Panel Discussion with Nancy Hopkins, Claude Steele, and Virginia Valian
In the Viginia Gildersleeve panel on "Women, Work, and the Academy"
(December 9, 2004), Nancy Hopkins, Claude Steele, and Virginia Valian
outline our best current understanding of the status of women and
minority scholars in academia and describe some of the most promising
interventions undertaken to change these conditions. The inspiration for
this panel and for the conference that followed (click here for the program) is a
growing body of work that focuses attention on conditions that
persistently reproduce inequalities in the representation and
recognition of women and minority scholars in most senior ranks of the
academy, even as their numbers improve in the training pipeline in
virtually all fields.
In the context of this panel discussion, Nancy Hopkins describes the
process by which a number of senior women scientists at MIT came to see
patterns of gender inequity in support and recognition that each had
assumed to be localized, idiosyncratic difficulties. The analysis they
presented in the 1999 report on "The Status of Women Faculty in Science
at MIT" drew immediate and wide attention; it captured, in especially
salient terms, the key insight that what keeps women and minority
scholars on the margins is often not overt, deliberate discrimination
but the cumulative effects of small-scale, often unintended and
unrecognized differences in uptake and response.
The central challenge we face, in counteracting what the authors of
the MIT report describe as post-Civil Rights era discrimination, is to
understand and change these patterns of cumulative disadvantage. Claude
Steel has done pivotal work on just this nexus of problems; in his panel
presentation he extends his analysis of how stereotype threat in
academic testing to a wide range of environments and conditions in which
the mobilization of stereotypes affects performance, and he describes
some of the strategies for defusing stereotype threat that he has been
instrumental in developing for educational contexts. Virginia Valian
draws together the results of several traditions of psychological
research that document the myriad ways in which we learn and enact
gender schemas, often without realizing that we do this or, indeed,
while firmly believing that we have repudiated gender-conventional
assumptions—that they do not influence our perceptions of others and our
responses to them. For purposes of the panel discussion she considers
some striking results of research on the gender dynamics of leadership
in academic and professional contexts.
Nancy Hopkins is the Amgen, Inc. Professor of Biology at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is well known as a scientist
for her innovative use of large-scale forward genetic screens in
research designed to identify the genetic basis of developmental
processes in zebrafish. For more information about her research
interests, see her website: http://web.mit.edu/biology/www/facultyareas/facresearch/hopkins.shtml.
Outside the biological research community Hopkins is
probably best known as the architect of the 1999 Study on the Status
of Women Faculty in Science at MIT. She continues to lead efforts to
realize institutional change for women in science at MIT and she plays a
pivotal role catalyzing initiatives to improve the training, employment,
retention, and recognition of women in the sciences on a national scale.
The MIT Study is available on-line at: http://web.mit.edu/fnl/women/women.html.
Claude Steele is the Lucy Stern Professor of Psychology at
Stanford University. He has done pioneering research on the ways in
which race and gender stereotypes affect self-evaluation and academic
performance in a range of settings. His elegant experimental work has
been pivotal in delineating the mechanisms by which these such
stereotypes can be mobilized and can significantly compromise
standardized test performance. Significantly, he shows that even quite
subtle cues can generate stereotype threat and that this affects women
and African American students who are in the academic vanguard of their
groups. Steele has also played an active role in designing and
implementing strategies for defusing stereotype threat in educational
contexts. For more information about Steele's research interests, see
his website: http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~steele/.
Virginia Valian is Distinguished Professor of Psychology and
Linguistics at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York (CUNY). She is a cognitive scientist whose
research ranges from first and second language acquisition to gender
differences and gender equity. In her landmark book, Why So Slow?
The Advancement of Women (MIT Press, 1998), she asks why so few
women are at the top of their profession, whether the profession be
science, law, medicine, college teaching, industry, or business. In
answering this question she integrates research from psychology,
sociology, economics, and neuropsychology. Valian is the lead Principal
Investigator on an NSF ADVANCE Award, the "Gender Equity Project" at
Hunter College. For more information about this initiative, visit the
project website at: www.hunter.cuny.edu/genderequity. For more
information about Valian's research interests and publications, visit
her website at:
http://maxweber.hunter.cuny.edu/psych/faculty/valian/valian.htm.
