Women in Biology Internet Launch pages

Page 3: Chilly Climate

If you just arrived, please start at the index page for an introduction to the site and an index to the topics at left (you can use the buttons to navigate between all the pages). The starting page also provides a special section for all recent additions to this site; these will eventually be moved to their appropriate category as new resources are added.

Links I consider to be of particular interest or use. Your mileage may vary.
Direct quotations are in color.
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Section contents:
Professional issues

publishing
Prizes
Mentoring
Equal pay
harrassment

A chilly climate for women scientists?

Start here: these reports and articles about women in science have been moved to the reports/data page.

• Statistics
• Government reports and studies
• Conference reports and other studies

• Is the glass half empty, or half full?, an excellent feature from Scientific American Explorations. Very readable essays "to document the changing challenges facing women in science, delve into gender differences, examine the underlying causes and theories about women's status in science and present some proposals for change." These essays resulted from a study called Project Access, which was the subject of an article in The Scientist. If you read only one site, make it this one.
• The gender gap in science. "Societal norms, a lack of role models, discrimination, husbands, kids, and cats: Anybody who wants to bring gender equity to science has many issues to tackle....the gender gap goes far beyond campus policies."
• The "Problem" of Women in Science: Why is it so difficult to convince people that there is one?
• The heart of the matter: Is the condition of women in science better than it used to be? Absolutely. Should we be satisfied with the current condition of women in science? Absolutely not. From Science's Nextwave (password may be required.)
• European Women in science:
  • Women in UK Science: no promotions or appreciation from The Scientist
  • Women in science links from EMBO
• Barriers to women in science and engineering
• Is your soprano-pitched voice a disadvantage? Ms Mentor comments....
• Women and Science: an exploration of barriers. .
• How women make science work, an interview with Carol Kovac (IBM Life Sciences) from Wired.com
• Are women scared away from STEM fields because there are so few women there? Here's another article about it.
• Dataline: a newsletter from the early 90s with cases relating to the glass ceiling. Includes a lot of commentary on actual cases (under headings "cases" and "profiles"). And you thought we already had equality... Essays of general interest:
  • The glass ceiling: how it works at different stages.
  • The glass ceiling: a civil rights issue
• Women: natural leaders, unnatural role, comments by Dr Anne Peterson at AWIS Leadership Seminar.
• Damned if you do, damned if you don't: Women can't win as leaders, as they are viewed negatively if they adhere to gender norms, or if not. From the NY Times.
• Female behavior is often unrecognized as leader behavior (.pdf), a WICB column from ASCB's newsletter discusses a recent study describing how both men and women find it difficult to recognize leadership in women. Refers to this report from Catalyst.
• Passion and prejudice in research, a feature from Nature. Examines the need for diversity in science.
• Why so few women computer scientists? The thoughts are equally applicable to biology.
• The Challenges for Women Chemists, again, similar to those for biologists.
• Editorial on women in science by Maxine Singer; published in the ASCB newsletter. The solutions proposed provoked considerable discussion on the Women-in-Biology newsgroup!
• A debate from Nature on low numbers of women in science (Sept 1999).
• "A Room of One's Own"-- At the Top, a speech by Jaleh Daie, Ph.D (President of AWIS) asking Why are there so few women scientists in leadership positions?
• Women's issues and gender differences in science and engineering, from the Online ethics center for science and engineering.
• Communicating effectively in department etc. meetings: how to be heard.
• Stratagies to break the glass ceiling. "The strategy to overcome this must be women networking together and mentoring each other. The reason is simple: most men will not mentor you unless you are their daughter or a friend's daughter."
• Walking on Broken Glass describes the continuing pressures on individual women who break the glass ceiling. "Balancing being a woman with being a career professional exerts enormous and conflicting pressures on people, long before anything as overt as sexual harassment rears its ugly head."
• Women in science: the clash of cultures: an essay by Londa Schiebinger. This neatly summarizes two areas of conflict for women scientists: that of domestic or family life, and that of the professional culture of science, which still takes women less seriously.
• Few females at the bench, an article from ScienceNow about a recent EU conference showing " that even nations that aggressively promote gender equity have lackluster female representation in academic research."
• The Chilly Climate: how men and women are treated differently in classrooms and at work.
• Beyond stereotypes: gender-specific stereotypes about lab communication. From The Scientist (free password may be required).
• Opting out, or just being realistic? Workplace inflexibility forces women to "opt out" of careers
• The X-Gals write a series of columns from The Chronicle about a group of nine female biologists who began meeting weekly over a few beers in 2000, as several of us wrote up our dissertations....What began as a survival mechanism for a few female graduate students has become an incredible motivational force and a sounding board vital to our lives and careers. The columns::
  • Introductions
  • Balancing it out
  • Life as a Mother-scientist
  • Too few choices Are women "choosing ourselves" out of an academic career, or is the traditional path of the academic profession so hostile to women that we feel we do not have a choice?
  • Still a scientist even if not a tenure track professor.
  • Leaving the US to solve the 2-body problem
  • A fair to remember I would argue, based on personal experience and observation, that the culture of educational institutions conveys many messages about who is welcome in the scientific community, and who is not. ?
  • The eldest X-gals
  • Archetypes in science write letters of response. They range from "Dismissive male" to "desperately coping". This concludes the X-gals series, and they write, Women pursuing scientific careers must understand the challenges they may face. They must have peers who can provide advice, constructive criticism, encouragement, and sympathy. Academe can be a lonely, hostile territory, but with the right friends, it doesn't need to be.

