In a recent address on the under-representation of women in science
and engineering, Princeton University President Shirley M. Tilghman
offered "a rationale for why universities in particular and Americans
in general should care about this issue."
Tilghman spoke March 24 at the launch of the ADVANCE Lecture Series at
Columbia University's Earth Institute, part of a program intended to
increase the recruitment, retention and advancement of women scientists
and engineers.
"First and foremost," she said, "the future vitality and prosperity of
the United States fundamentally depend upon the scientific and
technological creativity and innovation that is nurtured within its
research universities. Universities like ours are the research engines
of this country, a role that is based on a social contract between the
federal government and universities that was forged just after the
Second World War. … For this partnership between universities and
government to thrive in the 21st century, we will have to attract into
science and engineering more than our fair share of the best and
brightest young minds from all over the world.
"To restrict the pool, either intentionally or unintentionally, by
discouraging women – or under-represented minorities for that matter –
from pursuing careers in science and engineering is to guarantee
that the outcome, and thus the future prosperity of the United States,
will be less than it could be," Tilghman said.
The full text of her speech, "Changing the Demographics: Recruiting,
Retaining and Advancing Women Scientists in Academia," is posted below.
Good afternoon. I am delighted to be able to join you for the launching of your ADVANCE program to strengthen the presence and enhance the experience of female scientists and engineers at Columbia University. I must say, however, that when I accepted this invitation in the fall, I did not foresee that speaking as a university president on the subject of the under-representation of women in science and engineering would become a form of risk-taking behavior that makes bungee jumping and going over Niagara Falls in a barrel seem like child’s play.
I want to begin with the images of the women on the first slide. These
are among the most successful women working in the fields of science
and engineering today – Linda Buck, who received the Nobel Prize in
Medicine last year for her work on the molecular basis of olfaction;
Jackie Barton, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a
chemist at Caltech; Ingrid Daubechies, a mathematician at Princeton and
another NAS member; Barbara Meyer, a NAS member and brilliant
geneticist; Barbara Grosz, a computer scientist who works on artificial
intelligence and serves as Dean of Science at the Radcliffe Institute;
Sharon Long, a NAS member and plant biologist who is Dean of Humanities
and Sciences at Stanford; Vera Rubin, an astrophysicist and NAS member;
Susan Kieffer, a geoscientist at Illinois and NAS member; Liz
Blackburn, a cell biologist whose discovery of telomeres has won her
many wards, including membership in the NAS; and Pam Bjorkman, a
structural biologist and a very young NAS member at Caltech. While
hardly a random sample, this slide could have included dozens of other
successful women scientists.
I wanted to have their images in our minds during my address because in
our eagerness to find ways to increase the participation of women in
science and engineering, we should not lose sight of how far we have
come. This slide could not have been constructed 30 years ago when I
was completing my Ph.D., and I find the successes of the women it
depicts to be a tremendous source of inspiration and guidance going
forward. Last spring, the first woman in the history of Princeton
University to be granted tenure, Professor of Sociology Suzanne Keller,
retired. When describing the Princeton of 1966, when she joined our
faculty, she commented, “I really thought I was from Mars. It was as if
the men had never seen a woman.” Today, within the span of one career,
105 members or just under 20% of Princeton’s tenured faculty is female,
28% of the junior faculty are women, and last year 36% of all new
appointments to the faculty were female. Two traditionally male
domains, the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Woodrow
Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, are currently headed
by female deans. Today’s Princeton would be unrecognizable to the young
Suzanne Keller, and that alone gives me enormous hope for the future.
In thinking about this talk, I concluded that it made little sense for
me to review once again the numbers – I suspect everyone in this
audience knows them by heart. Instead, I want to begin with developing
the rationale for why universities in particular and Americans in
general should care about this issue.
