Science and Engineering: An Equal Playing Field for Women?

By Jewells Chambers (New York City)

Historically, the work of women scientists and engineers in academia has been downplayed and undervalued by their male counterparts. Consequentially, such treatment has resulted in talented women leaking out of the science and engineering pipeline to pursue other endeavors. As women transition out of these fields along the pipeline, few are left to hold top ranking positions.

The lack of female role models and the presence of gender bias have made it difficult to convince young women to dedicate their professional careers to fields where they will be marginalized and undercompensated. With half of the United States’ population severely underrepresented within the science and engineering academic profession, it all too clear that these fields are not maximizing on their innovation and economic growth potential.

A Professor’s Perspective

Nancy Hopkins is the Amgen professor of Biology at MIT. Her work on the early development, longevity and predisposition to cancer in zebra fish has made her a celebrated microbiologist but her path to success has involved battling gender bias in her workplace as an academic professional.

Professor Hopkins was the keynote speaker at this year’s The Status of Women in Science and Engineering at MIT conference and she recapped on the scientific approach she used to better understand the gender bias at the prestigious institute.

”It turns out that understanding this problem requires that you do two things: analyze the numbers of women in science and engineering as a function of time and what changed those numbers and examine the experiences of the women who first entered these field’s as undergraduates, moved on to graduate school, joined university faculties and became professors. When you do these two things, the mystery actually begins to evaporate and a quite fascinating story emerges.”

For Professor Hopkins, her recollection of women experiencing gender bias started in the early 1960’s when she was a young graduate student working summers at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. While there, she met an amazing woman scientist by the name of Barbara McClintock. Barbara was considered the number one person in the world in the area of genetics and yet she was denied a faculty position in any university biology department. She was, however, directed to apply for positions in home economics.

With the Civil Rights Act enacted in 1964, organized protests by women and class action suits to enforce legislation, universities started to hire women as faculty members in the science and engineering departments in the 1970’s. MIT saw a jump in women faculty members from 0% to 8% in these departments but soon after the numbers hit a plateau for almost 20 years.

Affirmative Action had set the stage for talented and smart women in science to finally work as faculty members but there were still obvious barriers. “What I saw was that when a man and a woman made scientific discoveries of equal importance, neither the discovery nor the woman was equal to the man and his discovery. Sometimes the woman got no credit at all. She could be invisible…Science is a merit based occupation, so how could this be true?” Professor Hopkins questioned.

Self Reflection

Looking outward at the gender discrimination that other women in science and engineering were facing all around her sparked self reflection in Professor Hopkins.

“Amazing, it took me 20 years to know it was even true of me, not just other women. That I believe is called denial. The realization of this strange truth was very, very demoralizing. Sometimes I wanted to quit science… I came to feel like my life had been a failure.”

This painstaking discovery became even more difficult to digest when Professor Hopkins realized that even as a tenured professor she was not given the minimal space and resources for her research that was available to her male colleagues. She started to feel at the end of her rope.

MIT Women Faculty Members Band Together

Professor Hopkins finally mustered up the courage to discuss the gender bias she had discovered with a fellow female colleague, Professor Mary-Lou Pardue. Surprisingly, Professor Pardue had also discovered the same problem. Both women were unsure if any other female faculty members realized the gender bias but they were determined to find out. Along with another colleague, Lisa Steiner, the three tenured women professors took an inventory of the number of tenured women faculty members in the science and engineering departments. Professor Hopkins was astonished to find that there were only 17 tenured women faculty members, as opposed to 197 tenured men.

A letter signed by 16 out of 17 women was sent to the then dean of science, Bob Birgeneau, “…informing him there was a systemic, largely invisible and almost certainly unconscious bias against women faculty” said, Professor Hopkins. The exclusion experienced at this prestigious institute rendered the women’s job more difficult and less gratifying. Birgeneau responded to the report by correcting inequities and hiring more top women scientist from around the country.

A summary of the report was initially run in the MIT faculty newsletter but was soon in The Boston Globe and The New York Times. Women across the country wrote in saying they too were experiencing marginalization, inequity and exclusion in their academic work place.

Embedding Solutions for Long Term Sustainability

Hiring more women was a great short term solution but MIT knew that it needed to implement policies that would sustain and promote gender equity in the future. Some of the new changes were a variety of family leave policies, heads of departments became more inclusive of women and gender equity is checked annually.

The accomplishments of the institute in the area of gender equity, after 15 years, is most definitely worth celebrating but MIT isn’t losing sight of their long term goal of eliminating unconscious gender bias among their staff and student body.

Professor Hopkins ended her speech by clearing stating how to address unconscious judgments, “The only defense is to keep putting it on the table and deal with it as the new report on women faculty wisely did. It’s the unfounded, unconscious bias itself that needs to change. Men’s and women’s undervaluation of women and women’s undervaluation of themselves is perhaps the very last barrier to overcome.”