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aerili
Nov 28, 2009, 8:59 PM
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Hire more female professors, according to some new research.
Really interesting article.
http://www.slate.com/id/2219701/
Also, as someone who is working toward pursuing a Master's in biomechanics within a biomedical engineering program, I can say I have already experienced being a minority in an undergraduate, entry-level eng. class....i.e. I was the only female. The men stared for a while, but eventually got used to my presence.
Also been reading Arlene Blum's Breaking Trail autobiography and she actually talks about being inspired to stick with biochem because of one female chem professor during her undergraduate years.
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clausti
Nov 28, 2009, 11:33 PM
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I happened to attend a seminar recently at Ohio State about women in academia. An interesting bit of data that i learned there was that, while women who try for tenure do not achieve it as often as men do, there is a bigger difference for the question of "why, even in fields like some life sciences where undergraduate degrees are pretty much 50/50, are there so many more male faculty and so many more female part time instructors?" that difference was that women "leak" (the seminar speaker's term) between grad school and post-doc and, most significantly, between post docs and first tenure track job.
the seminar was actually "Do babies matter in acedemia?" the general consensus seemed to be "yes, because when the crap are you planning on having these alleged babies, mrs. science lady?" "the year I get tenure." there was a really neat graph of years before tenure 4, 3, 2, 1, practically no babies, and tenure year a huge spike and then gradually leveling off again. when, duh, most women are pushing 35.
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lena_chita
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Nov 28, 2009, 11:47 PM
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Interesting study of the achievement gap, for sure.
The litle blurb burried in the middle about men doing better with male teachers (though not as big a discrepancy as for females) has me wondering about my own observations. My son (11yo, 5th grade) has a male math teacher for the first time ever. He's never had a male teacher in school before. And I can see a difference already. I also saw a big difference between having a male music teacher and a female music teacher for him. My son didn't like music lessons and we stopped it, but while he was taking it, there was simply no goofing-off and joking his way out when he had a male teacher, while the female teacher just didn't know what to do with him!
I wonder how much a variability there is within a gorup of women in this respect. I cannot say that I ever wanted specifically a female teacher/mentor. And obviously it hasn't turned me off science...
But yes, gender gap in science is very real, and the higher you go, the more pronounced it is. In our lab, I am one of only 2 females with PhDs -- there are 7 males with PhDs in the lab. But if you look at technicians (those with BS/BA), the ratio is reversed: 1 male to 6 females. And if you look at professors... none on the entire floor of a dozen labs, I believe? there is one, sort-of, but she is basicly running a core facility, not a research lab.
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lena_chita
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Nov 28, 2009, 11:48 PM
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clausti wrote: I happened to attend a seminar recently at Ohio State about women in academia. An interesting bit of data that i learned there was that, while women who try for tenure do not achieve it as often as men do, there is a bigger difference for the question of "why, even in fields like some life sciences where undergraduate degrees are pretty much 50/50, are there so many more male faculty and so many more female part time instructors?" that difference was that women "leak" (the seminar speaker's term) between grad school and post-doc and, most significantly, between post docs and first tenure track job. the seminar was actually "Do babies matter in acedemia?" the general consensus seemed to be "yes, because when the crap are you planning on having these alleged babies, mrs. science lady?" "the year I get tenure." there was a really neat graph of years before tenure 4, 3, 2, 1, practically no babies, and tenure year a huge spike and then gradually leveling off again. when, duh, most women are pushing 35.
You beat me to it, I was going to make a separate post about this...
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clausti
Nov 29, 2009, 2:44 AM
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lena_chita wrote: I wonder how much a variability there is within a gorup of women in this respect. I cannot say that I ever wanted specifically a female teacher/mentor. And obviously it hasn't turned me off science...
i'm guessing the KIND of science matters, too. i know that i've had a pretty even mix of male and female faculty teaching my classes* from undergrad through my grad classes. but my classmates that were engineering students? not so much. and physics was even more skewed. and i know that the rate at which female engineering students dropped the major was double the rate at which male engineering students dropped the major. and anecdotally, a big part of the problem was that the male instructors were really dismissive of the female students until the third year or so. as in "oh she'll just drop it so why should i bother or take her seriously."
In reply to: But yes, gender gap in science is very real, and the higher you go, the more pronounced it is. In our lab, I am one of only 2 females with PhDs -- there are 7 males with PhDs in the lab. But if you look at technicians (those with BS/BA), the ratio is reversed: 1 male to 6 females. And if you look at professors... none on the entire floor of a dozen labs, I believe? there is one, sort-of, but she is basicly running a core facility, not a research lab.
this was commented on heavily at that seminar. lots of males up top, ratio reversed in support/secondary positions.
*edited to clarify: i'm a phd student in the life sciences, specifically, genetics.