• More rewards could bolster retention of women in science. From The Scientist: "...women may be overlooked at earlier stages of their careers, and that has a negative effect on their scientific futures." What's involved in getting recognized?
• The importance of recognition in academe.
• Here's a comprehensive list from Stanford
• L'Oreal/UNESCO women in science page describes awards and grants from this unusual partnership, which is intended to highlight and encourage outstanding work by women in life science.
• The new Vanderbilt Prize
• Another prize for women in science comes from the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science.
• There's an Excellence in science award for women in science from FASEB
• Rosalind Franklin Young Investigator Award awards $75,000 to women geneticists in the first three years of a faculty-level position.
• The ASCB Women in Cell Biology Committee makes annual junior and senior career awards for women.
• NSF Advance, a new program from the National Science Foundation to support individuals and institutions in improving women's representation in research
• Elitism, Excellence, or Both at the National Academy of Sciences? Why are there so few women NAS members? "Only 7 of the 72 new members who were picked last week were women, and women make up just 6.6 percent of the academy's 1,960 American members...."
• Maria Mitchell Award for promoting girls and women in science
• Grant opportunities from GWIS offer $500-$4000 to PhD, postdoc, or junior faculty women
• Awards from the ASBMB. Be sure to nominate significant women scientists for these!
• Women's International Science Collaboration Program from the AAAS provides funds to connect US women scientists and with collaborators from Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics.
• RAISE project: Recognizing Achievements of Women in Science, Medicine and Engineering. Has a list of awards.

• The NAS guide to mentoring. An excellent resource for what to do and what to expect as mentor and mentee.
• Mentors really do help
• Women as Mentors; myths and commandments
• How mentoring by senior faculty can help junior faculty, especially women
• Should a mentor be a friend?
• AWIS mentoring project which includes Mentornet
• Mentoring and how to diffuse some of the sexual issues.
• Mentoring Handbooks from the University of Michigan. Both of these address issues of diversity, from somewhat different viewpoints (one as mentor, one as mentee). Available as .pdf files.
  • Graduate Student Mentoring: How to get the Mentoring you want:
  • Graduate Student Mentoring: A Faculty Guide
• Sister Mentors: Female minoritydoctoral candidates living and working in the D.C. area while they write their dissertations benefit from mentoring one another through a long (theyÕll say prolonged) process. They then Òpay it forward,Ó so to speak, in their work mentoring the middle and high school girls (many of whom, itÕs worth noting, are avid young volunteers themselves). More minority girls go to college, with the hope that more minority women will be there ready to teach them.

