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Women, Work and the Academy > Executive Summaries > Sally Chapman
Some Intervention Activities in Chemisty: A Personal View
Sally Chapman, Department of Chemistry, Barnard College
The statistics for women in academic chemistry paint a mixed picture.
On the positive side, women are nearing parity in the fraction of
bachelor's degrees awarded. Progress has been real at the Ph.D. level
as well (Fig. 1). However the near linear growth between 1975 and 1995
does not appear to be continuing; we seem to have hit a plateau at about
30%. A complicating factor is the changing composition by nationality
of the pool of Ph.D. candidates at U.S. universities.
Does the increasing percentage of women chemistry graduates lead to
more women in university chemistry departments? Yes and no. In the
early 1970's, Chemical and Engineering News, the weekly magazine of the
American Chemical Society (ACS), started publishing articles about women
in science. Back then, the compelling story was often the significant
number of top-rated departments with no women on the faculty. This is
no longer the case. But there remain highly regarded departments with
just one or two woman in the tenure or tenure-track ranks. Departments
with two or three women faculty often behave as if their "woman problem"
is solved. According to the 1999 ACS Directory of Graduate Research,
(DGR) 11.5% of faculty in Chemistry departments giving graduate degrees
are women; this fell to 8.5% if only the 25 top-ranked Ph.D. granting
schools were included (using 1995 National Academy of Sciences rankings
for Chemistry). In the same year, looking only at the private
universities among the top 25 Ph.D. granting chemistry departments, only
7.7% of faculty are women. On average, at top 25 departments at public
institutions, 4 out of 37 faculty members are women, while at private
institutions 2 out of 27.
These numbers include faculty at all ranks. Not surprisingly, women
are better represented at the lower ranks. According to the 1999 DGR,
23.2% of Assistant Professors in chemistry graduate departments were
women (in the 2003 edition, the fraction is 22.8%). At the top 25
ranked schools, the fraction in 1999 was is 17.5%. Some would argue
that these numbers are evidence that gender equity problems have been
solved: 23% (Assistant Professors) and 31% (Ph.D.'s) are not all that
different, and in time these better numbers will progress naturally to
the higher ranks. I don't concur: first, the difference is not
insignificant: even while many chemistry departments argue that they are
desperately seeking women, the hiring rate for women is 25% lower.
Moreover the fall-off in the fraction of women as they ascend the ranks
appears to be persistent. Another way of looking at these data is more
sobering: on average in 1999, of 6.0 Assistant Professors at top-25
ranked departments, 1.0 was female. She was a very busy young woman; no
wonder she was less likely to succeed.
The situation for women faculty is a bit better at four year colleges
(Fig. 2; ACS data). However there too there are disturbing facts. The
percentage of women in junior ranks is quite impressive, but the
fall-off rate at the tenured ranks is significantly larger. Some of
this difference might reflect the fact that faculty tend to remain in
the Associate Professor rank longer at these schools. However I suspect
that the greater attrition among women is real: some women are attracted
to four-year schools believing that the pressure to publish and secure
grants will be less severe, but there they encounter a different set of
pressures and barriers to success.
Many of my male chemistry colleagues believe that gender inequity is
a solved problem: barriers to advancement are largely gone and the
numbers will simply improve by attrition. There is a wealth of data
showing that this is not so; many participants at this workshop have
done the significant work that supports this view. Sonnert and Holton's
book 1 documents clearly the many ways that women are disadvantaged, and
Valian's work 2 describes compellingly the significant impact of
accumulation of disadvantages.
Gender equity in chemistry departments is not just a problem for
women, but for chemistry as a whole. I love chemistry, and I am
genuinely fearful that too many bright young women and men considering
graduate study in chemistry at U.S. universities do not see it as a
welcoming field. Students today are much more sensitive to issues of
climate, and they have many other options. This is why I have chosen in
the last few years to become more involved with some projects designed
specifically to address these issues.
The first is COACh: the Committee on the Advancement of Women
Chemists. Geraldine Richmond, an energetic chemist from the University
of Oregon, is the founder and driving force behind this organization.
