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Women, Work and the Academy > Executive Summaries > Elizabeth S. Boylan
Beyond the "Porous Pipeline": Points of Leverage and Light for Women in Science
Elizabeth S. Boylan, Provost and Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Biological Sciences,
Barnard College
In a review[1] of Women in Science: Career Processes and
Outcomes by Y. Xie and K. A. Shauman (Harvard University Press,
2003), Abigail J. Stewart and Danielle LaVaque-Manty contrast the
familiar "science pipeline" metaphor with its unidirectional and
one-dimensional characteristics with Xie and Shauman's "life-course
perspective" for the study of gender and career trajectories in science,
and applaud the advances that this analysis of multiple data sets
permits. Noting also the limitations of the data available to Xie and
Shauman, they look for the work to stimulate "further research applying
equally careful and creative approaches to the many questions that
remain."
Creative approaches often require substituting established metaphors
with new ones that generate new lines of inquiry. The "science
pipeline" has been used for decades to visualize the progressive loss of
potential scientists over time, with its large bore pipe open at the
left of the page representing the many grade school and high school
girls with interest in, and aptitude for, science connected by soldered
joints to ever smaller and smaller-bore tubes across to the right hand
side of the page, with the changes in pipe diameter representing the
fewer and fewer women who survive in science as the levels of
educational achievement increase. Even the more recent "porous
pipeline" image that congers up perforations in the still rigid metal
plumbing assumes a unidirectional enclosure, with inanimate walls acting
as permanent, inflexible constraints.
Perhaps it is time for us to change metaphors, anticipating that they
may be able to change our thinking in creative ways. To that end I
offer a couple of biological metaphors for those of us who are concerned
with gender equity in the academy to use to ask an "impertinent
question." I refer here to the words of mathematician, scientist,
philosopher Jacob Bronowski: "That is the essence of science: ask an
impertinent question and you are on your way to a pertinent answer."
Hopefully both the "impertinent question" and the "pertinent answer" can
help us develop new strategies for individuals and institutions to use
to improve the access, persistence and fulfillment of women in
science.
I would like to credit my husband, a microbiologist, for this first
example. I was querying him the night before I had to chair a session
at the February 2002 conference at Barnard College associated with the
release of the study "Balancing the Equation: Where Are Women and Girls
in Science, Engineering and Technology" by the National Council for
Research on Women. "What," I asked as we drove home late after an
evening event on campus, "do you remember about the proteins and
co-factors involved in microtubule self-assembly? I want to use them to
talk about the importance of single molecules of alpha- and beta-tubulin
becoming dimers and acquiring the ability to self-assemble into
microtubules." "Whatever for?" he replied. I explained, "I am thinking
about using them as an example of the importance of specific molecules
and critical mass in the development and integrity of structures,
functions and relationships - to make the case for attention to complex
variables when we think about the goal of attracting and retaining more
women in science." "Oh," he said, "but I probably remember even less
than you do since bacteria are prokaryotes, not eukaryotes, and they
don't even have microtubules. Maybe what you want to talk about is
quorum sensing."
"What?" I asked. "Quorum sensing," he replied. "It's the
ability some bacteria have to sense their environment, to count how many
other bacteria of their own type are in the area, and in response, to
acquire new group properties as a function of attaining a critical
mass."
How interesting I thought. I had no idea that such supposedly
primitive cells as individual bacteria had this capacity to "count" each
other. So I asked, "What can they do together that they can't do
individually or when there are only a few?" He said, "Some actually
emit light, and some develop increased antibiotic resistance to improve
their chances of survival in unfavorable circumstances. Some even delay
initiating an infection until there are enough of them to cause disease.
Some pretty amazing changes in genetic activity must occur to cause
these effects, and it depends on their sensing who else is there." So
the next day, I did use quorum sensing at the NCRW conference at Barnard
to ask rhetorically whether such a phenomenon was operating in the
society of science.
