Women in the Chemical Workforce A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable (2000) / Chapter Skim
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Experience of women at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Experience of women at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Pages 110-124
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From page 110... ...
I recall one of my colleagues saying, "Nancy, you're wasting your time. No one, not even other women, will ever care about the problems of these few women scientists." But to our surprise, last year we learned that we were in fact dealing with a very widespread, if not universal, problem for women in science, and indeed in many other workplace settings, including law firms, the military, businesses, the arts, and so on.
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From page 111... ...
By the time I was convinced of it, I wished that I could age faster, so that I could retire, because it was so discouraging to see these brilliant and highly successful scientists treated unfairly. What kept me going was my passion for science and the fact that I thought I was the one exception.
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From page 112... ...
We, and a third woman we soon recruited to our task, got out a catalog of the faculty in order to make a list of the tenured women faculty in the six departments in the School of Science. We wrote down the names, and when we had finished, we found there were only 15 tenured women in the six departments in the School of Science, versus 194 tenured men.
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From page 113... ...
So what did we learn from this enormous amount of work? From interviews, we found out the following: We found that young women faculty come to MIT today, just like women of my generation came there, believing that civil rights and affirmative action had solved gender discrimination long ago, so that such discrimination would not impact their careers.
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From page 114... ...
It is a highly confidential process. What the committee did involved a number of people, both women and men, including experienced department heads, looking at a lot of data together.
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From page 115... ...
I believe it was these comments, particularly the comment of President Vest, that turned what had been just faculty news into real news. President Vest wrote, "I have always believed that contemporary gender discrimination within universities is part reality and part perception.
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From page 116... ...
Those sentences and the comments of Dean Birgeneau gave the report an impact beyond MIT. A president of one of these elite universities had said, Hey, it's true.
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From page 117... ...
Many studies like the one at MIT have documented gender bias, and we have heard at this meeting that it is a well-known phenomenon in many fields beside science, and that study after study confirms this. This is not about affirmative action, this is about discrimination and exclusion in a profession that requires extensive interaction.
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From page 118... ...
To address the fact that greater family responsibilities fall to women, we must recognize that most high-level jobs in science were designed for a man with a full-time wife at home, a situation that does not apply to many men and most women today. We must restructure the job and provide support, so that both men and women can work on a level playing field.
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From page 119... ...
Having gone through this process for 5 years at a place like MIT, with its secrecy aspects or the privacy or whatever, I'm not sure that I wouldn't rather have women with a completely diverse power structure, where people of all types are integrated throughout the system. That would be almost as effective, if not more so.
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From page 120... ...
But now I'm looking at it saying, "This isn't good." One of the things that we have talked about is having a consultant come in and do a salary equity study. Marye Anne Fox mentioned that possibility at a recent meeting of women faculty from the whole North Carolina State university campus.
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From page 121... ...
Nancy Hopkins: I asked the president why he did it, and he gave a really simple answer. He said, "It was the right thing to do, so we did it." He said, "We didn't ask the lawyers." All the other university presidents asked, How did you do it?
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From page 122... ...
percent women; it- that is all that want to do it, it- those women are incredibly happy and having a great time I am of two minds about this. Maryka Bhattacharyya: I was more or less pointing out what a difficult job it might be as 10 percent of the whole to bring that persuasive argument, because seeing that difficulty can help you to solve the problem.
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From page 123... ...
Maryka Bhattacharyya mentioned our WIST program. Ten years ago, when we first approached laboratory management, we had an experience similar to the one you described.
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From page 124... ...
We probably have slightly lower publication rates. The agencies like NSF, NIH, EPA, and DOE come back and say, "You're at Maine, you have to teach." I teach general chemistry to hundreds of students every year, as well as graduate courses, and I have a big research program.
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