New report asks "Why so few?" women at the top of science/math fields

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sun Mar 28, 2010 at 18:30

In my "Chatty Cathies" diary, Hopeful in NJ referred to Atrios's Friday Wanker Of The Day nomination for Bobo's denigration of Speaker Pelosi:

Last night on the Newshour, Bobo kind of grudgingly admits that she is an effective leader, but then says "Maybe she got it from her father or brother." He goes on to say maybe it's just in her blood. I don't know?  Maybe it's because in her 70 years on the planet she has worked hard and learned a few things along the way?  Even with her girly bits?  Nah.  Must of gotten it from her brother who has not held office since 1971, or her father who died in 1987.  Certainly nothing she accomplished on her own.

But this sort of routinized denigration of the most powerful female politician in America--and potentially one of the most effective Speakers of all time--is only the tip of the iceberg. A few days earlier, at TAPPED, Monica Potts called attention to new report "Why So Few?" about women academics in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) from the American Association of University Women:

A new report has found that female representation among tenured professors in the sciences and math at universities remains stubbornly out of proportion to the number of women who obtain high-level degrees. Researchers credit it to bias against women who apply for those jobs. From The New York Times:

The report found ample evidence of continuing cultural bias. One study of postdoctoral applicants, for example, found that women had to publish 3 more papers in prestigious journals, or 20 more in less-known publications, to be judged as productive as male applicants.

The gender gap among math geniuses is shrinking fast as well, making a solely biological explanation unlikely. Most disturbingly, to get college women to perform worse than men on math tests, all researchers have to do is tell them they probably will. More and more, research shows that we internalize gender and racial stereotypes in ways that reinforce those stereotypes. It's also becoming increasingly clear that the best way to tackle it is to enforce parity, rather than just hope the people doing the hiring at universities and other institutions overcome their biases.

The AAUW report can be read on at three levels.  First is the level of the results presented--that despite enormous gains in how well women and girls do in math and science compared to men and boys, they still lag increasingly behind at higher and higher levels of professional representation, in ways that are much more intense in some fields than in others.  Second is the level of detailed understanding of what is going and why.  This is the level of scientific inquiry into why gender differences exist, and how they reflect on social and cognitive processes more generally.  Because cultural conservatives persist in simply reiterating gender stereotypes, flooding the zone of public discourse with idiocies and irrelevancies mass understanding of this second level is virtually non-existent.  Indeed, most women who are living through these problems in their everyday lives remain largely ignorant of what they're going through.  Third is the level of comparative resource allocation and utilization: If women must significantly out-perform men to get equivalent professional recognition, then a significant amount of substandard male professional work is crowding out superior female professional work, resulting in  overall performance in one of the most cutting-edge sectors of our society in terms of contribution to basic scientific and technological advances, a major contributor to continued economic growth & development.

Of course, because cultural conservatives manage to make our public discourse so stupid, we erroneously believe-as a culturally-shared, hegemonic default assumption---that it's a matter of gender equity vs. objective standards and optimal economic growth.  But in reality, the exact opposite is true:  gender justice at the individual, personal level is integrally related to the maximal realized potential of our socio-economic system as a whole.  While some particular entrenched special interests may be the worse off for it, our society as a whole does well by doing good.

On the flip, I take a closer look at examples on all three levels.

Contrary to still-prevailing patriarchal stereotypes, women are doing an increasingly significant amount of significant work in STEM fields, but this is not reflected at the highest levels of academia, the report explains:

Women's representation among tenured faculty is lower than one would expect based on the supply of female science and engineering doctoral degree recipients in recent decades (Kulis et al., 2002). The path from elementary school to a STEM career has often been compared to a pipeline. This metaphor suggests that as the number of girls who study STEM subjects in elementary, middle, and secondary school increases (more girls go into the pipeline), the number of women who become scientists and engineers will also increase (more women come out of the pipeline), and gender disparities in representation will disappear. This has not happened at the expected rate, especially at the tenured faculty level in science and engineering. If we compare the percentage of tenured female faculty in 2006 with the percentage of STEM doctorates awarded to women in 1996 (allowing 10 years for an individual to start an academic job and earn tenure), in most STEM fields the drop-off is pronounced. For example, women earned 12 percent of the doctorates in engineering in 1996 but were only 7 percent of the tenured faculty in engineering in 2006. Even in fields like biology, where women now receive about one-half of doctorates and received 42 percent in 1996, women made up less than one-quarter of tenured faculty and only 34 percent of tenure-track faculty in 2006 (National Science Foundation, 2008, 2009a). Women make up larger percentages of the lower-paying, nontenured STEM faculty positions (see figure 13).

