Athena Unbound: The Advancement of Women

Abstract

Why are there so few women scientists? Persisting differences between women's and men's experiences in science make this question as relevant today as it ever was. This book sets out to answer this question, and to propose solutions for the future. Based on extensive research, it emphasizes that science is an intensely social activity. Despite the scientific ethos of universalism and inclusion, scientists and their institutions are not immune to the prejudices of society as a whole. By presenting women's experiences at all key career stages - from childhood to retirement - the authors reveal the hidden barriers, subtle exclusions and unwritten rules of the scientific workplace, and the effects, both professional and personal, that these have on the female scientist. This important book should be read by all scientists - both male and female - and sociologists, as well as women thinking of embarking on a scientific career.

Full text

ATHENA UNBOUND:
THE ADVANCEMENT
OF WOMEN IN
SCIENCE AND
TECHNOLOGY
Henry Etzkowitz
Carol Kemelgor
Brian Uzzi
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Athena Unbound
The Advancement of Women in Science and Technology
Why are there so few women scientists? Persisting differences between
women’s and men’s experiences in science make this question as relevant
today as it ever was. This book sets out to answer this question, and to
propose solutions for the future.
Based on extensive research, it emphasizes that science is an intensely
social activity. Despite the scientific ethos of universalism and inclusion,
scientists and their institutions are not immune to the prejudices of
society as a whole. By presenting women’s experiences at all key career
stages – from childhood to retirement – the authors reveal the hidden
barriers, subtle exclusions and unwritten rules of the scientific workplace,
and the effects, both professional and personal, that these have on the
female scientist.
This important book should be read by all scientists – both male and
female – and sociologists, as well as women thinking of embarking on a
scientific career.
henry etzkowitz is Director of the Science Policy Institute and
Associate Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at
Purchase.
carol kemelgor is a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst in private
practice in Westchester County, New York, and Director of the Center for
Women in Science, at the Science Policy Institute, State University of
New York at Purchase.
brian uzzi is Associate Professor of Business and Sociology at the
Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.

To my mother
MARY MIRIAM LIFSHITZ ETZKOWITZ
BA Hunter College 1933
Magna Cum Laude, Geology
H.E.
For LARRY
C.K.

ξ
ATHENA UNBOUND
the advancement of women
in science and technology
HENRY ETZKOWITZ
Science Policy Institute,
State University of New York at Purchase
CAROL KEMELGOR
Science Policy Institute,
State University of New York at Purchase
BRIAN UZZI
Kellogg School, Northwestern University
With:
michael neuschatz, American Institute of Physics
elaine seymour, University of Colorado
lynn mulkey,University of South Carolina
joseph alonzo, Rockefeller University

PUBLISHED BY CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS (VIRTUAL PUBLISHING)
FOR AND ON BEHALF OF THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
http://www.cambridge.org
© Henry Etzkowitz 2000
This edition © Henry Etzkowitz 2003
First published in printed format 2000
A catalogue record for the original printed book is available
from the British Library and from the Library of Congress
Original ISBN 0 521 56380 1 hardback
Original ISBN 0 521 78738 6 paperback
ISBN 0 511 00944 5 virtual (netLibrary Edition)

Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Women in science: Why so few? 1
1The science career pipeline 5
2Women and science: Athena Bound 15
3Gender, sex and science 31
4Selective access 49
5Critical transitions in the graduate and post-graduate
career path 69
6Women’s (and men’s) graduate experience in science 83
7The paradox of critical mass for women in science 105
8The ‘kula ring’ of scientific success 115
9Women’s faculty experience 131
10 Dual male and female worlds of science137
11 Differences between women in science 147
12 Social capital and faculty network relationships 157
13 Negative and positive departmental cultures 179
14 Initiatives for departmental change 187
15 International comparisons 203
16 Athena Unbound: Policy for women in science 225
Appendix 251
Bibliography 257
Index 269

Acknowledgements
We express our appreciation to the National Science Foundation and
the Sloan Foundation for research support.

Introduction
Women in science: Why so few?
Why are there still so few women scientists, especially at the upper
levels of the scientific professions? Persisting differences between
women’s and men’s experience in science make this question as
relevant today as when sociologist Alice Rossi posed it more than three
decades ago at a conference on women in science at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (Rossi, 1965).
The years since Rossi’s groundbreaking analysis have witnessed the
revival of the feminist movement and the increased entry of women
into many professions. Women have become lawyers and doctors
in significant numbers, albeit unevenly distributed into high and low
status subfields of these professions. Despite significant advances,
there is a continuing disproportionate lack of women in most scientific
and engineering disciplines, especially at the upper reaches of the
professions.
One such scientist, Leslie Barber, a female Ph.D. in molecular
biology, decided to end her career as a research scientist shortly after
being awarded the doctorate. She reflected upon the mixed experience
of her male and female peers in a recent article (Barber, 1995). On the
positive side, she found widespread evidence of encouragement for
girls and women to pursue scientific professions from the media and
from parents and teachers.
On the negative side, in comparing the career trajectories of the ten
members of her graduate research group, equally divided into five men
and five women, Barber noted significant differences. Whether or not
the men had done well in their graduate careers, they had forged ahead
in their professional lives. Among the women, three ‘have left research
altogether, while the other two languish in post-doctoral positions,

apparently unable to settle on a next step.’ Barber was initially
surprised that, despite the unique story that each woman offered to
explain her situation, the traditional pattern of relative exclusion of
females from the scientific professions had been reproduced in her
graduate cohort.
A guarded professional prognosis for both men and women could
well be advised for a field such as physics, where the potential numbers
of qualified applicants, vastly overwhelm traditional occupational
demand (Linowitz, 1996). Certainly there has been a shift away from
nuclear weapons and power plants, as well as from ‘big science’
projects such as the cancelled Superconducting Super Collider, which
once gave virtually automatic multiple choices of employment to
Ph.D. physicists. Although not unemployed, young physicists can
often be found utilizing their quantitative and analytical skills in the
back rooms of Wall Street or even in their own financial firms.
But how can the male–female divide in following scientific research
careers, as identified by Barber, be explained for molecular biology,
given the proliferation of biotechnology firms with research positions
in recent years? Why has the increase in women entering graduate
school not been fully translated into female scientists occupying
higher positions in the field? Why has science lagged other professions
in its inclusion of women? The answers to these questions, and the
responsibility for repairing a less than optimal outcome, can be found
primarily within science and secondarily in the larger society
(National Research Council, 1940; Fox, 1994).
A LIFE COURSE ANALYSIS OF WOMEN IN SCIENCE
The thesis of this book is that women face a special series of
gender related barriers to entry and success in scientific careers
that persist, despite recent advances. Indeed, while some of their
male contemporaries view female scientists as ‘honorary men’, others
see them as ‘flawed women’ for attempting to participate in a
traditional male realm (Longino, 1987; Stolte-Heiskanen, 1987;
Barinaga, 1993).
ATHENA UNBOUND
2

Female scientists have been at odds over how to respond to these
invidious distinctions. Should they insist that as scientists they are
not different from men? On the other hand, given that science has
historically been a male-dominated profession, should not women
claim that they must have their needs taken into account in how the
field is organized?
We focus the greater part of this book on the quality of women’s
experience in academic science, on the grounds that the university
serves as a gateway into the larger scientific community. Our analysis
is based on extensive systematic fieldwork that focuses both on the
personal accounts of female and male graduate students and faculty
members, and on the statistical analysis of aggregate demographic data
and survey data on person-to-person ties in departments. In interviews
with us, they discussed their experience in research groups and
departments as well as their interaction with male and female peers
and mentors.
Athena Unbound provides a life-course analysis of women in
science from early childhood interest, through university, graduate
school and the academic workplace. The book is based on several
studies: (1) fifty in-depth interviews with female graduate students and
faculty members in five science and engineering disciplines at two
universities; (2) four hundred in-depth interviews and focus groups
with female and male graduate students and faculty members in five
science and engineering disciplines at eleven universities; (3) follow-
up interviews with a sub-sample of graduate students and post-
doctoral fellows interviewed in the previous study; (4) a quantitative
survey of female graduate students and faculty members in five science
and engineering disciplines at one university, focusing on publication
experiences; and (5) interviews with very young children on their
image of the scientist as a gender-related role.
In the following chapter we will begin to address the question raised
in this introduction: why so few women in science? We will present
quantitative evidence documenting how women’s entry into and
leakage from the ranks of graduate school education and university
INTRODUCTION
:
WOMEN IN SCIENCE
:
WHY SO FEW
?3

departments differ from men’s. As society becomes more knowledge-
intensive, ending any exclusion of women from science and tech-
nology becomes more pressing.
ATHENA UNBOUND
4

1The science career pipeline
In this chapter we discuss the ‘pipeline’ thesis for improving women’s
participation in science. This ‘supply side’ approach assumes that if
sufficient women are encouraged to enter the scientific and
engineering professions, the gender gap in science and technology will
disappear.
The scientific career track, from elementary school to initial
employment, has been depicted as a ‘pipeline’ like those for the
transport of fluids and gases such as water, oil or natural gas. The rate of
flow into scientific careers is measured by passage through transition
points in the pipeline such as graduation and continuation to the next
educational level.
Nevertheless, the flow of women into science is through, ‘a pipe
with leaks at every joint along its span, a pipe that begins with a high-
pressure surge of young women at the source – a roiling Amazon of
smart graduate students – and ends at the spigot with a trickle of
women prominent enough to be deans or department heads at major
universities or to win such honours as membership in the National
Academy of Science or even, heaven forfend, the Nobel Prize’ (Angier,
1995). Even this negative depiction of the pipeline as a leaky vessel is
too optimistic. As we shall see, many women are discouraged from
pursuing their scientific interests far earlier in their educational career
than graduate training.
Although the rate of women entering scientific professions has
improved significantly, especially in the biological sciences, the
numbers reaching high-level positions are much smaller than
expected. In the United States, for example, decades after the science-
based profession of medicine experienced a significant increase in
female medical students (currently about 40% are women), only 3% of

medical school deans and 5% of department heads are women. Dr
Eleanor Shore, dean for faculty affairs at Harvard Medical School,
recalled, ‘Originally we thought if we got enough women in, the
problem would take care of itself’ (Angier, 1995). But it obviously has
not.
Significant numbers of women enter the ‘pipeline’ and then leave at
disproportionate rates, or function less effectively, as covert resistance
to their participation creates difficulties. At best, the picture of
women’s participation in science in recent decades is mixed. Indeed,
the pipeline analogy is unintentionally appropriate as an implicit
criticism of the way that the recruitment to science takes place.
In addition to the positive meaning of steady flow and assured
delivery, a pipeline also connotes a narrow, constricted vessel with few
if any alternative ways of passage through the channel. At each age
grade, the entry ways for women become narrower and increasingly
restrictive. As more are excluded, the talent pool for the next level to
draw upon becomes smaller.
Although the genders are almost equally represented in the early
stages of the pipeline they increasingly diverge at the later stages,
resulting in a much smaller proportion of women than men emerging
from the pipeline. At the point of career choice, many women are
diverted from the academic and research tracks, even though some
who are trained as scientists pursue science-related careers such as
scientific writing or administration. The U.S. science pipeline runs
through a distinctly different educational landscape than its
counterparts in many other countries, and it is worth taking a moment
to describe the system here.
THE U
.
S
.
EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM
In contrast to most European, Latin American and other countries
where a specialized course of study on one or a few related areas makes
up virtually the entire undergraduate curriculum, the U.S. educational
system does not expect students to make an early choice of careers.
Even though an increasing number of secondary and even middle
ATHENA UNBOUND
6

schools have occupational themes such as healthcare, art and science,
all offer a general education. The flexibility of the U.S. undergraduate
degree allows room for secondary education to remain unspecialized.
Students typically graduate from high school after twelve years of
primary and secondary education at the age of seventeen or eighteen.
Where to go to college or university becomes a serious issue in the third
year of high school, although student and parental anxieties about
getting into a prestigious college or university have pushed these
concerns ever earlier. Again in contrast to countries with national
systems of examinations at secondary school leaving, the U.S. high
school offers an education that can vary widely in quality among
schools and even within the same school. High school is still the
quintessential U.S. social scene depicted in television programs and
motion pictures of a youth culture focused on peer status, looks and
athletic ability. Intellectual merit is not a leading status distinction
except in a very few leading public and private high schools.
Universities also vary widely in quality of education and prestige, in
contrast to Europe where university-level institutions are, more or
less, expected to be on the same level. There is also a tradition in the
U.S. of students going to university away from home, if it can be
afforded. This makes the college decision a major turning point in
life. It also marks the entry of the student into a nationwide
educational and prestige gradation market. To take account of the
wide differences in quality among secondary schools, an external
system of exams offered by a non-profit corporation rather than a
government agency was established in order to help universities sort
potential students from a wide variety of backgrounds. Once
university intake broadened from a select set of students attending
college preparatory public and private high schools, as had been the
case in the 1920s, to a mass education system, uniform measures were
needed and the College Board examinations were established for this
purpose.
The College Board examinations focus on general abilities in
mathematical and analytical reasoning and are not directly tied to the
THE SCIENCE CAREER PIPELINE
7

high school curriculum. Therefore, a separate educational industry has
grown up offering courses and tutoring to prepare students for these
examinations, whose sponsors persist in insisting that formal
preparation will do no good. Through these exams, high school grades,
recommendations and sometimes an essay to be written on ‘life goals’,
‘the most influential book I have read’ or some such topic, combined
with interviews by an alumnus or a college admissions officer, an
initial selection is made.
High school graduates are sorted into more than 3,000 institutions of
higher education, ranging from four-year baccalaureate colleges to
universities offering Ph.D. degrees. However, this selection is still
malleable since college students increasingly take time off from their
studies to travel or work for a while and then decide to apply for
transfer.
Almost 70% of U.S. high school graduates now continue on to post-
secondary education. This is still in sharp contrast to the U.K. which
has only in the past decade seen a rise from 10% to 30%, with an
expected rise to 40% of secondary school leavers continuing on to
university during the next decade.
In the U.S., general education continues from high school into the
university. ‘Distribution requirements’ insure that students take one
or more courses in the various spheres of knowledge such as science,
art, history, languages and mathematics. In addition, many colleges
and universities require students to take certain courses, typically in
writing and the history of western civilization, as part of a general
education program. In other countries such broad knowledge and skills
are expected to be acquired in secondary schools, leaving the university
career completely to specialized and professional training.
In the U.S. specialization begins at the baccalaureate level with
declaring a major. ‘A major’ is a group of related courses in a
disciplinary area such as history or biology, although it can also be
an interdisciplinary group of courses in an area such as biology and
society. An individual course typically consists of a sixteen-week
series of class meetings totalling around three hours per week. It
ATHENA UNBOUND
8

may combine lectures, class discussion and laboratories. Evaluation
is likely to be some combination of laboratory exercises, short
examinations or quizzes, a mid-term examination and/or a final
examination. A research paper may also be required.
The course is the basic building block of undergraduate education
and the credits attached to it, typically three or four, are added up to the
requisite 120 for the degree with the major representing perhaps a third
of that total. The European model would instead be the degree course
with a set of requirements, lectures and examinations geared to
measuring an end result rather than discrete pieces along the way,
through the course.
The science major in the U.S. follows an intermediate format
between the general U.S. undergraduate and specialized European
educational models. Its courses typically must be taken in sequence
and a larger proportion of the student’s time is required. This leaves
less time for electives, those courses apart form major, distribution or
general education requirements in which students may follow a non-
degree interest or simply take a course that has a reputation for being
interesting, easy or challenging, whatever meets their needs!
Vocational choices can be put off at least until the second year of a
four-year undergraduate career, or even later, unless one is in the
sciences. Even if a science or engineering major is chosen late in the
undergraduate career, courses can be made up in summer school or by
taking an extra year for the degree. Some universities even offer a post-
baccalaureate year program to prepare humanities and social science
majors who have decided after graduation that they wish to go to
medical school, a post-bachelor’s degree program in the U.S. A year of
chemistry, biology, physics and other related courses allows them to
meet the basic requirements for admission.
The U.S. undergraduate model of education, based on courses,
continues on into graduate school. A Ph.D. program typically begins
with a set of courses during the first and second years whose purpose is
to bring everyone up to the same level of basic knowledge in the field.
Now, at this late stage, the U.S. system finally begins to follow the
THE SCIENCE CAREER PIPELINE
9

European model, by evaluating students through an extensive
‘qualifying’ examination, cross-cutting an entire field.
Indeed, students do not necessarily have to prepare for the qualifying
exam, the prerequisite for beginning research for the Ph.D.
dissertation, by taking a set of courses. They may also study on their
own, using reading lists, or more likely, in small groups of fellow
students, so-called study groups, where old exams and problems are
discussed. Again, this organized system of preparation for research is
in contrast to the traditional European model in which a student
tackles a research problem from the outset of the advanced degree
process. There, the problem is often set in advance and candidates are
advertised for in the scientific press.
Although the U.S. secondary and undergraduate education varies
greatly in quality, it is at the graduate level that the U.S. excels.
Research groups of a professor with graduate, undergraduate students
and technicians are the basic building block of U.S. academic science.
Assistant professors in the U.S., who would be junior researchers under
a professor in many European countries, have the responsibility for
raising their own research funds through competitive grants to start
their own group. Success or failure in convincing the research
community to fund their proposal is the prerequisite for attaining a
permanent position in a U.S. research university. However, as we shall
see, women and men experience the various stages and phases of this
system quite differently.
THE LOSS OF WOMEN TO SCIENCE
With this system of education in mind, we return to the ‘pipeline’
hypothesis. This optimistic hypothesis has been at least partially
disconfirmed by the mixed experience of the most recent generation of
women in science and engineering. True, a large number of women in
the U.S. major in science and engineering and a significant percentage
of women receive BA degrees. As a result, the proportion of science and
engineering bachelors’ degrees going to women has almost doubled in
three decades, rising from 25% in 1966 to 47% in 1995 (NSF, 1998:
ATHENA UNBOUND
10

171). But the number of women enrolled in graduate school is still
significantly lower, at 38% in 1995 (ibid.:226–7). And the percentage
who emerge with a Ph.D. in these disciplines is lower still, reaching
only 31% by 1995. Even this figure is misleading, however, since it
conceals sharp contrasts by discipline. Most of the progress is
attributable to the greater presence of women in the life and social
sciences, in contrast to the physical sciences and engineering. Highly
unequal participation is still the norm in many fields.
These contrasts are, not surprisingly, most evident at the highest
academic levels. Starting from what was then a relatively strong base of
16% in the 1960s, women increased their representation among Ph.D.
biologists to 40% by the 1990s (see Table 1.1). From a smaller base of
7%, chemistry has seen a corresponding rise to 27%, while the
geosciences increased more dramatically from 3% to 22% in the same
period. However, although mathematics, physics and engineering
have also seen substantial gains in the presence of women among
doctorates, in none of these fields did the 1995 figure even reach one in
five. Thus, starting from bases of 5% in mathematics, 2% in physics,
and less than 1% in engineering in the 1960s, the proportion of Ph.D.s
going to women has risen to 19%, 12% and 11% in the 1990s.
THE SCIENCE CAREER PIPELINE
11
Table 1.1 Women’s share of science and engineering Ph.D.s, 1966–1997
1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s
Biology 16 21 33 40
Chemistry 7 10 19 27
Geosciences 3 6 16 22
Mathematics 5 10 15 19
Physics 2 4 8 12
All engineering <1 1 6 11
Source: U.S. National Science Foundation, Survey of Earned Doctorates.

EUROPEAN COMPARISONS
Most European countries have shown similar patterns to the U.S. For
example, in the United Kingdom, the starting point was so low in most
fields that, even after some progress, women remain far below parity.
In the late 1980s, female chemists in the U.K. were 35% of
undergraduates, 24% of graduate students, 22% of post-doctoral
researchers, 5.5% of lecturers, 1.5% of senior lecturers, 1% of the
readers and 0% of professors. In U.K. academic science as a whole only
3% of professors and department heads were female, compared with
10% in the U.S. In France, there is a decreasing proportion of women
physicists at the higher levels of government-sponsored research
institutes (CNRS). At the lower levels, 42% of the best-qualified
research assistants are women, perhaps in part reflecting their
disproportionately low (16.8%) representation (Couture-Cherki,
1976).
The paucity of women in high-level scientific positions in the U.K. is
exemplified by a footnote identifying the author of a preface to a
volume on the condition of women in science: it notes that Professor
Jackson was the first and only female professor of physics in the United
Kingdom (Haas and Perucci, 1986). She is now deceased, but there were
two female physics professors in British universities in the early 1990s
(Healey, 1992). Nevertheless, the continuing low participation at
higher career levels is a virtually universal cross-national phenomenon
despite a history of improvement at the lower levels. University
College London is a bright spot. The proportion of female professors at
9% is three times the national average. This is due to ‘attention to
problems of family and childcare’. Despite the bleakness of the overall
situation, this instance demonstrates that actions can be taken that
will significantly improve matters.
THE FALLACY OF THE
‘
SUPPLY SIDE
’
The expectation that the problem of participation of women and
minorities in the scientific and engineering professions could be solved
with a bit of ‘pump priming’ is a supply side thesis. The supply side
ATHENA UNBOUND
12

approach is codified in the so-called ‘pipeline’ thesis that recruiting
more women is a sufficient strategy. By encouraging girls to study
science, so the theory goes, participation of women and men in science
will become more equal. Once this is accomplished, it is expected that
one can then wait patiently for the next generation to witness women’s
inevitable rise to leadership positions in science in equal proportions to
male scientists. Such a focus tends to neglect analysis of the ‘demand
side’, especially organizational resistance to change and the
persistence of barriers to entry of women into the scientific and
engineering professions. Although there has been some recent
progress, women continue to be chronically underrepresented in
scientific careers, and their participation declines as one moves higher
up the career ladder (Zuckerman, Cole and Bruer, 1991; National
Research Council, 1993).
Role models
Some proponents of women in science believe that presenting young
women entering the scientific and engineering professions with a
picture of the resistance they will encounter will discourage them from
going on. They believe that introducing young women to successful
role models is the best way to enhance their chances of success.
A recent event hosted by the Section of Women In Science at the
New York Academy of Sciences further illustrates the contradiction of
celebrating the achievement of successful female scientists as an
encouragement to girls to do science, rather than warning them about
(and thus preparing them to meet) the possible obstacles. Several
leading female scientists and engineers including Sheila Widnall, then
Secretary of the Air Force, presented an account of their careers to an
audience primarily composed of secondary school women, pursuing
Westinghouse and other awards. Although one woman mentioned
significant obstacles in her path, such as being turned down for tenure
despite considerable research achievements, the overall tone of the
meeting was upbeat and celebratory. The darker side of the scientific
endeavor for females was played down.
THE SCIENCE CAREER PIPELINE
13

As minorities move up educational and job ladders, it is expected
that the problem of exclusion will be solved. However, a significant
increase in women in academic science is unlikely to be realized
simply by increasing the numbers of women who embark on a
scientific career. Encouraging more women to enter the pipeline is at
best a partial answer if so few are willing or able to come out at the other
end and carry on professional careers in science.
ATHENA UNBOUND
14

2Women and science:
Athena Bound
Athena, the Greek mythological figure with strong female and male
elements in her identity, personifies the dilemma of the contemporary
female scientist. Contemporary female scientists are expected, and
often expect themselves, to combine a demanding personal and
professional life, without its effects on either. Even as some female
scientists struggle to balance their professional and personal lives,
others continue or are constrained to comply with a traditional ‘male
model’ that rigidly subordinates the personal to the professional.
Women in science comprise a diverse set of persons who, despite a
common gender, do not embrace a collective identity.
Many successful women in scientific and engineering professions
expect to have crossed a threshold into a work life in which gender is
irrelevant. These fortunate few females are taken on as apprentices
and, encouraged by their undergraduate professors, enter graduate
school in the sciences and engineering. There again, they encounter an
opaque competitive system that typically depletes their self-
confidence.
Those women who complete the Ph.D. face a series of career choices
that often needlessly clash with personal aspirations. As Athena found
in pursuing her adventures as a woman in a higher world dominated by
a male ethos, gender matters.
Alternate competing theses have been suggested to explain the
resistance to women in science. It is not ‘either/or’. Rather than
‘barriers to entry’, visible and invisible impediments to women
pursuing a scientific career, or a ‘glass ceiling’ that places limits on
recognition of achievement, difficulties exist at all stages and phases of
the scientific career line.

