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Women, Work and the Academy > Executive Summaries > Abigail J. Stewart
The Power of Ideas: Feminist Theory and Social Science Research
as Resources for Transforming the Academic Science Work Environment
Abigail J. Stewart, University of Michigan
For many years researchers and administrators who care about the
situation of women and science have regularly bemoaned the "chilly
climate" for faculty and students. This concern has grown more intense
as observers have noted that over the past thirty years, when other
fields have seen dramatic change in the demographics, many fields in
science and engineering have hardly changed at all, particularly in
faculty composition. At the University of Michigan we have drawn ideas
from interdisciplinary women's studies and from social science research
to develop interventions that seem to be allowing us to make some
headway on this problem.
Funded by the NSF ADVANCE Institutional Transformation program, a
committee of distinguished scientists and engineers on the faculty of
the University of Michigan has studied the social science literature on
cognitive bias in evaluation of performance, and has been talking with
their science faculty colleagues about it. This committee (on Science
and Technology Recruiting to Increase Diversity and Excellence, or
STRIDE) is particularly concerned about the impact that gender schemas
and unconscious biases have on judgments of job candidates and of
women's performance as scholars, teachers and community members. They
have selected social science articles for their colleagues to read, and
have developed a recruitment handbook, a fact sheet about retention, and
three different kinds of presentations - two in a lecture format and one
in a longer workshop format. They work together in interdisciplinary
teams to present these research findings, along with the information
that conscious awareness and a variety of very specific practices can
minimize the likelihood of biased judgments. Even after only two years,
twice as many offers as before are being made to women in science and
engineering fields, and twice as many women are accepting positions!
This year, because of the prior success, STRIDE has been asked by three
deans (of Medicine, Engineering and Literature, Science and the Arts) to
offer workshops for those faculty chairing faculty search committees, in
an effort to create a cadre of senior faculty well-versed in fair and
effective recruitment and retention strategies, and able to represent
the rationales for those strategies to their colleagues.
In another effort at Michigan, an interactive theater troupe (the
CRLT Players) performs brief sketches depicting gendered interaction
dynamics and gender stereotypes that can influence faculty meeting
discussions of candidates, mentoring of women junior faculty by senior
faculty (particularly men), and discussions of candidates by tenure
committees. In post-sketch interactions with the troupe, actors remain
"in role" and explore with faculty audiences the motivations and
reactions of the various characters. In depicting their characters the
actors draw not only on the social science literature, but on the
research into Michigan's climate conducted at the outset of the ADVANCE
project. Many faculty have reported that they do notice connections
between what they see in the sketches and what they see in their
departments, and that they also pay attention to new things after the
performances. CRLT Players attempt to encourage faculty audiences not
only to develop new insights into what may sometimes happen in their
departments, but also to develop new strategies for interacting with
their colleagues.
Institution-level efforts at "consciousness-raising" advanced last
year through the establishment of three high level committees, named by
the President and Provost and chaired by three deans, to review
institutional policies and practices around three large topics
(recruitment and retention, evaluation, and family-related policies and
career tracks). After a year's deliberation, reports were issued from
each committee, reviewed by the Provost's council of deans, and
implementation processes were initiated, tailored to the level of
institutional policy implicated (college or university), and the type of
remedy sought. This effort reflects the project's recognition that a
"system" perspective on the academy requires both institutionalization
beyond science, and specific institutionalization via key academic
practices.
Finally, the development of a positive "collective identity" among
the women scientists and engineers has been deliberately encouraged and
facilitated. In the long run, this group's resistance to their own
stigmatization and marginalization will be best ensured by their own
commitment and activism on their own behalf. Social movement and social
identity literatures provide useful insight into both the processes of
transformation of stigmatized identities, and political
mobilization.
Throughout our efforts we have drawn - more and less consciously and
deliberately on the intellectual resources of interdisciplinary women's
studies, feminist theory and social science. We believe we have learned
that one important obstacle to transformation of the science climate has
been a dearth of conceptual tools for understanding the
self-perpetuating and systemic causes of its chilliness to women and
other underrepresented groups. Fortunately those tools are close at
hand!
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