First and foremost, the future vitality and prosperity of the United
States fundamentally depend upon the scientific and technological
creativity and innovation that is nurtured within its research
universities. Universities like ours are the research engines of this
country, a role that is based on a social contract between the federal
government and universities that was forged just after the Second World
War. New industries that were born in this country and grew up in the
second half of the 20th century – like the biotechnology industry, the
microchip industry, wired and wireless telecommunications, and internet
commerce – all have their roots in the work of faculty and their
students and fellows in universities like Columbia and Princeton. For
this partnership between universities and government to thrive in the
21st century, we will have to attract into science and engineering more
than our fair share of the best and brightest young minds from all over
the world. To restrict the pool, either intentionally or
unintentionally, by discouraging women – or under-represented
minorities for that matter – from pursuing careers in science and
engineering is to guarantee that the outcome, and thus the future
prosperity of the United States, will be less than it could be.
The second argument for increasing the participation of women in
science and engineering is that the scientific interests of women may
not be completely coincident with those of their male colleagues. I am
not suggesting that women conduct scientific inquiry differently from
men – the scientific method is universal – but it has been my own
experience that the problems that intrigue women about the natural
world are not always exactly the same as those that attract men. By
encouraging women to embrace science, we likely increase the range of
problems under study, and this will broaden and strengthen the entire
enterprise.
The third argument is unquestionably true. If women continue to be
under-represented in science, engineering, and mathematics, these
fields will look increasingly anachronistic to students, and we risk
losing the most talented among them, who will, after all, have an
infinite range of career options from which to choose. As law, medical,
and business schools reach gender parity in their student bodies,
science and engineering will become increasingly unattractive vis-à-vis
those fields. Today the difference is there for all to see. For
example, the Association of American Medical Colleges reports that
45.2% of medical school graduates in 2003 were female, whereas,
according to the American Society for Engineering Education, only 17.4%
of Ph.D. degrees in engineering were awarded to women that year.
I am reminded here of one of the reasons that was offered as to why the
schools in the Ivy League became co-educational. It was argued at the
time that the schools were afraid that they would lose the most
talented male students to co-educational schools. Now, as a reason to
admit women, it may not ring with high principle, but it was a
realistic concern. Those schools back in the late 1960s knew that men
did not want to be educated any longer only with men.
Finally, it is simply unjust for a profession to exclude – whether by
sins of commission or omission – a significant proportion of the
population on the basis of gender. For every girl who dreams of
becoming a scientist or engineer, there is a moral obligation on our
part to do everything we can to even the playing field so her chances
rest on her (dare I say innate?) abilities and her determination, just
as it does for her male counterparts. It is not sufficient to shrug our
shoulders, invoke all the historical reasons for the situation, call
upon the leaky pipeline, or bemoan the difficulty of changing culture.
As Pogo famously said, “I’ve seen the enemy, and he is us.”
The under-representation of women in science and engineering has many
causes, some of which are rooted in childhood, when boys and girls
confront divergent parental, scholastic, and societal opportunities and
expectations. Indeed, part of our challenge is that universities stand
at the end of a long and imperfectly constructed pipeline that is
partially controlled by others, yet this does not excuse us from fixing
leaks – and there are many – in the section of the pipeline that we do
control. Nor should we forget that universities sit at the pipeline’s
terminus and, therefore, add more value to the knowledge flowing
through it than any other stakeholder.
When we place a premium on creating an equitable and supportive
environment for female students and scholars, when we empower women to
fulfill their potential in science and engineering, and when the human
face of these fields is diversified, we send a very powerful message
all the way back to the wellhead. The message we communicate is this:
women can and do excel in disciplines where men have long predominated.
So if you are persuaded that we have good reasons for making science
and engineering more inclusive, the question becomes one of “how do we
get there?” There is no silver bullet – no instantaneous solution – but
with determination and imagination, universities can surely change the
climate for women where they are under-represented. Programs like
ADVANCE will help Columbia University and, indirectly, all of us to
identify the ways in which universities must change in order to achieve
better representation of women in science and engineering. I salute Lee
Bollinger, Jean Howard, and Robin Bell for the dynamic leadership they
are providing.