Women who have avoided discouraging experiences at an earlier
stage often encounter them later. For example, because women
are often excluded from information and informal channels in graduate
school, they have less access to ‘social capital,’ the network of
relationships and connections, than their male peers. Without
this network of professional and social psychological partners, women
of equal or better ‘human capital’ (their skills and knowledge) are
more likely to drop out of graduate school, and those who receive a
Ph.D. lack the ‘halo effect’ that comes from inclusion in such a
network.
When a relatively small number of women traverse the pipeline to
win a faculty appointment the story is said to have ended successfully.
Yet even at this juncture many highly effective women suddenly find
themselves subtly ostracized while paradoxically expected to be ‘role
models’ during the precarious tenure process. We call all of these
disjunctures aspects of the ‘cascade effect’ in which the steady flow of
energy can be short-circuited at any point, regardless of the level of
achievement.
The experiences of women scientists begin and end with the
consequences of social exclusion in an activity that necessitates,
perhaps demands, community. All too often the consequences of
social isolation and aloneness have been attributed to inherent deficits
within the women themselves. The argument has been that they lack
the right human capital for physically demanding and mathematically
intensive scientific work, whether by nature’s wisdom which has
divided the gene pool or by self-selection into softer fields that permit
greater attention to family. However, the experience of separateness
and stigma makes more understandable the tendencies for self-blame,
lack of self-confidence, fear of risk-taking and role confusion at the
highest faculty level. These constraints on women arise from the way
that society tracks and awards women and men differently, and are
then manifested and reinforced at the organizational level (universities
and departments) through discriminatory practices, misperceptions,
and social networks that can include or isolate women.
ATHENA UNBOUND
16

Female scientists sometimes respond to the strictures against them
by adopting a research strategy that emphasizes the careful
construction of extensive data bases in a special field rather than rapid
shift from one ‘hot topic’ to the next, longer but less frequent articles,
and a reluctance to test hypotheses for fear of being shot down. The
barriers to women are such that what appears to be a flawed strategy of
reaction actually represents a creative response to obstacles in their
path. We have found that in science, these strategies are enacted
because the interpersonal networks that promote learning, the
practice of the craft, the knowledge transfer, and ultimately the
psychological freedom to take the risks inherent in innovative and
creative work, are different for men and women. What is paradoxical is
that while women pursue the myth that scientific individualism and
isolation spurs scientific breakthrough, it is in fact a fiction that
undermines their advancements, even as men (and some successful
women) operate within networks of collaborative learning that
advance ideas most competitively (Powell, Koput and Smith-Doerr,
1996).
SCIENTIFIC HEROINES
Even as they overcame the obstacles in their path, the most successful
female scientists were constricted by their gender. The careers of Marie
Curie, Lise Meitner, Rosalind Franklin and Rachel Carson provide us
with benchmarks of how much has been achieved during the past
century and how far the distance to equality was in each of their
experiences. Indeed, the entry of women into scientific careers, as
more than an anomaly, is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Just a century ago women were barred from seeking degrees and
advanced training in the sciences in most universities in Europe. In
their youth, during the late nineteenth century, Marie Curie and Lise
Meitner received some of their training in so-called ‘flying
universities’ through courses offered in the living rooms of homes by
sympathetic male academics (Quinn, 1995). Other, less sympathetic,
men believing that women’s nature fitted them mainly for family
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and home, accepted female candidates only under exceptional
circumstances, and still others, not at all.
When Lise Meitner emigrated to Germany from Austria to pursue a
scientific career, she received financial support from her family that
made it possible for her to pursue advanced studies. To Max Planck, the
doyen of German physics in the late nineteenth century, Lise Meitner
appeared to be one of those exceptional women and he allowed her into
his advanced courses and, most importantly, his laboratory, a training
experience that an improvised university could not provide (Sime,
1996).
During the nineteenth century women could attend German
universities only as unmatriculated auditors. Baden was the first
German state to open its universities to women in 1900. Prussia, where
Lise Meitner aspired to follow her vocation for physics in Berlin,
followed in 1908 and was by no means the last. Perhaps ironically, in
the eighteenth century many laboratories, especially in chemistry, had
been in kitchens in the home and thus more accessible to women’s
participation (Abir-Am and Outram, 1986).
The professionalization of the sciences and their incorporation into
the universities during the nineteenth century placed the increasingly
technologically sophisticated experimental sciences beyond the reach
of most interested women. It was not until the 1970s that female access
to the laboratory bench again reached the level that it had attained in
the eighteenth century, a less institutionalized era in the sciences
when upper-class women, at least, had open access to scientific work
through their family and social connections (Gabor, 1995). Although
women gained formal access to university-level scientific education in
the late nineteenth century, informal barriers have persisted into the
twenty-first century.
Such barriers are not so obvious as the rule that, even when she
attained a research position, restricted Lise Meitner’s presence at the
Chemistry Institute in Berlin to a makeshift basement laboratory.
Despite exclusion from the other laboratories and meeting places of
her erstwhile colleagues, Meitner informally guided the investigations
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of male peers such as Otto Hahn through the force of her theoretical
insight, combined with careful experimentation. Hitler’s persecution
finally drove her from her laboratory at virtually the last moment that a
person of Jewish background could openly escape from Nazi Germany.
Nevertheless, through clandestine contacts, she continued to advise
her former colleagues on their research program. Always careful to
soothe the male ego, Meitner negotiated a precarious path in German
science, contributing at the highest level but receiving recognition at a
somewhat lower level than her accomplishments warranted.
Meitner remained an outsider all her life, perhaps most poignantly
during her years in Sweden, which provided a haven from Nazi
persecution. Although she had a post at a research institute, she lacked
access to support staff and research resources. Excluded from the Nobel
Prize for the work she did with Hahn, Meitner received fuller
recognition only late in life in the form of an Institute named jointly for
her and Hahn, several individual scientific awards and a street named
after her in Berlin. Nevertheless, she has perhaps only received full
recompense from Ruth Sime, her excellent biographer (1996).
Despite the difficulties she encountered, Meitner was the key person
in a leading German research center for much of her work life. Nazi
persecution, and the war that marginalized Meitner, ironically brought
another female scientist to the forefront. Until very late in her
professional life, Maria Goeppert Mayer (later a Nobel prizewinner)
pursued an outsider career even more on the margins of U.S. academia
than Meitner’s place in the German research system. Maria Goeppert
grew up in an academic family in Göttingen and, when she showed an
aptitude for physics, had access to leading scientific figures in the
community such as Max Born who became her mentor. Nevertheless,
when she married Joe Mayer, an American chemist, and moved to the
United States in the early 1930s, her Ph.D. and advanced knowledge of
theoretical physics only landed her an unpaid position in the physics
department at her husband’s university.
With his support and encouragement she was able to pursue a
research career at the margins of Johns Hopkins University and then at
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the universities of Columbia and Chicago (Gabor, 1995). The war-time
emergency that drew many women into the workforce also opened up a
place for Goeppert Mayer in the Manhattan project, where her previous
research meshed with the needs of the crash-program to develop the
atom bomb. Until 1959, on the eve of receiving the Nobel Prize, when
she left the University of Chicago with her husband to move to the
University of California at San Diego, she held no full-time, fully
remunerated academic position. She wanted nothing more than to be
‘one of the boys,’ fully accepted in scientific conversation.
To a great extent she achieved that goal. In discussions in the early
1950s with Enrico Fermi, the Italian physicist then at the University of
Chicago, he encouraged her to formulate her ideas and set forth a claim
to scientific recognition for her elucidation of the structure of the
nucleus. Although she was granted a full academic position only late in
life, Mayer can be seen as the prototypical traditional woman scientist,
devoted to her work to the virtual exclusion of all other aspects of life.
Only through far superior work could she be recognized as an equal.
Mayer’s later career coincided with the beginning of the opening up
of academic science to women’s participation, often through pressures
from the Equal Employment Opportunities process. Despite formal,
tenured positions achieved by a growing minority of women, the way
the world of academic science works still marginalizes women.
Nepotism rules that prohibited universities from hiring husbands and
wives were only the most overt of the many social and cultural
restrictions on women’s full participation in academic science.
Nepotism rules are gone but reminders that science is a man’s world
persist even as women strive to make it their own.
In the early post-war era, when a London college’s common rooms
were still sex-segregated, men could take advantage of scientific
women and get away with it by disparaging their femininity. This is
how James Watson treated Rosalind Franklin in his autobiographical
account, The Double Helix. Franklin concentrated on developing a
data base of X-ray crystallography photographs to elucidate the
structure of DNA but was reluctant to specify a structure until she
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could be confident of her results.
James Watson and his colleague Francis Crick were more willing to
put forth speculative hypotheses but they needed access to her data to
guide their model building efforts. Watson attempted to wheedle out
the necessary information from her without offering collaboration and
joint publication, the overt coin of the scientific realm. Rosalind
Franklin, the co-discoverer of the chemical composition of DNA,
relatively unacknowledged by her male peers and unavoidably passed
over by the Nobel Prize committee, owing to her untimely death, had
to wait for recognition from her biographer, Ann Sayre.
Rachel Carson, the biologist and author of Silent Spring, was widely
recognized during her lifetime. However, her fame did not derive from
research findings, in the traditional sense, but rather from analytical
and literary accomplishments. Carson drew together and synthesized a
broad body of evidence on the deleterious effects of chemical
production processes and their effluents on the natural environment
and human health. Indeed, Carson’s own research career was stunted
by the social environment of advanced academic science that made it
difficult for a woman to find a Ph.D. advisor and be taken seriously as a
scholar.
Despite her mother’s unstinting encouragement and the availability
of a female academic scientist (who herself experienced great
difficulties in her research career) as a role model during her
undergraduate years, Carson was precluded from a conventional
research career by the obstacles she encountered as a graduate student
at Johns Hopkins University during the 1920s. Instead, as is still the
case for many women who wish to pursue scientific careers, she found
a job at the outskirts of conventional science, in her case in a
government bureau as a writer of pamphlets on ecology and wildlife.
Collecting the data for her writing projects through field trips and
personal observation as well as from sources among a wide variety of
researchers, provided the basis for her evocative and precise depictions
of The Sea Around Us and other ecological themes that combined
metaphorical insight and scientific acuity (Lear, 1997). Perhaps
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ironically, Carson’s career on the periphery of science has become an
exemplar of a new type of scientific career that emphasizes the
relationship between science and society, rather than the traditional
pursuit of research in isolation from its uses (Tobias and Birer, 1998).
Science writing, research management, technology transfer and
science policy analysis are becoming careers in their own right rather
than offshoots of research career lines. As science becomes more
important to the political and economic spheres, the career lines that
embody these intersections become less exceptional and more
important. If traditional practices hold, however, one indicator of the
increasing acceptance of such occupational endeavors will be their
being taken up by an increasing number of men as well as women. If
traditional discriminatory practices persist, the removal of women as
leaders, if not practitioners, of these occupations, is also likely to take
place.
UNSUNG HEROINES AND INVISIBLE BATTLES
Female scientists often told us, in interviews, about the obstacles that
women encounter as they pursue their scientific callings. Academic
practices, presumed to be meritocratic and gender-free, often work
against women’s professional success. These effects are sometimes
hidden behind a neutral or even positive facade erected on the
publicized achievements of a few exceptional women, some of whom
deny the existence of obstacles in their path. Other women are
unaware that they have been singled out for negative treatment while
still others are all too cognisant but are also wary of challenging unfair
practices for fear of reprisal.
Sex-role stereotyping sometimes colors advisor–advisee relation-
ships. There are hidden obstacles, such as the length of the tenure
process or the expectation that faculty members should move between
schools to broaden academic training, which become apparent when a
family or relationship is considered. Overt processes of discrimination
include the sexual separation of scientific labor, with men seen as
more appropriate to pursue the theoretical aspects of disciplines
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(usually mathematical not experimental) and women as more
congruent with the parts of the field related to practice, policy, and the
humanities.
The 1997 Harvey award lecture at Rockefeller University
unintentionally symbolized some of the continuing gender disparities
in science. The Rockefeller ceremony was a typical scientific honorary
event in many ways. On the podium, the award recipient in black tie,
Leroy Hood, the distinguished molecular biologist and professor of
computer studies at the University of Washington, foresaw the union
of the biological and computer sciences, and set forth the scientific,
technological, commercial and health benefits that would issue from
this marriage of disciplines. Curiously, even though Rockefeller
University has a number of female faculty and graduate students, and
the biological sciences have for some decades attracted a steadily
increasing number of women, Dr Hood’s formally attired cohort of
hosts were all men.
Invidious distinctions, such as differences in timing, even appear in
seemingly positive experiences such as the receipt of rewards. When a
woman receives a prestigious fellowship or award, too often it comes
late in her work life when it does not provide the same career boost as it
would have at an earlier stage.
Cultural traits that are helpful to the conduct of science as well as
those that are discriminatory must be disentangled from their origins
in order to create a gender-neutral scientific role and workplace. The
sexual separation of labor, the association of certain occupational
specialties with one gender or the other strongly persists in most
societies.
Perhaps ironically, the gender associated with a particular field may
reverse, suggesting that the association is hardly inevitable. For
example, nursing, a male occupation well into the nineteenth century,
had become a largely female field not long into the twentieth century.
The profession also, along the way, acquired the presumption of
‘natural’ association with the traditional feminine trait of nurturance.
Those males who continued to enter the profession disproportionately
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assumed high-level positions, reflecting the continuing association of
traditional male characteristics with leadership (Etzkowitz, 1971).
ECONOMIC AND STRUCTURAL BARRIERS
The state of the economy also affects conditions of entry and retention
of women in science. Barriers to entry in industry and academia fall
most easily under conditions of expansion and prove more intractable
under conditions of recession. In the United States, Finland, and
Portugal, women gained an increased proportion of R&D (research and
development) positions during the post-war expansion of the sciences
(Ruivo, 1987) On the other hand, when the expansionary period ended
in Finland in 1983, it became more difficult for women, relative to
men, to obtain posts in academic science. During such periods of
increased competition, ‘informal discriminatory practices and
attitudes...’ take hold with renewed strength (Luukkonen-Gronow,
1987: 196).
The renewal of discriminatory practices under harsh economic
conditions can best be avoided if enough women have attained
decision-making positions in science and technology workplaces by
the time the downturn occurs. Otherwise, a disproportionate number
of women ‘... will lose their positions . . . unless preventive measures
are devised’ (Ruivo, 1987:390). Even when they retain their positions, a
disproportionate number of women are to be found on the lower rungs
of the job ladder in many scientific and engineering organizations.
OVERCOMING RESISTANCE TO WOMEN IN SCIENCE
Despite often having to put up a brave front in order to gain acceptance
from their male peers, successful women scientists as well as other
female professionals are becoming more willing to acknowledge the
greater burden that they carry as women, and to seek changes in career
structures and work styles. In an era of financial stringency and
increased research competitiveness, change is made more difficult by
pressures to obtain grants and lengthen one’s list of publications. On
the other hand, the struggle for equality is eased somewhat by allies
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among younger male scientists seeking some of the same reforms, to
allow a better balance between their personal and professional lives.
Women scientists and academics, individually and collectively, are
taking a more aggressive approach to redressing the imbalances
between male and female participation, especially at the upper reaches
of academia. Several generations of alumni of Radcliffe College are
engaged in an organized effort to get the administration of Harvard
University to increase the extremely low numbers of women with
higher-level academic appointments at the university, including in the
sciences. They have established an escrow fund to encourage donors to
put their gifts on hold until progress is made.
The technical advisor to this effort is Dr Lily Hornig, a physicist and
long-term activist on behalf of women in science. The perpetuation of
gender-linked work roles and the continuing low rate of participation
of women in many scientific disciplines appears to contradict one of
the accepted standards of science: the norm of ‘universalism’, or in
other words, the principle that scientific careers are open to all who
have talent. The norm of universalism, formulated by sociologist
Robert K. Merton, is that the acceptance or rejection of claims should
not be based upon ‘the personal or social attributes of their
protagonists’ (1973 [1942]: 270). It suggests that although science has
traditionally been a male-dominated profession, it is not inherently so.
Moreover, by excluding persons of talent, as Merton argues in his
analysis of the scientific profession in Nazi Germany, science is
diminished by a ‘racialist purge’ (Merton, 1973 [1938]: 255). Although
not as immediately striking as the elimination of Jewish scientists
from German universities in the 1930s, the long-term relative
exclusion of women has had a similar hampering effect on the conduct
of science.
An earlier body of research identified as fallacious the notion that
advancing age inevitably inhibited high-quality scientific work
(Merton and Zuckerman, 1976). Unwarranted presumptions that
youth was associated with high scientific achievement had served to
justify extreme work pressures in early career stages. These unduly
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heightened expectations for early achievement have had unintended
consequences on women’s participation in science, given their
coincidence with child-bearing years. Nevertheless, the implications
of this earlier research for the structure of scientific careers, and the
leeway for possible restructuring, has yet to be taken fully into
account. We view these issues as ‘critical transitions,’ a series of overt
and covert points in the life course when individuals are either
propelled forward to careers in science or deflected away.
THE CONFLICT BETWEEN THE PERSONAL AND THE
PROFESSIONAL
During their early childhood years, boys and girls develop different
gendered images of scientists and what they do. Despite some early
negative perceptions, large numbers of girls express interest in science
and many follow up this interest through coursework and extra-
curricular activities, often with the encouragement of teachers and
parents. When they enter U.S. universities young women are dis-
proportionately removed from science and engineering majors by a
harsh ‘weed-out’ system designed to test the mettle of young males,
well socialized in the norms of competition. Nevertheless, some
women, looking back, report a positive experience of being mentored
as undergraduates.
Despite the increased entry of women into science, opposition to
their full participation continues. Implicitly ‘male’ standards of
behavior permeate scientific time and space, including a belief that a
researcher is most productive when their time is devoted to
investigation to the virtual exclusion of all other aspects of life.
Ironically, the personal qualities required for success in science may
be changing. Sociability, a trait traditionally associated with women,
has also been found to be conducive to success in science, especially as
the individual researcher is supplanted by group research, and
multiple-authored publications become the norm. Perhaps, in the
future, female socialization will become a career advantage in the
scientific and engineering professions.
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At present, female social attributes are a disadvantage that is
exacerbated by competitive norms. While scientific training is an
arduous process for all, our research and that of others suggests that
women who aspire to scientific careers face barriers that do not equally
exist for men and that equal success results only from truly heroic
efforts (Abir-Am and Outram, 1987).
A letter to the editor of The New York Times entitled ‘Science is for
Childless Women’ (May 17, 1995) exemplifies the persisting dilemma
of women in science. The writer, Stephanie Dimant, identified herself
as ‘... one of those women who “leaked out of the pipeline”’. She
cited the difficulty of reconciling the hours required of a bench
scientist with the demands of raising a family. In a fast-paced, high-
pressured environment, traditional solutions such as withdrawing
from research for several years to raise a family and returning later were
‘so unrealistic as to be comical.’
In bench science, ‘ . . . no second prizes are awarded, and the
economic situation demands unrelenting writing of grant applications
and publication of results.’ Diment could not think of anyone she
knew who had taken the extended leave option and who later returned
to the academic track. Female scientists who made the decision to
combine an academic career with raising a family typically took only
the briefest time off for having a baby and then spent their limited
maternity leave ‘ . . . with an infant in one hand and a telephone
connected to the lab in the other.’ Nor will there be many protests:
given the stringency of research funding and the paucity of academic
jobs, women do not want to be labelled as ‘lame ducks’.
Nevertheless, given the pressures on women, including those that
force the lower-paid spouse (rarely a man) to assume primary
responsibility for child care, ‘It is not surprising that many eventually
make a heart-wrenching decision to leave bench science to those who
have no children or to those who are fortunate to have that
acknowledged asset, a wife.’ Despite these obstacles, some women
with children attain the highest levels of scientific achievement and
recognition.
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However, the price of success appears to be significantly related to
each woman’s ability to adapt to the highly competitive milieu of
science. Dr Shirley Tilghman, director of a ‘large and wildly successful’
laboratory at the Howard Hughes Institute of Princeton University,
concluded, ‘Maybe it’s because I’ve been in science so long that
competition just seems like life. Maybe I’ve just given up.’ A
competitive sports enthusiast as a child, Dr Tilghman, a Canadian
citizen and a recently elected foreign associate of the U.S. National
Academy of Sciences, was featured in an article in The New York
Times ‘Fighting and Studying the Battle of the Sexes With Mice and
Men.’
The article discusses Dr Tilghman’s research on genetic imprinting,
her experience as a mother and her concerns about the future of women
in science. She is described as having ‘jury rigged the pieces of her life by
being almost preternaturally organised and focused, as well as
spiritedly fierce in her work’, in contrast to many women who draw
back when criticized. Although she raised her two children as a single
parent for most of their childhood, the article did not detail the child-
care arrangements that made this possible.
Her own female graduate students were highly skeptical of their
ability to follow her example, fearing, like Ms Dimant, that they would
be forced to choose between science and motherhood. The students
told Tilghman, ‘Don’t tell me about your experience. Your experience
has no bearing on me.’ They feared the time pressures of a highly
competitive research funding system as well as the accepted belief that
constant presence in the laboratory is a prerequisite for scientific
success. Is there a one-to-one relationship between time put in and
results achieved? Dr Tilghman attempted to reassure her students that
‘[h]ow one does in science is really dependent on your creativity and
originality, and not how many mini-preps you can do in a 24-hour
period’, but the students were not convinced.
Unsure that this assessment applied to them, the students believed
that the grant environment, now more competitive than their mentor
had faced as a young scientist, inevitably increased the time that had to
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be devoted to a scientific career. Although a competitive environment
also affects men, increased time pressures have additional effects on
women. Thus, even this notable success story of a woman’s
achievements at the highest levels illustrates the persisting dilemma
of women in science. This dilemma has its roots in the earliest years of
childhood, and our next chapter focuses on how gender socialization
affects the entry of girls and boys into scientific careers.
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3Gender, sex and science
The strong effect of culturally defined gender roles persists in science
and other traditionally male professions through the social meanings
attached to gender. Rather than a fluid perspective of human attributes
that can be held by members of either sex, behavioral characteristics
are frequently presumed to be innate and immutably ‘masculine’ or
‘feminine’ in the same way as one’s biology.
The thesis that science is masculine, with ‘masculine’ understood as
a cultural rather than as a biological term, ties issues of women in
science to broader questions of gender roles and how they are culturally
defined and transmitted from birth (Ruskai, 1990; Hyde, 1994). As
Howell (private communication) points out, ‘Sex, which is concrete
and universal, specifies no role whatsoever.’ Rather, it is cultural
prescriptions and proscriptions, delineating which behaviors are
appropriate to one sex and not the other, that creates the ‘psychological
meaning’ of what it is to be male and female.
Thus gender as a concept was created to understand ‘the social
quality of distinctions between the sexes . . . for the explicit purpose of
creating a space in which socially mediated differences can be explored
apart from biological differences’ (Hare-Mustin and Maracek, 1988).
However, the concepts of sex and gender become easily entwined and
socialization becomes confused with biology. Taking this a step
further, ‘... it would be illogical to say that being male or female
would, in itself, make someone a good or bad scientist. Yet this kind of
statement is often made.’ (Howell, private communication). Negative
stereotypes persist. The images of the role of women in science may be
slightly more positive, but they have not been radically reshaped.
As the role of women has shifted to meet both society’s needs and
their own, some mothers and fathers relate to their daughters

differently than in the past. They convey possibilities and expectations
that transcend traditional role designations. Many of the young
women whom we have interviewed over the course of the past decade
not only report that it was their father who encouraged them to attain
the Ph.D. in a science discipline, but credit their male advisors for
sensitivity to gender inequities and their strategic assistance in helping
them move forward. Individuals who encourage an interest in science
need not belong to a particular sex or be a member of the family. What is
essential is either a broad, flexible and encompassing vision of gender
that incorporates non-traditional occupations or, paradoxically, a
definition of gender in which it is viewed as irrelevant to vocational
choice. The following discussion illustrates how far we are from this
goal.
GENDERED CHOICES
The gender roles that children internalize influence which sex will
choose to do science as well as who will have the best chances for
scientific success. Blatant discrimination may be a thing of the past,
but culturally generated gender beliefs play a significant role in leading
children toward or away from an interest in science. Perhaps the most
effective covert barrier to women is the simplistic idea that science is
men’s work and that women cannot make good researchers. The
erroneous view of biological sex and gender as one and the same has led
to the association of the male with the scientific role in western
culture: science, like the Church, has been viewed as a ‘world without
women’ (Noble, 1992). In most of this book we explore the conditions
faced by women already in science. In this chapter we discuss the forces
that work to divert females away from scientific careers from the
earliest years of childhood through adolescence.
Differences between boys and girls appear at an early age as part of
the social creation of the ‘self’. As classically formulated by
philosopher George Herbert Mead (1934), the child learns to ‘take the
role of the other’ in play and other social relations. The self is thus
constituted through a reflexive interplay of mirroring events. In the
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words of classical sociologist Charles Horton Cooley, the self is a
‘looking glass self.’ Much of our fate thus depends upon what other
people think of us and how we respond to them. Children are
influenced by the appraisals of others and respond according to those
appraisals. If the information received is restrictive, whether based on
race, sex or any other variable, there will be loss of human potential.
Too frequently experiences for females are constricted through a
process in which gender differences are recast into gender stereotypes.
Messages from those close to the child are especially influential in
initially shaping a self-concept. As the influence of the child’s family
decreases, peers, authority figures, and culture as interpreted through
the media, perpetuate the transmission of ideals of masculinity and
femininity (Ortmeyer, 1988). The curiosity of infants and young
children creates for them energy and excitement as they interact and
are drawn to novelty in their environment.
However, if experiences are foreclosed and the child’s world
becomes constrained by what is seen to be appropriate to that sex, the
child not only tends to abandon socially unacceptable interests, but
comes to fearfully avoid that which is unfamiliar (Schachtel, 1959).
Such a self-limiting process is exemplified in the historically high
proportion of girls who lose interest in how the natural world works.
When socialization impedes the individual’s fulfillment of his or her
potentiality, society as well as the individual loses.
VERY YOUNG CHILDREN
’
S CONCEPT OF THE SCIENTIST
Given the forces that push girls and boys apart, is there an inevitable
dichotomy between the female and the male; the female and the
scientist? A sample of fifty-three children from Southeastern
Montessori School, ages two to six, were interviewed to analyze the
emergence of gender differences in the perception of the scientist in
early childhood. The middle-class school composition promised the
optimal probability for a child’s acquaintance with scientists and/or
representations of science. A table contained four photographs (from
the covers of Chemical and Engineering News) of male and female
GENDER
,
SEX AND SCIENCE
33

scientists. The interviewer asked each child to tell her about the
pictures: ‘Who do you think these people are?’ ‘What are they doing?’
‘How do you feel about them?’
Preliminary data that we have collected suggests that sex-typing
persists and appears to become more evident the older the child. For
some boys, science was seen as an activity that males, but not females,
should take seriously. A typical response was that of a four-year-old
boy who said, ‘ . . . only boys should make science.’ The strength of the
male identification with technology was also indicated by a boy who
referred to a picture of a woman at a computer as ‘he’. Yet in several
instances rigid classifications by sex appeared to be less fixed as some of
the children were able to identify both sexes with the role of the
scientist. A four-year-old boy recognized a female scientist in the
pictures and described her work thus, ‘That one looks like a doctor.’
‘She’s working.’ ‘Something in a science. She’s looking. Doing gravity.
Making things fly. Someone who makes things we never saw before.
With machines.’
In addition to discerning gender differences among very young
children in their image of the scientist, the objective of this investi-
gation was to identify discrepancies between their perception of the
role of scientist and the child’s view of themself. Boys were more likely
to see themselves like the scientist, engaged in ‘serious’ behavior.
Boys, in general, were more negative in their views of women
scientists than girls. Moreover, the older boys in the sample (ages five
to six) were increasingly less likely to see girls as possible future
scientists. One said, ‘My sister Amanda wouldn’t like to do this; she’s
really into Barbie dolls.’ When, as part of the survey, the children were
asked to draw scientists, more of the girls who drew women scientists
did so in their second drawings. This suggests that even where the
image of a woman scientist is held, it may be considered ‘not quite
right’ and be presented only after the first, more acceptable picture of
the male scientist has been recorded.
These perceptions and self-concepts illustrate the notion of the
construction of gender schema (Bem, 1983), a highly selective process
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comprising ‘a sprawling network of associations’ in which information
is taken in and organized according to the sex-differentiated values of
the culture. A schema functions as a cognitive structure, serving to
anticipate and make sense of new information coming in based on pre-
existing perceptions. For instance, boys and girls at age two had
‘concepts’ of persons by occupation only if they had previous exposure
to people holding the particular role. None of the two-year-olds were
able to identify ‘scientists’, but those youngsters whose parents were
expecting babies understood the notion of ‘doctor’ and thus applied
this familiar concept based on the white lab coat. In other words, the
young child’s perceptions are not always dictated by a concrete
situation. In this same way, the child learns to link attributes with
their own sex or the sex of others. The perception of gender does not
depend on the actual situation, but rather on organizing information
that makes sense of novelty.
Two-year-olds without expected siblings, and therefore less
exposure to doctor visits, were consistent with Piagetian develop-
mental theory. When a child said, ‘I don’t know this person’, it
indicated that there were no available mental concepts whatsoever
which reflected the attributes in the photograph. Therefore the child
could make no interpretation of the photograph.
However, children above the age of three could identify scientific
and medical occupational roles and had begun to link occupations with
sex based on their knowledge of their family and the outside world. A
three-year-old girl said, ‘That’s a man doctor,’ while a three-year-old
boy identified another picture as ‘a big girl doctor with a cigarette.’
A six-year-old boy said, ‘My daddy’s a builder; my mom’s a scientist,
but she’s a student.’ On the other hand, although a three-year-old girl
recognized and characterized the activity, she did not attribute the
activity to the woman in the photographs, only the man: ‘Someone is
working hard. He’s a scientist because he is doing science stuff.’ By age
three to six, not only were most children in the sample familiar enough
with the concept of the scientist to correctly identify the pictures, but
they had begun to generalize sentiments and meanings across
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35