Starting with seed funding from the Dreyfus Foundation, in 1997 Geri
convened a group of senior women academic chemists to serve on the COACh
Advisory Board. The COACh Board, of which I am a member, meets twice
yearly. COACh is involved in the planning and implementation of a
number of programs including professional skills development workshops
for faculty, research on gender issues in the chemical sciences,
development of a data base of women in the chemical sciences, and
coaching, mentoring and networking activities at all levels. We are
currently supported with funding from NSF, NIH, and the Department of
Energy.
Our most visible and extensive activity is our workshops. The Board
identifies workshop topics, and, working with consultants, selects
potential workshop leaders. We then test them ourselves, and have a
good time doing so. Successful workshops are then offered to faculty,
generally arranged to coordinate with a national meeting of ACS or
AIChE. We cover the travel and housing costs for workshop participants.
Initially, we limited workshops to tenured faculty. More recently, we
have been offering workshops designed for Assistant Professors and for
postdocs. The workshop topics are specifically tailored to the group.
One very popular and successful workshop is "Coaching Strong Women in
the Art of Strategic Persuasion", lead by Lee Warren (Associate
Director, Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, Harvard
University), Nancy Houfek (Head of Voice and Speech, Institute for
Advanced Theater Training, Harvard University), Barbara Butterfield
(Chief Human Resource Officer for Academic and Staff Human Resources and
Affirmative Action, University of Michigan) and Jane Tucker (Senior
Manager, Administration Systems Management Group, Duke University). The
workshop is conducted in two sessions; two groups typically switch off,
morning and afternoon. In one session, Warren and Houfek work on
presentation skills, while in the other Butterfield and Tucker focus on
negotiation skills. A year later it is quite common for workshop
participants to report specific successes which they attribute to their
stronger negotiation skills. This was certainly true for the COACh
board members!
Another COACh workshop is "The Chemistry of Leadership: A Women's
Leadership Development Program" lead by Sandra L. Shullman (Executive
Development Group, Columbus, OH). This workshop is of particular value
to women undertaking leadership roles in their departments, but the
lessons are also powerful for those wishing to be more effective leaders
of their own research groups. Shullman has also offered the COACh
Advisory Board an advanced leadership workshop on the topic "Changing
Institutions from Within".
Over 200 women have participated in these workshops. The evaluations
have been very strong. The success of the workshops comes from the fact
that they deal with specific problems faced by women chemists in a
particular stage of their careers; in addition the women participating
in the workshop become a natural mutual support network. The workshop
leaders continue to work with COACh to refine the workshops and design
new ones; their expertise is an essential part of the strength of COACh.
Several universities have invited the workshop leaders to offer the
workshops at their own institutions.
Research is part of the COACh mandate; we have been collecting data
from workshop participants and from other women, through our web site.
Preliminary results have been presented at professional meetings, and
written results are forthcoming. Other COACh activities include working
with the American Chemical Society to open up its procedures for
selecting national prizes, and working to get a better representation of
women on editorial boards.
More recently, I have become involved in an activity initiated by the
American Chemical Society, as part of its recent PROGRESS initiative.
While ACS has had an active Women Chemists Committee for more than 75
years, PROGRESS (Partnerships, Reflection, Openness, Grants, Resources,
Education, Site Visits, Successes), a three-year pilot project, was just
launched in 2002. The Academic Awareness/Site Visits component was
funded in February 2004 as an NSF ADVANCE Leadership project; I am the
principal investigator.
The project was in part inspired by earlier (and continuing) efforts
of both The American Physical Society (APS)3 3 and of The Association
for Women in Science (AWIS)4 4. Our principal activity, at least
initially, is site visits to chemistry and chemical engineering
departments at approximately 35 research-intensive universities. The
visits are conducted by Valerie Kuck, a chemist recently retired from
Lucent Technologies who has also had a distinguished career of service
in ACS. Those of you who know Val know that she is a dynamic and
persuasive woman. Using questionnaires and focus group interviews, we
interview graduate students, postdocs, faculty, and administrators,
women and men, asking a wide range of questions about what has
influenced their career choices, and assessing the climate for women in
their department. All groups are asked to discuss the barriers to
advancement of women.