The first and most intractable obstacle that many female scientists and
engineers confront in our institutions is the sheer fact that they are
sometimes overwhelmingly outnumbered by men. For, simply put, numbers
really matter. I suspect that most of us, male and female, black and
white, young and old, have been in the minority at some point in our
lives. As a teacher in Sierra Leone in the late 1960s I learned what it
means to stand out in a crowd, but I also knew that my time in Africa
was limited and that this was an interlude in my life rather than a
state of being. Female scientists and engineers do not have the luxury
of going home, at least in a professional context.
Social psychologists have documented the disparate experience of men
and women in male-dominated disciplines, particularly in those fields
where there is a cultural assumption that women are less able. This can
lead to “stereotype threat,” a phenomenon originally identified by
Professor Claude Steele of Stanford and his colleagues in which targets
of stereotypes perform less well when they are reminded of the
possibility that their performance may confirm a negative stereotype
about a group to which they belong. For example, psychologists Michael
Inzlicht and Talia Ben-Zeev looked at the mathematical performance of
male and female undergraduates in mixed and single-sex groups. They
found that women performed more poorly in the presence of men than they
did when men were absent and that this deficit actually grew as the
number of men increased. Men, in contrast, were unaffected by the
number of women in the room. Unfortunately, the women most likely to
suffer in such circumstances are those with the greatest ability,
precisely because they are so intent on disproving the negative
stereotype. This may help to explain the fact that the gap between male
and female scores on the math SAT is largest in the most gifted
population.
Just in case you think that negative stereotypes are beginning to
recede from view, consider this exchange between a Rhodes Scholar in
mathematics, studying at Oxford University, and the Queen of England:
The Queen turned to me and said “And what about you?” “I’m from California and I’m studying pure math,” I said. The Queen made a little face that was trying to be friendly and uncritical, but showed playful disgust – at least I think that was it. “Ah…pure maths,” she said. “What are you going to do with it?” “I’m going to become a mathematician. I’d like to go into academia and be a professor.” She paused, looked at me, and then looked away, and said, “Not many girls have the head for…” and paused, wiggling her fingers up by her head, “pure maths.” Looking at her, amazed that the Queen of England thought not only that many girls do not do math, but that many girls cannot do math, I said “Well, actually, I think that most women are told that they can’t do math, and then they don’t.” “Ah…” she said, taking a step backward. Looking at me again, she moved on down the line.
The problem with the numbers game, of course, is that it poses a
chicken and egg dilemma. It will not be possible to erase stereotype
threat until we enhance the number of women in science and engineering,
which we cannot easily do because of stereotype threat. While
strategies to combat this vary widely – from exposing the dangers of
stereotype threat to those at risk, thereby blunting its effects, to
positive reinforcement through mentoring, to single-sex instruction –
all should affirm the innate abilities of women while challenging them
– indeed, expecting them – to exceed their present level of achievement.
I attribute my own resistance to the stereotypical view that women are
not meant to do science to four things: an extraordinary father who
taught me that I could do anything I wanted, and “don’t let anybody
tell you differently,” highly supportive mentors who happened to have
been men, strong and inspirational senior women colleagues at the right
times, and an absolute inability to recognize reality. Let me amplify
the last point, which may be the least obvious. It has been my
experience that many successful women in science simply fail to
perceive that there are obstacles in their path. They are able to go
through life with metaphorical blinders on – not that they would deny
that there are forces working against the progress of women, but rather
that they refuse to acknowledge that those forces apply to them. A
blunt way to describe such women is to say that they refuse to allow
themselves to become victims. They are able to deflect any slings and
arrows that come their way. I do think that this is a tremendous
survival tool, but one that takes the kind of self-confidence that only
comes from strong parents and mentors. As mentors and as parents, we
should be encouraging this trait in young women, rather than engaging
in a lot of hand-wringing about how tough things are.