situations, demonstrating how at this early age information is encoded
and organized according to cultural definitions of what is masculine
and feminine (Bem, 1983).
In responding to the pictures, girls tended to see doctors while boys
saw scientists. Showing the power of popular culture on gender images,
one six-year-old male associated the images in the pictures taken from
Chemical and Engineering News with similar images seen on
television: ‘They’re called scientist[s]. I know that because of a cartoon
that does [the] same thing he does.’ Possibly boys are more frequently
exposed to science in the media, games and toys, whereas girls
apprehend the physician’s role through their own increasing
encounters with women doctors. When queried, girls more often
identified the scientists as doctors, possibly because more
obstetricians and pediatricians are now frequently women, chosen by
other women rather than male doctors.
Young girls then not only learn about doctors in relation to female
reproduction, but may experience this specialty as gender-neutral or
women-friendly. Certainly it supports Bem’s suggestion that gender
schematic processing is dependent upon the social context and is a
‘learned phenomenon and, hence, neither inevitable or unmodifiable.’
Indeed, some boys draw similar androgynous conclusions especially
when their mother holds a non-traditional occupational role. Thus, a
three-year-old boy said, ‘My mom’s a doctor. [The person in the picture
is] a doctor because he has a thing on his coat.’
Despite the persistence of sex-typing, there were indicators of
change. For instance, a four-year-old girl demonstrated a working sense
of the disciplinary order and division of labor in science. She said,
‘Doctors fix people. A scientist checks things. I only want to be a
veterinarian’, and a four-year-old boy used clothing, not sex, as the
identifying marker: ‘Scientists! The clothes look like scientists.’
Lastly, a six-year-old boy could identify researchers with a purely
operational definition of the scientific method, notably gender-free,
‘These are scientists. They’re working really hard with experimenting
to see if something does it or not. That’s figuring out what do.’
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Adults who provide a neutralizing message serve to counteract
stereotypical notions of gender pervasive in the larger society. For
example, a six-year-old female at Southeastern Montessori School told
her interviewer ‘I would like to do science. My mom gives me kits some-
times. A scientist is somebody who creates things. I like computers.’
Although science was still linked to notions of gender by a number of
the youngsters, some shift in traditional gendered associations of the
scientific role can be inferred from the responses of others.
GENDER DIFFERENCES IN THE EARLY YEARS
The notion of clear-cut sex differences in the way newborns behave has
not been borne out. In repeated studies girls could not be distinguished
from boys without seeing physical differences. In those few studies
where subtle behavioral differences were discerned, they were deemed
moderate at best and were observed to diminish, disappear or be
heightened based on the social context. The majority of studies have
found that for parents, the sex of a newborn is a ‘central organizer, a
potent description of who the newborn baby is’ (Tronick and Adamson,
1980). From infancy, boys and girls receive divergent messages from
adults. Both Block (1984) and Hoffman (1977), in their studies of child-
rearing practices, found parents encouraged their sons to actively
explore the physical world, emphasized achievement, competition,
and self-reliance, and felt it was important they try new things. In
contrast, daughters were expected to be ‘kind, unselfish, attractive,
loving and well mannered [and grew] up in a more structured and
directive world than males’ (Block, 1984).
With few exceptions, these studies reflect how adult reactions to
babies based on presumed sex perpetuate cultural beliefs about
masculinity and femininity. Beginning in infancy, adults speak to and
touch girls and boys differently. Sex-typed toys are offered by both
parents with ‘boy toys’ providing more active physical manipulation
and feedback from the physical world. In general, boys are given more
freedom and less supervision, while girls are interrupted more
frequently by their parents, particularly fathers.
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37

Researchers alternated between dressing the same baby in pink and
calling her Beth or dressing her in blue and calling her Adam. The
adults who played with ‘her’ or ‘him’ noted that Beth was ‘feminine and
sweet’ and Adam was ‘sturdy and vigorous’ (Will, Self and Datan,
1976). In a similar study, subjects were shown a videotape of a nine-
month-old baby playing with a jack-in-the-box. When the baby was
said to be a girl, her response was called fear; when a boy, anger (Condry
and Condry, 1976) When a researcher told subjects that her new baby
was a girl they responded with coos about ‘how sweet she is’. When
others were told that the baby was a boy, they said he was ‘big and
strapping’. In yet another study, parents were given a fourteen-month-
old with whom to play. When designated a boy, ‘he’ was encouraged in
active play with typically masculine toys. As a girl, ‘she’ received more
nurturance and cuddling. In each instance, parental attitudes were
projected onto the baby, depending upon the sex label, once again
demonstrating the thesis of sociologist W.I. Thomas that ‘a social
situation is real if it is real in its consequences.’
These unconscious parental behaviors create an underlying ‘gender
awareness’ during early childhood in which the world becomes
categorized into mutually exclusive classifications (Condry, 1984).
Gender roles come to be perceived as ‘all or nothing’ categories leading
to prescriptions that scientists are men and secretaries are women. A
female child may therefore believe that she cannot be a scientist even
if she would like to because she is of the wrong sex (Kohlberg, 1966).
This sex-typing process frequently continues with all authority
relationships as the child’s social world expands. However, the
broadening of experience can sometimes provide the possibility for
new influences which serve to enhance a child’s self-concept when
early familial experiences may have been rigid and stifling.
STEREOTYPING OF SCIENCE IN THE
PRIMARY SCHOOL YEARS
Among the many forces working against women’s participation in
science is the masculine image of the scientific role that frequently has
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taken hold by primary school. This is often followed by neglect and/or
discouragement of girls from doing mathematics in secondary school
in concert with parental (and particularly maternal) perceptions of
mathematics as difficult and non-essential for their daughters (Eccles
and Jacobs, 1986). Moreover, conformity to stereotypes is frequently,
but subtly, encouraged by educators and other authority figures. By
puberty, these cumulative cultural messages are reinforced by the
powerful need for peer approval and acceptance.
Unless the child is exposed to a wider range of possibilities, they may
come to see gender-determined life choices as mutually exclusive and
exhaustive. It is notable that both brighter girls and boys have come
from family environments which were responsive to all aspects of the
child’s personality. Optimal performance was reported when children
of each sex were encouraged to take the role of the other. Girls were free
to actively explore and were ‘encouraged to fend for themselves’ while
boys had received ongoing ‘maternal warmth and protection’
(Maccoby, 1966). However, once in school, many female children who
have had a wholesome beginning in which they were relatively free to
explore all aspects of themselves may now experience an erosion of the
self based on stereotyped demands of teachers.
Enlightened parents may feel helpless in counteracting ubiquitous
sexual stereotyping once their daughter enters school and other social
situations outside the home. The recent dismay of dynamic classroom
teachers who had allowed their interactions with students to be
videotaped underscores the unconscious pull of stereotypical sex-
typing behaviors even by educators who thought they were self-aware.
As had been found in earlier studies, the teachers observed themselves
calling on boys more frequently, providing extended conversation,
information and help. On the other hand, because girls were less vocal
and more cooperative, teachers were less likely to notice them or
reward their talents, appreciating the girls’ compliance in large
classroom settings which they had to control.
A longitudinal study, over a 25-year period, found that girls were
eight times less likely to call out comments, but when they did were
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39

reminded to raise their hands. In contrast, teachers responded to the
typically rowdier and more assertive behavior of boys. Thus highly
intelligent young girls often give up their own assertiveness and risk-
taking behavior in order to earn their teacher’s acceptance, fulfilling
the social virtues of selflessness and cooperation (Sadker and Sadker,
1994).
By treating boys and girls differently, teachers encouraged
‘the exploratory, autonomous, independent mathematical skills
associated with males . . .’ and discouraged them in females (Birns,
1976). Similarly, teachers gave extra attention to boys who chose to
play at more complex tasks, but did not reward girls for the same
behavior (Fagot, 1978). In addition, girls received few rewards for highly
active behavior, whereas boys gained the attention of their teachers
and also the admiration of their peers. While compliance may provide
some rewards, it does so at a cost to development. Paradoxically,
behaving like the boys can bring with it severe penalties, including
adult reprimand and peer ostracism.
Significantly, teacher attention favors those attributes considered as
male. Boys frequently succeed in gaining attention by using negative
and inappropriate behavior, while less aggressive but more appropriate
expressive bids by girls are often ignored (Block, 1984). Thus many
teachers unconsciously reward compliance and cooperation from girls,
while encouraging or condoning a highly competitive style of
interacting for boys. At its most virulent, competitive ‘putting others
down’ can become a pervasive part of personal interactions within the
classroom. Not surprisingly, it is these very kinds of behavior on the
part of adult male peers that have been identified by female Ph.D.
candidates as disturbing and alienating.
Since boys have generally been previously exposed to manipulative
toys, such as construction sets and models, they enter science classes
with more confidence based on these earlier experiences. Moreover,
the teacher’s interactions with students influence children’s
perception of their own ability to do science. Not only are interactions
more frequent with boys, but science experiments are often segregated
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into all-girl and all-boy groups with the boys receiving more attention,
or if in integrated groups, the girls often watch the boys do the
experiments (Wellesley College Center, 1992).
A learning environment that emphasizes experimentation, self-
motivated exploration and inquiry is often an unfamiliar experience
for girls, given ‘the more structured, supervised, prescribed and
proscribed world of girlhood as compared to boyhood’ (Block, 1984).
Thus rather than having a lack of interest in science, girls may tend to
avoid the lack of structure in science laboratories where their anxiety
would be higher than that of boys. In contrast to this kind of early
experience, our studies indicate that women Ph.D. candidates
frequently identify a particular high school science teacher who was
attuned and responsive to their interest and inherent competencies,
ultimately assisting in the development of independent exploration.
On a deeper level, these socializing processes may also account for
later differences in the cognitive strategies used by girls and boys. In
their more highly structured play and learning environments, girls use
‘assimilative strategies’ for adapting (that is, they tend to fit new
information or experiences into their pre-existing cognitive ways of
understanding) and are discouraged from engaging in more anxiety-
provoking innovative efforts (Block, 1984). In contrast, where boys
have been encouraged to explore ‘a less predictable world . . . success in
inventive ad hoc solutions would be expected to benefit boys’ self-
confidence’ and the freedom to take risks. Along these lines, women
graduate students in our studies, comparing themselves to male peers,
reported feeling ‘less able to take risks.’ However, their prior
educational successes and continued positive movement through the
pipeline appear to reflect the importance of women’s programs, as well
as past and current mentors who created and continue to provide
learning and social experiences free of gender-laden constraints.
Thus, gender differences become significant when masculine and
feminine are defined in terms of narrow cultural norms, some of which
are peculiar to American society. These norms set up a supposed
contradiction between the traditional notion of ‘scientific values’ and
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41

what are considered feminine characteristics. Once they have
identified themselves as males or females, girls and boys then want to
adopt the behaviors consistent with their newly discovered status.
This process of socialization results in children forming a conception
of maleness and femaleness, revolving about such highly visible traits
as hair style, dress, and occupation. They then use these gender images
to organize their behavior and to cultivate attitudes and actions
associated with being a boy or a girl (Kohlberg, 1966)
Although a young girl may have attended the same classes as male
peers, by the time a young woman enters high school, she will not have
had the same educational experience (Eccles and Jacobs,1986). The
cultural message that has predominated has been that active exploration,
the capacity to be competitive, and the opportunity to handle machinery,
play with chemistry sets and operate a computer are exclusively male
activities. Not only are boys pictured prominently on the packaging of
most science and building toys, but even the box of a chemistry set shows
a girl looking on while a boy conducts the experiment. An eighth-grader
described a dream in which she saw herself working for a scientist who
did the experiments while she was left to write the paper. The youngster
ended with, ‘That’s the way it is, right? . . . That’s how we’ll end up, the
girls.’ It is not that most girls will have been directly told that they ‘can’t’
do what boys can. Indeed, most will be encouraged to ‘fulfill their
potential.’ Nevertheless, in various ways many receive veiled messages
of discouragement and denigration (Orenstein, 1994).
DISCOURAGEMENT OF GIRLS
’
INTEREST IN SCIENCE
DURING ADOLESCENCE
One of the primary tasks of adolescence is the further consolidation of
identity. Peers replace adults in importance, and social acceptance has
primacy. The cumulative subtle and covert messages regarding
expectations and perceptions of females eventually influence the sense
of one’s place in the world, feelings of self-worth, and possibilities for
the future. At a time when peer acceptance is crucial, conformity to
stereotypical social roles is heightened. The anticipation of rejection
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by male and female peers in competitive activities may make such
activities too threatening for most young women to undertake,
particularly if such ‘masculine’ behavior contradicts the attitudes of
the popular culture and the family (Block, 1984; Eccles and Jacobs,
1986). Therefore, adolescence is a logical time for the hidden meanings
of gender roles to solidify further and become enacted in school
performance and life choices unless the social milieu strongly
encourages an inclusive ethos free of assumptions about gender.
By the time young women enter college many are not sufficiently
qualified to major in those hard science areas that require a strong
mathematical background, having avoided advanced classes in high
school. Based on the research available and the fact that girls
demonstrate equal mathematical capacity before adolescence, we can
regard this ‘giving up’ of a potential skill as part of the legacy of the days
when women’s attempts at mastering mathematics met with
indifference or overt rejection.
The controversy over differences between males’ and females’
mathematical skills, in concert with the issue of ‘math anxiety’, is of
particular importance in illustrating how gender-appropriate roles
affect later competencies. Nevertheless, an analysis of the results from
numerous studies found no differences between males and females of
any age in ability to understand mathematical concepts (Hyde, 1994).
Gender differences in science achievement do not appear until the
eighth grade; thereafter, strong gender differences in career orientation
emerge, with half as many girls as boys showing interest in
mathematics and science careers (Catsambis, 1994).
Thus, females appear to have the same aptitude for mathematics as
males, but begin to lose interest and take only the minimum
requirement in high school. Based on class grades, girls and boys are
similar in mathematical and scientific ability until about tenth grade
when girls decline to take elective mathematics courses. It is then that
sex differences in problem-solving abilities begin to emerge. The
question is not that of inherent ability, but one of why girls drop out of
mathematics courses in high school and college (Hyde, 1994).
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A 2-year longitudinal study of seventh- through ninth-graders, and
their mathematics teachers and parents, argued that sex differences in
attitudes toward mathematics, as well as achievement, are due to
‘math anxiety’ (Eccles and Jacobs, 1986). The level of anxiety correlates
with the gender-stereotyped beliefs of parents (and particularly
mothers) and the values placed on mathematics by the family.
Students’ attitudes and plans to continue taking mathematics courses
were substantially influenced by parental perception that mathe-
matics was difficult and of little value for their daughters. Thus rather
than grades and performance having direct bearing on girls’ self-
confidence in mathematics, beliefs about their competence and desire
to pursue interests and goals appeared to be strongly influenced by
the parent’s response to their daughter’s grades. In short, prior
performance, even when stellar, was secondary to the response of
significant others. While there is a correlation between teachers’
attitudes and the student’s beliefs, the impact of teachers was not as
strong as the influence of the parents.
There is conflicting evidence over whether the support of the school
or the family is more significant to the minority of young women who
do express an interest in science. Alice Rossi (1965) noted that a young
girl with high intelligence and scientific interests must come from a
very special family situation and must be a far rarer person than the
young boy of high intelligence and scientific interests. On the other
hand, if she reaches adolescence with the same intellectual
inclination, it is often despite her early family or social experiences
rather than because of them. This may reflect why women, when
questioned in college about the background of their science interests,
frequently point to particularly important teachers they had, often as
early as the third or fourth grade, who provided them with new
channels of communication and new expectations. In contrast,
graduate students in our studies frequently cited both parents, and
most often the father, as highly encouraging. Fathers have been found
to be particularly supportive of their daughters’ mathematical abilities
(Eccles and Jacobs, 1986).
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The gap in gender differences in standardized testing and
achievement has narrowed since the early 1980s (Berryman, 1983;
Orenstein, 1994; Hyde 1994). Nevertheless, girls’ historically lower
mathematics scores are typically attributed to biological
characteristics, even a so-called ‘math gene.’ Yet how can biological
differences explain the 50% reduction in this score gap between boys
and girls by 1994 and current near-parity? Girls’ supposedly lesser
‘spatial abilities’ have also improved with increasing exposure to
spatial tasks. If mathematical skills were biologically determined they
would presumably be impervious to such rapid and dramatic shifts.
Another seeming anomaly is the fact that non-Caucasian girls
outperform boys in the highest-level mathematics classes in Hawaii
(Orenstein, 1994). Since most people construct their perceptions of the
world largely in accordance with cultural prescriptions that they take
for granted, ethnic variation within the larger structure speaks to the
influence of subsets, including family attitudes. During the past few
decades there has been increased awareness of the way girls are treated
in mathematics and science classes. Indeed, given the coincidence in
the timing of the change in testing outcomes, even a modest shift in
social attitudes might well be an indirect cause of improved awareness
in how teachers relate to girls.
Nevertheless, it has been argued, perhaps most prominently in an
article in the journal Science, that innate, biological male superiority
was the best explanation for sex differences in standardized testing,
based on the premise that girls and boys received identical training
(Benbow and Stanley, 1980). In contrast to the fathers, mothers’
confidence in their daughters’ mathematical aptitude declined further
in response to the Science article. Given the prestige of the journal and
its prominence within the scientific community, the influence of the
article in adding to pre-existing gender bias in the sciences could be
high, but is still unknown.
Benbow and Stanley’s paper certainly enabled advocates of
‘meritocracy’ to draw the conclusion that females are, in fact,
‘incompetent’ at science and competent at other things. Along these
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45

lines, our own findings indicate that any inference of ‘difference’,
including variation in socialization, opens the floodgates for negative
interpretation of what it means to be female. For instance, graduate
women’s programs, created to mitigate social isolation by building
networks, are frequently interpreted as indicating that women have
special needs. The possibility of different biological influences does
not have to imply that behavior is ‘predetermined’. Instead, biological
propensities may be ‘manifested in behavior in diverse and complex
ways, as organisms are shaped by . . . the environment in which they
must function’ (Block, 1984).
Our concern is how socialization, based on stereotyped sexual
division, appears to restrict the possibilities for girls and women and
has a destructive impact on the sense of self for both sexes. The
consequences of female socialization have a concomitant deleterious
effect for young males as well, in the demand that they ‘maintain the
image of the aggressive, detached, active male’ (Gould, 1978).
Neurological differences between right and left side brain
development, or distinctive identifications and attachment between
mother and daughter, have provided insight into the more verbal,
relational and nurturing characteristics of females (Chodorow, 1978;
Miller, 1976; Gilligan and Brown, 1990). However, qualities of
maleness and femaleness are not rigid and impermeable. Boys and men
have rich capacities for empathy, nurturance and attunement in
relationships just as girls and women have aggressive, active, and
competitive capacities.
Considering gender along lines of difference or non-difference
presents numerous paradoxes with which women in the scientific
community currently struggle. As mentioned above, when differences
are acknowledged, as in graduate women’s programs, females are
negatively construed as the same (in some way needy or deficient) and
not viewed as individuals. Thus, by focusing on difference, this
approach minimizes similarities between males and females while
obfuscating institutional sexism. On the other hand, adherence to a no-
difference model ‘makes man the referent . . . women must aspire to be
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46

as good as men’ (Hare-Mustin and Maracek, 1988). For women
scientists in less hospitable milieus, the no-difference model creates
another paradox in which women must be either ‘better than’ or ‘just
like’ men in order to prove they are equal.
FORECLOSING WOMEN
’
S CHOICE TO DO SCIENCE
By adolescence, gender socialization has affected career plans. The
achievement orientation of the scientist depends on competitive
success. Yet for females, competitive success is often accompanied by
great emotional costs based on family attitudes and their early
experiences in the classroom.
In many ways, women are unable to choose to do science; society has
already chosen who will do science through its construction of gender
roles. There is considerable evidence of the relationship between
the adolescents’ notions of gender-appropriateness and recruitment
to scientific careers (Eiduson and Beckman, 1973; NSF, 1988). The
image of the scientist as eccentric, non-conformist, and lacking in
emotional capacity suggests that the potential recruit must have
certain types of personality characteristics and live a particular
lifestyle.
If the caricature of the scientific personality and lifestyle does not
mesh with the student’s interests, beliefs, and values, she or he is
unlikely to become committed to being a scientist. For women, the
requirements of a college major or pre-college mathematical
preparation are not the only factors when making a career choice
(Barnett, 1978). Rather, women avoid majors in science and
engineering, in part, because they are socially ascribed as ‘men’s jobs.’
Other studies corroborate these findings (Gerson, 1985; Berryman,
1983).
An early study by anthropologist Margaret Mead and Rhoda Metraux
(1957), conducted during the 1950s, identified a negative image of the
scientist among high school students in the U.S. and found that girls,
especially, viewed a scientific career as an inappropriate form of work
for themselves. Girls rejected science as being concerned with things
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rather than people. Moreover, they viewed science as a highly
demanding career that would take them away from their future
husbands and children, an issue which continues to trouble and
impede women scientists today.
More recently, in Norway, strong clashes were found between girls’
values and priorities and their perception of what it means to be a
scientist (Sjoberg, 1988). Indeed, a series of U.S. studies, from the 1950s
through the 1980s, showed that both boys and girls identify the typical
scientist as a man (LaFollette, 1988). On the other hand, a study of
elementary and middle school children in Taiwan found that although
older students were more influenced by stereotypical images
representing scientists as men, female students were three times more
likely than male students to draw female scientists (She, 1995).
A study of the image of the scientist among older primary school
students in Ireland found that girls, but not boys, drew pictures of
female scientists, suggesting that even if the boys did not see science as
an appropriate career for women, some girls, at least, could envision
the possibility (O Maoldomhnaigh and Hunt, 1988) .
Given these disparate and possibly contradictory findings across
cultures, what is not yet known is which aspects of gender remain fixed
and which are more flexible and amenable to change as individuals
mature, particularly as they pertain to the image of the scientist.
American girls’ performance in mathematics and science is still
negatively affected by traditional gender beliefs. In other countries,
particularly in Asia, boys and girls perform equally on mathematics
tests. David Dunn of the University of Texas at Dallas notes, ‘We tend,
both in our family lives and in grade school and high school, to counsel
girls away from math and science.’
By the time young women attend high school and college, they are
frequently viewed as inappropriate persons to become scientists and
engineers. Girls are often given the impression that they will face ‘ . . .
intolerable obstacles, conflicts and handicaps’ (Moulton, 1972), an
understanding that all too accurately reflects the traditional
organization of science.
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4Selective access
INTRODUCTION
Social practices that work against women’s participation in science are
often embedded in a seemingly gender-neutral competitive selection
system. In this chapter we discuss how the normal workings of the U.S.
higher educational system push women out rather than recruiting
them into science and engineering careers. We contrast the workings of
the unofficial ‘weed-out’ system in undergraduate education at large
universities with a ‘reverse weed-out’ system at small colleges that
must recruit students to their science courses in order to maintain
their majors.
The weed-out system
In large universities at the bachelor’s or first degree level, women often
encounter a ‘weed-out’ system of courses based upon a competitive
model that is designed to eliminate unwanted numbers of prospective
students. This system has even worse effects on women than it does on
men. Its encoded meanings, obscure to young women whose education
was grounded in a different system of values, produce feelings of
rejection, discouragement, and lowered self-confidence (Seymour,
1995).
A fortunate few women, after surviving this perilous journey, are
recruited into a smaller scale, supportive version of the graduate
research apprenticeship model. These women had no difficulties
academically as undergraduates, in fact they were usually at the top in
their classes and worked closely with their professors who were often
important researchers. This perhaps explains why virtually all of the
students interviewed in the graduate school samples reported positive
and successful experiences in undergraduate school. Once in graduate

