Boston

The leaders of the top research universities in the United States are facing up to the fact that they have a problem with women.

Presidents, chancellors and provosts from nine élite institutions met up with 25 women academics last week at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to confront the issue of gender bias in science and engineering.

Representatives from the schools — including the California Institute of Technology, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Yale — acknowledged that women researchers face substantial barriers to career advancement. Without promising any immediate specific actions, they vowed to work together to break these barriers down.

Chewing the fat: Nancy Hopkins (centre) takes equality issues to university leaders at an MIT forum. Credit: DONNA COVENEY/MIT

Biologist Nancy Hopkins, who has led the fight against discriminatory practices at MIT, describes the meeting as an “historic event—a milestone that I thought would never happen in my lifetime”.

Harvard physicist Howard Georgi agrees. “The top institutions are the places where the [bias] problems may be the most serious because the faculty is the most competitive. If we can make inroads here, it will have an enormous impact,” he says.

The participants pledged to go back to their institutions, collect information on factors such as hiring practices, salaries and committee membership, and then try to establish “a faculty whose diversity reflects that of the students we educate”.

The group will reconvene in a year's time to collate their data and discuss what improvements, if any, have been made. The possibility of collective action will then be considered.

“The fact that we're all coming back a year from now creates some pressure to actually get something done,” says MIT president Charles Vest, who organized the event.