Some charts taken from the report vividly show the dramatic increases in female achievement at the high-school level:

And there has been dramatic growth at the doctoral level in all fields--though clearly much more in some than others:

[Click to Enlarge in New Window]

In between, however, growth has actually reversed in mathematics (slightly) and computer science (more markedly) since 20 years ago:

[Click to Enlarge in New Window]

The difference in employment growth trajectories in different fields is striking, showing enormous room for improvement:

[Click to Enlarge in New Window]

Women are also funneled more toward non-tenured positions, particularly in the biological sciences where their numbers are largest:

[Click to Enlarge in New Window]

Level 2: Understanding The Issues In Detail

My purpose here is not to be exhaustive, or even representative.  I just want to present a couple of excerpts that give a feeling for the sort of complexity and empirically-driven detailed understanding that is called for in understanding the problems--in stark contrast to the sort of Neanderthal rhetoric that to this day continues to dominate our discourse coming from the right.

First is the issue of institutional culture, something that goes far beyond the more mundane and minimal concept of a avoiding a "hostile work environment" that can trigger a lawsuit.  What's more, raising awareness of institutional cultures and their impacts can result in much higher levels of career satisfaction for men as well as women: awareness is always a good thing.  It's really simple: You can't improve conditions or solve problems that you aren't aware of.  

Cathy Trower and her colleagues at the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE) at Harvard University found that female STEM faculty express lower job satisfaction than do their male peers. Lower satisfaction leads to higher turnover and a loss of talent in science and engineering. Trower's research, profiled in chapter 7, suggests that the climate of science and engineering departments is closely related to satisfaction of female faculty and that providing effective mentoring and work-life policies can help improve job satisfaction and, hence, the retention of female STEM faculty.

And, from a different angle, the report underscores that just being good at math is hardly a career prescription. This insight alone opens up an entire range of questions for further research, with impacts that could be as profound for men as they are for women:

Scientists and engineers are not necessarily the highest math achievers
Boys outnumber girls at the very high end of the math test score distribution. Some researchers have suggested that this gender difference accounts for the small number of women in certain STEM fields. This logic has two main flaws. First, as mentioned above, girls have made rapid inroads into the ranks of children identified as "mathematically gifted" in the past 30 years, while women's representation in mathematically demanding fields such as physics, computer science, and engineering has grown slowly. That is, fewer women pursue STEM careers than would be expected based on the number of girls who earn very high math scores. Second, Weinberger (2005) found that the science and engineering workforce is not populated primarily by the highest-scoring math students, male or female. Less than one-third of college-educated white men in the engineering, math, computer science, and physical science workforce scored higher than 650 on the SAT math exam, and more than one-third had SAT math scores below 550--the math score of the average humanities major. Even though a correlation exists between high school math test scores and later entry into STEM education and careers, very high math scores are not necessarily a prerequisite for success in STEM fields.

Level 3: Comparative Resource Allocation and Utilization: A Just World Is A More Productive, More Abundant World

One of the most striking findings discussed in the report, mentioned in the NYT, was the
much higher level of achievement women need to attain in order to get recognition:

Research has also pointed to bias in peer review (Wenneras & Wold, 1997) and hiring (Steinpreis et al., 1999; Trix & Psenka, 2003). For example, Wenneras and Wold found that a female postdoctoral applicant had to be significantly more productive than a male applicant to receive the same peer review score. This meant that she either had to publish at least three more papers in a prestigious science journal or an additional 20 papers in lesser-known specialty journals to be judged as productive as a male applicant. The authors concluded that the systematic underrating of female applicants could help explain the lower success rate of female scientists in achieving high academic rank compared with their male counterparts.

At the individual level, this looks like a problem of just treatment--and it most certainly is that, in spades.  But at the societal level, it's also a problem of resource allocation.  If women have to perform much better than men to reach a certain level of professional success, bringing with it the power to do more professional work, and have a greater impact on the future direction of their fields, then gender injustice is materially impeding academic, scientific, and technological progress.  We all pay a price for the lack of justice--not just the individual woman who is judged second best when her work is actually superior.

The consequences of this finding are so profound they cannot be overstated: Instead of the traditional conservative assumption of justice competing with objective standards of progress for society as a whole, we find that lack of gender justice is materially holding us back as a scientific, technological society. This arguably the most important finding that is highlighted in this report.  Justice is not a luxury or frivolity--as conservatives and other pessimists about human nature have long contended.  Rather, it is essentially important to us as a society, not just to the individuals who may be threatened by its deprivation.  A just society is not only a better-feeling society to live in, it is a materially better society to live in as well.

This goes completely against the either/or trade-off logic of conservatives who are oppose gender justice as an imposition on the natural order of things which they simply assume represents the "best of all possible worlds."

Life is not zeor-sum.  It is only our archaic, patriarchal belief systems that are.  And well past time that we got rid of them, once and for all.