school, many women recall their college experience as having been a
nurturing environment that typically provided them with a mentor (as
advisor, professor, lab director, etc.) who encouraged them to aim for
the Ph.D. Ironically, once in graduate school, women often encounter a
second weed-out system, a harsher, more discouraging, version of the
research model they experienced as undergraduates. Their self-
confidence, so precariously acquired in college, is once again deflated.
Most women who choose to major in science at university have had a
positive high school experience which was one of the factors that
encouraged them to continue. Thus, at each level the system removes
disproportionately large numbers of women from the science career
pipeline while providing a positive experience to a much smaller
number, most of whom are fated to have a discouraging experience at
the next level of their training. It may be said that the system applies to
men as well, but as we shall see, the same strictures affect women
worse than men, given the cultural differences between most women
and men.
The weed-out system sifts large intake classes for intrinsic interest,
talent, and fortitude, while, at the same time, drastically reducing the
classes to a size that departments can handle in the upper division
regardless of variations in the caliber of particular student cohorts.
‘Weed-out’ is a long-established tradition in a number of academic
disciplines, but it is dominant in all science, mathematics and
engineering (SME) majors. It has a semi-legitimate, legendary status
and is part of what gives SME majors their image of hardness. It is thus
an important feature in students’ informal prestige ranking systems,
both for individuals and for majors, disciplines, or sub-specialties.
Weed-out systems are similar to the ‘hazing’ practices of military
academies and fraternities. Although these practices seem archaic
they persist because they serve important functions that are difficult to
achieve by other means. ‘Weed-out’ strategies are perceived as a test for
both ability and character and are the main mechanism by which SME
disciplines seek to find the most able and interested students of all who
enter their introductory SME classes. The system operates in its most
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stringent form in larger, less elite universities, and although it still
exists in elite universities and small colleges, its impact is moderated
by countervailing forces. These forces include, in the one case, the
likely higher class background of the students, and in the other case,
the ability of programs to accommodate a higher proportion of students
at the upper level.
The core of college education is the course, a set of class meetings
held two or three times a week during a semester of fifteen or sixteen
weeks, punctuated and/or concluded by examinations testing
students’ knowledge. The official purpose of a course is to impart
knowledge to students, traditionally by lecture or recitation, more
recently through laboratory practice or class discussion. Based upon
the oral transmission of knowledge and originating with the founding
of universities in the medieval period, before the invention of the
printing press, the course of lectures has been a quintessential element
of the academic structure.
In addition to its educational purpose, the course has traditionally
had a role of evaluation, as the examinations attached to it show. Some
colleges have tried to separate education from evaluation by
scheduling examinations after blocks of courses, for example in a
‘junior examination’. For the most part the examination has remained
a part of the course, also serving as a sorting mechanism to place
students into different categories. The highest category traditionally
has been the few students most worthy of personal attention from the
master: those most likely to have the abilities and inclination to
become masters themselves.
As universities became training institutions for distinct professions
the selection mechanism took on other functions as well. If there was a
surplus of students interested in a profession, excess numbers could be
selected out by raising the standards and eliminating the unwanted
students.
Selection mechanisms can also accomplish more covert purposes,
even some that may not be acknowledged consciously by persons
running the system. For example, one covert goal may be to eliminate
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persons who are not in the image of those already in the profession.
Selection can take place on a seemingly meritocratic basis by
organizing the process according to cultural criteria that fit and
therefore select for members of one group but are incompatible with,
and therefore deselect, members of the unwanted group. Thus, the
normal operation of the academic system will insure that reproduction
of the profession occurs in a way that selects for people with similar
social, cultural and economic characteristics to those already in the
profession. Those eliminated will have little grounds for protest since
the selection has seemingly been made according to universalistic
standards.
The weed-out process acts as a post hoc selection system which
avoids conflict with the ideal of open entry to higher education.
Believing in the democratic ethic of the American educational system
(which includes the idea that most people should be able to go to
college if they have the desire and entry qualifications), most students
were uncomfortable with the idea of decreasing access to college. In
effect, academic faculty members are performing the traditional gate-
keeping role of all professional bodies, from medieval guilds onwards,
by identifying students best fitted for the profession, according to its
own standards.
There are no references to weed-out systems in official university
literature, and, when questioned, deans and faculty may be evasive, or
deny their existence. Nevertheless, on entering the university,
students soon become aware of a weed-out system. A previously
unaware female student said, ‘When I went to the orientation with my
mom, the dean actually sat there and said, “Don’t be surprised if about
three-fourths of the people sitting here don’t make it, particularly not
in four years.”’ A more knowledgeable male student commented,
‘They do the usual speech: “Look to the right of you; look to the left of
you. Forty percent of you won’t be here next year.” I think that’s the
standard speech at every university.’
Weed-out systems also become evident to students in the ways that
curricula were constructed, classes organized and taught, and
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assessment and grading practices set up and managed. A female
student described her experience: ‘The teacher was relatively young: I
think he had just finished graduate school and he was kind of cold and
cynical, kind of like, “I know a lot of you are going to drop out, so you
might as well do it now, so that the rest of us can get on with this
thing.”’ Student estimates of attrition targets ranged from 30 percent
to 75 percent, with a median of around 50 percent. They also had a
visual impression of how the weed-out process was progressing by
shifts in the seating patterns in their classes. A male student said, ‘You
can always tell. There’s what we call the “T”, the students in the front
two rows and down the middle, they’re the A students, and everybody
else you’re gonna lose.’
GENDER SOCIALIZATION AND UNDERGRADUATE
SCIENCE EDUCATION
Socialization into gender roles affects the educational experience,
especially when teaching styles are skewed in favor of one gender
rather. Highly competitive in nature, introductory science and
engineering courses tend to select out women. Although highly
motivated and scientifically able, women are not as accustomed as
men to the rigors of competition and thus are removed from the career
pipeline. The system for intellectual and moral education of young
men in the sciences and engineering contradicts female expectations.
Young women, who worked hard in high school and used their
teacher’s praise and encouragement as the basis for their self-esteem,
become disoriented in college. Lacking experience with the ‘male’
culture of science and engineering majors, most women do not know
how to respond appropriately. Women quite realistically sense that its
standards differ from their previous experience and that many men
resent their presence.
The disproportionate exclusion of women from the upper levels of
science and engineering education is an important latent function of
the weed-out system of the first two years of engineering and science
majors. That women and men respond to the scientific education
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system differently is exemplified by a female student’s observation,
‘Science is a wonderful example of how men just have their own little
world – just men, and men’s ways, and men’s concerns, and men’s
thinking.’ The system does not relate to the way that women are taught
to learn, nor to the models of adult womanhood that their socialization
encourages them to emulate. Even well-prepared female first-year
students enter basic classes feeling uncertain about whether they
belong. Faculty members who teach ‘weed-out’ classes discourage the
kind of personal contact and support that was an important part of high
school learning. The loss of regular contact with high school teachers
who encouraged them to believe in their ability to do science exposes
the frailty of their self-confidence. (As we have seen, the relatively few
women who avoid the debilitating effects of ‘weed out’ and advance to
higher levels encounter a similar experience upon entering graduate
school.)
The system tests for characteristics traditionally associated with
‘maleness’ in Anglo-Saxon societies and is based on motivational
strategies, such as the idea of ‘challenge’, understood by young men
reared in that tradition. Challenge is a central theme in many rites of
passage into manhood: the boy is challenged to test his mettle against
that of the established adult males who set hurdles for him to
surmount before he is allowed to join them, initially as an apprentice,
ultimately as an equal. The nature of the challenge is as much moral as
it is intellectual, in that it is intended to test the ability of young men to
tolerate stress, pain, or humiliation with fortitude and self-control. By
a deliberate denial of nurturing, young males are forced to look inward
for intrinsic sources of strength, and outward to bond with their
brothers in adversity – their peer group.
Most faculty members in science and engineering departments treat
young women the same as they treat young men. But this seeming
equality actually differentiates against women in asking them to
perform in ways that are contrary to their socialization. By
‘challenging’ everyone in the class to ‘prove’ themselves in the face of
harsh teaching methods, rapid curriculum pace, and a rigid assessment
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system, academic staff send a meaningless message to the female
minority. Not only is the metaphor of ‘challenge’ obscure to female
students, so, too, are other elements in the traditional male
educational process such as ‘proving’ yourself, a gender-defining
activity for men that is risky and inappropriate for women. As one
young woman said, ‘I’m not going to waste any more of my time
proving myself. I know who I am, and what I can do.’ To be drawn into
the male model is to court anxiety, insecurity, and confusion about the
basis of one’s sense of self.
Competing for grades is another aspect of the male testing process. It
has ill effects on both women and men, though not necessarily for the
same reasons. Competition is about ‘winning’, which is the most
traditional way of placing individuals within male prestige and ranking
systems. It is a central feature of all military, political, and economic
activity, and is metaphorically represented in sports and games
originally developed by men. As women increasingly involve
themselves in these areas of activity, some women adopt the
competitive imperative, and learn how to compete in male terms. Men
are often not comfortable with this. It is their game, and there is no
place in their prestige system for a woman who competes successfully
with them.
The extent to which women adapt to the system depends upon the
degree to which they have already accepted competition as a way of
relating to others in high school, or in sports and games. Entry to first-
year science, mathematics or engineering suddenly makes explicit,
and then widens, what is actually a long-standing divergence in the
socialization experiences of young men and women. The divergence in
self-perceptions, attitudes, life and career goals, and customary ways of
learning and of responding to problems, which has been built up along
gender lines throughout childhood and adolescence, is suddenly
brought into focus, and into practical significance.
The essential opposition between two categories embedded in the
traditional gender-role system has consequences for all students and
faculty members. It occurs when a relatively small number of
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inexperienced young women are encouraged (with little prior
preparation in the cultural and personal dimensions of their
undertaking) to venture into an institutionalized national (possibly
international) teaching and learning system which has evolved over a
long period as an approved way to induct young men into the adult
fraternities of science, mathematics and engineering. Most young
white men seem able to recognize, and respond to, the unwritten rules
of the adult male social system. The rules are familiar because they are
consistent with, and are an extension of, traditional male norms,
established by parents and reinforced by male adults and peers
throughout their formal education, sports, and social life. The same set
of norms are to be found in the education and training systems used by
many occupations and professions, including the military.
The ease with which young men adjust is variable; but the nature of
the undertaking is, at least, familiar. Indeed, the ability of male
students to recognize, and respond appropriately to, these male norms
transcends national boundaries. For example, at one institution which
regularly attracts students from Norway, a Norwegian woman in our
sample commented on the ease with which her male Norwegian peers
seemed to adjust to their engineering and science majors. She
contrasted this with her own difficulties in developing a sense of
belonging in her major – a difficulty which she shared with American
women.
Many aspects of science and engineering majors force women into
conflict with their gender socialization. The resolution of these
conflicts is sometimes accomplished by leaving the major; sometimes
by making personal adjustments to the dominant male social system.
These adjustments tend to be psychologically uncomfortable, and
some coping strategies provoke disapproval from other women, male
peers, or both.
Most young women develop a sense of identity that is highly
sensitive to extrinsic response. From very early childhood, throughout
the years of formal education, girls are encouraged to perform to please
others, and to base their feelings of confidence and self-worth on praise
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or other signs such of approval. The degree to which any woman
depends on significant others for her sense of achievement varies
according to her mixture of cultural influences. Nor is the tendency to
perform for others restricted to women; depending on the
circumstances of their upbringing and education young men may also
exhibit this trait.
The ways in which women have learned to learn also raises the
difficult issue of whether, and how, to change the traditional ways in
which girls are socialized and educated. Even if we knew how to teach
girls to be more independent in their learning style, is it desirable to
change the collective identity of one gender group so they can more
easily be fitted into educational settings which reflect the learning
styles of the other gender; furthermore, some aspects of the learning
environment in which women feel most comfortable – particularly
learning through cooperation, interaction, and experience – encourage
the development of skills and attitudes which have increasing value
beyond academe, especially as the need to work collaboratively
increases in science and business.
Part of the traditional socialization of women has been the
development of a high degree of tolerance for behavior which is
increasingly being redefined as ‘abusive’. At a trivial level, this
includes ‘making excuses’ for rude or insensitive male behavior in
order to preserve the appearance of normal social or domestic relations.
When talking about how they respond to rude peer behavior, female
students made comments such as, ‘It’s best to just ignore them’,
‘Reacting just makes it worse’, and ‘They’ll grow out of it.’ Women who
felt angry expressed it to each other, rather than directly to the men
concerned.
Where the power differential is so much to their disadvantage, and
there are no guidelines for responding to the situation, women fall back
on learned ways of discounting abuses of male power. Assuming the
traditional female role of ‘peace maker’ comes at the price of tolerating
an abusive situation, and, in this case, of offering some rationale for
that accommodation to the researcher who questions it.
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A second possible explanation, which is not inconsistent with the
first, derives from games theory. The outsider who wishes to become a
player in a game which is already under way, with a group who know
the rules, who are more skillful players, and to which he or she does not
belong, has to accept admission tests – even if they seem silly or
arbitrary. Although our women informants described the constant
implicit demand of their male peers that they ‘prove themselves’ as
foolish and irrelevant – as, indeed, for women, it is – they nevertheless
were drawn into proving behavior.
They felt constantly forced to demonstrate their ‘right’ to belong,
and part of their motivation to work hard, or harder than the men, was a
vain attempt to force this concession. Those women who adjusted
their presentation of self to a parody of male style can be seen as seeking
to side-step the admission test by claiming group affinity.
Paradoxically, while disputing that unpleasant male behavior bothers
them enough to undermine their motivation, the female minority
tacitly accepts the rules of the game imposed by the dominant group.
Women were also concerned that male acceptance of their academic
worth would detract from their sense of who they were as women. The
problems of belonging and identity are linked, because the qualities
that women feel they must demonstrate in order to win recognition for
their ‘right to belong’ (especially intelligence, assertiveness, and
competitiveness) raise the anxiety that such recognition can only be
won at the expense of ‘femininity’.
Women are forced to make a cultural choice between being
attractive and being smart. As one female student said, ‘ . . . maybe I
was afraid to be too good at it . . . that if I showed how good I was, I
would lose my femininity – that men wouldn’t find me attractive. I
think I’ve always been encouraged to mess up, then guys come and help
you out [laughs] – even though I didn’t really need the help. But they
have to think that you do . . . Subconsciously, I really felt that if I
succeeded, then they wouldn’t see how attractive I was.’
To succeed in science and engineering, women are forced to follow
the male model, but most women are reluctant to do so, with obvious
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implications for their willingness to remain in the profession. As one
woman realized, ‘It’s set up that women have to be more male in
engineering to get along. I notice that women in other majors don’t
seem like they have to change themselves like I did in order to fit in.’
Women face a double-bind situation and can only win male
acceptance, in academic terms, by losing it in personal terms. ‘ To
make it in engineering, I had to learn to be more male . . . Eventually,
you’ve learned to take more stuff – maybe are stronger than when you
first came in. But it always bothered me that I had to change.’ The
extrinsic nature of traditional female identity is both defined and
confirmed by men. Women can be set up to fail, unless they are helped
to see how the existing male-dominant power structure can play upon
their anxieties about their self-image, and are offered some strategies to
protect themselves from it.
BEATING THE SYSTEM OR BEING BEATEN BY IT
A common theme that distinguishes the accounts of women and men
in science and engineering majors is rupture with past educational and
social experience. Notwithstanding the discriminatory pre-college
experiences of some women, or the doubts generated by a generalized
cultural discouragement from the pursuit of non-traditional
disciplines, most women enter college in the U.S. at a peak of self-
confidence, based on good high school performances, good scores in
their Scholastic Aptitude Tests, and a great deal of encouragement and
praise from teachers, family and friends. Soon after entry into college,
women who felt intelligent, were confident in their abilities and prior
performance level, and took their sense of identity for granted, began to
feel isolated, insecure, intimidated; to question whether they
‘belonged’ in the sciences at all, and whether they were good enough to
continue.
A female student whose confidence in her ability is highly
dependent on the judgments of others finds it difficult to judge the
adequacy of her performance. Receiving what are viewed as adequate
or even good grades for their classes is not in itself sufficient to prevent
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what women commonly referred to as feeling ‘intimidated’ and
‘discouraged’. Her self-confidence may be already shaken by her abrupt
reduction in status. In high school, she was treated as special. Now, she
is part of an unwelcome minority which is treated with a hostility that
she cannot explain. Her new college teachers, to whom she looks for
guidance, ignore her.
Part of the difficulty women experience in defining their
performance as adequate to the task is their isolation. Without a
support network of people with more experience, it is easy for each of
them to assume that they alone are struggling. Even when their
performance is adequate or good, women who have an under-
developed sense of their abilities in mathematics or science have
difficulty in knowing that they are ‘doing okay’ without the teachers’
reassurance. Deprived of that exchange, certainty about self-in-science
is lost until the relationship is re-constructed with another supportive
teacher, or a more independent self-concept is developed.
For the first time in their lives, white women suddenly experience
what it is like to be a minority, negatively viewed by the majority. A
young woman said, ‘It’s intimidating to be in a class with ninety-seven
men and just three women – at least, it used to be: I think I’ve finally
gotten used to it.’ From the outset, they are excluded from
conversations and activities solely on the grounds of characteristics
which they cannot hide, and over which they have no control. A young
man commented, ‘Women just can’t break into those solid ranks of
men. It may just be as simple as that. It’s always been male, and they’re
gonna keep it that way.’ Many men are well aware that they or their
peers often exclude the women in their classes from their working or
social groups solely because they are women.
Unfamiliar with this experience and lacking contact with senior
women who understand the nature and source of their problems, first-
year women find it difficult to make sense of their discomfort. As one
young woman expressed her need for affiliation, ‘I need to feel like
there’s someone there sharing it with me. I don’t want to feel so alone
. . . it gets you down . . . And, if you get down about something, it
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snowballs, because you’ve no one to talk to. That’s when you get to the
point of, “What am I doing here?”’ Few had received any guidance
about what to expect, and how to survive; they lacked a female folklore
offering ready-made explanations or remedies for their difficulties; and
most had little knowledge, or acceptance, of the analytical framework
offered by feminist theory. In short, they were inexperienced eighteen-
year-olds, who tended to blame themselves when people behaved
disapprovingly towards them.
Since they are raised to work more for the approval of others than for
intrinsic satisfactions and goals, many women fail to develop a clear
personal view of what they want out of college before they arrive. This
also explains why the openness of teachers to the personal approaches
of their students is so central to women’s definitions of the ‘good’
teacher. For many women entering college, engaging the teacher in a
personal dialogue appears to be critical to the ease with which they can
learn, and to their level of confidence in the adequacy of their
performance. Failure to establish a personal relationship with faculty
members represents a major loss to women, and, indeed, to all students
whose high school teachers gave them considerable personal
attention, and who fostered their potential.
To a much higher degree than is the case for young men, preserving
the self-confidence which young women bring into college depends on
periodic reinforcement by teachers. The prospect of four years of
isolation and male hostility on the one hand, and the abrupt
withdrawal of praise, encouragement, and reassurance by teaching
staff on the other, depletes self-confidence. One young woman said:
After the positive influences and positive reinforcements in high
school, you feel on top of the world, and that you can do anything.
Then you get into an entirely new system. I noticed a marked
difference in my attitude. And I believe it was because of the fact
I was a number and nothing else to anyone . . . I had no one to
perform for – and probably many other women are so used to being
performers for others, that you take that away and you’re left with
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a void. And at the time, I didn’t really know it was that. The
classes I do best in are the ones where the professor cares about me,
and it’s always been that simple for me. I cannot separate my
feelings for the professor from my performance.
Faculty members may, or may not, realize the critical role which they
play in the persistence of women, both as a source of ongoing support,
and at times of crisis. Many women offered ‘fork-in-the-road’ stories in
which, having plummeted into depression, confusion, and
uncertainty, they sought the counsel of faculty members about
whether they should continue. They were prepared to accept their
professor’s assessment of their ability and performance, so long as this
was conveyed in a manner that suggested he or she cared one way or
another about their well-being. Describing a critical time when they
felt unable to trust their own judgment about their ability to continue,
seniors recounted the vital difference made to their decision to stay by
expressions of support from faculty members whom they consulted.
The personal style of some college teachers, and their active, open
encouragement of women in their classes, or in advisory sessions,
made an enormous difference to the confidence with which women
tackled their work, and, therefore, to their likelihood of success. If
women survive, it is partly because someone noticed they had the
talent and encouraged them in the first place. Even more important,
they have received some support along the way. As one young woman
summed it up, ‘It’s not any one characteristic in women that stands out
as making them likely to succeed – like having lots of will-power or
something. It’s more that their talent has been supported. They’ve
been helped to keep going, and not let the discouraging things get them
down.’
Male undergraduates who meet the challenges presented to them in
the early college years are assured of mentoring by the adult fraternity
once the weed-out process is complete. Women who survive the
undergraduate testing process do not automatically receive this
reward. There is a seeming anomaly between our undergraduate and
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graduate data sets. The undergraduate study found that female
survivors are often not accepted into the fraternity, except as tokens, or
are not supported by it. The graduate study concluded that in women’s
colleges and small liberal arts colleges, and in some departments in
larger universities, women do receive the support and mentoring that
place them on the path to graduate school. An increasing number of
women are entering graduate school in the sciences and engineering,
drawn from the ever larger pool of qualified female BA recipients.
However, with the exception of a very few scientific fields, a
significantly larger proportion of men than women proceed from
undergraduate to graduate school.
UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS THAT PROMOTE WOMEN
’
S
INTEREST IN SCIENCE
Nevertheless, there are important differences among undergraduate
schools in preparing women for graduate training. A female faculty
member at a prestigious graduate school observed that women
students from women’s colleges appear to have greater self-confidence.
From interviews with female Ph.D. candidates who emphasized their
need for ‘safety’ in order to practice presenting papers and developing a
professional self, it seems likely that women who have attended
women’s colleges have had the opportunity to take necessary risks in a
secure environment while being supported by a committed faculty.
Some female graduate students are curious about the behavioral
differences they also perceive in classmates who have attended
women’s colleges: ‘Confidence is the most important. It’s what needs
building. I’ve read that the women who go to women’s colleges have
much more confidence than those who have been competing with the
males all along. I met a young woman in a class and she said she felt that
it had made a big difference. You could just tell. She just had a different
manner.’
Another female graduate student had developed an assertive style,
yet maintained strong opinions on the needs of women. She had
received solid mentoring before graduate school and felt she had
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benefited by having worked in a research laboratory directed by a
woman, within a small university with four women Ph.D.s on faculty.
Her capacity to look after herself was carefully developed by both male
and female mentors before her entry into graduate school. Her
laboratory advisor and professors primed and prepared her, teaching
her strategies and the realities she would experience. Her subsequent
ability to negotiate the graduate school system argues against hiding
sexual discrimination from women before or upon arrival at graduate
school.
She said, ‘I absolutely was prepared. I worked for two years in a real
research laboratory of a woman, one of four on faculty at the university
I went to. Pretty much along the line she would say, “This is the kind of
class you want to take if you want to go to graduate school.” And when I
started studying physical chemistry, my professor stated, “Now these
are the kinds of things you are going to want to do when you go to
graduate school.” I actually had a professor take me aside and say,
“Okay, now the rest of the world doesn’t have four women on faculty.”
They tried to get me ready for the big world. They wanted to make sure
the move wouldn’t be a shock. So maybe they gave me the worst
perspective and then said reality is somewhere in between. They
always let me know, “We wouldn’t be telling you to do it, if we didn’t
think you could do it.” There was always the reality, but there was
always the support. A lot of support.’ Obviously, more women need to
receive that kind of experience, and sensitive mentoring, in
undergraduate school.
For contrast, we also conducted several focus group interviews with
science students at a small state university college. The existence of a
weed-out system was recognized in one course, organic chemistry,
where students were aware that many who began would not finish.
The dominant reported experience in virtually all courses was that
professors were available to speak to students about their difficulties.
A system of undergraduate teaching assistants was in place with
regular meetings of students in a class held in small groups. The
teaching assistants also encouraged students to form their own study
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groups. Given the small size of the science departments, the emphasis
was on retaining students rather than trying to eliminate them. Indeed,
with most advanced classes having fewer than ten students, the
problem was too few students rather than too many. The rationale for a
weed-out system was absent. Indeed, a ‘reverse weed-out’ system
appeared to be in place in which students were strongly encouraged to
complete their degrees.
CHANGING THE WEED
-
OUT SYSTEM
Too often, undergraduate teaching staff conflate the male role with the
role of the scientist, to the predictable detriment of their female
students. The more the faculty treat the demonstration of ‘masculine’
characteristics as an essential part of ‘becoming a scientist’, the more
resistance women experience to their participation. This is the precise
opposite of what many young women – and some young men – feel they
require in order to give of their best, that is, teachers who care about
them, advise on the adequacy of their work, praise or chide them, as
appropriate, and give support through periods of difficulty.
Unable to evoke such responses from the largely male faculty (or
from those female faculty members who have adopted the style of their
male colleagues), women in science and engineering classes tend to
feel they must be performing badly, and doubt that they should
continue. Male peers advocate not taking faculty ‘rejection’ to heart.
Many women have little experience of taking it any other way.
Young women tend to lose confidence in their ability to ‘do science’,
regardless of how well they are actually doing, when they have
insufficient independence in their learning styles, decision-making,
and judgments about their own abilities, to survive the lack of
motivational support and reassurance by faculty, or the refusal of male
peers to acknowledge that they belong in science. Women who persist
tend to have entered with sufficient independence to adjust quickly to
the more impersonal teaching, have an intrinsic interest in the major
and a strong sense of career direction, and develop attitudes and
strategies (including alternative avenues of support), in order to
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neutralize the effects of male, peer hostility. However, the loss of many
able women cannot be reduced without changing traditional faculty
norms and practices (as well as those of some high school teachers and
advisors).
The emergence of gender parity is also a spur to cultural change in
engineering and science departments. In the life sciences, and some
mathematics departments, female students report the atmosphere to
be more comfortable, and the problems fewer. As one young woman
reported, ‘Well, in biology, it’s fifty–fifty, so I just never felt that much
of a difference.’ Similarly, at the two research universities, and at the
small liberal arts college, which were actively recruiting male and
female students into science and engineering majors in more equal
proportions, the discomforts caused by male peers and faculty were
considerably less than they were in the same disciplines on the other
four campuses studied.
While change is under way, first- and second-year women need
programs to help them understand the source and typical nature of the
discomforts and self-doubts they experience; strategies to deal with
them; and support to off-set tendencies to self-criticism, sinking
confidence, and emotional confusion. These difficulties are induced by
normal educational experiences in science and engineering and are
entirely predictable. Thus, programs for women in unremediated
situations cannot be effective when they are set up on a one-on-one,
crisis-based, ‘women’s advisor’ system, or when they lack the public
commitment of senior administrators and departmental chairs. (As we
shall see, the same conclusion holds for the graduate level.) Successful
programs draw on the involvement of senior women students, faculty
women, and sympathetic male faculty members, in each major, and on
a network of professional mentors.
In some departments, cross-cohort informational and support
networks have been established by chapters of national societies such
as the Society for Women in Engineering (SWE), and the Association for
Women in Science (AWIS). Other strategies include: field-based
residential options; pre-college orientation programs; mentoring
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systems (including pairing senior with more junior women); and
augmentation of classes with all-women tutorials, seminars, and study
groups. Some departmental and institution-wide programs which
exemplify these strategies, are the residential program for women of
color at Stanford, the WISE programs at Brown University, and, at the
University of Washington, both the Women in Engineering Programs
(WIEP), and the WIS and Freshman Interest Group programs for women
in chemistry. The period over which such programs continue to be
needed will be determined by the speed and profundity with which
traditional attitudes and practices are addressed.
Changes are needed, not only in the transition from one phase to
another but in the internal structure of each state of scientific career
preparation. The culmination of higher education is attainment of the
doctoral degree as a certification of the ability to advance knowledge in
a field and a license to train others to become ‘doctors’. In the next
chapter we discuss the Ph.D. socialization process, how women are
treated differently than men, and why.
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5Critical transitions in the
graduate and post-graduate
career path
Graduate education is not a smooth continuum, with a steady rate of
‘leakage’ from the pipeline, but rather a discontinuous, turbulent flow,
with attrition rates rising at certain key junctures (NSF, 1994). We have
identified several specific points in the career trajectory when people
are propelled forward, pushed out, or dropped down to a lower level. We
call these points ‘critical transitions.’ At the Ph.D. level these
transitions are likely to include: (1) the qualifying examination, (2)
finding a research advisor, (3) negotiating a dissertation topic, and (4)
deciding what is sufficient work for the granting of the degree.
Academic transition points sometimes coincide with events in the
course of a life time that affect how decisions are made. Thus, for
example, a student who is pregnant might have difficulty in finding an
advisor, if decision makers view child-rearing and research as
inherently incompatible.
The most crucial transition in the experimental sciences is the one
from being a student in courses to becoming part of a research
environment. A female graduate student described it as an
apprenticeship: ‘You learn the part of being a physicist through
interaction with other physicists.’ However, a belief permeates many
departments, and is transmitted to incoming female students, that
their admission is based on affirmative action rather than merit.
Female students’ self-confidence is eroded by the attitude of faculty
and male peers that women are less competent than men. Rather than
promoting interaction as fellow scientists, the attitude towards
women can create feelings of incompetence and lack of success. As a