The importance of good mentors cannot be over-estimated. In the fall of
2001, I appointed a task force to examine the status of female faculty
in the natural sciences and engineering at Princeton University. The
task force found overwhelming support for mentoring on the part of male
and female faculty alike, but among untenured professors, only 33
percent of women, versus 64 percent of men, reported having had this
critical support. Other institutions face similar challenges. In a
fascinating survey conducted by Cathy Trower and Jared Bleak in 2002,
involving almost a thousand male and female tenure-track faculty at six
research universities, women were “significantly less satisfied” than
men in terms of 19 of 28 measures of workplace satisfaction, including
the perceived commitment of departmental chairs and senior faculty to
their success. In no areas were men found to be significantly less
satisfied than women.
It is a fair question to ask why women report a greater level of
dissatisfaction and a greater need for mentoring than men. One view is
that these are signs of weakness on the part of women, signs that they
need more nurturing than their tougher male colleagues. I would argue
that young women’s dissatisfaction and call for mentoring grow out of
their need to have the cultural milieu of science – a culture that was
formed when all scientists were men – interpreted for them. To give you
one example of what I mean – I attended a Gordon Conference in the
early 1980s when my children were quite small. After the evening
session a group of us were sitting around, drinking beer and talking
about our lives. The men were comparing their travel schedules,
bragging about how long they had been on the road and how long it had
been since they had seen their families. Longer, in this case, was
better. I was having precisely the opposite reaction – fretting about
being away for a few days. Imagine the impact of that discussion on the
female graduate students and postdocs at the table.
Let me give you another example where the culture – and the image of
the stereotypical scientist – works against women. Several years later
I was an organizer of a Gordon Conference. With my male co-chair, we
put together a list of 45 speakers, a third of whom were women. We did
not purposely think about gender, we just talked through names. The
next year, that same co-chair organized the same conference – on the
same topics – with a male co-chair, and when their list was published,
43 of 45 speakers were men. What had happened in just one year? The
difference is that when I close my eyes and think “stellar scientist,”
I can imagine a woman in my head. When my colleagues closed their eyes,
they only saw a man. This is not evil, it is human nature. In so many
circumstances we have to fight against the natural instinct to
associate with people who look and think most like ourselves. This
tendency is exacerbated by the fact that the world works by lists,
whether they are lists of individuals to hire, individuals to give
prominent lectures, individuals to nominate for prizes, or individuals
to appoint to important committees, and if women are not involved in
making up the lists, it is almost inevitable that they will be
overlooked.
I have taken a lot of criticism at Princeton for appointing women to
positions of influence in the university. I have argued – sometimes
successfully – that I did not do this deliberately or with a political
agenda in mind. When challenged to explain why other universities have
not hired as many women, my answer is always the same – that I have a
huge advantage, for when I close my eyes I can imagine that a female
candidate could actually be the best person for the position. Thus I
have a larger pool to choose from.
The lesson that follows from these stories is – in the immortal words
of Linda Loman – “Attention must be paid.” For the foreseeable future,
we will have to be eternally vigilant to the ways in which the societal
image of what constitutes a successful scientist or engineer is working
against the goal of increasing women’s participation in these fields.
The Linda Loman rule would argue that departments must be reminded by
deans to look harder for female candidates for admission to graduate
school and, most importantly, when hiring faculty. Deans must be
prepared to turn back searches that have not considered any female
candidates or have constructed the search in such a way that finding a
woman is unlikely. I am not suggesting that a different standard be
applied – I am perfectly confident that women scientists and engineers
compete effectively when given the chance. Because chairs of
departments are so critical in this regard, the choices deans make when
filling these positions are also very important.
Finally, it has been my experience over many years that the greatest
impediment to hiring a woman today is the two-body problem.
