Women, Work and the Academy: Strategies for Responding to 'Post-Civil Rights Era' Gender Discrimination

Women, Work and the Academy > Executive Summaries > Alice Hogan

The NSF ADVANCE Program

Alice Hogan

The pursuit of new scientific and engineering knowledge and its use in service to society requires the talent, perspectives and insight that can only be assured by increasing diversity in the science, engineering and technological workforce. Despite advances made in the proportion of women choosing to pursue science and engineering careers, women continue to be significantly underrepresented in almost all science and engineering fields and constitute only approximately 22% of the science and engineering workforce at large. Women from minority groups underrepresented in science and engineering constitute only about 3% of the science and engineering workforce, and only 2% of science and engineering faculty in 4-year colleges and universities.

Academic institutions of higher learning play a pivotal role in preparing the science and engineering workforce of the 21st century. Faculty members and academic and administrative leadership at these institutions serve as intellectual, professional, personal and organizational role models that shape the expectations of many prospective scientists and engineers. The under-representation of senior women faculty members is likely to affect women students' critical relationships with mentors, full participation as members of research and education teams, and self-identification as potential researchers. Currently women make up less than 20% of science and engineering faculty in 4-year colleges and universities, and hold an even smaller percentage of high-ranked positions. This situation creates a minimizing effect on the number of women choosing to pursue science and engineering careers.

A number of factors have been hypothesized to account for the lower proportion of women in the senior ranks of science and engineering faculties, e.g. differential effects of conflicts between work and family demands, unequal access to resources such as space and supporting facilities, under-representation of women in important departmental decision-making processes, to name but a few. The cumulative effect of such diverse factors has been to create formidable systemic barriers to the advancement of women in academic science and engineering.

To address these and other challenges, the ADVANCE Program provides award opportunities for both individuals and organizations: Fellows Awards, Institutional Transformation Awards, and Leadership Awards. Since its inception in 2001, NSF has made 19 awards for Institutional Transformation (http://www.nsf.gov/ADVANCE); these awards are for five years, and are funded at approximately $3-$4 million each.

Where other programs have sought to 'fix' women, ADVANCE seeks to work through academic institutions to create awareness and to address structural impediments to women's success in science and engineering. While there has not been enough time to evaluate program effectiveness, several themes have emerged. One is the necessity to integrate social science into program interventions. Scientists and engineers not accustomed to looking to the social sciences for research frameworks and findings may miss important insights about stereotyping, occupational segregation, gender schemas, organizational behavior, and bias avoidance, for example, that can provide the intellectual framework for understanding the structural issues of academic science and engineering and their effect on women. Another issue the program has identified is the difficulty of evaluating these investments; institutional change, particularly, perhaps, in academic institutions is more difficult and complex than in other sectors where mandates (for example, in hiring) can create change whether or not the institutional culture has been transformed.

The importance of national leadership on these issues has been clear; by stating that the under-representation of women in academic science and engineering is an issue of concern for the national scientific enterprise, the National Science Foundation (NSF) provided a legitimizing framework within which institutions could discuss issues, assemble data, define possible solutions, and engage both faculty and institutional leadership in the process. The importance of the funding available through the ADVANCE Program made clear the value that NSF placed on broadening participation in academic science and engineering.