female faculty member observed, ‘This support [of the faculty] is key. If
you don’t have it, if you have people with the attitude that it’s their job
to fail certain people, then yes, people are going to drop out. Then they
wonder, why don’t we have more women here.’ The ability to negotiate
a transition point successfully often depends on access to informal
sources of information which are often more readily available to males
than females.
Transition processes are not uniform but are strongly affected by
degree program organization and structure. The experiences of Ph.D.
students vary widely, depending upon the practices of a discipline,
university, department or advisor. For example, finding a research
advisor in biology takes place through the custom of rotation among
laboratories during the first year, which typically introduces the
entering student to three professors and their research practices. Some
critical transitions are highly structured, with clear benchmarks;
others are more informal with loose or shifting criteria. A few Ph.D.
programs have recently been reorganized to make transition points
more flexible. For example, in some instances a series of written
qualifying examinations have been replaced by a research paper and
sets of course grades, opening up alternative paths to certify
acquisition of sufficient knowledge to undertake a dissertation.
THE U
.
S
.
GRADUATE EDUCATION MODEL
In the mid-nineteenth century, when American scholars returned
from Germany after earning their Ph.D. they attempted to replicate the
advanced education system they had experienced abroad. Not
surprisingly, a building project for a domestic institution was often an
interpretation of a particular idiosyncratic professor’s laboratory
abroad. Although U.S. scientists founded research institutes according
to the models they had learned in Europe, their efforts usually failed
through lack of resources at home.
By the late nineteenth century, when the German-style hierarchical
professorship failed to take hold as the model for organizing research
and teaching in U.S. universities, the department was invented as a
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consortium of, more or less, equals (Oleson and Voss, 1979). The U.S.
academic model was based upon a professorial status, with the ability
to initiate research, granted early in the academic career.
The department became an association of relative equals, with each
professor representing a different aspect of the discipline. The
emerging U.S. academic system was much less centralized than the
German model, typically built around a single professor. Research was
developed relatively inexpensively by hiring students as research
assistants instead of using Ph.D.s as in the European Institute model. In
time the Ph.D. training process in the sciences was also transformed
from an individualized research endeavor, which still persists in the
humanities, to a group effort. In an apprenticeship format, an entering
student typically takes off from the work of an advanced student and
is, in part, supervised by the student whose work they are building
upon (Etzkowitz, 1992). Under these collaborative conditions the
dissertation is also transformed. Although still presented under an
individual signature, the thesis increasingly looks less like a
monograph on a single subject and more like a series of co-authored
articles on discrete topics.
Some female graduate students assume that the old model of the
lone investigator still holds. Often less integrated into their research
group than men, they sometimes expect to have to produce a magnum
opus for a dissertation. Some male faculty members, who are resistant
to women, use this cultural lag against their female students by
assigning ambitious projects in expectation of inducing failure. After
the supportive social environment that many experienced in their
undergraduate training, female students are often surprised at the
resistance to their presence in graduate departments. Lacking access to
informal sources of information that would allow them to make a
smooth transition, women usually find the norms and rules of graduate
school opaque and difficult to decipher, placing them at a severe
disadvantage.
Contrary to gender stereotypes, female graduate students are often
left to be the ‘rugged individualists’, having to fend for themselves,
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while male professors draw many of their male graduate students into a
supportive, caring environment. Such coteries surrounding a faculty
member, typically including students from many nations and cultures,
constitute the basic social unit of U.S. doctoral education. The
countries that Ph.D. candidates come from may be at odds in the
outside world, but in the research group students, irrespective of their
background, are expected to form bonds that will last a career, if not a
life time. In the experimental sciences there is typically a common
physical site in a laboratory. In theoretical fields the informal social
ties that form the basis of the group often originate in a seminar.
THE ILLUSION OF MALE AUTONOMY
Male students appear to be singularly work-directed and able to
function autonomously. They are in fact formally and, more
importantly, informally very connected to each other, whether in the
laboratory, in study groups, at conferences, on the basketball court, or
in a bar. The male students receive informal ‘mentoring’ from male
advisors who reflect themselves and see themselves reflected in these
students. Even when men do not receive ideal support from their
advisor interactions among peers and senior associates provide
sufficient connection, feedback and information to shore up their self-
confidence, thereby encouraging the capacity for assertiveness and
risk-taking.
The existence of these mechanisms for support and connection
belies the notion that somehow males are mysteriously constructed to
be individualists, devoid of any relational needs. While acceptance of
gender differences provides greater richness to complex questions,
‘difference’ does not indicate two rigidly distinct camps with no
common ground between them. This notion gives license to a false
perception of a fundamental disparity in personality structure, in
which it is presumed that men are automatically programmed to
function autonomously and women to be dependent. Such differential
socialization is often falsely believed to decide, in advance, who can
achieve in academic science and who cannot. But in fact, the way some
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male students function may not only reflect learned behaviors and
coping mechanisms specific to gender, but also demonstrate the
importance of identification with like others, based on subtle acts of
inclusion and validation.
THE UNOFFICIAL PH
.
D
.
PROGRAM
An unofficial doctoral education process, based upon the
establishment of informal ties, runs parallel to the official degree
program of formal instruction, examinations and research production.
Informal support structures and social gatherings provide information,
encouragement and, most importantly, opportunities to learn from
peers and role models in unpressured settings. Pick-up basketball
games, pub visits with faculty, and study groups with fellow students
to prepare for examinations are less open to women Ph.D. students
than men in those disciplines where women have traditionally been
scarce.
The induction of male graduate students into academic culture
usually takes place with great ease. Knowledge is passed on about the
informal rules of the game such as finding a compatible advisor and
how to gain approval of a feasible thesis topic. This relatively invisible
informal side of doctoral training in engineering and the sciences is
more readily recognized in other disciplines. For example, it is well
known that the motivation for attending a renowned business school
to pursue the MBA degree stems not only from the cognitive content of
the degree but also from the contacts to advance a future career that can
be made during the course. Even when women are admitted to the
official Ph.D. program, they are often still excluded from the unofficial,
informal doctoral training process.
Women’s precarious status has predictable social and psychological
consequences that, if not countered, eventually affects scientific work.
Particularly during the first two to three years of the Ph.D. program,
women experience severe ‘anomie’ (loss of identity or meaning, a state
of being without order), both psychological and social. In this context, a
set of rigorous courses has the potential to challenge self-esteem built
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on earlier success. Feelings of ‘anxiety–isolation–purposelessness’ are
the psychological counterpart to sociological anomie (Merton, 1938).
In this instance, sociological anomie arises from the encounter with
male-centered Ph.D. programs which disadvantage female students. A
female graduate student described her predicament, ‘I felt like I didn’t
have any back-up support. I didn’t know how to pick a topic. The guys
talk about that at the bars. I don’t go there.’
The themes expressed by entering students revolved around the
need to feel connected to others, to feel psychologically safe, to be given
a professional identity, to be cared about, to be provided the strategies
required to succeed and knowledge of the ‘rules of the game’. However,
the overwhelming experience of women is that of isolation and
disconnection in their departments, and, in the most severely negative
academic environments, among themselves. Thus, not only are they
an alienated group within the department, they are isolated from each
other as well.
Even when a woman was fairly well accepted, she was often
excluded from crucial aspects of the graduate student experience. For
example, a female doctoral student reported:
We would all go to parties together and go and have beer on Friday,
but if somebody came in to ask what drying agent to use to clean
up THF, they would never ask me. It just wasn’t something that
would cross their minds. Nobody ever came in my office to ask
what an answer was. People came in my office to ask the person
who was in my room with me. I wouldn’t have known if there
were study groups . . .
The degree of invisibility of the informal education process is
reinforced by a faculty informant who reported that through much of
her graduate student career she was unaware that she was being left out
of study groups; she simply didn’t know that they existed.
EXCLUSION FROM STUDY GROUPS
The unoffical Ph.D. program begins with the formation of study groups
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of peers, considered by students and teachers alike as the best way to
prepare for doctoral qualifying examinations. This informal
counterpart to the course structure consists of regular meetings of
small groups of students in a department. Such groups provide a non-
evaluative arena for thinking about complicated theories and
articulating the jargon of the field. Technical knowledge is reinforced
through discussion and informal presentations in these shadow
structures to coursework and the qualifying examination.
Departmental lore as well as other tacit knowledge is shared about
faculty interests and idiosyncrasies that are likely to be transmuted
either into exam questions or gaps in the examination regime. We
identified some degree of exclusion from study groups in virtually all
departments studied.
Participation in study groups and other social networks of peers in
the department and the broader scientific community is an essential
element of expected future success in science. An isolated individual
has fewer intellectual possibilities. As one informant put it:
If you’re not in that scientific conversation then you’re stifled.
You can’t get any help and you can’t progress as far. Sitting and
talking about scientific issues makes your brain work. Your
creative juices flow and that didn’t happen for me as a woman
because discussions didn’t occur. What was hard was that I was in
class with all these people, and often getting better grades, and
they knew I wasn’t stupid, but it didn’t matter. Oh, it was very
isolating.
This exclusion from participation in study groups is not only
personally painful but also removes access to a crucial component of
graduate education.
QUALIFYING EXAMINATIONS
All students are concerned about qualifying examinations. However,
women and men cope differently with this anxiety. Women tend to
internalize difficulties and resort to self-blame, in contrast to men,
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who externalize and blame outside forces. Moreover, women are more
likely to buy in to the likelihood that they will not pass. In the instance
below, this student did not accept the self-fulfilling prophecy of a
professor:
[He] said, ‘I think you should take them very soon so that you can
fail them and then we can figure out what you need to do to pass.’ I
was struck that he expected me to fail, [that] someone can be that
overt to me about their prejudices. I was able to go back to this
person and say, ‘You know, I was thinking about your strategy and
what I prefer to do is figure out what I need to do to pass and then
take them.’ He actually became one of my biggest allies and was
throwing questions at me once a week and I passed.
Another woman described her success in the candidacy examination
as giving her a very strong push to complete the Ph.D. She felt that the
experience raised her scientific maturity and provided ‘ . . .
reassurance that I can complete a task.’ Too often many women absorb
the message that they cannot pass these examinations and elect to
leave, particularly when they have failed once. A female graduate
student said, ‘I had very little expectation to pass and everyone had told
me all along, you may get in, you can do the work, but you’ll never get
through those exams.’ We suspect that the largest number of drop-outs
may come either prior to the qualifying examinations, or even more
likely, after one failure.
On the other hand, women who pass their qualifying examinations
at the first attempt report a tremendous boost in self confidence. The
successful experience with the examination is taken as proof that they
will make it through the program. Often graded blindly, the qualifying
examination comes closest to being a gender-neutral element in the
Ph.D. program. Even when responsibility for its sections is handed over
to a group of specialists in the field, the qualifying examination is a
collective review. This, perhaps, explains why minor changes are
always being made by professors in the department, ‘especially in the
qualifying exam’.
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FINDING AN ADVISOR
Finding an advisor to work with is essential to attaining the Ph.D.
degree. Students are expected to develop a close working relationship
with their faculty advisor, a relationship that lasts several years and is
crucial to the progress of the student through the program and out into
the professional world. Yet entry into a relationship with an advisor is
charged with ambivalence and ambiguity. Ph.D. students undergo a
transition from a classroom to a research environment where they
must learn to follow instructions and, virtually simultaneously, learn
to make their own decisions. Thus, the content of the advisor–advisee
relationship is likely to be even more significant, and more difficult,
than the process of establishing the initial connection. Although it is
presumed that the advisor has the most knowledge of the area of study,
in reality the student soon accumulates a greater knowledge base in the
particular area of their dissertation research. An imbalance between
power and authority often emerges, in which near-absolute control
rests with the advisor, even as the student’s knowledge increases.
Despite the official existence of a committee for each student, most
of the Ph.D. process is under the control of the individual advisor who
has great leeway in defining the Ph.D. program for their students. The
advisor decides what constitutes acceptable research for the
dissertation and determines satisfactory progress.
A former student who had attained the Ph.D. discussed the necessity
of developing strong ties with an advisor to reach that goal, especially
given their discretionary authority. She said, ‘One of the good and bad
things about research universities is that the professors aren’t really
given guidelines . . . to turn students into scientists.’ A female
graduate student referred to the power of the advisor explaining, ‘Most
of the rewards come through the professor.’ Despite the existence of a
larger committee and even department-wide reviews of all students,
there is great reliance on the opinion of the advisor. The advisor retains
the authority to make the final judgment; the other professors on the
committee are essentially there to support the advisor’s decision.
The quality of the ongoing advisor–advisee relationship is crucial to
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the student’s success. Difficulties in establishing a good relationship or
deterioration of an existing one are signs of potential trouble in
attaining the Ph.D. Without encouragement from a good advisor, a
student can be lost and waste valuable time and effort. There is a great
strain in having an advisor who is unable to provide guidance or shows
a lack of concern with a student’s progress.
For example, a physics student attributed her lack of direction to an
inattentive advisor who was difficult to arrange to see, owing to a busy
schedule. Their relationship deteriorated and the lack of contact
contributed to the slow pace of her work. Even though she had found an
advisor, the relationship did not provide the assistance needed.
Advisors have virtually complete freedom to make their own
decisions, with the expectation that they will be supported by their
colleagues. This situation can sustain both successful advisor–advisee
collaborations, or contribute to a breakdown of relations without
likelihood of repair. A student who developed a good relationship with
her advisor used the advisor’s help to plot a course which made the
transition into research seem less abstract.
She explained ‘ . . . You have to know what you will be doing’, and
she described a ‘settling in’ process, a ‘transition within the transition’
in which, ‘ . . . as soon as I figured out what I wanted to do, I was happy
with the work.’ Having been appropriately guided, she did not ‘float’,
the term some women applied to their state of lack of advisorial
direction and support. A transition with a positive resolution left this
student engrossed in research and finding satisfaction in her work.
Negative interactional patterns between male advisors and their
female graduate students have been identified that, ‘ . . . [lessen] their
opportunity for advancement’ (Fox, 1988: 226). We also found a series
of gender-related blockages to successful advising. Sometimes, there
was an attempt at equal treatment based upon the faulty assumption
that women had been socialized and educated the same as men. At
worst, women graduate students were stereotyped as less capable and
uncompetitive and were viewed as non-scientists. Such advisors
simply could not take women seriously as graduate students. On the
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other hand, some male advisors were markedly more successful with
their female advisees than some women faculty members.
We identified female experiences with male advisors ranging from
the denigrating to the supportive. On the negative side are interactions
that leave women with doubt about their self-worth. Even though this
advisor probably thought that he was allaying concerns, the effect was
the reverse. ‘He said to me, “You don’t have anything to worry about,
they want women; so you’ll pass [the qualifying exams].” You have the
feeling, “Am I here because I’m a woman or because I am qualified?”
It’s like they take away all your achievements.’ Women also discussed
specific incidents in which their gender led to presumptions of lack of
scientific ability.
For example, a female student was talking to a professor about her
research problems and he said she was an ‘emotional female’. She
recalled, ‘I couldn’t believe he was thinking that. Maybe he was
thinking I shouldn’t be in physics. I always thought he was a nice
guy. That’s when I feel it: I’m out there on my own.’ Male faculty
members can exacerbate or mitigate the effects of traditional female
socialization, depending upon their awareness, sensitivity and
political stance on sex roles.
Most women are not socialized to understand the political strategies
necessary to advance within the academic system. Without an advisor
who is willing to encourage and direct, women are often unable to
puzzle out the strategies necessary to get through graduate school.
Women report that the best advisors are encouraging, give concrete
directions and show them the ropes.
A women faculty member called attention to women’s relative lack
of knowledge of how to negotiate the academic system, explaining that
many women lacked a strategy to deal with the admissions process:
What you’re supposed to do is get a hold of the brochure and if you
want to get in at least say that’s what you want. The women don’t
seem to have grasped that... the men go down the list and say, I
want to work with this professor for this reason, that professor for
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that reason . . . the females give me no indication that they have
even looked at the brochure.
This female faculty member suffered a particular sense of conflict
since, in her own graduate career, she had taken a pragmatic approach,
putting aside her own intellectual interests until later and pursuing her
professor’s research to get the degree in good time.
Attempts to find an analogy to the traditional female role for women
in the laboratory are part of the notion of science as a ‘male milieu’ in
which women’s presence is viewed as disruptive and threatening. A
chemistry professor used analogies from cooking in his discussion
with a female student. (In a Japanese laboratory, the female graduate
student took over tea and coffee duties in the secretary’s absence.)
These ‘degradation ceremonies’ may be followed up by subtle and not
so subtle attempts to eliminate the unwanted presence.
For example, one woman commented: ‘When I was trying to get
something to work, [my advisor] would come up to me and say, “Did
you see it yet?” Everyday he would say, “Did you see it?” I should have
stopped it, but sometimes it takes a long time to see what’s going on. It
was very humiliating.’ It is not only male advisors’ treatment of female
students that affects their situation but also how male advisors
instruct their male students to act toward women. A female graduate
student said, ‘I hear rumors about myself . . . being involved with
somebody. [I heard that] a faculty member was advising his students
that it might be interesting to have an affair with me.’
Of course, men have also served as successful advisors to women. An
offset to viewing women as ‘sex objects’ can be found in the following
instance of advice about how to negotiate the shoals of negative
behavior toward women. A sensitive male advisor helped this student
make future decisions based on the reality of being a woman within the
field:
His attitude toward women is very understanding, very
supportive, without being condescending. He doesn’t say ‘I
understand what’s going on,’ which is offensive because it’s hard
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for a man to understand what’s going on. He doesn’t bring these
issues up, I bring them up. He is very politically aware. He’ll say,
‘Don’t talk to—.’ Sometimes [his advice] was because of sexism
and sometimes because this person was an arrogant son of a bitch
and sometimes because this is a good person, but is just not
comfortable with women.
Thus, women and men faculty do not, simply by virtue of their gender,
automatically make good or poor mentors for female students.
Faculty who make the best mentors are aware of the different
experience of men and women in the Ph.D. education process. They
buttress their female students against the ‘slings and arrows’ of
outrageous treatment. Sometimes they are willing to advocate change,
going against prevailing conservative academic ethos with respect to
academic practices. Traditional academic training programs are
usually strongly believed to be meritocratic, even when and
sometimes because they discriminate! In the next chapter we discuss
the different experience of women and men in a ‘male-centric’
academic system.
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6Women’s (and men’s) graduate
experience in science
The overall picture is of a prevailing academic culture that provides
inadequate direction and mentoring for women, thereby eroding their
self-confidence. In the first years of the program, women Ph.D.
students experience the entire range of disorientation delineated in the
Srole anomie scale: (1) the perception that community leaders are
indifferent to one’s needs; (2) the perception that little can be
accomplished in the society which is seen as unpredictable; (3) the
perception that life-goals are receding from reach rather than being
realized; (4) a sense of futility; and (5) the conviction that one cannot
count on personal associates for social and psychological support.
In addition, the individual is left with the feeling that it is she who is
to blame, and this exacts a severe psychic toll including doubts about
competency that prevent the successful working through of problems
as they arise. It is not surprising that half of the informants revealed
having sought personal psychological counseling during this period.
Isolation also creates powerlessness, loneliness, and confusion
which, in many cases, leads to dropping out. Reports by informants
describe how isolation reduces the opportunity (a) to compare
experiences through communication with others in the same
situation, (b) to test the reality of their experiences to ascertain that
difficulties are not based on personal deficit, (c) to reduce feelings of
alienation and rejection in hostile, male-dominated labs, (d) to work
through strategies to deal with discrimination by male advisors, (e) to
experience peer support when advisory support is non-existent, (f) to
gain information and practical advice regarding strategies to succeed
within the program, (g) to build a professional network among female