We promise complete confidentiality in the process: indeed in the
reports we share with departments, we do not identify the other schools
we have visited. While that this is essential for our data collection,
we find it somewhat frustrating. In many instances we believe that
faculty and department chairs could benefit from hearing specifically
what we have learned about the climate in their department, but, given
the small numbers of people we interview, we see no way of doing so
without possibly compromising confidentiality.
The data, quantitative and qualitative, is being analyzed by a team
of social scientists. Preliminary reports, with aggregate data, are
shared with the departments we have visited. Thus far we have visited
about 20 schools; the data analysis is complete for the first 13. We
hope to complete the site visits during the 2004-05 academic year. Our
ultimate objective is to use the results of this analysis to develop and
make available a toolkit of materials and strategies for the advancement
of women. Many of the recommendations in the toolkit will surely be
familiar to those who pay attention to these issues; indeed the AWIS web
site4 4 already offers an excellent model. Our hope is that basing
these recommendations in well-documented empirical evidence using
chemistry department data will make them more compelling.
In preliminary analysis of the data, we separate departments into two
groups: one with four or fewer women on the faculty, the other with five
or more. To date, there are nine schools in the former, four in the
latter. While the data are still quite incomplete, some interesting
differences do appear. Students - graduate students and postdocs,
women and men - at the schools with more women faculty are generally
more satisfied with the quality of the mentoring they receive. At these
same schools, more students, both women and men, report that there are
programs in place to support graduate students. Within both groups,
women are much more likely than men to be aware of such programs.
When asked to describe the reasons for few tenured women faculty
chemists, women are most likely to cite explicit forms of
discrimination, while men attribute family priorities and lifestyle
choices. 30% of male faculty (and none of the women) believe that women
experience no extra barriers to promotion. At most institutions, many
women faculty feel that their research is undervalued. However there
were a couple of departments where the situation was strikingly
different: the women know they are doing good science, and they are
confident that the men know it too. If we continue to find such
differences, and if we can pinpoint the factors that underlie them, our
study will be a resounding success.
Our study may offer hard evidence to support trends that have been
observed before, but for which much of the evidence heretofore has been
anecdotal. One trend that is troubling to the future health of academic
chemistry in the U.S. is the widespread opinion among students, even at
the very top ranked universities, that life as a faculty member at a
top-rated research university is simply unappealing: they admire their
hard-working Professors, but they do not wish to emulate them. Students
(men and women, but especially women) repeatedly express the belief that
jobs in the chemical industry or at four-year colleges have more regular
hours and are more family-friendly. Unless they have observed specific
counter-examples, young women repeatedly express the opinion that a
successful academic research career is incompatible with raising
children. Some report that they have been told this explicitly, by male
faculty. If this continues, will enough bright talented young people be
attracted to careers in university chemistry departments today and in
the future? There are plenty of talented international students, but
what about those from the U.S.? Does this matter? If it does, what
must change? We certainly won't be able to provide simple answers to
such weighty questions, but we hope we can foster some serious
conversation.
The ADVANCE project is reporting its results in several ways.
Symposia are planned at American Chemical Society national meetings,
journal articles will be prepared, and we will seek coverage in news
media such as Chemical and Engineering News.
I see my activities in COACh and in the ADVANCE project as
complementary. COACh has chosen to focus on the women themselves:
providing them more powerful tools to succeed. As a small group of very
busy women, we decided that this was our most effective strategy. In
the ACS ADVANCE project, we are focusing on departments. As part of the
ACS PROGRESS program, we are able to use some of ACS's influence. For
example, the letter to department chairs requesting that we make a site
visit is signed by the President of ACS. We have always been welcomed.
We hope our results and recommendations will be welcomed too.
References
Sonnert, G. and Holton, G. Who Succeeds in Science? The Gender Dimension (Rutgers University Press, 1995).
Valian, V. Why so slow? The advancement of women (MIT, Cambridge, MA, 1998).
http://www.aps.org/educ/cswp/visits/index.cfm
http://www.academicclimate.org/index.asp
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