FOCUS Feature: A Spot at the Bench

When Pae Wu recently attended a workshop designed to encourage more women to become professors, she couldn’t help but notice that the discussion seemed more negative than positive. The engineering graduate student had been fairly torn on whether or not to stay in academia, and the presentations on the rigors of the tenure process didn’t make her any more confident that she wanted to face those tough first years of a career in science.

“People were questioning why there weren’t more women in science, and I had to point out that we are not going to be banging down the doors to enter a profession that just sounds so awful,” said Wu, who just completed her doctorate at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke. “While I do love science, I just don’t know that I can be the heart and soul of it.”

Your Worst Critic

It can be difficult for women, even those who have spent their whole lives gunning for a spot at the bench, to stay on the career path when they have so few female mentors to light the way. And while many scientific disciplines are enjoying equal numbers of women and men in their training programs, when it gets to the faculty level women are still in the minority. Part of the problem stems from societal influences that may cause women – and men, for that matter– to view their abilities, responsibilities and career options through a rather narrow lens.

“If all you know about scientists, if the vision of a scientist is a brilliant white man with glasses and funny hair and a lab coat, then none of us are going to feel like we match that model,” said Mary Wyer, who has championed the advancement of women in science and engineering through the integration of women's studies into the undergraduate and graduate curriculum at NC State University. “The truth of the matter is that women and people of color have made substantive contributions to science and that these are forgotten, they are lost history.”

One concept she teaches is that of stereotype threat, or the risk that a negative stereotype about one’s group –such as being female or African-American – will lead to self-doubt and affect academic performance. In the classic study of this self-fulfilling prophesy, social psychologists Steven Spencer, Claude Steele and Diane Quinn told a group of students that they were going to take a very difficult math test. When they scored the exam, they found that on average, the women earned ten points, whereas the men got twenty-five.

When they administered the exact same test to a different class -- again telling them it was very difficult but also typing at the top “this test has been designed to be gender neutral” -- women doubled their score with an average of twenty points, and the men also scored twenty points. This experiment, and over a hundred others like it, indicated that it was not simply innate ability, but rather the perception of one’s ability that can make a significant difference in how women scientists perform.

Molly Carnes, co-founder of the Women In Science & Engineering Leadership Institute (WISELI) at the University of Wisconsin, thinks that it is important that people recognize these biases, even within themselves, and try to overcome them. “We are not going to do away with these stereotypes, they have been there for centuries,” said Carnes. “But if the pervasive message that came across was that in spite of these stereotypes, all research has shown that men and women are equally capable of being leaders, scientists, architects, and so on, well that in and of itself would probably be the most powerful way to mitigate the damage from stereotypes.”

Those with the confidence to continue in science can go on to face a whole new set of challenges as the token female in a laboratory, on a thesis committee, or even in an entire department. And being the token in the situation can mean that you are seen as woman first and a scientist second. Carla Koehler, who investigates how defects in mitochondria lead to disease, says that there are often only one or two female speakers at scientific meetings on the topic. While she recognizes the scant number of women in the field, Koehler claims it has never factored into her career choices.

“If I was going to be the only woman in the department that would have been fine, I just wanted to go to the best place to do science,” says Koehler, one of several female faculty in chemistry and biochemistry at UCLA. “Ultimately, I want to do my science; sure it would be nice to have some more female colleagues, but it isn’t a requisite.”

But the number of women in the profession does matter, not just in terms of equity, but also because they serve to recruit – and retain – budding female scientists. A study of two dozen Virginia colleges and universities compared the characteristics of computer science and biological science departments to better understand the elements needed to prevent women from leaving a discipline. They found that being surrounded by same-sex peers was the single most important factor for the retention of females. “Tons of students leave graduate school not because they aren’t good at the subject but because they feel like they just don’t fit in,” said Carol Frieze, associate director and program coordinator of the student organization Women@SCS.

Power of Peers

While women are in the minority in most areas of the sciences, their numbers are the fewest by far in engineering, computer science and physics. Women studying computer science at Carnegie Mellon University created Women@SCS with the idea that some learning – mentoring, networking, study groups – occurs outside the classroom. For example, men sharing a dormitory floor are likely to interact and help each other with homework, but that might not be happen for the small number of women spread around campus. The program creates opportunities for women by bringing in invited speakers, sponsoring seminars that are of interest to both males and females, conducting outreach for middle school girls, educating guidance counselors about the breadth of computer science and connecting female students with mentors.