peers for future professional advancement, (h) to feel safe to have
questions answered without being judged as stupid or inadequate, (i) to
practice the necessary skills for future advancement (presenting
papers, discussing science).
NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES OF ACADEMIC CULTURE
FOR WOMEN
The academic structure, rather than aiding the passage of qualified and
competent women, actively discourages them. The tiny cuts and
stigmatizing reproaches experienced in graduate school range from
assumptions of devalued admission to simply not having one’s
comments in a research group meeting taken seriously, only to hear
them accepted when repeated a few minutes later, in a more glib and
deeper voice, by a male counterpart.
Despite a formal and even at times a strongly stated commitment to
non-discriminatory treatment of women, discrimination can be
manifested informally. For example, a female graduate student
reported different treatment of men’s and women’s contributions. She
said, ‘In group meetings I get the sense that if a woman says something,
“okay fine” and that’s the end of that.’ In contrast, the response to
males would be enthusiastic. Frequently compliments and praise
would be given for the thought. This graduate student even mentioned
that a woman might make the same observation and be met with a
dismissal while a male student would receive accolades for the
thought. The devaluation of women’s scientific contributions is
widespread (Benjamin, 1991) and takes many forms, including
crediting the male partner in scientific collaborations and ignoring the
work of women (Scott, 1990).
In some instances women are devalued by not being included in
professional events. A female graduate student reported that
invisibility was imposed when ‘you have a visitor to the lab, the
professor introduces the male students, but does not introduce you.’
Another reported self-imposed invisibility in reaction to expectations
that her contributions would not be valued:
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[In lab meetings] you feel very self conscious saying what you
think and I think it’s because you are a woman. They would just as
soon you would sit back and be quiet and when they ask you if it
turned red or green, [you say] ‘it turned red,’ rather than saying ‘it
turned red and this is what we’re going to do next.’
Made to feel uncomfortable, women sometimes hold back from
contributing their ideas to the scientific give and take of research group
meetings.
The graduate school experience, as constituted at present, is often
counterproductive. It results in the loss of many brilliant female minds
to science and creates damaged identities instead. How is a secure
scientific identity created? A sense of competence is related to the
esteem of others for one’s contribution and is further enhanced by a
feeling of acceptance and inclusion by others. This amplifies a sense of
self and ultimately frees us to take chances. The AIDS researcher who,
against well-accepted methodological practice, mixed several samples
together in order to have sufficient material to conduct an experiment,
exemplifies the scientist as risk taker (Haritos and Glassman, 1990). In
this instance the risk paid off; had it failed the individual would have
been subject to ridicule, embarrassment and the censure of colleagues.
To take such a chance, and to be prepared to accept its negative
consequences, requires a secure sense of self. Without it, such
scientific risks are not likely to be taken.
Women Ph.D. candidates are frequently mystified and sometimes
struggle with guilt as to why they feel unable to enjoy the psychological
freedom to assert themselves and take similar risks to their male
counterparts. However, to enjoy such freedom requires connective
tissue in which two powerful needs are met: ‘the striving for autonomy
in which self-organizing, self-enhancing and self-determining needs
may be freely sought, and the striving for harmony which is the need to
relate to and feel a part of a larger whole’ (Ullman, 1992). These
universal needs are inextricably interwoven and interdependent on
one another.
WOMEN
’
S
(
AND MEN
’
S
)
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The development of autonomous functioning, highly valued in the
scientific work ethic, cannot be accomplished without full
membership and inclusion within the social psychological milieu
of the scientific workplace. Isolated and without interpersonal
connection, a woman’s ability to be playfully creative is impeded.
Moreover, she is understandably reluctant to ask for the help she needs
since it is likely that she will then be labeled as ‘dependent’. A gendered
‘apartheid system’ exists in which many male advisors offer support to
male students, but leave women to figure things out for themselves.
With no support or connection with an advisor, taking risks in the lab
becomes too threatening. People only take risks when they feel safe to
do so. In contrast, there is sufficient support and acceptance, by way of
informal interactions with male advisors and peers, for male students
to enjoy the freedom to be innovative.
Women found it difficult to be taken seriously as professionals
outside the department as well. One said: ‘If I go to conferences, if I ask
a question, the answer gets addressed to a man in the room. It’s worse in
physics than in other fields.’ A female graduate student reported her
response to being ignored, ‘It’s always a thing where being invisible,
you don’t exist . . . It was in a sense, I didn’t exist.’ Other times, women
are made to feel different by being made too conspicuous. A female
graduate student reported that a professor was ‘ . . . addressing the
class, “Gentlemen” . . . and then made a big pause and looked at me
and added, “and lady”. I was different. Other people noticed it . . . ’
Still other times women are patronized. A female graduate student
told how ‘I was sitting at this table and he kept referring to us as “my
girls.” In that context I didn’t like it. He was thinking of us differently.
He didn’t say “my boys.”’ At one department, many graduate women
felt that they were treated as ‘one of the boys’ but this too was an
unsatisfactory resolution. Since the demands or possibility of child-
bearing were not taken into account in structuring work schedules and
evaluation, women were placed at a disadvantage, nevertheless.
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LIFE
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COURSE EVENTS
Academic transition points sometimes coincide with life-course
events that affect how decisions are made. For example, as mentioned
earlier, a pregnancy that coincides with such critical transitions as
finding an advisor will set a female Ph.D. student at a disadvantage, if
decision makers view child-rearing and research as inherently
incompatible. A female graduate student said: ‘There are no real good
role models to follow. The women a generation ahead of us had it so
difficult that they are by and large a very aggressive group. [They had to
be so aggressive] and that’s who got ahead. You have trouble looking at
them and saying, “I want to be like that.” You don’t.’ Even as taken-for-
granted academic practices continue to work against them, most
women in science do not want to be ‘men’. Instead, many attempt to
legitimize a female model of doing science (Science, special issue,
1993).
Male expectations about female commitment to family roles often
lead to further discrimination against women in academic science.
Many scientists believe it to be legitimate to take family
responsibilities into account in evaluating a colleague, irrespective of
demonstrated achievement; this is held to be the converse of a
commitment to long hours spent at the laboratory site which is
positively interpreted, irrespective of how they are spent. A female
junior faculty member reported:
I asked [her mentor and colleague] what his reaction would be if I
had a child. He said, none. Then he said, ‘I take that back. There
are others in this department who will say, “Well, she won’t be
around now.” A decision to have a child before tenure will have an
impact on your tenure decision.’ He was always extremely
supportive. It was devastating [that he did not understand]. He’s
somebody who has good politics, who has been supportive of
women. It was shocking to me. That did play a big part in my
decision to stop working with him. I have felt completely isolated
since then.
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The barriers discussed in the previous chapter are exacerbated by the
desire of most women, and an increasing number of men, for a personal
life beyond the work site and the inability of academic science to
accommodate their wishes.
MARRIAGE AND FAMILY
Marriage and children negatively affect women’s careers in academic
science at three key times: having a child during graduate school,
marriage at the point of seeking a job, and pregnancy prior to tenure. In
addition, we found some disparagement of marriage during the
graduate student career. Women, but not men, are sometimes thought
to be less than serious about their science if they do not stay single
while in graduate school. As a female graduate student recalled:
When I first interviewed to come here, I was single. On my first
day of walking into this department I had an engagement ring on
my finger. [My advisor’s] attitude was ‘families and graduate
programs don’t go together very well.’ First he was worried I was
going to blow my first year planning my wedding. I got a lot of
flack about that and so did other women . . . teasing. ‘So and so’s
not going to get much work done this semester because she’ll be
planning her wedding.’ [sarcastically] The guys don’t plan
weddings.
Earlier in the century, marriage was grounds for a woman’s expected
retirement from a faculty position. The mutual exclusion of academic
and family life has a long history. Until well into the nineteenth
century Oxbridge male academics were also expected to choose
between academic career and marriage. Neveretheless, there have
been few if any residual carryovers from the academic celibate role for
men, whereas for women, even when a choice between academic
career and family is no longer an offical requirement, the presumption
that each role requires a woman’s total attention survives. It next
surfaces when children are contemplated or arrive.
Women graduate students expect that they will be penalized for
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having children. One informant visualized her advisor’s and the
department’s reaction: ‘If I had walked into —’s office and said I was
pregnant, they would have been happy for me as a woman, but in their
list of priorities as to . . . who to support I would have plummeted to the
bottom of the list.’ These concerns arise because the existing academic
structure is ill equipped to deal with pregnancy. Pregnancy is
discouraged and graduate women who have children are encouraged to
take leaves of absence that tend to become permanent withdrawals. In
one department an informant reported that: ‘The only one left is — [of
the students who have children]. Two women Ph.D.s who got pregnant
were strongly encouraged to take leaves of absence. One did and one did
not come back.’ In another department a female graduate student
reported:
One person took a leave of absence to get married and asked her
advisor if she had a child would she be able to work part time and
he told her, ‘Absolutely not. No way.’ What if I should want to do
something like that? Is it the end of my career in — ? Was it just
the advisor? What am I going to do with my life? People say they’re
not going to have children until they’re 40 and have tenure. I can’t
think like that. Thinking about [these] details is what scares me.
That’s when I think I should drop out.
The expectation that women students will succumb to the pressures of
child-bearing and child-rearing makes some male and female faculty
members wary of taking on women students in the first place
especially since funding is tight and every place must be made to count.
Another female faculty member stated:
If a student had a baby with her, I wouldn’t have her. Students who
have babies here get no work done. It’s not that I wouldn’t take a
woman with a child in the first place, but the first sign of trouble, I
would just tell them to go away. If my students fail it looks bad for
me.
Graduate student women were caught in a bind, wanting to have
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children and, while doing so, wanting to show that they could keep up
with the pace of graduate work. A female faculty member reported:
I had one student who was having her child in the middle of the
semester and was to take and pass her qualifiers at the end of the
semester. She wanted to do it. I said, ‘Don’t do it’ . . . because of
the emotional state you are in and the physical state after having a
baby. We discussed this at length at one of our meetings . . . she
ended up not doing it.
One department had taken child-bearing into account to a limited
extent:
During evaluations, if a Ph.D. [student] has a child she will be
given some leeway for that semester . . . I think that’s pretty
funny . . . it’s such a small amount of time. I think the women
should get more leeway, you’re physically out of it. It should be
longer . . . at least a year. What’s the big deal? [In one case, a
student] had the baby in November and had until the end of the
semester. It was partly her fault as well; she did not want to say she
could do less. The faculty gave her a choice of doing a part-time
thing or keeping up to pace. She chose to be put to the same
standard as everyone else.
A peer had a somewhat different view of the faculty’s action and
described an unusual instance of solidarity among women graduate
students:
She decided not to take a leave [when she had the child] and made
the decision at the end of the semester when we are all evaluated.
She got a particularly harsh letter, [the faculty] essentially
threatened to cut her support. They gave her requirements that
would not be achievable for anybody . . . even without a baby.
Two people had left the department earlier in the semester. One
was a new mother, the other was a man who was very involved
with his family. We got the feeling this was being done to
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discourage her and tell her to go away. She was encouraged by her
husband and a number of us to renegotiate this because it was
clearly off base and came out of the blue.
There is a strong cultural bias in most of the academic science
departments we studied against women combining parenthood with a
graduate career; most advisors expect students to delay having
children until after the degree, but then, when is the ‘right time’ if a
woman stays on the academic track?
THE ACCUMULATION OF DISADVANTAGE
Barriers to women deriving from the structure of the academic system
are reinforced by ‘cumulative disadvantage’ factors that excluded other
women from science but also carry over and affect the academic careers
of those who persisted. Beyond cumulative disadvantage carried over
from previous negative experiences lies the realm of ‘marginal
disadvantage’, irritations, the tiny cuts and stigmatizing reproaches
experienced in graduate school. Disadvantage experienced at the
margin of presumed success, after admission to a prestigious graduate
program, is the unkindest cut of all. The fall to failure from such a lofty
height is brought about in many ways.
Cumulative disadvantage extends back to the differential social-
ization of men and women. Girls are encouraged to be good students in
so far as they expect to be given a task, complete it well, and then
receive a reward from an authority figure. The roots of this problem lie
in the different experiences of boys and girls. As young girls and
women, females are socialized to seek help and be help-givers rather
than to be self-reliant or to function autonomously or competitively, as
are boys. In graduate school, despite the underground support structure
provided for male students, behavior is expected to be independent,
strategic, and void of interpersonal support. These expectations are
antithetical to traditional female socialization. In addition, the needs
of women, based on socialization which encourages supportive
interaction with teachers, is frowned upon by many male and some
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female academic staff as indicative of inability. As a female graduate
student put it: ‘The men have the attitude of “Why should people need
their hands held?”’
Many women come into graduate programs in science with low self-
confidence. Women in physics, chemistry, and computer science
reported that their graduate school experience further eroded their
confidence. A female graduate student described the following
symptoms: ‘Women couch their words with all these qualifiers
[because they are so insecure] . . . “I’m not sure, but maybe . . .”’ One
female graduate student said: ‘I have the symptoms of the insecure
woman. A comment from a professor can cripple me. I would be self-
deprecating. My science is different because of my socialization, not
my gender.’ Another woman reported, ‘Women tend to measure
themselves: “Am I allowed to do this? This I know and this I don’t
know. This I should be ashamed I don’t know.”’ Depletion of
confidence is a signal of impending disaster.
An insecure person is like a weakened immune system, vulnerable
to destruction from even a mild attack. If things are working out well,
then initial lack of self-confidence is not too important: but if problems
arise, then negative feelings come forth. For example, one woman had
this to say: ‘It is much worse if a woman fails an exam because her self-
confidence is so low. I got an A- on an exam and was upset. The man
sitting next to me got a C and he said, “So what?”’ Another woman
described the invidious comparisons that she began to make if things
were not going well: ‘If I’m not feeling good about myself, I start
comparing myself to these brilliant people [highly qualified foreign
students]. It doesn’t affect American males as much.’
Finally, if the barriers remain high, low self-confidence translates
into an increased rate of attrition. This loss can be viewed as a result of
the cumulating thwarting of the development of a viable professional
identity. Even those who do not give up, or are not pushed out, often
reduce their professional aspirations.
Young women who remain in science and engineering Ph.D.
programs, as well as those who leave, frequently describe expending a
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great deal of emotional energy in order to cope with a harsh social
environment. A woman who left a Ph.D. program in chemistry after
investing three years of effort said:
There is no impetus that [my family] can give me that I would put
myself back in that situation. There was no feedback on how I was
doing, no pat on the back for what I had done. No feeling that I
could knock on the door to initiate that kind of conversation. And
constantly living with sexist joke telling. It was a complete blow
to my self-esteem for the first time in my life . . . I was always
successful in finding summer employment in chemistry, winning
internships, getting science scholarships. Then I came here and I
couldn’t survive.
Similar feelings were expressed by women who persisted to the degree
despite the alienation they experienced. For some women, experiences
of denigration, rejection and dismissal are sometimes so elusive that
they are not recognized until years later.
When rejection inexplicably follows great success a person is ‘ . . .
left feeling inadequate and a failure, particularly when an individual
has, up until this point, held a different view of herself’ (White, 1974).
Such a cumulatively deprecating experience erodes one’s sense of
personal worth. The female chemist drop-out further elucidated the
effect on her of leaving the Ph.D program:
It was really the first failure. The first major failure. I still view
myself as intelligent enough, hard working enough to have earned
that paper. I guess part of me views my graduate experience as a big
black mark on an otherwise successful life. I very much wanted to
earn the Ph.D. This continues to be an open wound because I
didn’t finish.
The psychological toll of such an insidious experience has con-
sequences for how one adapts to the situation or if one even chooses to
remain a scientist.
Ironically, most women Ph.D. candidates view graduate school as
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just as stressful for their male peers as for themselves. They are
perplexed as to why they lack the apparent self-confidence and
assertiveness of their colleagues. Anxiety often escalates into self-
blame, exacerbated by feelings of inadequacy. Women report feeling
increasingly anxious, and careful, desiring more direction in their
research, and quick to blame themselves for perceived failure. In
contrast, they observe their male peers as more assertive, action-
oriented and risk-taking. These behaviors are cited as evidence of
‘independence’ and ‘autonomy’, and that lack of these characteristics
is frequently mentioned by an older generation of male scientists as the
rationale for women’s ‘inherent’ difficulties in academic science.
The findings discussed above have been corroborated elsewhere, for
example in site visits to assess the climate for women in physics
departments (Dresselhaus et al., 1997) and in a study of three other
science disciplines carried out in 1994 by the Association of Women In
Science. There have also been a few attempts to supplement
qualitative evidence by querying and comparing broad representative
cross-sections of students of both genders. One such recent survey
(Curtin et al., 1997) which aimed at all female graduate students and a
comparable number of randomly selected male students in physics in a
given year, provided confirmation, albeit modest, of the picture that
emerged from qualitative studies. Among students who were U.S.
citizens, women students were somewhat less likely to describe the
faculty as easy to discuss ideas with (38% as against 52% for men), or
fellow students as respectful of the respondent’s opinions (72%
compared to 87% for men). U.S. women were also slightly more likely
than men (15% to 8%) to indicate a currently unfulfilled wish to belong
to a study group.
However, most other aspects of departmental life evoked only
muted differences between male and female students. These included
respondents’ relationships with other students in their research group,
their sense about whether other students in general treated them as
colleagues, and the degree to which they are encouraged by faculty
members. Indeed, most graduate students gave positive evaluations of
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their department environment, with a few notable exceptions such as
whether the department encouraged student self-confidence, or
whether department faculty as a whole treated students as colleagues,
and such reservations issued more or less equally from male and female
students alike.
One clue to understanding these apparently equivalent findings for
each gender is buried in the comments provided by the respondents at
the end of the questionnaire. Women who had given negative
evaluations of their graduate experiences quite often elaborated
specifically on a departmental climate that they felt was hostile to
women, whereas male ‘complainants’ discussed issues such as the
poor job market they faced once they graduated or the overall quality of
their coursework and the coverage of their program’s curriculum.
Thus, although men and women seemingly evaluate the overall
graduate environment similarly, women note distinctly different bad
experiences. The human price for the Ph.D. is higher for women than
for men, and the rewards are often lower.
A good graduate school experience can allow the effects of previous
disadvantages to be left behind. Too often, old bad experiences interact
with a new set, further lowering self-confidence. This concatenation of
disadvantage, as it is disentangled, explains the cumulative thwarting
of female scientific talent. In conjunction with lack of a viable
professional identity that should have been nurtured in graduate
school, it produces reduced aspirations. A male faculty member said of
his female students, ‘Their job aspirations are so low, their self-
confidence is so low, they tend not to apply for what they see as a very
tough place.’ The effects of traditional female socialization are
exacerbated by the assumption that women should fit in to a ‘male’
academic culture, instead of that culture being reformulated to
accommodate both sexes.
INFORMAL TRANSITIONS
:
THE ROLE OF CONFERENCES
A key hopeful finding is the identification of participation in
conferences as a significant informal transition point. In addition to
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‘vertical’ transitions through the stages of a Ph.D. program, there are
also ‘lateral’ transitions in which the student moves out of the research
group and department and into the broader scientific community. If
Ph.D. students participate in conferences, it widens their social circles
and allows them to envision their future in the scientific community.
Several respondents brought up the topic of conferences without being
asked and discussed how their participation had enhanced their
graduate career. One advisor’s suggestion to a student that she take
part in a conference was taken by her as a signal of his high regard. Here
we see exemplified the role of the advisor in assisting their graduate
students and moving them forward. A female graduate student pointed
out that ‘not just everyone can attend . . .’ and that the invitation gave
her a feeling that she was ‘doing the right thing’; that she was ‘ . . . on
the right track.’
Conferences thus play an unexpected role in the socialization of
female scientists, providing information and social support that might
not otherwise have been available. Since women experience problems
at various points in the Ph.D. career, a transition point that provides a
positive experience takes on a greater import for women than men.
Participation in conferences builds confidence and gives women a
chance to network on a new level. A female graduate student explained
that ‘ . . . being sent to conferences happens in accordance to your
relationship with your advisor, specifically it depends on how you
please your advisor.’ Conferences give additional support to those
students who have proven themselves capable of doing excellent work;
those who are invited or permitted to attend are pushed into an
environment that allows them to make connections they would
otherwise not find.
Perhaps the most important event, at sub-specialty workshops and
conferences, is being introduced to key senior scientists and fellow
graduate students from other departments. While larger meetings are
widely publicized, smaller meetings and workshops are often by
invitation only. In any event, it is typically the student’s advisor who
can insure that the student gains the maximum benefit from
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participation. Legitimation from the advisor, through a few words
added to a personal introduction about the quality and potential of a
student’s research, means that they will be taken seriously from the
outset by peers. It is through these introductions that the advisor’s
social capital is placed like a mantle around the student, guaranteeing
that whatever she does or says will be taken seriously.
Invitations to speak at or simply attend conferences are especially
important to women in furthering their graduate careers. At least three
positive effects can be identified: (1) an increase in the female student’s
confidence from a favourable reaction to a research presentation; (2)
introduction into scientific networks, paving the way for future
conference invitations, job possibilities and research collaborations;
and (3) reinforcement of the advisor–advisee relationship, as both
parties recognize its place in a broader social network. The more
recognition they received in the scientific world beyond the
department, the greater the acceptance female Ph.D. students felt in
their home department.
FINISHING THE PROGRAM
Issues of isolation, lack of direction and contacts, and conflict around
one’s life chances continue to dominate toward the end of the program.
A sixth-year student admitted that even though she had only six
months left before finishing, she frequently considered seeking
counseling. She reported feeling overwhelmed with anxiety about the
future and obtaining a job even though she had spent five years in
industry before entering the program: ‘I was feeling left out. I didn’t
know where I belonged. The longer I have continued in this work [the
more I have felt], “Where am I?” If you’re not feeling good, your self-
confidence is going down . . . and on top of that you have no money and
going in debt, I think that’s another consideration [to make you feel
like quitting.]’
The only reports of women who elected to drop out toward the end of
their graduate school career concerned those who apparently had
earlier despaired of remaining in their science owing to difficulties
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within the department. After having negotiated continuous conflicts
with either advisor or committee, the candidates finally decided to
remove themselves completely from a rejecting and distasteful
situation by withdrawing regardless of the consequences for their
degree.
Not feeling ‘cared about’ is thematic throughout these interviews.
There is frustration that there is no group or individual geared to meet
the needs of upper classwomen. For the most part, these women have
banded together but find themselves alienated from the mainstream,
with little access to learning ‘the rules’ and gaining access to ‘the club.’
Advanced female students found that male peers belittled their
accomplishments. Male student’s attitudes typically reflect what
filters down from the male faculty, a complacent, dismissive denial of
women’s scientific ability.
Many advanced female students were not struggling with issues
regarding their dissertations or finishing their degrees. The women
who had reached this point had been able to locate an advisor-advocate;
those who dropped out had not. Their paramount concerns were for the
future, after graduation, ‘how their lives were going to go.’ They wished
to find someone to ask about negotiating a balance between
employment and family. Lastly, it was at this juncture, when they
were close to the completion of the Ph.D., that many realized that they
were devoid of professional contacts and networks as they sought post-
doctoral fellowships and employment, and this struck home. Those
with children were now concerned about career choices and finding
jobs that would allow for time with their children.
POST
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DOCTORAL FELLOWS
A recent study of female post-doctoral fellows concluded that, with
the possible exception of biology, men in positions of power (doctoral
and post-doctoral advisors, tenured professors) often harmed women’s
scientific careers, intentionally and unintentionally (Sonnert and
Holton, 1996). Invidious differences arose from male professors not
taking women seriously as scientists; although present in their labs
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they might not do something as simple as passing on information
about a relevant conference or as crucial as using their connections to
further a promising woman’s career as they would for a man. One
woman even reported not being introduced by her sponsor to a
laboratory visitor, a seemingly surprising but all too typical instance of
discrimination also reported in other studies of research groups.
Gender constraints from the larger society further reinforced the
male culture of science which tended to make women ‘invisible.’ A
significant number of women reported that they selected a fellowship
site not on professional grounds, but in order to follow a husband
whose career had priority. Each of these disadvantages might indi-
vidually appear to be a small matter, an oversight or a matter of
personal choice. Yet, over time, advantages and disadvantages accu-
mulate; more often for men into a ‘Matthew effect’, the halo of success
that attracts additional rewards and renown (Merton, 1968), but for
women into a ‘Cinderella effect’ where the reverse conditions hold.
Several Ph.D. students in our sample had graduated and moved on to
their post-doctoral placements. Some who had good relations with
their advisor at the graduate level reported poor experiences at the post-
doctoral level. A post-doc at an Ivy League university said that she
received no supervision at the start of the fellowship. Although her
situation has since improved, her transition was an isolating
experience. She was left alone in her work; nobody noticed her
presence. Writing her first paper by herself was a difficult task in these
circumstances. She believes that supervision would have helped. In
retrospect, she decided that she had received considerable moral
support during graduate school, especially in comparison to her post-
doctoral experience. She hadn’t realized at the time how good it was.
Another student working on her post-doc in New Mexico reported
that the work was similar to thesis work she had completed, the only
difference being that she is now more highly paid. A student pursuing
her post-doc at a cancer research facility in Philadelphia described the
environment as being a good hybrid, in between academia and
industry, and a good transition, especially if one was interested in a
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career in industry. Both of these fellows had taken the initiative in
obtaining their positions, either through networking at conferences or
simply writing a letter to the chair of a department. But these are not
typical cases. Instead of a rich experience of ever-increasing integration
into a scientific community, as women move to higher levels, many
report isolating experiences.
OVERCOMING THE EFFECTS OF ISOLATION
Few women who attain advanced degrees acquire the density of
connections that typically accrue to men as they move into the
academic system. Increasing the flow of women through the pipeline
by removing blockages to entry and exit from Ph.D courses of study is a
necessary but insufficient policy. To attain the maximum value from
investment in human capital, it is necessary to recognize that the
quality of women’s Ph.D. experience is as important as the numbers of
degrees granted to women.
The crucial relationship for Ph.D. students is with their advisor; the
second most important is with fellow students. Female graduate
students report problems with both male and female advisors. Feelings
of incompetence, self-blame, isolation and confusion arise from poor
relationships with advisors. Without the support of an authority
figure, women consistently reported feeling lost and incompetent.
Early in their graduate school experience, they were often unable to
gain their advisor’s attention and support. Later in the degree program
some reported compensating support from peers that helped them
persist to the degree. Under conditions of relative isolation,
attainment of a Ph.D. degree could be merely a formal achievement,
lacking the penumbra of informal connections that arise from being
introduced into a scientific community by a mentor.
Student participation in conferences was identified as a critical
informal transition point. Conferences, in addition to providing a
forum for the dissemination of scientific knowledge, are also a venue
for distribution of ‘social capital’, the connections and access to
information and resources that help build a research career. However,
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full participation rests on much more than simply receiving funds to
attend. Although access to resources is important, it is the advisor’s
introduction of the student to colleagues that is crucial in forming
relationships that will be important to future scientific success.
Women report mixed experiences in being introduced into the broader
scientific community in their field by their advisor.
Conducting regular ‘body counts’ of Ph.D. production, by sub-
discipline and department, is an important first step toward evaluating
graduate education in the sciences. ‘Quality of academic life’
indicators should also be constructed. A female graduate student
referred to transition points as ‘threats’, suggesting that intimidation is
still the norm. The continuing perception of transitions as dangerous
appeared to contradict indications that her Ph.D. program was moving
away from a ‘weeding-out’ approach.
Even though changes have been made, the previous system, or at
least its image, is still intact. Critical transitions for women in science
are not yet ‘rites of passage’ into a welcoming community; instead,
they are often fraught with peril for female scientific careers. As
women ascend the educational ladder, they increasingly find support
at the early stages, only to later encounter the exercise of arbitrary
authority or simple inattention to women’s needs.
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GRADUATE EXPERIENCE
:
A
SUMMARY
Getting a Ph.D. involves far more than passing qualifying
examinations and producing high quality research for a dissertation.
Success in graduate school is highly dependent upon being included in
the informal social relations of academic departments. Even though
men and women are in the same graduate programs their experience
can be strikingly different. Most men quickly become included in the
informal aspects of departmental life while women are often left out.
No matter how brilliant and academically successful an individual has
been in the past, isolation can take a toll.
The academically superior women in our study, who had typically
WOMEN
’
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(
AND MEN
’
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been at the top of their school and undergraduate classes, were shocked
upon entering graduate school to find themselves marginalized and
isolated. They were often excluded from study groups and left to
grapple with course work and examinations on their own. Many either
found themselves deterred from attaining the Ph.D. or received the
formal diploma without becoming part of the social networks that are
an important prerequisite for future scientific accomplishment.
All of the female students interviewed for this study had had highly
successful undergraduate careers. Most reported strong mentoring
relationships with a special advisor, professor, or lab director (usually
male) who recognized their scientific potential and encouraged them
to apply to graduate school. As one respondent put it, ‘I think all of us
were very successful [before coming], otherwise we would not be here
today. I was very successful, cruising through my undergraduate
classes.’ She continued, ‘The one thing that really made me decide to go
to grad school was the experience of doing one-on-one research with a
professor at my undergraduate institution. He gave me a lot of
encouragement which gave me a lot of confidence, all of which has
been drained since the first month here.’ Although a disproportionate
number of women are deterred from graduate training by discouraging
experiences in college, the smaller number that do go on have typically
had a superior experience that all too often is not repeated at the next
level.
Ideally, an educational institution should provide for ongoing
development, with each succeeding stage providing new opportunities
to further consolidate and advance past achievements. U.S.
elementary and secondary education has a mixed reputation.
Universities, however, are viewed as the crowning glory and saving
grace of an otherwise flawed educational system. Because of this aura
of exceptionalism, graduate school is usually examined as a unique
closed system: socially, legally, and dynamically different even from
other elite institutions. Nevertheless, graduate school is a social-
psychological milieu like any other place of work. It can therefore
become either a source for self-realization or a place where
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interpersonal interactions are blocked (Berger, 1967). In this chapter
our focus has been on the experiences of women in graduate programs
in the sciences and engineering and the effects of both formal and
informal structures on their training. The different graduate
educational experiences of females and males make it almost seem as if
there are two Ph.D. programs in the same department: one track for
men, the other for women.
The female ‘track’ has long been less well populated. In recent years
an increasing number of women have pursued higher degrees in the
sciences, bringing the tension between women’s lives and the taken for
granted ‘male’ structure of the Ph.D. program to light. In an earlier era
when women in science were very few in number, unconscious
negative effects of a training system that did not take women’s
interests into account were all but invisible.
The fact of a growing population of women at the higher levels of
scientific education does not tell the whole story of what is within
those advancing numbers. In the next chapter we address the anomaly
of dispersion and isolation within this numerical increase: the paradox
of ‘critical mass’ for women in science.
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7The paradox of critical mass for
women in science
At each transitional point the number of women decreases at a
significantly higher rate than men. Thus, while women made up 37%
of the students taking physics in U.S. high schools in 1988, only 22% of
those taking the calculus-based introductory physics course in college
were women (AIP, 1988, 1991). Women’s presence is reduced to 15% of
those receiving the bachelor’s degree in physics and then to 10% of the
share of Ph.D.s. The decline continues in the shift from education to
academic employment, with women constituting 7% of assistant
professors of physics and only about 3% of full professors.
What are the effects of such small numbers on the women who
persist in scientific careers? A key finding in our interviews was that as
the number of women faculty members in a department increased,
they divided into distinct subgroups that could be at odds with each
other. Senior female scientists typically shared the values and
workstyles of older men; their narrow focus failed to meet the needs of
most younger women. In contrast, some younger women (and a few
men) struggled to create an alternative scientific role, balancing work
and non-work issues. The scientific role thus divides along
generational and gender fault lines. These developments have
significant unintended consequences for the socialization of female
scientists – for example, the availability of relevant role models. As
long as the relatively few women in academic science were willing to
accept the strictures of a workplace organized on the assumption of a
social and emotional support structure provided to the male scientist
by an unpaid full-time housewife or done without, issues of women in
science were not attended to. A modest increase in the numbers of

