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

Women, Work and the Academy > Executive Summaries > Gerhard Sonnert

Executive Summary

Gerhard Sonnert

My primary interest has been in research rather than intervention, and, in terms of career stages, I have looked at postdoctoral and later phases as well as at the college level. (My focus has been on the sciences, not on all fields of higher education). The Project Access Study, which I conducted with Gerald Holton, examined gender differences in the careers former postdoctoral fellows who had received a fellowship from the National Science Foundation (NSF) or the National Research Council (NRC). Currently, I am collaborating with Mary Frank Fox of Georgia Tech in a study of programs for women undergraduates in the sciences.

I. Thinking about science careers

Here are some ways I have found useful in thinking about science careers and about gender differences in career outcomes.

1. Robert Merton's concept of the accumulation of advantages and disadvantages over the course of a science career provides valuable insights. It also holds a lesson for potential interventions: It appears unlikely that a "magic bullet" could be found that solves all problems of women in science entirely. Rather, small effects and micro-inequities are important, as they can add up.

2. Cole and Singer's kick-reaction model shows a concrete mechanism of how the accumulation process might work. According to this model, a science career consists of a sequence of positive or negative kicks and of advantageous or disadvantageous reactions. Feedback loops represent the accumulation of advantages and disadvantages; that is, positive kicks increase the possibility of future positive kicks, and so on. Thus, if women, as a group, have an even slightly lower probability of positive kicks (or higher probability of negative ones) or a slightly lower probability of advantageous reactions (or higher probability of negative ones), the average career paths will diverge considerably in the long run.

3. The kick-reaction model also makes it possible to represent a useful distinction between two major sources of gender-specific differences in the characteristics and outcomes of science careers. One possible source is a gender bias in the opportunity structure. We have called this the deficit model - in it, women's access to opportunities is restricted; women are treated differently and therefore have collectively worse career outcomes. In the difference model, women act differently (and various sources of such a difference have been hypothesized in the literature). The kick-reaction model elucidates how the deficit model (influencing kicks) and the difference model (influencing reactions) can work in concert.

4. The accumulation processes may differ in different career stages. For instance, one might ask whether women scientists who did well at earlier career stages pass a threshold beyond which the proceed on equal footing, collectively, with comparable men, or whether they hit a glass ceiling that makes it harder for them than for their male counterparts to reach the top of their profession.

II. Postdoctoral fellowship and beyond

Our evidence from Project Access mostly supported the glass ceiling hypothesis, especially in fields outside biology. It is therefore advisable for policy interventions to address the "top end" of later career stages.

We also found that the connections between marital and parental statuses and career outcomes are much more complex than often imagined. These statuses present not only restrictions for women scientists (as commonly understood), but also opportunities.

III. Undergraduates

The proportion of women among majors and bachelor recipients in biology, the physical sciences, and engineering was positively correlated with the proportion of women among the faculty. This is consistent with the notion that the presence of women faculty boosts the participation of women students in the sciences.

A small but pervasive gap was found in cumulative GPA: Women students tended to have higher GPA scores than did men students. One of the causes for that gap may lie in differences in self-selection. Women students might embark on careers in male-dominated fields, such as the sciences, only if they consider themselves particularly well-prepared or talented. In addition, they might take their studies more seriously and work harder. Again, the size of this gap was found to be correlated with the proportion of women among the faculty. The women students' GPA advantage was smaller when more women faculty members were present. The gap might be interpreted as a sign that women students feel as if they are "swimming upstream" when they participate a field that is non-traditional for women. A strong representation of women on the faculty may make the field look more like a "normal" field for women, which may affect women's self-selection and attitudes.

Both these results underline how different career stages are interconnected.

It is also my preliminary impression from this ongoing study that residential programs and living and learning communities of women students work are beneficial.

IV. Final thought

In policy discussions, one sometimes hears alternative goals being set up: "Changing women to fit science, or science to fit women." This may not be an alternative, as the two processes work at different time scales. There is near-universal consensus that discriminations of the deficit-model type should be eradicated, but it is a more controversial question to what extent difference-model type elements should be accommodated through structural changes. Furthermore, we found a high degree of naiveté about the dynamics of science career in the Project Access study. A good understanding of the currently effective dynamics is necessary for making informed choices.