(This post was edited by clausti on Nov 29, 2009, 3:08 AM)
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smallclimber
Nov 29, 2009, 3:06 AM
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Hi Lena, What sort of lab do you work in? Academic or industrial, physical or biological science?
I think the comment about the higher the level the lower the female ratio is correct. In my area (chemistry) women were well represented at PhD level, reasonably represented at post doc level, but very poorly at faculty level. I moved to industry and while the PhD intake to my department is about representative of the post doc gender ratio, we see a significant heamorage rate to other deapartments/companies at around the 3-5 year mark leading to severe under representation at higher levels. While there are multiple contributing factors incompatibility of the main aspects of the job with pregnancy or motherhood seem to be contributors.
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lena_chita
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Nov 29, 2009, 2:15 PM
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clausti wrote: i'm guessing the KIND of science matters, too. i know that i've had a pretty even mix of male and female faculty teaching my classes* from undergrad through my grad classes. but my classmates that were engineering students? not so much. and physics was even more skewed.
I was thinking more of the student distribution in Moscow State, where the percent of females was about the same in Physics, Chamistry, and Biological sciences, and was actually about 50/50 at the undergrad levels. But I have heard that engineering/physics is especially prone to gender gap in the US.
Interestingly, I have thought of going into physics myself, and my Mom, who is an electrical engineer by training, was VERY much against it. I guess she didn't have a good time at it, even though she majored in physics, graduated with 4.0 GPA and got her masters' by the time she was 21.
Her main concern was NOT whether it would be hard to study for me as a female. LOL, no... All her arguments against it focused more or less on 'someday you will want to start a family, and...'. I guess he didn't realize it would be just as hard in biological sciences as it is in physics, when it comes to balancing family and work.
She worked as an engineer all through my childhood, and struggled very much wiht trying to balance work and family. After coming to US in her mid 40s, she decided to re-train for social worker, and is much happier now, I think.
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tavs
Nov 30, 2009, 3:10 PM
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The patterns clausti and others have noted hold in non-science fields as well. Don't have the exact citation handy, but there was an article published a year or two ago in a political science journal about the drop-off in % female from masters to phd to assistant prof to tenured. At least some portion of this can probably be accounted for by some lag--e.g., it's only relatively recently that women have made up a higher percentage of students, so to put it bluntly--there are a lot of older men in the tenured prof positions. But that definitely doesn't account for the whole gap.
More recently, there was a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed that posed the question (posed by others, of course) of whether the tenure system hurts women. The suggested answer was, as clausti mentioned, "duh, yes." The push for tenure occurs precisely during the usual child-bearing years, and the tenure system is not very forgiving of time off, gaps in research, etc.
On the science front, I'm currently teaching a gender and politics course, and to illustrate the ongoing sex segregation in various disciplines (so many students seem to think this is something that only happened decades ago!) I pulled recent graduation numbers for different departments on campus. The data showed a breakdown of all students who graduated from my university in the 2008-2009 academic year. Engineering, computer science, and physics were the most skewed (all 70% male or more) of the "hard science/tech" fields; chemistry, biology, and other science departments were less male-dominated. Business programs, architecture, and economics were also among the most male-skewed depts (70% or more), while most education programs, art depts (except film), social work, and nursing were all 70% or more female.
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granite_grrl
Nov 30, 2009, 3:44 PM
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I'm a little surprized at how many females were in your engineering programs. You didn't state exactly what your undergrad was, but at the school I studied engineering the guys were in the minority in the biological engineering class and it was about 50/50 in chem eng (this was true for my year and the year my older sister was in chemical engineering 4 years previous at the same school).
On the other had I was electrical engineering which had less than 10% females in the class, but I never felt that the profs were dismissive of any of us.
I'm also trying to think back to my first two years when people were dropping out of engineering like flies, and can't remember the male to female ratio. I do know that the only other female in my second year engineering class was one of the few in it that carried on their third year (I did my first two years at a smaller university then continued to finish at a larger school).
All that being said I did not have a SINGLE female prof my entire 4 years of school. In hindsight this does seem like a serious unbalance in the sexes, but I don't know if I really noticed it at the time. Yeah, I think it would have been cool to have some female profs, could look up to them as a role model of sorts I suppose.
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desertwanderer81
Dec 18, 2009, 9:41 PM
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aerili wrote: Hire more female professors, according to some new research. Really interesting article. http://www.slate.com/id/2219701/ Also, as someone who is working toward pursuing a Master's in biomechanics within a biomedical engineering program, I can say I have already experienced being a minority in an undergraduate, entry-level eng. class....i.e. I was the only female. The men stared for a while, but eventually got used to my presence. Also been reading Arlene Blum's Breaking Trail autobiography and she actually talks about being inspired to stick with biochem because of one female chem professor during her undergraduate years.
It's because women can't do physics ;)
PS, you never did tell me how you did :p
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