women in science, without a change in the structure of the scientific
workplace, creates a paradox of critical mass.
Affirmative action is expected to clear up blockages in the pipeline
but many of these barriers persist. Affirmative action rests, in part, on
the premise that a sufficient number of persons from a previously
excluded social category is required – a critical mass – in order to foster
the inclusion of others from that background. From the 1970s, efforts
to increase the number of women in academic science departments
have largely resided in affirmative action programs, requiring full
consideration of female and minority candidates. However, in the
1980s lack of vigorous enforcement reduced the spirit of the law into a
bureaucratic requirement that became a routine part of the paperwork
of the academic hiring process, often with little or no effect on
recruitment (Nuevo Kerr, 1993.)
A minority group (especially one that has traditionally been
discriminated against) is easily marginalized when only a small
presence in a larger population; its continued presence and survival is
in constant jeopardy, requiring outside intervention and assistance to
prevent extinction. As the group’s presence and level of participation
grows, at a particular point the perspective of members of the minority
group and the character of relations between minority and majority
changes qualitatively. In theory, the minority is increasingly
able to organize itself and insure its survival from within and effects
a transition to an accepted presence, without external assistance,
in a self-sustaining process. The discrete point at which the presence of
a sufficient number brings about qualitative improvement in
conditions and accelerates the dynamics of change is known as ‘critical
mass’.
The magical statistic for a critical mass has sometimes been defined
as a ‘strong minority’ of at least 15%. This implies that there are a
sufficient number to have an impact on the majority. But as we shall
see in this chapter, it matters what the 15% represents: if it represents
women of several nationalities who self-isolate within their own
communities, leaving two American women in two unrelated
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laboratories unknown to each other, it is a false number. It is also a false
number if the departmental culture is so toxic that the freedom to
associate with other women is subtly restricted. It is also a false
number if the 15% is so dispersed within multiple laboratories that it is
not known that there are other women with whom to interact. The
outcome in all these scenarios is the perpetuation of isolation. So the
precise number is less important than the nature of the response that
the new minority receives from the majority – in this case, female
scientists from their male counterparts.
Critical mass, the presence of a significant minority whose precise
number varies by context, has contradictory effects. Indeed, as
underlying conditions improve, the situation of the minority group
may appear worse as formerly repressed grievances come out into the
open. For example, sociologist Paula Rayman and co-workers (1996)
have reported that as a ‘critical mass’ of women appears in medical
school, the rate of sexual harassment cases increases. One explanation
is that the rise of empowerment is at work, with women feeling safe
enough to file complaints, as well as there being more women available
to be subject to harassment!
When women are a token minority they may well fear the adverse
consequences of raising controversial issues and complaints. As their
numbers increase and they become better organized, women are more
likely to avail themselves of redress procedures. At one university that
we studied, the affirmative action officer reported an active caseload in
the humanities and social sciences but virtually none in the sciences
and engineering. She attributed this difference to the ‘universalistic’
character of science.
However, in our interviews we found women in science and
engineering departments with similar complaints. With token
numbers and an unorganized presence, these women expected highly
undesirable consequences, placing their degrees at risk, if they brought
an action. In contrast to the humanities and social sciences, science
and engineering departments lacked an organized political support
structure at the time of the study, leading women to repress their
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grievances and giving their departments a false appearance of gender
equity.
In one instance, a woman graduate student at this university
contemplated making a complaint against a male faculty member who
was discussing pornographic images on a computer screen with his
male graduate student. The incident took place in her presence in an
office that she shared with the graduate student. She drew back from
making an official complaint, fearful of endangering her degree.
However, the matter became so widely known within the department
that the chair sent out a strongly worded message condemning the
practice as unacceptable and warning against its repetition. The chair’s
response to this incident, which received some publicity on the
departmental and nationwide e-mail networks for women in computer
science, was an isolated event; the department remained basically
unchanged in its treatment of female graduate students.
Change without struggle is less likely than conflict with determined
resistance. Under certain conditions, an organizational transfor-
mation culminates in minority group members achieving and
retaining positions of real power and authority that were previously
beyond their grasp. Paradoxically, ostracism of women often
accompanies the breaching of gender uniformity, the first stage in the
breakdown of resistance to women’s participation in science. The
initial reaction of men to the appearance of women in a scientific field,
research unit or academic department has typically been to ignore
them.
When they must be taken seriously because of demonstrated
accomplishment, there is often a negative reaction couched as a
criticism of a woman’s personality or appearance. The fear of ostracism
often leads some women in science who have ‘made it’ to deny the
existence of the gender-related obstacles in their path. Calling
attention to difficulties that they have managed to overcome could
lead to counter-charges that they received special privileges and
thereby devalue their achievements. Younger women are often
concerned that participating in activities for women in their
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department will set them apart; they perceive that men will look
askance at this affiliation and are sometimes unwilling to participate
as a result.
This finding implies that the minority must attain power to
overcome resistance, as opposed to findings that a modest increase in
numbers, by itself, results in improved conditions. The support of
persons in structural positions of power, or attainment of such
positions by members of the minority group, is the key to change. In
this view, despite accretion of numbers, it is strategic power that really
counts. Despite their apparent success within the existing system,
women faculty members struggle with feelings of inadequacy
regardless of their status.
As one female faculty member summed up the condition of women
in science, ‘ I guess it’s our socialization. I have a lack of self-confidence
myself. I guess I’ve gotten more confident as I get older and take on
more jobs like editor in chief of a journal and so on. I still notice feelings
of lack of confidence and maybe I’m not good enough to do this. I
see it in lots and lots of my colleagues. I see it at the faculty level
and especially in young graduate students.’ This phenomenon
explains why many women, especially junior faculty members,
do not feel that they can afford, either socially or professionally, to be
activists or advocates for young women students within their
departments.
ALTERNATIVE THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
Two theoretical frameworks have been offered by sociologists to
explain the effects of tokenism: the ‘group interaction’ perspective and
the ‘demographic group power’ perspective. The group interaction
literature indicates that women suffer in work groups where they are
present in small numbers. Kanter (1977) argued that minority group
members or ‘tokens’ are less likely to be accepted by members of the
majority, a process that she called ‘boundary heightening’. In addition,
tokens face increased visibility and pressure to perform that negatively
affects working conditions and reduces performance. Social contact
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with majority members is lessened and when such contact occurs it is
often based on stereotypes. Significant differences appear as the ratio of
minority to majority members improves.
Spangler, Gordon and Popkin (1978) found that women students in a
law program composed of 20% women earned lower grades, tended to
select ‘ghettos’ law specialties and participated less in class than
women in a law school with 30% women students. Alexander and
Thoits (1985), Gutek (1985) and Konrad (1986) found similar effects on
grade point averages, relations between male and female co-workers,
and self-evaluation of work. The group interaction perspective
suggests that as the proportion of minority members in a group
increases, achievement levels improve but not necessarily in a
continuous fashion.
Alternatively, the demographic group power thesis argues that a
subgroup’s ability to gain organizational resources is proportional to
its size. Thus, some group power theorists argue that the higher the
proportion of women, the greater their ability to improve their share in
the distribution of resources. However, while the increase in the size of
a discriminated-against sub-group may improve members’ ability to
influence the distribution of rewards in their favor, it also engenders
increased resistance from majority members who expect to suffer
corresponding losses.
Indeed, South et al. (1982) found that among office workers, as the
proportion of women increased, their interaction with male co-
workers and the support they received for promotion from male co-
workers decreased. Thus, the larger the minority the greater the
discrimination against it, causing the culture and experience in
different departments to seem impervious to incremental change.
IS CRITICAL MASS SUFFICIENT
?
Attainment of critical mass only partly resolves the dilemma of women
in academic departments and research units. The fallacy of critical
mass as a unilateral change strategy is shown by the fact that female
faculty and senior research scientists pursue strikingly different
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strategies. Despite some progress, organizational structures within
units, and the divisions they engender, continue to isolate women.
Furthermore, the dispersal of women students into male-dominated
research groups sustains isolation even when there is a potential
critical mass in academic departments. Nor does an improvement in
the total number of women in a unit necessarily overcome an
underlying situation of subfield fragmentation that further increased
the isolation of women.
Quite often a department is divided into subdisciplinary groupings
that have little to do with each other. For example, one chemistry
department in our sample was so fragmented by area that neither a
female faculty member respondent nor the students interviewed had
an accurate picture of how many women graduate students were in the
department. This fragmentation seems to be especially pervasive in
chemistry, more so than in other disciplines studied. When the
numbers are low to begin with, once in research groups, women
students often do not see one another, and occasionally barely know of
each other’s existence.
In this environment, small numbers have two implications. First,
members of any group characterized by small numbers will have a
statistically lower chance of being central figures in different
networks. Second, although critical mass is a prerequisite for access
into powerful social networks it is not enough on its own, because
social networks criss-cross sub-specialties in the field, research topics
and geography. Nevertheless, we also found that a modest increase in
the number of women did bring about some change in departments.
In this respect, critical mass does work smoothly: there is more
support and safety in numbers. A female student observed, ‘One good
thing is that there were female faculty members. It definitely changes
the attitude of how male students react to women. They must take
them seriously and this is positive.’ When senior females were present,
overt male behavior toward women improved (for example, public
sexual joking and stereotyping declined) in a threshold effect of critical
mass.
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THE EMERGENCE OF FEMALE
-
GENDERED SUBFIELDS
Women who are in positions of power can act as mentors to help bring
other women into central networks, rather than leaving them in minor
subfields where women traditionally congregate. Of course, what is
central and what is peripheral changes over time. We are currently in
the midst of a transformation in which the male-dominated physical
sciences are being displaced from their scientific and economic central
position by biological sciences, both molecular and evolutionary.
Women have traditionally made up a larger proportion of biologically
related fields.
The concentration of women in subfields is not always voluntary;
women are also subtly or not so subtly directed to these fields. It is
significant that these areas are usually biologically focused. In
chemistry at one university, biochemistry had a significant number of
women and the area was connected to the bio-science division. In
computer science, many women gravitate to artificial intelligence (AI)
where cognitive processes and psychological links are prevalent. In
electrical engineering, the bio-electrical subfield attracted the most
women.
Biology has evolved sufficiently in its gender composition and
character into a field where attitudes toward women have changed.
Many informants expressed this as a given: when they were told that
we were looking at biology, their assumption was that this field was
less problem-ridden owing to the numbers of women present. There is
a snowball effect: as the numbers increase in the biologically related
areas in electrical engineering, chemistry and computer science, they
then attract still more women.
The difficulty in relying on creation of a critical mass of women
faculty members in a department as a change strategy is that the
faculty members may be unable or unwilling to play the designated
role. Nevertheless, even though it is not the whole solution, a
significant presence of women on the faculty allows students to
become acquainted with female role models, even if some are persons
they do not wish to emulate. As one faculty woman put it, ‘Women are
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attracting women. The broadcasting of women-friendly environments
through the grapevine [is a step forward]. Women are being empowered
as women are increasingly a scarce commodity of departments seeking
female faculty.’ Beyond the creation of women’s networks is the issue
of opening up all networks to female participation.
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8The ‘kula ring’ of scientific
success
Elite male participants in a cultural complex extending from the
Kwakiutl Native American communities in the Pacific Northwest to
the Trobriand Islands in the South Pacific regularly meet to give
away their most prized possessions to each other. The more material
goods an individual gives away, the higher their social status and the
more secure their standing within the group. This pattern of social
relations, called the ‘kula ring’ in Melanesia and the ‘potlatch’ in North
America, provides an informal means of organizing and redistributing
resources and power in the community (Drucker and Heizer, 1967).
‘And it is just through this exchange, through their being constantly
within reach and the object of competitive desire, through being
the means of arousing envy and conferring social distinction and
renown, that these objects attain their high value’ (Malinowski, 1922:
511).
Conducted at regular intervals, the kula ring has its analog in the way
scientists exchange ideas, resources, and information. Like gatherings
of Melanesian clan leaders, elite scientists who are linked by
ongoing networks of relations and governed by norms of trust and
reciprocity ritualistically meet to discuss collaborations, discover
complementary areas of research, and introduce their graduate
students and post-doctoral fellows to each other for future
correspondence and employment.
Even members of the same department may experience the
scientific world quite differently, depending on the configuration of
their social networks. The differential effect of networks on women
and men has also been noted, particularly in regard to problems of

mentorship and networking across sub-areas that differ in status
(Ibarra and Smith-Lovin, 1997). Suzanne Brainard, director of the
Women in Engineering Initiative at the University of Washington (an
organization that promotes the inclusion of women in the engineering
professions) concluded that ‘The major issue facing women at the
academic level is isolation’ (Emmett, 1992).
Epstein (1970) found that in medicine, law, and science, men get
more opportunities for professional advancement through informal
sponsors who provide advice and share tacit knowledge on how to get
ahead. Reskin (1978) documents this exclusionary process for women
in scientific careers. She found that when there are few women in an
academic department or in an industrial or government research unit,
and women are not well accepted by men in those settings, they
experience the effects of isolation.
Post-graduate women in academic research groups also experience
professional isolation more acutely than men as they become aware
that they are not being invited, to the same degree as their male peers,
to be part of the professional network that leads to contacts and
potential job openings. A female graduate student commented on the
frustration that this kind of perception creates about career prospects
and job aspirations and said, ‘If you had a job, who would you hire first?
Someone you’re buddies with, right?’
The benefits of being in a strong network of contacts are the mirror
image of the problems of isolation. Early inclusion in a strong network
provides a ‘jump start’ to a scientific career. For example, a professor’s
invitation to a graduate student to deliver a paper at an elite conference
allows network building among fellow graduate students and their
senior sponsors. Such connections create a stable and supportive
reference group as well as providing channels by which to disseminate
work and share ideas.
In this chapter, we argue that differences in scientists’ social
networks influence their career success by shaping their level of social
capital. Like the more familiar concepts of human capital (a person’s
talents and know-how) and financial capital, social capital has
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exchange value and can be accumulated. It is different in that it
depends on relationships to create and sustain it.
SOCIAL AND OTHER CAPITALS
:
DEFINING OUR TERMS
Social capital is one of several forms of ‘capital’ that have recently been
recognized by analogy to monetary capital. Thus, human capital or
‘what you know’ is the intellectual reservoir of ideas, methods, and
factual knowledge that one accumulates, whereas social capital or
‘who you know’ is the web of contacts and relationships that provide
information, validation, and encouragement. Social capital refers to
the relational aspects or informal dimensions (e.g., commitment and
intimacy between persons) while ‘cognitive capital’ is the knowledge
base that an individual has acquired in a particular field. Both kinds of
capital, human and social, in optimum combinations are the key to
achievement, reward and recognition in science.1
Thus, social capital refers to the productive resources a person gains
access to through contacts that control critical resources, or creates
with another person they have a relationship with, but which decrease
in value if the relationship ends or the resources are transferred to
another relationship. Social capital ‘accrue[s] to an individual or a
group by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less
institutionalized relationships [that are] embedded in a stable system
of contacts possessed by an individual’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992:
119). These resources include interpersonal trust and norms of
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KULA RING
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1The ‘social capital’ thesis had its origin in a debate over the relative importance of family ties
or formal schooling in occupational success. The social capital literature focuses on the role of
the home and the school in reducing or mediating the negative effects of social origins through
provision of a network of trust or what Granovetter (1985) calls ‘embeddedness’. ‘Social capital’
also refers to the nature of relations between individuals based on their mutual expectations and
obligations, channels of communications and social norms (Coleman, 1988). Families at all
economic levels are becoming increasingly ill equipped to provide the setting that schools are
designed to complement and augment in preparing the next generation. Within the family, the
growth in ‘human capital’ is extensive, as reflected by the increased levels of educational
attainment. But social capital (relationships and social ties), as reflected by the presence of adults
in the home, and the range of exchange between parents and children about academic, social,
economic, and personal matters, has declined, at the same time that the parents’ human capital
(e.g. level of education) has grown.

reciprocity as well as knowledge of new scientific ideas and strategies
for developing a line of research.
Social capital provides an approach for analyzing differences in the
success of men and women in a social context in which productivity is
based on managing interdependence with others. Our hypothesis is
that the role of social capital increases in a non-linear fashion. As
individuals attain initial increments of social capital, their likelihood
of obtaining future infusions grows ever greater. The presence or lack
of connections to a mentor or role model of scientific success gives
some individuals a head start and places others at a disadvantage.
Importantly, social capital accumulation is all too often gender linked
and makes a difference even among the successful. A recent Danish
study of access to post-doctoral fellowships found that women had to
have 2.6 times the publication productivity of males to achieve equal
career success. Our hypothesis is that a greater measure of human
capital was required to make up for a deficit of social capital.
We begin by describing how the production of scientific knowledge
has changed from solitary work to production lab work that places new
emphasis on social networks as the mechanism for linking
interdependent scientists across departments and universities. Next,
we describe the creation of social capital in scientific careers and its
effect on both careers and knowledge production. This material
provides the background for a later chapter which empirically
examines the differences in the social capital of men and women
scientists and the ways in which it influences their aspirations and
career chances. Then we describe the role that social capital played in
the race to discover the structure of DNA. Finally, we draw a series of
inferences from the data analyzed earlier in the chapter about the
relationship among women, social capital and science.
THE NEW ORDER OF SCIENTIFIC PRODUCTION
The model of scientific practice in the natural sciences that was once
taken for granted, and was expounded by Vannevar Bush in his
landmark vision Science: The Endless Frontier (1945), has materially
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changed. Bush argued that science follows three simple linear steps –
basic research, applied research and development – and that a rich
human capital base and heavy investments by the government drove
the success of scientific achievement. The important factors are two: a
strong, government-led financial infrastructure and a strong physical
infrastructure composed of state-of-the-art technology, laboratories,
instruments, and facilities. In the fifty years since The Endless Frontier
the myth of the individual scientist has been supplanted by the reality
that the development of scientific innovations requires not only
financial and human capital, but also a store of social capital.
Nevertheless, the myth of the individual scientist persists as an
instance of what anthropologists call ‘cultural lag’, where a belief
about a practice may continue to be strongly held long after reality has
irrevocably changed. Thus, funding agencies and scientists themselves
refer to the ‘individual investigator’, who is actually a research
manager, whether in academia or industry, who provides intellectual
inspiration for the work of several graduate students, post-doctoral
fellows, undergraduates and technicians, and who also raises the funds
from granting agencies to support their work.
The managerial responsibilities assumed by the contemporary
academic scientist who conducts funded research lead many of them to
say that they feel like they are running a small business . Indeed, these
academic quasi-firms have many of the characteristics of a business
firm, save for the profit motive (Etzkowitz and Peters, 1991). Certainly
academic science has come a long way organizationally from the
individual faculty member before the Second World War, who might
work with a few graduate students individually. The contemporary
academic scene requires a continuing replenishment of resources, of
varying kinds, to maintain the viability of a research group.
The pivotal role of social capital over and above the effects of
financial and human capital is illustrated by recent research on
successful university/industry partnerships in Great Britain,
Germany, and the U.S. from 1850 to 1914 (Murmann, 1998; Murmann
and Laudau, 1998). Murmann carefully measured and compared the
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government expenditures on R&D and education in these nations, as
well as the quality of research faculty and the number of Ph.D.s
awarded. He demonstrated that the decisive factor for the
advancement of science was not the quality of the financial or human
capital (even though some base level was obviously needed), because
these were at equal levels in all the countries studied.
Rather, the nature of social ties among scientists in the academic
community and industry was the key factor that stimulated scientific
innovation and the likelihood that laboratories, led by university
professors, would develop world class research and products. It was the
higher level of social capital among German scientists – that is, their
ties within the university, and between university and industry – that
enabled them to pool resources and ideas more effectively than those in
other nations.
We believe that social capital is even more important in scientific
production today than it was nearly 100 years ago. First, beyond the
formal structure of courses and examinations, contemporary advanced
scientific training is increasingly based on transfer of tacit knowledge
in group settings among peers and with mentors and through learning-
by-doing.
Second, most problems are too large for a single individual to tackle
alone, given the increased specialization of subfields and the high costs
of analysis, testing, and product development. The success of research
projects increasingly depends upon the coordination of several
scientists and non-scientific groups that bring diverse scientific as well
as managerial and financial competencies to bear on problems that are
increasingly at the interface between science and commerce.
The complex reality of rapidly developing fields, in which
knowledge is both sophisticated and widely dispersed, demand a range
of intellectual and scientific skills that far exceed the capabilities of
any single organization, as illustrated by two notable recent
discoveries in biotechnology. The development of an animal model for
Alzheimer’s disease appeared in a report (Nature, Feb. 9, 1995) co-
authored by 34 scientists affiliated with two new biotechnology
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companies, one established pharmaceutical firm, a leading research
university, a federal research laboratory, and a non-profit research
institute.
Similarly, a publication identifying a strong candidate for the gene
determining susceptibility to breast and ovarian cancer (Science, Oct.
7, 1994) featured 45 co-authors drawn from a biotechnology firm, a U.S.
medical school, a Canadian medical school, an established pharma-
ceutical company, and a government research laboratory. More
important than the number of authors is the diversity of sources of
innovation and the wide range of different organizations involved in
these breakthrough publications (Powell et al., 1996:118–119). All of
this work suggests that as knowledge becomes more fragmented and
dispersed among individuals and organizations that are geographically
separated and institutionally independent, the role of social networks
in forming information bridges and providing social support increases.
THE MOBILIZATION OF SOCIAL CAPITAL IN SCIENTIFIC
CAREERS
Social networks emerge as a matter of necessity around scientists who
must pool resources and talent, providing members of these networks
with special access to information that is not available to those
outside. An important aspect of social networks is that they influence
how individuals exchange ideas, information, and resources in ways
that other forms of information transfer, such as journals or gossip, do
not. In particular, a quid pro quo logic of exchange is the norm in
networks as new members (e.g., incoming graduate students) feel
indebted to others in the network for bringing them in and sharing with
them their knowledge and resources. As this indebtedness builds up
among different members in the network, the social network becomes
a repository for opportunities and investments that can be drawn on
when needed and are reciprocated at some time in the future back to
the group.
In this sense, networks share similarities with revolving credit
associations – associations in which members donate resources to the
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group and draw on them when in need. The result is that social capital
builds at different rates depending on the structure and membership of
a person’s network, and that social capital is created as a by-product of
many different activities which share a common thread of generating,
consuming, and investing in productive resources.
As this process extends over time and to new contacts, an
individual’s social network is enriched with opportunities (social
capital) that can facilitate success. Contacts can be called to access
information about jobs before they are nationally posted, to discover
what areas might receive special funding consideration, to locate
unpublished material, or to garner the validity of new research
findings. Being invited to participate in research grant proposals by
senior faculty members increases chances of success; exclusion sends a
strong message to women to seek another position before tenure
review.
In one department that we studied, junior female faculty members
in an electrical engineering department reported that they were left out
of invitations given to young males to participate in large-scale
research proposals. The negative message this gave to one female
faculty member was so strong that she resigned her research position in
favor of a job at a teaching college. This capital also plays a critical role
when evaluation is equivocal (e.g., the evaluation of work), when
favorable interpretations are important, or when referrals are made to
individuals in other networks with other opportunities for jobs,
research projects, and funding. To begin a career without these
connections isolates an individual at the very stage of a scientific
career when visible achievement is crucial to long-term success
(Merton, 1968; Lin, Ensel and Vaughn, 1981; Fernandez and Weinberg,
1997).
Senior scientists who have developed a high degree of social capital
can be thought of as ‘social capital bankers’ and typically have the
greatest access to information; their networks are widely cast, cross-
cutting research teams, departments, and universities (Zuckerman
and Merton, 1972; Seashore et al., 1989). These individuals are in the
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best position to spot opportunities and to connect less embedded
individuals to opportunities. Persons new to departments, such as
graduate students or assistant professors, are in the opposite position.
They lack a large and well-developed network of opportunities and
therefore are highly dependent, for information and contacts, upon
individuals in central positions.
Elite scientists deposit social capital with their protegés and fellows
in the form of invitations to high-level conferences and access to
privileged information. Participation in a circle of investigators of
related topics gives a scientist confidence to move swiftly in
interpreting his or her findings, increasing the likelihood of being
credited for a new discovery. Information gained through telephoning
friends can be a crucial part of preparing an experiment and assessing
results. Such ties provide informal access to knowledge about
emerging topics for investigation along fast-moving research fronts, a
hint of related results, or warnings about unfruitful approaches already
attempted elsewhere, so-called ‘telephone science.’
Offering access to protegés, who are viewed as rising stars enhances
the prestige of a senior scientist and further expands their power just as
the ceremonious circle of gift giving, among the Kwakiutl tribe,
produces the ‘social glue’ that keeps the dispersed clans together as a
collective entity. As with the Kwakiutl, access to participation in
informal ties and networks is the surest path to high achievement and
enhanced social standing in the group (Burt, 1992).
Exclusion from a network of social ties and critical mass contributes
to the well-documented decline in the proportion of women who make
it to each succeeding rung on the professional career ladders (Burt,
1997). But the exclusion also affects those seemingly ‘successful’
women who manage to persist all the way to the Ph.D. Here the issue is
not one of survival, but of the quality of the experience in graduate
school, and the efficacy of the tools that are available to make the
transition to a productive and satisfying career.
Attaining formal status such as an advanced degree or a research
position is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a highly
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successful career in science. Formal positions are only a rough
indicator of success, since individuals of the same rank differ widely in
the strength of their networks and their access to scientists with
relevant knowledge for possible collaboration.
Thus, social capital plays an important role in enabling scientists to
manage the interdependencies inherent in scientific labor and
practice. It does not replace human capital or financial capital as the
primary force but reveals the importance of resources that are lodged in
relationships between people rather than in individuals, technology, or
institutional systems in scientific careers and work. Social capital
increases an individual’s timing, access, and referral benefits, which
span the contexts in which other ‘capitals’ operate, and also links them
together in new combinations and innovations that result in the
creations of privileged resources (Burt, 1992). While we postpone to a
later chapter our exposition of how social capital is measured in the
context of the hard sciences, we note that it depends on the structure of
a person’s network and the quality of the relationships they maintain
with people who occupy that structure.
Large expansive networks of weak ties offer access to new and novel
information while strong ties provide social support and a basis for
gaining social and political support (Granovetter, 1973; Coleman,
1990; Burt, 1992; Uzzi, 1997). Our hypothesis is that men’s and
women’s different career trajectories can in part be explained by
looking at their differences in social capital.
SOCIAL CAPITAL
,
DNA
,
AND GENDER
In his memoir on the discovery of the structure of DNA, James Watson
described the epiphany that he experienced at an international
poliomyelitis congress in Copenhagen. After a week of ‘ . . . receptions,
dinners and trips to waterfront bars . . . an important truth was slowly
entering my head: a scientist’s life might be interesting socially as well
as intellectually’ (Watson, 1968: 40; italics added). Sharon Traweek, an
anthropologist who conducted a participant observation study as a
public information officer at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center,
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observed the same kind of social interaction noted by Watson but
among the average scientist and away from the spotlight of fame. At
this leading high-energy physics research site, she found that groups of
men from each detector congregated at lunch in the cafeteria and after
hours at local pubs to build friendships and exchange ideas. The same
was true of theoretical physicists, who, unlike experimental
physicists, were expected to be ‘solo artists’ because they experienced
few technological or financial incentives that might divide the labor of
a project among a workgroup of fellow scientists.
Watson apart, the informal social relations of science usually go
unreported in the history of scientific achievement. The news sections
of Science and Nature do not yet have a gossip columnist to chronicle
who was seen with whom at a meeting or to note new collaborative
partnerships. Ironically, a solitary existence has been assumed to be the
mode of scientific life. Consequently, an examination of the effects of
isolation on scientific careers goes against the grain of popular
expectations that ‘scientists work alone, in silence’ (Traweek, 1988: 57).
Nevertheless, news is routinely transmitted among colleagues,
locally and at a distance through informal channels, third-person
gossip, phone, and e-mail. There are times, such as when two groups
make simultaneous discoveries, when gossip among scientists is
intensely conspicuous. But ties among scientists not only permit
information flow, they increase the probability of finding scientific
partners with complementary skills, a shared commitment to a
particular line of work, and the conviction to stand by their
recommendations and convictions.
Consider the case of Rosalind Franklin, Watson and Crick, and the
discovery of DNA’s helical structure. Why wasn’t Rosalind Franklin
included among the recipients of the Nobel prize for this achievement?
Owing to her untimely death, the inevitability of her exclusion can
never be proven. Rosalind Franklin produced the first photographs
containing the crucial evidence of DNA’s helical structure. But she
worked in an isolated research environment apart from the assistance
of a single junior colleague.
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Franklin lacked membership in a group of colleagues who might
have supported riskier inferences and encouraged her to publish her
findings more fully and quickly. Instead, in the prototypical fashion of
an isolated female scientist, she built up her battery of evidence slowly
and precisely before she was willing to draw strong conclusions. She
lacked the social capital needed to locate persons with particular
scientific information that was outside her expertise that could have
allayed her hesitation about the speculative nature of her findings. In
addition, she lacked contacts to researchers who could have mobilized
support for her insights.
In contrast, her competitors Watson and Crick set forth ill-supported
hypotheses on the chance of hitting the mark, despite the risk of being
shot down, because of the support furnished by their large and well-
connected network. After announcing a theory that was quickly found
to be empirically wrong, they were ordered to cease and desist from this
line of work by the Institute’s head. Nevertheless, Watson and Crick
obtained informal support and expressions of interest from colleagues
and soon geared up for another assault on their goal.
Watson and Crick also used informal social interaction with
scientists outside their new laboratory to complement the knowledge
that was shared among scientists and technicians in their own
laboratory. For example, the chance presence of a structural chemist at
the Cavendish laboratory helped confirm the validity of Watson and
Crick’s helical model by revealing an error in another published work
that was the foundation of Watson and Crick’s insight. This was the
same information that had eluded Franklin.
Watson reported that the discovery was due in part to the
‘unforeseen dividend of having Jerry share an office with Francis, Peter
and me.’ He also noted the opposite effect on one of his competitors, a
scientist working on the same problem: ‘ . . . in a lab devoid of
structural chemists, [he] did not have anyone to tell him that all the
textbook pictures were wrong. But for Jerry, only Pauling would have
been likely to make the right choice and stick by its consequences.’
Had it not been for the network ties with chemists at the Cambridge
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pub, the misunderstandings of the chemical structure induced by the
inaccurate pictures in chemistry textbooks might have never been
uncovered – or at least not in so timely a fashion. Similarly, the large
and diverse network of personal contacts possessed by Watson and
Crick enabled them to mobilize resources and to effect a quick
recovery after an initial failure.
A related example of the effects the lack of social capital is seen
through the eyes of Evelyn Fox-Keller and in her analysis of Barbara
McClintock, a future Nobel Laureate who, like Watson, was
associated with the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Evelyn Fox-
Keller’s graduate school experience in physics in the late 1950s and
early 1960s shows the dark side of networks – isolation. She described
how a lack of a supportive network negates motivation and lowers
levels of aspiration in ways that undermine an individual’s ability to
realize their potential at a crucial point in the maturation of a scientist
(Shapiro and Henry).
Fox-Keller almost dropped out of her Ph.D. program after being
systematically excluded from participation in the informal social
relations of her department. ‘She was making a name for herself indeed,
but the process was a nightmare. She was completely isolated . . . She
was going to get out of physics’ (Horning, 1993). Fox-Keller told her
interviewer, ‘My real world began to resemble a paranoid delusion.
Many people in Cambridge knew who I was and speculated about me.
None of them offered friendship.’ After two years of such treatment, she
‘was a wreck – defensive, weepy and unapproachable. She passed her
orals but decided not to do a thesis.’ Fox-Keller eventually completed her
doctorate after a revivifying visit with biologists at Cold Spring Harbor
Laboratory whose ‘attitude to her was a lot more accepting than that of
most members of the Harvard physics department’ (Horning, 1993).
Her own experience of isolation turned Fox-Keller’s scientific career
from physics to molecular biology and eventually to the history of
science. Years later, preparing for a colloquium, Fox-Keller
experienced the converse of Watson’s epiphany, recalling to
consciousness the effects of her isolation. She had repressed her painful
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experiences, including the haunting image of a distinguished female
scientist seen on solitary walks at Cold Spring Harbor. Fox-Keller
wrote, ‘Barbara McClintock represented everything that I was most
afraid of – that becoming a scientist would mean I’d be alone . . .’
(Horning, 1993). This realization led Fox-Keller to refocus her career on
the analysis of gender issues in science, starting with a biography of
Barbara McClintock, a Nobel prizewinner who shared with Watson an
interest in genetics and for a time a research home – the Cold Spring
Harbor Laboratory.
And what she showed was that despite being Nobelists and having
exceptional scientific minds, the career trajectories and networks of
McClintock and Watson were vastly dissimilar. McClintock was an
outsider who, on the fringe of key networks of communication and
support, operated at a competitive disadvantage relative to Watson.
While a few persons like Barbara McClintock turn social capital
disadvantages to advantage (Fox-Keller, 1980), most fall behind in
professional attainment or decide to change careers.
RAISING SOCIAL CAPITAL
In this chapter, we have described the nature of social capital, how it
forms, and the ways in which it can influence scientific achievement.
We drew an analogy between social capital and the kula ring. Both are
defined by membership, the special logic of exchange that governs
resource trades within the group, and the revolving ‘credit’ and
investment nature of the exchanges that tends to enrich the network
over time.
We placed social capital in context by reviewing literature that
showed how the change in the way scientific work and practice is
conducted – from graduate school recruitment to the conceptualiza-
tion and marketing of scientific goods – revolves around interdepen-
dencies among scientists that are best managed through social capital.
Our point was not to discount the importance of human, cognitive, or
financial capital in career success. Rather it is to show the effects of
social capital, particularly in how it enables scientists to find
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collaborators with complementary skills and resources and to invest in
public goods that are available to members of their network.
Social capital develops out of interaction with prior contacts and
network structure in several ways.
First, reciprocity governs exchanges between contacts. New faculty
members who are invited into a network feel indebted to the others in
the network for bringing them into a supportive and status-enhancing
social group.
Second, the new members’ initial indebtedness and reciprocity
expand as members exclusively share tacit knowledge on how to get
ahead or allocate discretionary resources to each other. For example,
contacts can help one to find out about jobs, pass on information about
research areas that might receive special funding consideration, locate
unpublished material, or make introductions/referrals between
formerly unacquainted persons who share similar interests (Kenney,
1986; Seashore et al., 1989; Powell et al., 1998).
Third, the right social network configurations not only get access to
but also increase the speed and veracity of the information transferred.
These outcomes are also important for the university. In decentralized
systems, non-bureaucratic systems, informal connections provide a
by-way by which information is accumulated and imported from other
institutions (Powell et al., 1998).
Fourth, networks provide social support to their members. Close
working relationships with experienced network members help new
members interpret critical feedback and motivate commitment to a
long-term program of scientific study, which is often punctuated by
few immediate rewards. Emotional support and group affiliation create
an identity that enhances feelings of self-worth (‘I know others feel the
same thing’), generate commitment to goals that have delayed pay-offs
(Ibarra, 1992), and provide a group mechanism for legitimating claims
or counteracting against discrimination (White, 1992; Podolny and
Baron, 1997). As an individual’s portfolio of contacts grows over time,
resources and opportunities also accumulate, facilitating success
(Coleman, 1988).
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Scientists at central positions in scientific networks function as
repositories for social capital because they have a large number of
connections to diverse persons in and outside the department. Those at
central positions in a network can be thought of as ‘social capital
banks’ which accrue gifts or loans from other senior scientists with
similar reservoirs of relationships. The members of the network gain
special access to information that is not available to non-network
members, and to information before it becomes available to the
‘market’, namely scientists outside the network.
Moreover, these connections facilitate the match between a person’s
human capital (i.e., a person’s specific skills, talents, or motivation)
and various situations in which opportunities appear to use and expand
one’s capital. Thus, the network is the organizing structure of
interpersonal ties in which social capital accrues and, depending on
their network access, individuals with equal human capital experience
different rates of success based on their social capital (Coleman, 1988;
Burt, 1992; Ibarra and Smith-Lovin, 1997).
In the next few chapters, we turn to an in-depth analysis of the
experiences of women faculty and the ways in which different
departmental structures affect their ability to succeed in science and
for science.
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9Women’s faculty experience
Despite the continuing existence of barriers to women, a generational
change in the traditional ‘male model’ of full-time devotion to science
and neglect of personal life is under way. A senior female scientist in an
academic department has often been an individual, successful by
conventional measures, who chose to adopt the strategy of emulating
the ‘male model’ as the only way to survive. Treated as ‘one of the
boys,’ she often later has second thoughts about the sacrifices that had
to be made to be accepted.
A decade ago, we identified a small number of women faculty
members who were limiting their time in the laboratory and
attempting to integrate a private sphere with their professional life.
Recently, more women as well as an increasing number of younger
male faculty members have expressed interest in a less-driven work
life but stringency in research funding has intensified the pressure to
work more. Even though some report that their satisfaction has
decreased under these conditions, the most driven scientists submit an
increased number of grant proposals and become even more successful.
The conflict between their behavior and the wish to change suggests
that transition to a more equal balance between professional and
personal life is still a long way from being realized, especially at the
higher levels of academic science.
Until quite recently relatively few women were willing to openly
articulate the vicissitudes of their professional and personal
experience in science. Aware of the responsibility their status carries
as role model and trail blazer for younger generations, they have not
wanted to inadvertently discourage the aspirations of their potential
successors in a scientific career. Moreover, needing to safeguard the
validity of their own personal achievement, based on impersonal