Universities that are prepared to be flexible and creative, and willing
to put some elbow grease into helping with spousal employment, are
going to do better over time. I can tell you that the single most
effective thing we did at Princeton to increase the number of women
faculty in the last three years was to appoint Professor Joan Girgus,
the former chair of Psychology, as a special assistant to the Dean of
the Faculty. About half her time is taken up with helping spouses find
employment.
It is clearly not sufficient to improve hiring practices. The same
vigilance needs to be applied to issues of equity once women are on the
faculty. That universities had been unconsciously treating male and
female faculty differently became clear when the then President of MIT,
Chuck Vest, a man of extraordinary character and courage, responded to
Professor Nancy Hopkins’ request for an investigation into conditions
for women faculty at MIT. What we all learned from their experience is
that the Linda Loman rule needs to be applied on a regular basis to
everything from salaries, to space, to resource allocation, to
committee assignments. I believe we owe President Vest and Professor
Hopkins a huge debt of gratitude for raising the issue and then
addressing it in such an open and forthright way. Their example spurred
many other institutions to make positive changes as well.
There is another – and profound – way in which women and men experience
careers in science and engineering differently, and that is not inside,
but outside the laboratory. Let me give you some statistics to make
this point. Over one-third of women scientists and engineers are
unmarried, compared to 17% of men. Ten percent of married women
scientists and engineers have an unemployed spouse compared to 40% of
men. In a survey conducted by the Amercian Chemical Society, 21% of
female chemists identified balancing family and work as their greatest
career obstacle, compared to 2.8% of men. These differences may help to
explain a very worrisome trend. In my own field of life sciences women
now constitute 50% of the bachelor’s degrees awarded and are closing in
on 50% of the Ph.D.s. Yet when my department and those at comparable
universities advertise an assistant professorship, the applicant pool
is composed of only 25% women. The same phenomenon is occurring in
chemistry as well – a field that has made tremendous progress in recent
years in attracting stellar women to graduate training. We have lost
half the Ph.D. pool between the awarding of the doctorate and the first
job application.
The underlying causes for this precipitous drop must be better
understood if we are to make further progress in bringing more women
into the academy in science, mathematics, and engineering. However, it
does not take much imagination to recognize that the drop coincides
with prime child-bearing years. Princeton’s task force on women faculty
in the natural sciences and engineering reported that “There is a
widespread sentiment among men and women, from junior faculty to
department chairs, that it is very difficult for women to succeed
professionally and to have children.” Indeed, as our task force also
noted, “In discussions with both department chairs and individual male
faculty, we were disturbed that several stated that childcare is not
compatible with success in the Natural Sciences and Engineering.”
I thought about naming this talk “Perception vs. Reality” because there
is both truth and fiction in these views. It is more difficult to have
a career as a woman and raise a family; there is no point denying this.
Some sacrifices are unavoidable, for no one, least of all mothers, can
do everything and have everything. There are books that will remain
unread, creative and athletic outlets that will never be pursued, and
friendships that will suffer. And there will always, always be late
nights and early mornings.
My most inventive coping mechanism as a young mother (actually, I was
quite an old mother, if the truth be told) involved my love of the
Sunday edition of The New York Times. In my desperation for a tranquil
moment to read this paper, I used to place my children – who are two
years apart – in the car and drive aimlessly until the motion put them
to sleep. As soon as they were both asleep I would stop – no matter
where we were – and read the Week in Review. I often wonder what people
thought of me as I huddled in my car, frantically trying to get through
the next section before my children woke up.
There are data that measure the challenge women face in combining
science and small children. According to a study published in 2002 and
entitled “Do Babies Matter?” Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden found that
“in the sciences and engineering . . . men who have early babies are
strikingly more successful in earning tenure than women who have early
babies.” In the context of their research, “early babies” are defined
as infants who are born within five years of a parent’s completion of a
Ph.D.” This disparity, of course, is precisely what you would expect in
a work environment that was not designed for women with children, and
one that has done little to accommodate the dramatic expansion of women
in the workforce of the last 40 years. The feminist revolution of the
1960s and 1970s that opened so many doors for me proclaimed that women
could and should find fulfillment in work, but there is a wildcard in
this scenario that both complicates and enriches life. The wildcard is
children, whose lives must be advanced as single-mindedly and carefully
as our own.