Although I am a firm believer in Darwinian evolution and the
conservation of structures and functions that are associated with
adaptation and improved survival, I hesitate to force all of the
properties of bacterial quorum sensing on human society. But the idea
did allow me to wonder just what powers might be unleashed when women
come to a certain population density - and authority - in science. What
would happen, for men, women and society, if quorum sensing "worked" in
the classrooms and laboratories of America's schools, colleges and
universities? Back in 2002, I left it at that. An interesting idea, a
provocative image.
But then in June 2004, I heard Sheila Widnall speak at Smith College
about the experience she and other MIT faculty have had as the
proportion of women students has increased. She spoke proudly of the
research done at MIT to use admissions criteria that were the best
predictors of how women fared in MIT courses, and of the resulting
improvements in the numbers of women admitted to and succeeding at MIT.
She reported[2]:
Along the way, we identified some very important critical
mass effects for women. Once the percentage of women students in a
department rises above say 15%, the academic performance of the women
improves. This suggests a link between acceptance and self-esteem and
resulting increases in performance. These items are under our control.
I am convinced that 50% of performance comes from motivation. An
environment that truly welcomes women will see women excel as students
and as professional engineers.
So, are women using quorum sensing capabilities without knowing it,
and when they find themselves in propitious densities, turning on the
functional equivalent of their light genes, their genes for antibiotic
resistance? Are they succeeding because of the presence of each other?
So, what if they are? Even if they are not using the mechanism that
works for bacteria, what research questions would we want to pose to
explore the dimensions of the "success in numbers" phenomenon that
Widnall and her colleagues have observed? What other triggers of
survival and success are there that we don't know how to use?
To extend the biological reference imagery yet further and in a
domain where I worked for a couple of decades, let's consider the
theories advanced for the mechanism which determines whether and where a
cancer cell will grow, i.e. metastasize, after it is shed into the
bloodstream from the primary tumor. While metastases from some tumor
types will form beside the small blood vessels of the first organ that a
tumor cell encounters, the pronounced selectivity of cells of certain
tumor types for particular, distant organs is also well established. In
1889, Stephen Paget labeled this the "seed and soil" hypothesis meaning
that it takes special characteristics of the tumor cell (the seed) and
of the host organ (the soil) for metastases to become established and
grow. Isiah Fidler[3] reduces the current version of the "seed and soil"
hypothesis as having two principles:
First, neoplasms are heterogeneous and consist of cells
with different biologic properties; second, the outcome of cancer growth
and spread depends on multiple interactions of tumor cells with host
homeostatic factors."
So, follow me one step further here: what if women and men are the
"seeds" and have assorted among them various biologic properties and
acquired characteristics; and what if there are host homeostatic factors
(in the "soils") that favor just some of the "seeds"? Can we prepare
all the "seeds" to metastasize more efficiently even in the face of
non-hospitable sites? Can we alter the "soils" that do not provide a
suitable environment for all worthy, competent "seeds?"
What do women have to have to survive and thrive in science besides
the grades and honors that credential them through the system? And, how
does our "soil," our different "soils" of the various disciplines,
influence, even dictate, the odds of their surviving and thriving?
Let's change metaphors to address impertinent questions and get to
pertinent answers. Let's move from the soldered pipelines of the past
to be challenged by ideas and images which are dynamic, complex,
reciprocal, interconnected, like quorum sensing capacities and "seed and
soil." In so doing, let's use our imagination and powers of analysis to
ask more of our institutions and our own social behaviors.
Endnotes
1. Nature 427: 198-199, 2004. [Return to text]
2. Widnall lecture on June 3, 2004 at the international conference of
presidents and academic deans on "Women's Education Worldwide 2004: The
Unfinished Agenda," sponsored by Mt. Holyoke and Smith Colleges; quoted
text taken from "Digits of Pi: Barriers and Enablers for Women in
Engineering" at http://esd.mit.edu/headline/widnall_presentation.html.
[Return to text]
3. Isiah J. Fidler, "Angiogenic Heterogeneity: Regulation of Neoplastic
Angiogenesis by the Organ Microenvirnoment." (Editorial) JNCI 93
(14): 1040-1041, 2001. [Return to text]
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