Women in the Chemical Workforce A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable (2000) / Chapter Skim
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Title IX for Women in Academic Chemistry: Isn't a Millenium of Affirmative Action for White Men Sufficient?
Title IX for Women in Academic Chemistry: Isn't a Millenium of Affirmative Action for White Men Sufficient?
Pages 74-93
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From page 74... ...
2Unlike most European universities, the Italian universities, and especially the University of Bologna, did have women faculty before the 1800s, including the outstanding physicist Laura Bassi (see |
From page 75... ...
in the natural sciences and engineering at U.S. universities and 4-year colleges were women.8 5Henry Etzkowitz, Carol Kemelgor, Michael Neuschatz, Brian uzzi, and Joseph Alonzo, ``The paradox of critical mass for women in science, Science, 1994, 266, 51.
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I think a very plausible case can be made for using that hammer, but the laws usually applied to discriminatory work environments are those embodied in the Civil Rights Act and Equal Employment Opportunity legislation. This legal recourse means that one files a lawsuit against a specific workplace, and if the treatment is especially egregious, the lawsuit can be expanded to a class-action suit.
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For the first time, there is room in the academic pool. This egress and accompanying ingress of faculty offers the chemical sciences a historic opportunity.
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That role is an enormous burden on one's energy, and it is a burden that many women take on gladly; but one person really cannot mentor the planet. After I proposed, in an editorial in Chemical & Engineering News, that it was time to apply Title IX to chemistry departments and presented a truncated list of reasons why that was a rational proposal,~5 I received reams of supportive e-mail from both men and women students and faculty, as well as people in industry and government.
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across the sediment-water interface subsequent to resuspension of the sediment; the microelectrodes are obscured in the flume by the suspended solids in the river water overlying the Columbia River sediment bed. Photo taken by middle-school science teacher Laurie Denio.
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From page 80... ...
What if we take the relative absence of women in the faculty applicant pool as a tacit statement from women that chemistry departments are not healthy places for human beings? Universities and chemistry departments are, as Dan Greenberg said, "retrograded they are missing representation from women and minorities and do not serve a modern society.
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From page 81... ...
Noble had this glorious piece of Durer's art retouched by Kathy Grove to take Eve out of the picture in order to symbolize, all too accurately, Western science. Western science derived from the intellectual context of monasteries and ecclesiastical schools and then moved into the universities, retaining almost all the vestiges of its beginnings in the monastery.24 The ideal was, and in some ways still is, that one is dedicated around-the-clock to the scholastic pursuit of knowledge, and to do that either one must be a monk (or exhibit monastic dedication)
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For example, most university faculty search committees are not really search committees; they are manila-envelope-opening committees. These committees do not seek out new life forms (i.e., women and minorities)
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Merely attaching a male name to the curriculum vitae raises the apparent quality of that application in the eyes of both male and female reviewers.33 In the third example, a study of fellowships awarded by the Swedish Medical Research Council showed that the productivity of a woman candidate applying for the prestigious SMRC fellowship had to be 2.5 times more stellar to get the same competency score as the average male candidate.34 It is clear that serious bias exists in how women are perceived in terms of their productivity and competence: women are consistently undervalued for their qualities and accomplishments. Search committees, department heads, deans, provosts, and university presidents need to be aware of this 30Virginia Valian, Why So Slow?
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If the problems enumerated above with respect to the unhealthy environment in chemistry departments are not solved, women will still vote with their feet and not apply to a university. To highlight the difficulty posed by the current environment of chemistry departments, I will now anonymously quote some of my electronic correspondents.
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A very big stick would be the withdrawal of federal dollars. If the case can be made that chemistry departments have merited the application of Title IX, that will put universities in serious trouble, no doubt about it.
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We could also bite the bullet and return faculty to their primary function, the reason we have universities in the first place: to train and challenge students and to conduct scholarly research that contributes to the greater store of human knowledge. Lastly, change the reward structure.
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We do things in different ways from one another and we don't all like each other. And this differentiation among female faculty sometimes produces isolation even when the numbers on an absolute basis have reached the purported critical mass.
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From page 88... ...
And a final concern: If we cannot pull women chemists into academics when we are graduating one woman for every two men, how are we ever going to get minorities on chemistry faculties? ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 1 would like to thank Janet Osteryoung and the Organizing Committee of the Chemical Sciences Roundtable for allowing me to expand on the 650-word editorial, written for the March 13, 2000, issue of Chemical and Engineering News, in which I proposed applying Title IX to U.S.
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From page 89... ...
But two days after my editorial came out I heard from a plant physiologist: "Please come talk to us because we have the same problem." Clearly, critical mass has not solved the problem, and I agree it is broader than just chemistry and chemical engineering departments. I think we have to retrain universities as a whole to understand what their function is.
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We had a person, Faith Wool, in our human resources office who was an extremely innovative and assertive woman in fact she was recruited by the Clinton Administration to help frame the Family and Medical Leave Act. Faith took the initiative to do several surveys at DuPont very large and inclusive surveys and after the second or third survey in which she had gathered a lot of information about retention and satisfaction, a lot of things started to happen around family and work issues.
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So, it does work, but it has to be built in a way that provides continuity. I think the only way to do that is to have a money component that is also related to the requirement for critical mass.
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43David F Noble, A World Without Women The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science (New York: Knopf, 1992~.
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TITLE IX FOR WOMEN IN ACADEMIC CHEMISTRY 93 Marion C Thurnauer, Argonne National Laboratory: Your comments reminded me of two studies carried out in the mid-1980s, one at MIT45 and the other at Stanford.46 These studies examined graduate student life and surveyed both male and female graduate students, asking questions about their situations as graduate students.
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