The other wildcard has been the increased national preoccupation with
work and the demand for instant results that long hours breed – hours
that significantly exceed those of nations such as Germany, France, and
Italy. Although the average workweek in this country has remained
relatively constant since 1970, many Americans are working longer
hours. Between 1970 and 2000, to cite a study by Jerry Jacobs, the
proportion of men working fifty or more hours per week rose from 21 to
26.5%, and the number of women from 5.2 to 11.3%. The growth of
two-income households has also increased the intensity of the workweek
for many Americans. And then there is the rise of single-parent
households, typically headed by a woman. Women without partners now
head more than one fifth of our nation’s families, more than double the
percentage in 1970. Needless to say, the pressure of the workplace on
such families is enormous. And, to top it off, all of these shifts have
occurred against a backdrop of technological changes that have
compressed both time and space, making it easier to feel you are at
work even when you are at home.
I firmly believe that universities can change their practices and
policies to make it easier for women to balance the demands of family
and work. And I do not mean to suggest that universities are unique in
this respect – achieving a balance between work and family is
fundamental to every workplace that hopes to include women. The first
step, to paraphrase the political strategist James Carville, is to
recognize “It’s daycare, stupid!” – daycare that is both accessible and
affordable. When our task force asked what Princeton University could
do to improve the environment for its current and future female
faculty, the second most frequent response, after hiring more women,
was to improve the state of childcare. This recommendation was also
advanced by another task force – one that focused on the health and
wellbeing of our university community. It concluded that childcare was
the highest priority of faculty and staff. Quality childcare that is
close to the workplace, responsive to the constraints of workday
schedules and emergencies, and within the reach of a family’s budget is
tangible evidence and a powerful symbol that an institution understands
the complex lives of its students, faculty, and staff. In response to
another recommendation of the health and wellbeing task force, we are
hiring an individual who will focus on work/family balance issues for
everyone at Princeton.
We have also offered one-year tenure extensions for each child and
workload relief to new parents – male and female – but we discovered
that men tended to take advantage of the tenure extension more often
than women, who were afraid that requesting the extra year would be
interpreted as a sign of weakness or lack of confidence. To overcome
this problem we have just changed the policy so that the extension is
granted automatically. This will not preclude someone from requesting
to come up early for review, but it will mean that the extension will
have no value judgment attached to it.
The tenure review process itself needs to be carefully monitored to
ensure that it is truly rewarding excellence. We need to be wary of the
numbers game – so many articles, so many citations, so many dollars –
and weigh the true quality of the work produced by our faculty, male
and female alike. What advances human knowledge? It is not the bulk of
scholarship that crowds the shelves of our libraries or fills our
electronic journals, but the seminal books and papers that break new
ground and take us to a wholly new level of understanding. There is a
natural desire to quantify our output, but this should not be the
measure of scholarship.
Balancing family and work has never been easy, and it never will be.
Much depends on the creativity and determination of individual parents.
But as seats of learning, universities have both a capacity and a duty
to shape our national discourse on this subject. By creating conditions
where family and work can be balanced, we can serve as a model for
other institutions and enterprises, a model that just might be
contagious.
I prefaced my discussion of the obstacles that female scientists and
engineers confront with the caution that there are no silver bullets.
On the other hand, initiatives such as yours will lead to attitudinal
and organizational changes that will one day complete the process that
has carried women, who could not even vote in federal elections when my
mother was born, into the mainstream of professional life. Let me close
with the faces on the next slide – young women who are among the next
generation of scientific leaders. They, and the thousands of other
young women like them, are a source of inspiration for me, and I hope
for your ADVANCE program, I wish you every success in this exciting new
program.
