PerspectivesAre you interested in submitting a Perspective Article? Be sure to read The Science Advisory Board's Editorial Guides for Perspective Articles. Click here. Women in Science by Lori Kelman, MBA, Ph.D. Larry Summers has a lot to answer for. It’s one thing to draw attention to the “gender gap”, or the dearth of female physics majors or the lack of tenured female scientists, but it’s quite another to state that the reason for the disparity is that women are innately dumber than men. This is an old idea, and it’s really time to let it go. But as it comes up again and again, I’ve been doing a slow burn since the comments by President Summers were made, wondering how many young women silently accept this stuff when they hear it and let it become their excuse for not following a dream. Hey, calculus is hard, anyway; it’s easier to say you have “math anxiety” than to continue on for a chemistry major with a C on your transcript. Same goes for organic chemistry and thermo…brain is just wired differently, not my fault I’m not getting As in both. And the flip side, of course, is that the men who do earn an A in organic are getting it due to innate ability, not hard work. Assuming you’ve ignored the critics and majored in science anyway, once you get to graduate school you’ll realize that everyone suffers from performance anxiety and that there are people both smarter and dumber than you out there, regardless of sex. Okay, okay, maybe it seems there are way more smart people out there, but it’s still common for women to get Ph.D.s in the life sciences (and in 2001 about 40% women of Ph.D.s went to women1). Chemistry and physics lag behind, but women are still getting the degrees. The problem isn’t completely in getting the first academic job, either, it’s in getting tenure at large research universities. Women account for fewer than 15% of tenured positions at Medical Schools2. And data from six European Union member states in 1997 clearly show the numbers of male and female college students start out about even, but as they are followed from Ph.D. to professorship positions, the percentage of women drops steadily to finally bottom out at about 10% of full professors3. The reason for this, of course, is that they’re dumb. Well, let’s back up a bit. All I need to do is observe my two young daughters’ friends to see what has been described by education people for years – boys and girls do indeed behave differently. Boys play games with lots of rules; girls cooperate. Boys’ games keep score; girls’ games don’t. In later life, boys use that aggression to climb up the tenure ladder; girls spend their emotional energy ensuring that the department gets along together, taking on important but not-rewarded jobs like committee work for the greater good rather than personal gain. Is it that simple? Of course not. But is this part of the story? In my case, I never wanted a top-tier faculty position, but was content to search for a position at a liberal arts college where teaching was stressed over research. First strike against me, because this choice means, on a practical level, that I will never wind up in a tenured university position. I had my children while the tenure clock was running; there was no option to stop the clock at that school in 1998 when I had my first child. I was awarded tenure, but my reduced productivity (I took the summer off and taught a reduced load for one semester with my first child, and did not teach the last 3 weeks of one class with my second) was recognized by my failure to earn the highest level of merit pay (on a smug note, I got the second-highest of three levels, meaning that I was still more productive than at least some of my colleagues who had not given birth those years). But family life intervened. My husband, who had been arranging his post-doctoral choices around my position, now found a position of his own 300 miles away from my school. Now it was time for some hard choices. With two children, it made more sense for me to accept that I was going to be responsible for a little more than half the childcare responsibility. If a kid needed help with homework, it would more than likely fall to me. My husband has his own excuse for this; English is not his first language and he doesn’t want his kids to wind up spelling like he does. Fair enough. So I quit my position to find a new one at our new location. Rather than a 4-year institution, I wound up at the local community college. It’s an easy commute, I have no research to supervise, and I love the students. But I’ll never have tenure (the school did away with tenure years ago), although I will have job stability (after my next review, I will be on a “rolling 6” contract). But, for the purposes of the statistics referred to by Dr. Summers, I’m out of the game. It seems to me that I only have so much mental energy, and I have to choose how I use it. It took me three years after my second child was born to feel mentally “sharp” again. I think that’s because of the sleep deprivation (turns out that even though I suffer from insomnia I need my sleep. Who woulda known?), and this lack of mental clarity was troubling to me at a time I was trying to direct undergraduate research. I spend most of my mental powers planning lectures and, yes, worrying about my kids. I don’t think I worry half as much as other moms say they do, but the fact is that someone has to remember to pack lunches and plan doctor appointments, remember field trips, etc. My husband often plans experiments in the shower. I spend that time either “clearing my brain” for a few precious minutes or planning how I’ll get dinner on the table that night. Bottom line: I’m smart, but I’m not superhuman. I’ve made choices that mean I won’t be a tenured female professor. But I know that, had I wished to go that route, I have the brains to do it. I didn’t choose to do it. Had I chosen to, I would have made different choices to get there. And now for the punch line (there is always a punch line). A few months ago, I went to bed an overworked full-time mom trying to juggle work and kids, but I woke up smack-dab in the sandwich generation. When the phone woke me at 7 am, I knew to answer by asking “what happened?” My father had suffered a stroke. Now I had the added responsibility of traveling 300 miles home to help out, in addition to my already overscheduled life. Luckily, he had a very minor stroke, but I can read the writing on the wall. A decade ago, I had an aging grandmother to take care of (oh, yeah, seems I didn’t even bother to think of that as perhaps influencing my choices at the time!). Soon I will probably have much more to do than I currently juggle. It’s all about choices, and I know I’ll choose to help out with my family. My husband has grants to write and students to supervise. He’s smart, and successful, and so am I. Larry Summers has got nothin’ on me. ### Lori M. Kelman is Professor of Biotechnology at Montgomery College in Germantown, MD, and Editor of BIOS: A quarterly journal of biology. She was a member of the 2004-2005 Steering Committee for The Science Advisory Board. References 1. NSF science and engineering doctorate awards 2001 used by AWIS http://www.awis.org/resource/statistics/S&E_PhDs_1992,2001.ppt 2. American Association of Medical Colleges 2002 benchmarking study http://www.aamc.org/members/wim/statistics/stats03/start.htm 3. Policies in the European Union: promoting excellence through mainstreaming gender equality 2000, used by AWIS http://www.awis.org/resource/statistics/Eu_1997.ppt ### << Previous Next >> [ View All Perspectives ] |
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