Equal pay

• Survey of salaries and employment of recent doctoral recipients, from CPST
• salary survey for life scientists, 2002. Some data are free.
• Number crunching: cold hard facts about academic salaries.
• Salary gap between private and public universities
• Faculty Survey, 1998, from the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA. This provides a snapshot of over 33,000 faculty in the US. The takehome: US faculty is aging; personal stress is increasing; ehthnic diversity of the faculty has not changed in 10 years, and gender disparities persist:"Women faculty continue to remain underrepresented in the most prestigious institutions.... Women also continue to serve in the lower academic ranks more often than do men....[and] are also less likely to be tenured." Moreover, the salary gap still exists, even when broken down by academic rank: "... even a small difference in annual bsalary makes a substantial difference in bincome earned over the span of a career. For example, a difference of onlyb$1,000 in current annual salary makes a difference of approximately $85,000 over a 40-year career."
• Disparities in the Salaries and Appointments of Academic Women and Men, a report from the AAUP (American Association of University Professors) showing that female faculty members continue to earn less and are promoted less frequently. Results and major data are summarized in a press release. Check out this statistic: "The increasing entry of women into the profession has so far exceeded the improvement in the positions women attain that the proportion of all female faculty who are tenured has actually declined from 24 to 20 percent." Glass ceiling, anyone?
• A guide to conducting salary equity studies from the AAUP
• Faculty salary and distribution fact sheet, from the AAUP, summarizes the position of women in the professoriate.
• summary of recent studies about the faculty wage gap (AAUP). Also see this links page
• Show me the money: salary inequity in academe
• Why the Wage Gap Worsens, from Science's Nextwave Site. Password required, but free. Here's an unencouraging update: "The more women [working in a department] the lower the salaries," says sociologist Marcia Bellas, describing the findings of her study. Even after controlling for nonacademic salary and unemployment levels, which tend to drive up academic salaries in male-dominated fields like engineering or physics, Bellas found that more women faculty in a department translated to lower salaries."
• Information for employers from the US Dept of Labor:
  • Tools for Employers: making equal pay a reality in your workplace.
  • Analyzing compensation data
• 2001 Salary survey by Science magazine confirms the gender gap, and also reveals that women are less satisfied with their recognition and opportunities than men. You can read more about it in this Biomednet article (password may be required.) This article from women's e-news includes a lot of commentary on the findings. More insights are in this New York Times article. (Passwords/registration may be required.)
• Women faculty salaries still lag behind men, reviewing a report from the AAUP and the complications in making the calculation.
• The subtle side of discrimination: linking faculty raises to outside offers leaves women at a disadvantage." 'Women get hit with a triple whammy. They are less likely to get offers because they are typically viewed as less moveable; women are also less likely to use an offer as leverage unless they are extremely serious and set to leave; and, finally, there is some evidence that women may be less likely to get counteroffers.' " It goes on to say, " Besides being potentially illegal, practices inconsistent with gender equality are often inefficient as well.....the practice of linking raises to outside offers ensures that departments spend a lot of energy on candidates who don't really want to move; they just want a raise where they are."

Sexual harrassment.

• Actual sexual harrassment is not the same as gender inequity of the sort discussed elsewhere on this site. However, many consider it an extreme example of sex discrimination. Harrassment can happen even in "enlightened" climates. Every university or company has policies on how to define and address such situations, and you should know the policies at your institution.
• Articles on sexual harrassment by Bernice Sandler, including: what to do if it happens to you; how a man can tell if his behavior is harrassment; and how supervisors should not respond to complaints. While the views are those of one woman, there are a lot of practical resources here, including resources for sexual assault.
• Resources from the Office of Civil Rights of the Education Dept. This includes It's not academic, a pamphlet about harrassment in schools. Also resources on racial harrassment
• Resources from The National Organization for Women (NOW)
• UNC maintains a huge links list of documents related to sexual harrassment policies and law.
• Campaign against workplace bullying provides strategies and definitions for dealing with various forms of harrassment.

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Standard disclaimer: Any opinions are my own and do not represent the views of my employer.