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FORUM
How Do You Encourage a Girl to Choose Science?
"Would you be willing to talk to her sometime?" Laura asked. I nodded in agreement with several other female members of my lab. Laura, an administrator in our department, wanted us to meet with the 12-year-old daughter of one of her colleagues. "She's at that age," she told us. We all knew what she meant—that age, when doing well in math and science didn't seem nearly as important as fitting in. In fact, at that age, no one wanted to seem too interested in math and science for fear of being labeled a geek. But girls were especially sensitive to the problem. I remember one cheerleader in my junior high who repeatedly denied any knowledge of math despite her placement in an honors algebra class. "Math is hard," she would whine, "I hate it." She wasn't alone. It seemed all you had to do was take a group of perfectly intelligent and capable girls, add a little trigonometry or chemistry, and poof!—blank stares. Laura wanted us to prevent this from happening to her colleague's daughter. We were to convince her that science is cool and even represents a viable career option for bright young women. We readily agreed to give it our best shot. But now, as Laura arranges for us to meet with the preteen, I find myself wondering what exactly I'm going to tell her. Of course, I could simply reassure her that science is cool and women are capable of succeeding at it just as well as men. I could also tell her that if she majors in biology in college, she'll be studying with many female peers. And should she go on to graduate school, about half of her class will undoubtedly be women. Even as a postdoc she can expect to interact with several other female postdocs. But if she manages to land a tenure-track position, she may notice that many of the women she befriended as a postdoc will gradually disappear from academia. Of the few who remain, even fewer will be around as tenured professors a decade later. Ladder or Slide? It's a widespread problem in academia that has received much attention in recent years. We've all seen the graphs illustrating the rapid drop in the number of women as the academic ladder ascends from postdoctoral to tenure-track faculty positions. In fact, all I have to do is look around to observe the phenomenon. In my own department, there are plenty of female graduate students and postdocs but only two female faculty members, both untenured. Obviously, something happened to most of my adviser's female peers. Where have they all gone? And more importantly, why did they disappear? In her book, Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women, Hunter College professor of psychology and linguistics Virginia Valian claims that women in academia "...remain overrepresented at the bottom and at the margins and underrepresented at the top...." In other words, too many women are stuck in limbo as postdocs or in nontenure-track positions. The reasons for this are complex. They involve gender schemas that begin to shape the behaviors of men and women from the day they're born. Girls are expected to be nurturing. Boys are expected to be aggressive. Girls aren't expected to do well in math or science. Boys are. Women are held more responsible than men for child-rearing and may experience more negative effects on their careers after having a child. Men are expected to succeed in higher paying or more prestigious professions. Women aren't. In fact, a woman often must accomplish much more than a man to be seen as successful by her employer and peers. As a result, men are rewarded more often and more easily accumulate advantage throughout their careers than women. These aren't just hypotheses. Valian points to many studies to back up her claims. And by now, everyone has heard about the MIT report in which tenured women in the School of Science proved that male professors enjoyed more lab space, higher salaries, and more powerful positions in their departments than equivalent female professors. Since the report was made public, sweeping changes have been made within the school to place female professors on more equal footing with their male peers. Nancy Hopkins, who chaired the committee that published the report, spoke at Harvard several months ago and claimed that the changes have done much to improve the morale of these women. After her talk, several women suggested that a similar study might be done at HMS and the beginnings of such a study have since been announced by the medical dean. But as I listened to the ensuing discussion, I couldn't help but feel that the problems uncovered in the MIT report are just the tip of the iceberg. Right Here in River City It seems to me that there are obvious difficulties affecting women right here at Harvard that should be addressed immediately. For example, although most female graduate students and postdocs at HMS are in their prime childbearing years, they are often discouraged from having children by their advisers and peers. Many feel they must choose between raising children and succeeding in science. This may, in part, explain why so many women disappear from academia altogether. Harvard could do more to alleviate this problem, such as offering affordable on-site day care for graduate students, postdocs, and faculty at HMS. And this would simply address the most basic problem women face in academia. It would be even more challenging to identify and correct whatever subtle gender discrimination that may flourish here at HMS as it did at MIT. I plan to encourage Laura's young friend to excel in math and science, if only to prove to herself that she can do it. I'll tell her that science can be a rewarding and exciting field and that she shouldn't stop pursuing it just because a few guys might tease her. I won't tell her that this is just the first obstacle of many that she'll encounter as a woman in science or that her gender will always affect the way she is evaluated and rewarded in academia. After all, these problems are not unique to science or academia, and there's not much she can do about them. "No woman should think that if she just does everything 'right' she will succeed," Valian writes. "Observers' views of women as a class constitute an entire structure that no individual woman can change. It is the structure that needs changing." —Robin Lucas, an HMS graduate student in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences microbiology program |
Robin Lucas