For those in flexible departments, the
  lower pay of academia was worth the ability to
  work a schedule that better suited her needs.
  These findings are consistent with other studies
  as significant to worker satisfaction (Estes,
  2005).

41
Climate

• Related to previous issues.
• Satisfaction varied widely and seemed to hinge on
  the overall climate of the department.
• Those in departments that got it. reported
  greater satisfaction than those in departments
  that did things the way they have always been
  done.

42
The Demise of the Good Old Boys Network

• Long time faculty noted the demise of the good
  old boys network on campus, and the positive
  changes this has meant for them. (Womens
  Studies Books can move off the hidden bottom
  shelf)
• Numerous specific incidences citing positive
  support of leadership when issues of gender
  discrimination came up were cited.
• Administrative commitments to diversity are
  critical to changing Universities today (Wilson,
  2004).

43
Collegial Environment

• Being in a department where one felt
  accommodated, valued and respected was critical.
  Faculty reported similar work loads, but those
  who worked in a positive climate department were
  far more satisfied.
• Scheduling was key.

44
Change at Every Level

• As noted by one administrator, The deans
  attitude, what they tolerate, filters down
  through leadership. Bilimoria et. al. (2006)
  suggest that the institutional leadership plays a
  significant role in climate, especially immediate
  superiors including college deans and department
  chairs. Faculty at all levels cited the support
  of administration as important to success in the
  RTP process and to job satisfaction.

45

• Being empowered in decision making is crucial to
  a positive instrumental environment for female
  faculty (Callister, 2006).
• Many faculty noted that their needs could not
  always be accommodated, but allowing them to be
  active participants in a negotiation process
  facilitated productivity. Faculty who had
  schedules that respected their needs, and whose
  family commitments were prioritized expressed
  higher levels of satisfaction. Those for whom
  these things did not occur expressed resentment.
  
• One faculty member remarked that she had been
  unable to take her own children to scout
  meetings, but was expected to come in for weekend
  scouting events on campus. While others
  complained of being unable to pick up children on
  time, or having childcare issues while meetings
  were arranged to suit someones tee times.
  Others complimented their colleagues for helping
  them be able to attend childrens soccer games,
  or being able to make it to daycare on time every
  day.

46
Conclusions- Gender Schemas

• Valians (2004) concept of gender schemas helps
  explain continued gender discrimination. While
  overt discrimination is largely a thing of the
  past, the cumulative impact of gender schemas
  remains salient.
• Work load, support, mentoring

47
How this Affects RTP for Women

• Recognition of a wider range of publications, and
  community service ie. Articles related to gender,
  newsletters, activism
• Recognition of womens disproportionate service
  burden along with effects to create equity
• Accommodations for working parents ie. Option to
  stop the tenure clock for maternity/paternity
  leave

48
Conundrums

• How does one institutionalize flexibility?
• Ritzers McDonaldization thesis- Irrationality of
  rationality
• Precisely what was valued was a flexible system,
  but this meant that not everyone had equitable
  access.
• How does one institutionalize climate?
• Participants made it clear that having others
  who got it was central to the climate for
  women, GLBT faculty and under-represented
  minority groups.
• Many long time faculty specifically noted the
  improved climate on campus as the good old boys
  network retired and a more diverse faculty
  replaced it.