Should science adapt to women?
Dear friends of women in science:
Back in 2002, Elizabeth Blackburn gave an interview about "why science must adapt to women." It was published in Discover Magazine and can be viewed online here
(http://discovermagazine.com/2002/nov/featadapt ). As you probably remember, Blackburn became a Nobel laureate in 2009 for her work on telomerase. The earlier article quotes her as follows: ""The argument has been that the pipeline will take care of this," Blackburn says, referring to the idea that if enough women are encouraged to enter science early, the gender gap, over time, will disappear. "But the pipeline has been good for a number of years, and it hasn't taken care of it. In biology it's especially insidious because 50 percent of grad students are female. This has been the case for quite some time. Yet when I was chair of my department, I was the only woman chair in the entire medical school. We are putting a lot of our students off continuing-both men and women, but more women. They vote with their feet."
She said that decades of work trying to reduce the barriers against progress by women has not been effective because that was not the only problem. She advocated in 2002 that to really create true equality, in order for the best minds to enter science regardless of gender, science will have to adapt to women. She pointed to the pressure of subtle bias along with tenure pressures at the peak of childbearing years as causes. Few academic employers had addressed these issues then; today they have been addressed in some ways, but they still remain as obstacles.
The article continued to quote Gerhard Sonnert, Harvard sociologist, whose 1995 study of gender and science showed that the combative style expected in science research puts women off, along with the attendant self-promotion. Blackburn pointed out that even if women do try to adopt such a style, they're then perceived as "difficult."
Blackburn is married to a cell biologist and has a son in his twenties now. She had her son at 38, after she was a full professor. Yet she says work/family balance was not really an issue for her. On the other hand, work and family completely fill up her life. She pokes fun at those who think "if you're not there until late, you're not really doing it," saying all that time in the lab does not necessarily make the science better. She would rather emphasize quality, not quantity. But she had to admit, when asked how she did it as a woman, that "I disguised myself as a man." She tries not to have the numerous women in her lab need to pursue that strategy. The women in her laboratory in 2002, at the time of the article, thought her mentoring was having an important positive effect on them. More women mentors would make it easier to get more women into the field, they thought.
Blackburn was propelled by her excitement about the science, the interesting new things her laboratory discovered. She says she considered dropping out of academic science at the end of her postdoc, and that gives her rapport with women who are unsure if they should continue.
What do you think about women's persistence in science?
A It's still about having and raising children. Industry can be much smarter about this than academia, at least at present.
B Still there's subtle bias, discrimination by thoughtless exclusion. Where women are not welcome, they can sense it and go elsewhere.
C Things are much better than in 2002, and most women can succeed in science if they can ignore a few snubs from older men of science
D Blackburn's point is still right: the culture needs to change so that women are comfortable. That change needs to include supportive child care, etc, respect for women's work in science, a friendly and stimulating work environment. No bandaid will take care of these issues.
I'm not the only one:) Mary Ann Mason seems to agree based on her recent work.
I find one of the issues with the "maintenance" of US superiority in science is that we never really gained that superiority because we implemented some new grand strategy of training and research or came up with a plan to make that happen.
What we did was get involved in WWII, "steal" key scientists who were fleeing oppression (at least those we deemed worthy) and engage in a huge nuclear weapons project that taught us how to coordinate a big group of scientists for one objective.
Because many of these key scientists were Jewish, we had to lower the institutional barriers at universities for these individuals to find places for them after the war. Anti-semitism didn't go away overnight, but the academic opportunities in the US were finally available to people that had been barred previously from serving as lab heads.
Although the atom bomb project has served as a great model for the National Labs and NASA/JPL, it has done little to change the way academic science is generally performed.
The one big change that the post WWII Cold War gained the US was the founding of the NIH and the development of a framework for competitive grant funding. That history is very interesting by itself...
Hi exCS,
I wish that prior planning were more normal in DC, but the government seems to get itself into reactive mode and then it just keeps on playing catch up (or not playing catch up). The shock when the Russians shot up Sputnik was enough to galvanize Congress into putting resources into science. Now, every news organization seems to be predicting the budget cuts will hit science hard. It's going to impact negatively on science competitiveness, but if Helen is right, that could turn out to be good news for women in science.
cheers,
Laura
I sure hope they won't wait until our science is way behind everyone else's to begin to address it by increasing opportunites for women. I can see why hmcbride predicted that, though. Action in response to crisis is not good planning, but we seem to do that on a national level an awful lot of the time.
Dear Helen,
That's an interesting take on the serious competition for science dominance world-wide: some slippage or even failure on the part of the US will ramp up efforts to help women succeed in science. I certainly came into science on the post-Sputnik reaction so it all makes sense to me. I'm thinking it will also attract more men, because user-friendly science is not just user-friendly to women as we've discussed on this site lately. We'll have to watch this trend and try to keep the US from missing the opportunity to open the doors of science.
cheers,
Laura
D. Blackburn hit the nail on the head on this one. Without a substantial change in the culture of science, you will not see a higher percentage of women persist regardless of how many minor tweaks to the system you make.
And change must come from within through the acknowledgement that having diverse perspectives in science keeps it at the cutting edge. Having spoken to many very successful and talented male professors about this very issue, there is still the perception that science was just fine before women and minorities came along, and it will be just fine the way without any change. So why bother?
The best thing for women in science is the loss of American dominance in the coming decades in several key fields. As talented postdocs return to their own countries to compete with colleagues in the US and marginalize the work done here, there will certainly be more effort placed in attracting and retaining US citizens in science at home. And that means positive changes for women especially as they are largest and thus easiest "minority" to impact quickly.
Hi Scifeminista and Postdoc cat,
At the conference I attended last week, a prominent woman in physics talked about her user-friendly class in physics with an applied project and compared its methods and goals with those defined earlier by others as feminist teaching practices. When she and her co-teachers thought a lot about student comfort and engagement without emphasis on gender in the planning, the course that resulted appealed greatly to women.
I really love the idea that making teaching (and I suspect making the workplace) more supportive for all will result in more comfort for women.
cheers,
Laura
I don't have kids so I guess B would be my choice. Not quite there yet in terms of never encountering bias or barriers, sorry Mad Dog. Surveys of women in science typically find over 80% have encountered some form of overt discouraging action by men in their field.
Hi Mad Dog,
I don't dispute that things have improved, but women generally don't feel that all of the slights and problems have disappeared. Better is not good enough yet, as far as I can tell. In much of academia, there are no reasonable child care facilities and little cognizance of the needs for nursing rooms or similar facilities. What Patagonia outdoor outfitters do, for example, would be unheard of in most of academia. At biotech firms, though, some or all of these supports are offered.
cheers,
Laura
D seems to include everything I'd like to see changed. The environment has simply not become welcoming, although it has indeed improved. A bandaid would be a memo from the administration welcoming women to the institution. A change in atmosphere would be going into the computer lab and seeing no posted nudie pictures, having someone in the lab say hello to the newly arrived woman instead of the laughter hushing suddenly so she would wonder if the joke was about her or just about a woman, etc. And CHILD CARE in all caps!!
I think the answer has to be C. Some women today may not even get any snubs from older men of science. Things have changed enormously for women in science in the US. But not for women in a lot of parts of the world, as someone has recently pointed out on this site.
