Women, Work and the Academy > Executive Summaries > Robin E. Bell

Leveling the Ivy Playing Field: A Plan for Institutional Intervention

Robin E. Bell, Jennifer Laird, Roberta Balstad, Mark Cane, John C. Mutter, Stephanie Pfirman, Earth Institute ADVANCE Program

Change is underway at Ivy League institutions. Since 1969, all of the Ivy League schools have enrolled women, and today, three have women presidents. In August 2004, MIT announced Susan Hockfield as its first women president. Despite these milestones, the leveling of the playing field seems to be occurring slowly - perhaps at glacial speeds. For example, after the release of the MIT report on the status of women faculty in science in 1999, the leadership of Harvard welcomed an initiative to hire more women scientists at the junior and senior levels (Lawler, 1999), but between 2000 and 2004, the percentage of women offered tenure slots in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences actually shrunk by half, from 37% of the total pool in 2000-01 to 16% in 2003-04 (Bhattacharjee, 2004). The atmosphere is still quite chilly in the Ivy League.

At Columbia University, a systematic study of the demographics of women through the ranks in the School of Arts and Science between 1990 and 2000 documented the lack of faculty diversity both at early and later career stages (Applegate et al., 2001). In this period, within the Natural Sciences at Columbia 32% of Ph.D. recipients were women, compared to the national average of 39%. A tremendous disparity then arises in the applicant pool for tenure track positions, with women making up only 14% of the pool over the last decade. Clearly, more needs to be done to inspire women to seek the tenured ranks.

The imbalance increases as women move through the pipeline, at the point when external hires and "targets of opportunity" are used to fill the tenured ranks. The Columbia study indicates that women that are hired at approximately the same rate as they apply (16% over the study period) and subsequently promoted to tenure at the same rate (16%). The Columbia study also found that from 1990 to 2000, 25 scientists were promoted in the tenured ranks, while 37 were hired from the outside. External hires into tenured positions are the major growth vehicle for the tenured faculty at Columbia and the Ivy League in general. Over the decade studied, only 2 women (5.5%) were hired from the outside into the tenured ranks.

There are several possible causes for the absence of women in applicant pools at Columbia. One reason for the lack of women in entry-level applicant pools is that women are leaving academia before they apply for the tenure track jobs, either for industry jobs or to raise a family. While both women and men have increasingly left academia for industry during the past thirty years, women scientists have moved into industry at a higher rate than men (Long, 2001). The overlap between the tenure clock and the biological clock has been widely documented (Cole and Zuckerman, 1987; de Wet et. al, 2002; de Wet and de Wet, 1994; Wilson, 2002). Some women simply perceive a highly competitive academic research environment to be counterproductive to raising a family.

Two possible factors seem to be contributing to the small number of women hired into the tenured ranks from outside the university: 1) women are outside or marginal to the professional networks used to recruit "rising stars," and 2) women have less geographic mobility than men. Scientists' professional networks can influence and sometimes even determine their career success. Personal contacts can control critical resources, as well as knowledge about new scientific ideas, and strategies for developing lines of research (Etzkowitz et al., 2000). In addition, women are less likely to relocate for a position, as they are disproportionately affected by the geographic constraints faced by dual-career couples (Preston, 2004; Smith and Zick, 1994). Surveys of women scientists have shown that they are more likely to be married to other scientists who are older and more established in their careers. To change the demographics in the sciences at Columbia, the under-representation of women in applicant pools and the lack of women hired into the tenured ranks from the outside must both be addressed.

Institutions in the Ivy League need to transform their culture from largely informal and risk-averse to one that actively encourages and recruits women for tenure-track positions. Based on the 2001 Columbia study, a group of senior scientists from the Earth Institute (EI) at Columbia University developed an intervention strategy. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the EI ADVANCE program at Columbia University was launched in 2004. The program will use the Earth Institute as a test bed for institutional change. NSF recognized the EI as a suitable test subject for ADVANCE because it is a relatively new institution, and it crosses disciplines and schools, with six academic departments, 19 research institutes, and over 600 scientists and engineers. As the ADVANCE program matures, successful strategies will then be transferred to other parts of the university.

The goals of ADVANCE at the Earth Institute are to achieve institutional change by 1) identifying methods for targeting emerging and established women leaders in the Academy 2) providing support to women scientists and engineers through demanding life transitions (e.g. elder care, adoption, birth of a child) 3) enhancing mentoring and networking opportunities for women scientists and engineers 4) increasing the transparency of promotion procedures and policies, and 5) conducting an institutional self-study that will establish a baseline for the program's evaluation, help identify targets areas that require special attention, and assess working assumptions about the work environment at Columbia upon which ADVANCE programs have been developed. These goals were developed after extensive analysis of the experiences of ADVANCE programs at other universities, including the University of Michigan and the University of Washington.