“These women know all too well that you can go a whole day without seeing another woman, so it is important that they have opportunities to get together and talk,” Frieze said. “Our intellectual capability may be the same, but our life experiences and the culture we live in can be different.”

Mentoring often occurs informally, but many universities and national organizations have created programs to formalize the process. The Association for Women in Science (AWIS) has almost 50 different chapters around the country that bring women scientists together to network, and the organization also partners with MentorNet, an online system that links up experienced scientists with junior people, anywhere from undergraduates and graduate students to early career faculty.

“It is not just mentoring the women so that as square pegs they will stick to round holes, but mentoring the faculty about what their thought processes are and what are the characteristics of inadvertent gender inequity,” said Phoebe Laboy, president of AWIS. While speaking at a conference to help set the research agenda for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office for Research on Women’s Health, Laboy told the NIH to do a better job of valuing mentoring. “They should not fund some guy with a multi-million dollar grant that is supporting ten graduate students and postdocs without worrying about what kind of mentoring is going on there,” she said.

As someone who has worked as a postdoctoral fellow for that scientist with the big grant (Irving Weismann), Amy Wagers says she owes her success in large part to the great mentors she has had throughout her career. “They never made me feel like there was something I couldn’t or shouldn’t do because I was a woman, it just never factored into the equation,” said Wagers, who is an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. “In fact, my graduate advisor had more confidence in what I was doing than I did at the time.”

Still, she admits that she has recently sought out female mentors. “It is a huge issue that there haven’t been as many female role models for women to look at who are going up through the training program to say yes, you can do this -- it is possible to have a family, a personal life and a great career,” Wagers said. “I think that as you see more women succeed then it encourages the women who are in training to continue on that track and it shows that it can be done.”

How it’s Done

One of those success stories belongs to Claudia Gunsch, a scientist whose work integrates genetics and environmental engineering. In addition to conducting her research, she mentors high school students, undergraduates and graduate students from underrepresented groups within her own laboratory, and she volunteers for programs to introduce girls to science and engineering, such as the Women and Math Mentoring Program.

Recently, Gunsch has begun developing individual classes as part of a National Science Foundation (NSF) award to give middle school students a hands-on experience that may spark an interest in environmental engineering. She will start by giving the classes at Rogers Herr Middle School, a predominantly African-American school in Durham, NC, and hopes to eventually disseminate the program to other schools. Gunsch’s goal is not only to convey her passion for research but also to show that a woman can be an engineer, and succeed at it. “Unfortunately, with one school you are targeting so few people that making sure that everyone gets this message can be difficult unless it is integrated into the curriculum from a very early age,” Gunsch said.

She also has another job altogether – as a mother. Gunsch has had three kids since she started her faculty position at Duke just five years ago. She could easily say she has too much on her plate to volunteer as a mentor to young women, but she doesn’t. “I think you have to make that decision whether or not it is important to you, and I have decided it is,” Gunsch said. “One of the reasons I went into teaching was I wanted to help people, and make sure that next generation of women is well represented. I know I have plenty of colleagues who have decided the outreach activities are not a priority, but I view them as a nice perk because I enjoy giving back.”

But in a field where the mantra is publish or perish, taking time away from research to give back could actually hurt one’s career. Gunsch herself admits that she doesn’t know what is going to happen when she goes up for tenure in a few years. Meg Urry, who has achieved tenure as a professor of physics at Yale, stresses that mentoring is a necessary burden for female faculty. “As women we spend a huge fraction of our time working with undergraduates and graduate students who need extra encouragement and who come to us because we’re the role models,” said Urry, a professor of physics at Yale. “That means we have that much less time to write a proposal grant or write a paper.”

Urry has advocated for supplemental research funds to help women scientists continue to provide mentoring and do good science. This year, a provision of the America COMPETES Act went into effect, requiring that all NSF grant applicants must describe how they mentor their postdocs. However, it may take similar provisions for the NIH, and other steps like inclusion of mentoring activities in the evaluation of faculty at universities, for women to get the mentoring they need to remain in the discipline. As Urry says, if we keep educating year after year women who don’t have female professors to look up to, why should we expect that they want to go into science?

Author Footnote:

In many academic disciplines the numbers of women may be finally reaching those of men, but the ranks in science and engineering are still a long way from displaying gender equity. This disparity has implications not only in terms of social justice, but also for the quality of science pursued in this country. This article is the second in a series examining some of the unique challenges faced by women in science, such as lack of mentoring, the biological clock and unconscious institutional bias, and will explore possible solutions to retain more talent in this important field.

By:  Marla Vacek Broadfoot