To address the absence of women in both entry-level and senior-level applicant pools, the EI ADVANCE program is forming a faculty committee to systematically evaluate the issue. Modeled after the University of Michigan's Science & Technology Recruiting to Improve Diversity and Excellent (STRIDE) Committee, the Columbia STRIDE Committee will consist of men and women who have direct influence over search committees, hiring decisions, and retention at the university. The primary incentive for this working group will be intellectual engagement, as it tackles the major gender questions facing university search committees. For example, since the ADVANCE grant was proposed, the dual-career issue has blossomed into a major stumbling block for the earth and environmental science departments at Columbia seeking to hire mid-career women faculty, with several failed efforts to recruit women for faculty positions. The STRIDE Committee will address this and other similar cases, as it works through a series of lunch meetings to identify strategies for recruiting and retaining emerging and established women leaders in the Academy.

To broaden the network of women scientists and engineers who might apply and be considered for hires into the tenured ranks, the Earth Institute ADVANCE Program will award several Marie Tharp Visiting Fellowships each year to promising women scientists. The fellowship is named after Marie Tharp, who has been called "the mother of modern ocean floor cartography." A pioneer of modern oceanography, Marie Tharp was the first to map details of the ocean floor on a global scale. She published the pivotal interpretation of mid-ocean ridges and her observations were crucial to the eventual acceptance of the theories of plate tectonics and continental drift in the Earth sciences. The purpose of the award is to provide an opportunity for women scientists outside of Columbia to conduct research at one of the units or related departments within the Earth Institute for a period of one to three months during their career-building years. Fellows will have an opportunity to work with Earth Institute research scientists, faculty, post-docs, and graduate students during their fellowship. Each Fellow will also be expected to make a scientific presentation during her residence at the Earth Institute.

While pursuing the formal goals (recruitment, retention, mentoring, transparency, and self study), the EI ADVANCE program is developing and codifying a number of implicit strategies for institutional change. First, the ADVANCE program is working to develop a coalition, secure buy-in and instill a sense of ownership of the program's activities across the institution, from the senior levels of the University administration to the level of department chairs and research institute directors. This process has involved ongoing discussions with the administration about the role of ADVANCE in the context of the university's general mission to achieve a diverse academia to educate a diverse student body. To broaden the network for scholars closely involved with the ADVANCE program, we have developed an internal advisory board of gender scholars from various departments at the University. Through this group, we are building a solid intellectual foundation for ADVANCE at Columbia, and the institutional self-study in particular. Between the STRIDE Committee and the internal gender scholar advisory board, we are seeking to build a critical mass of internal ambassadors for change at the University.

Second, to ensure the perceived legitimacy of ADVANCE among university decision-makers, we have realized the need to regularly revisit the case for change and ensure that the data supporting our goals is accurate and as up-to-date as possible. The new Vice Provost of Diversity at Columbia is working closely with the University's Office of Planning and Institutional Research to gather and analyze current data on the diversity of the faculty. Another mechanism for data collection is the self-study, which will include both a survey and semi-structured interviews with a sample of officers of research and officers of instruction at the university.

Third, we plan to use multiple formats and mediums to communicate ADVANCE's goals. The capacity for working with different disciplines and learning styles is key to changing institutions, and it is a factor that has been critical to the success of ADVANCE programs at other universities (Sturm, 2004). In some disciplines, narratives are the most powerful communication mechanism, while in other disciplines numbers are essential to conveying the story. We will utilize both narratives and quantitative data to develop a consensus for ADVANCE. As part of this effort, we will also develop a fabric of social networks that support ADVANCE through the internal advisory committee, the STRIDE Committee, meetings with administrators, and presentations to individual departments and research institutes. At the very least, the ADVANCE program is aiming to foster an active dialogue between and among multiple constituencies. As Douglas McCracken, the former CEO of consulting powerhouse Deloitte & Touche, once noted, "the key to inciting cultural change is turning taboo subjects at work into acceptable topics of discussion," (2000). We will encourage decision-makers to articulate the level of risk and uncertainty they are willing to assume hiring prospects outside of their informal network. This process will also allow the target audience to develop their own solutions to what is clearly a complex predicament.

References

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Cole, J.R., and Zuckerman, H., "Marriage, motherhood and research performance in science," Scientific American, 256, 119-125, 1987.

de wit, C.B., G.M. Ashley, and D.P. Kegel, "Biological clocks and tenure timetables: restructuring the academic timeline," GSA Today, 12, 11, November, 2002.

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Preston, A.E., Leaving Science: Occupational Exit from Scientific Careers, New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004.

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Sturm, S., Columbia University Professor of Law, Personal interview, October 5, 2004.

Wilson, R., "Working half time on the tenure track," Chronicle of Higher Education, 48, A10, January 25, 2002.

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