criteria of merit, they have not wanted to ‘rock the boat’ by suggesting
that scientific achievement is affected, either positively or negatively,
by personal or social factors. The growing willingness, during the past
decade, to discuss less than optimal experiences and concomitant
ambivalence is an important indicator of change among female
scientists who face a series of ambivalent situations in most science
and engineering departments.
Wanting to encourage younger women to pursue scientific careers,
successful women scientists are in a bind. If they focus upon gender
barriers and funding difficulties, young women might become
discouraged and respond very rationally that it is not worth the effort to
pursue such a difficult career. To examine these issues, we conducted
more than 400 in-depth, in-person, interviews (followed in some cases
by re-interviews over the Internet), in several waves, with female
faculty in twenty-one departments in five disciplines (chemistry,
biology, computer science, physics, and electrical engineering) in both
public and private research universities located in all major regions of
the U.S.
On the surface, women who have attained faculty appointments at
prestigious research universities appear to have crossed a significant
threshold of status and achievement to a place where gender ‘no longer
matters’ (Sonnert and Holton, 1996). These women scientists have
become icons to a scientific community that proclaims the ideal of
universalism (Merton, 1942), and to a society in flux around issues of
gender. For most women scientists who achieve faculty status, full
professional self-definition in the face of subtle and overt exclusion
remains problematic.
In many departments it is dangerous to identify oneself with
women’s issues or other women. Even when there were two women
faculty members in a department, they would typically stay apart from
each other and not form a friendship until after tenure. Often lacking
anyone to talk to, younger women discussed the conflicts between
work and personal life in confidential interviews for this study that
often took on the emotional intensity of a therapy session. In this
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chapter we discuss the experience of women faculty, in both negative
and positive settings, to explain the troubled, and troubling,
experience of women in academic science.
THE CASCADE EFFECT
Impediments to women in science appear at all stages and phases of the
scientific career line and can be viewed as a ‘cascade effect.’ Like a
series of interconnected circuits, the first member of the chain supplies
power to the second, the third and so on. A cascade of affirming
experiences serves to amplify a string of positive effects, until there is a
short-circuit and the process is reversed. Women who have avoided
negative experiences at an earlier stage often encounter them later.
The majority of girls and women do not experience such uninterrupted
multiple positive experiences as they ascend the educational ladder.
Instead, at some point in time what had the potential for a cumulative
positive cascade of experience becomes short-circuited by negative
experiences.
Successful women in science view themselves as having had
prolonged relatively positive experiences and attribute their status and
achievement to supportive mentors along the way. However, the value
of these early experiences becomes at risk when negative experiences
begin to accumulate on a faculty level. Many are understandably
unsure, especially before the tenure decision, how much risk they can
afford to take in acting as mentors and advocates for their women
students. Even after a permanent position has been achieved, the
complex and, at times, contradictory experience of the successful
woman scientist carries with it an aura of taboo. The path to faculty
status begins with the job search, but social capital and gender strongly
affect the outcome.
THE JOB SEARCH
We have identified several patterns of impediment at the point of the
job search: a dominant one of deferring to a male partner, a less usual
one of ignoring personal considerations. Departments also typically
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receive job applicants differentially by gender, taking into account
women’s personal obligations in deciding to hire while ignoring them
for men. The assumption, of course, is that women will be strongly
affected by their ties; men less so. A certain persona, strict adherence to
a rigid academic career path and total time commitment are among the
unstated requirements for many jobs.
Women who survive the strain of lack of support for child-bearing
and child-rearing in academia and complete their degrees at the highest
levels of achievement may nevertheless find that their career will not
survive the next hurdle of the academic career path. When a married
woman is about to attain the Ph.D., the ‘two body’ problem comes into
play, typically deflecting women’s careers from their highest potential.
Two shifts in work site are typically needed: from Ph.D. program to
post-doctoral position in a different university and from post-doc to yet
another work site. The highest climbers on the academic ladder of
success are able to accept the most promising and prestigious post-
doctoral and faculty positions without regard to any other
consideration. The rule of intellectual exogamy has disastrous career
consequences for women who are unable or unwilling to make
individualistic decisions on where to work. As one observer put it: ‘The
academic market is a national one. Those who do not accommodate
their choice of geographical location and willingness to move to their
careers may lose out’ (Rosenfeld, 1984: 99).
Marriage and children are generally viewed by male faculty
members as impediments to a scientific career for women. Even those
most supportive of women take this view to some extent, as the
following quote shows: ‘I’ve had some disappointments with very good
women who settled for jobs that are less than an equivalent man would
do. You have some extremely good people you think are going to go out
and make a mark and then somehow or other they marry somebody and
spend their time in a bad career. For a man to decide not to take his
career seriously is like admitting he takes drugs. For a woman to say
she puts her family ahead of her career is considred a virtue; the
pressures are all in that direction. The women are told, “Isn’t this
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wonderful. You are giving up your career to sacrifice for your husband.”
The pressures come from society, relatives, to some extent the men
involved, the parents of the husband.’
On the other hand, a few women take a different tack. They are
willing to break off personal relationships that interfere with accepting
the best possible job. A male professor portrayed the situation of a
woman, involved with a man, who, he said, ‘ . . . could have gone either
way. I asked her, “To what extent is his career going to interact with
what you do?” She said, “Not at all. I want to find the best job I can and
if it works out for him O.K. and if it doesn’t well then that’s the end of
the relationship.” So she had decided that career is what really
mattered. She’s at [prestigious Eastern university] and he’s still out in
California so that’s the end of him. She took what I would say is a
typically man’s approach to things, that the career is the primary
decision but they don’t all do that.’
Women who enter the academic job search often find that they have
made a career detour that is held against them despite evidence of solid
achievement. A male faculty member expressed amazement that a
respected research institute had hired a female Ph.D. who had
temporarily left the academic track to become an astronaut. An
academic career gap for more prosaic reasons of child-birth and child-
rearing is officially expected to be ignored but is inevitably taken into
account to a woman’s detriment. Affirmative action procedures have
too often been turned into an elaborate ritual of seeking out female
candidates for interviews and then determining that they cannot be
hired when compared with men who have followed the straight and
narrow path to academic success. If ‘best’ is defined in terms of an
aggressive persona, with numbers of publications the primary criteria
of achievement, then women will typically be defined as inferior.
GEOGRAPHICAL MOBILITY BARRIERS
The limited geographical mobility of many women restricts their
choice of both graduate school and job. A highly successful female
scientist interviewed in another study explained the impact of location
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on her career, given existing norms of hiring. A research associate, her
advance in rank was limited, as was her exposure to students and the
experience of raising her own funds. She felt that these consequences of
having to accept a position of lesser status had delayed her professional
maturation. ‘I was married – I’m still married – and I didn’t have the
flexibility of moving around. That’s one of the best ways to achieve a
permanent position and to increase one’s standing; to have the lever or
the threat of saying, well, I’m going to leave. And to mean it. You can’t
do it as an empty threat. You have to be ready to leave, and people are. I
was never in that position, so I could never use that threat’ (Dupree,
1991: 117).
A typical scenario that has been identified is marrying a man in the
same field who completes his graduate work before his wife. He finds
the best job he can without geographical constraints. When the woman
finishes, she finds what job she can in a circumscribed region (Max,
1982). Women who are already married often select their graduate
school based on what is available in a region and choose a job with
similar considerations in mind. Second-rank research universities
attract many higher quality candidates than they might otherwise,
because of women’s geographical restrictions. Of those of our graduate
student informants who aspired to academia, most were interested in
jobs in small teaching colleges rather than research universities
because, as one woman summed it up, ‘Science isn’t everything.’
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10 Dual male and female worlds of
science
Two scientific worlds, one male, the other female, emerge from the
faculty interviews. These dualities were expressed in the key moments
of an academic science career such as setting up a lab and preparing for
the tenure decision. The question of how to act as an advisor to female
graduate students was also fraught with tension. With respect to these
various issues, the female experience in academic science was
typically far more difficult in contrast to the well-connected male.
Lacking a satisfactory conduit for information, a junior faculty woman
reported that she and her peers would ‘sit and discuss for hours and
hours what to do, then we walk away not knowing if we should do it
because we are too young. We are brand new in this department and we
don’t know if that is the way to do it.’ Even having peers did not
necessarily help, for they were equally clueless.
For others, the separate and unequal experience was one of
invisibility and denied professional identity. A new woman faculty
member may be mistaken for a secretary, student, or technician by
hostile older men, or considered inauthentic: ‘I really don’t know
what they think [about me] because I interact with them so rarely. I
mean I’m the only woman among 42 faculty members, so they don’t
know what to make of me, period. Most of the faculty here are used
to treating women as wives and secretaries, or both.’ Bereft of
connection, there is an inability to check on day to day tasks as basic as
‘people to talk to so that I could compare labs’, and no mechanism for
reassurance which would occur ‘if everyone had a chance to talk to
somebody. Then it would be okay. They could see things can work out.’
Without such colleagueship, one’s science is depleted.

The impact of a first experience of professional and personal
ostracism is heightened because it is unanticipated at this level of
achievement. Echoing the astonishment of many women graduate
students who suddenly find themselves socially excluded upon entry
into a Ph.D. program, this successful woman scientist describes her
awareness of her own social emptiness when she reflects that ‘I’m not
on bad terms with these people. I’m on no terms. On every superficial
level I have something in common with them, but I have no
relationships. Everywhere I’ve been in my life, I’ve made friends.
Here it is a black hole.’ Another faculty woman reflects that ‘I was
never aware of any gender-based discrimination when I was a graduate
student or post-doc. It’s something I’m only aware of now that I am
interacting with an older generation . . . I’m just coming to grips with
the fact that there really is a problem. I’ve now seen enough people
to know there is a problem.’
Neglect by colleagues can also hurt the development of a sense of
professional identity. For the first time, reflects this junior woman,
‘you begin to notice things you probably never noticed . . . I started the
same time as my husband and his office partner. We’re all about the
same age. Everybody [on faculty] kept coming up to me when I first got
here asking “oh, so who are you working for?” That never happened to
those guys. These colleagues probably feel more comfortable, so they
ask the guys to do things. So it gets lonely. A lot lonelier as you move up
because you have no peers to talk to.’ After being introduced at a party
to welcome new faculty, a woman faculty member recounted that ‘one
organic chemist said to me, “Oh, I really respect women in science.
You know women just aren’t mechanically inclined, so I’m really
impressed when I see one in science.” At first you think it’s an isolated
incident and then it happens time after time after time, and you realize
these people have a problem.’ Women often face the constriction of
supportive professional networks and collaborations, as helpful to
achievement in science as in other endeavors.
Exclusion is also experienced as devaluing and undermining female
faculty members’ opportunities for scientific success. After a brilliant
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graduate school experience, one young electrical engineering professor
recalled the feelings of abandonment and anxiety during her first year
in the department while she attempted to relocate, set up her lab and
teach: ‘The department treated me like shit. The one guy who brought
me up here, he didn’t do a damn thing. It took eight months before my
name showed up in the front. No one ever told me I could get a phone
charge card, so for two years I’ve been paying for the calls myself. Before
I got here the former chair said, “We’ll put you up for a PYI”
[Presidential Young Investigator]. I had been here three days and he
said, “Maybe we won’t put you up for it this year. Go out and get some
teaching experience, go to some conferences and get to know some
people in your field.” Nobody told me about something I was
responsible for until a week before it was due. It was my first proposal.
They never appointed a mentor . . . a man or woman, it wouldn’t have
mattered. At the end of my first year I got extremely depressed. It was
very bad. It took a hell of a lot out of me. I was very anxious.’ Not only
was the scientific potential of this young faculty member harmed, the
department hurt itself by not encouraging all its members to achieve
and thus advance the collective academic reputation.
Without full membership in the scientific community, a
deprecating sense of self-consciousness appears to permeate the female
scientific experience. Not only are the professional linkages missing
for basic information and career building, but feelings of alienation
give rise to vigilance, guardedness against rebuff and the need to ‘prove
oneself.’ The outcome is a reluctance to ‘climb the ladder to get
something I want. I try to do it on my own. On my own capabilities,’ as
this woman biologist described. Ultimately, lack of full membership in
scientific activity creates uncertainty and self-protectiveness. A
protective response sometimes takes the form of niche work or
perfectionism, finding an out-of-the-way research field to cultivate on
one’s own with such a degree of certainty that it could not be subject to
attack. This is the obverse strategy of identifiying a ‘hot topic’ that
leading figures in a field cluster around simultaneously in a race to be
first with a brilliant hypothesis or a definitive finding.
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Since women faculty constitute only a tiny minority in many
departments, generational discrepancies in values and scientific style
among women themselves can further isolation. A young female
faculty member expressed the feelings of many of her contemporaries
whom we interviewed, ‘One of my biggest problems here is gender
bias from the older faculty. I never have worries like that from people of
my own age. I really think it is a generational problem.’ A female
chemist who had a close collegial relationship with her advisor in
graduate school, a contemporary, was unexpectedly stunned when she
spoke in a faculty meeting: ‘I got this guy so riled up that he sent a
memo around saying it was totally inappropriate for junior faculty to
speak at faculty meetings.’ Experiences such as these help explain why
the minuscule number of an earlier generation of women may have
been left with no alternative but to adopt a style that would make them
more acceptable to their male colleagues.
The effects of negative treatment of female scientists carry over from
within the university to the external professional world. Women, for
example, become reluctant to introduce themselves into informal
groups at scientific conferences and meetings. A tenured biologist still
feels ‘ . . . very isolated. It starts to cycle in: I start to withdraw, the
more withdrawn, the more isolated. It gets more and more difficult to
be there. My perception has been that it’s a boy’s club. It’s hard to break
in on them, especially if you are a young woman. My male friend says,
“It’s hard for me too,” but then I point out to him that you may feel
awkward, but you always walk over and when you do they separate,
and there you are. I can’t even walk over and I don’t know what would
happen if I did.’ Isolation begets expectations of isolation in a spiraling
fashion.
Even as they are discriminated against, female scientists are
expected to assume the official responsibilities of minority status in
academia. Women will be asked to take on more tasks within and
outside the department than their male equals, because of their status
as ‘the token woman’. Paradoxically, this role enjoins that an
individual who is invisible because she is different, become visible
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because she is different. It is, of course, an additional stressor in what is
already an inordinately stressful new situation: ‘When I first got here I
was asked to be on a lot of university committees and [male] colleagues
at the same level weren’t asked. So I realized pretty quickly that it was
because I was the only woman in the chemistry department and a lot of
these committees want to have representation by women. So when the
Dean’s office called me up once I said, “Look, you’re only asking me
because I’m a woman, so give me a break and let me do my research.”’
Of course, in declining, one runs the risk of being considered a ‘bad
citizen’, even though it is in a Republic of Science where she is often
not accorded full citizenship.
TENURE
The contradiction between the tenure clock and the biological clock,
for women, illustrates the taken for granted compatibility of the career
structure of science with traditional assumptions of male youthful
achievement. Despite the paucity of evidence that youth is associated
with scientific achievement (Merton, 1973), the U.S. academic system
is geared toward a forced march in the early years, allowing a slower
pace later. This is exactly the opposite of the structure that would be
preferable for most women. Until it is changed, there is little prospect
of attracting a signficant number of women to careers at the highest
levels of academic science.
The incompatibility of the seven-year race for tenure with the
biological clock for child-bearing has obvious negative consequences
for women’s participation in high-powered academic science. A male
faculty member told us that if women would wait until after age 35 to
have children, there would be no problem. They would be able to
pursue tenure single mindedly without interference from other
obligations. He recognized that most women were unwilling to delay
having children that long and thus saw no answer to this dilemma.
A graduate, now a professor at another university, reflected upon the
relationship between the biological and tenure clocks. In discussing
her plans for children she said: ‘I take every day as it comes. It would be
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outrageously difficult. I would feel much more confidence if I had
tenure but I would be 38 and I don’t choose to have a child that late.’ A
faculty member’s tenure review has caused an added measure of
anxiety. She said: ‘ When it comes to the real facts that’s when you feel
discrimination. The pregnancy worries me. It’s the wrong moment,
always the wrong moment. It puts you on a slower track. Maybe they
do see it like that. Maybe I’ve ruined my chances. They want you to
sacrifice something. If the baby hadn’t shown up, I would have pushed
for an early decision. Now I will wait.’ Career disruptions are often
caused by the inability of the academic system to easily allow a
modest reduction in workload. A supposedly temporary withdrawal is
often the only option, but the expected return sometimes does not
happen.
Departmental and university-wide efforts to make workplace child-
care facilities more widely available would help. An infant care center
in a neighboring school, discovered by one female graduate student,
helped several women with children in one of the departments studied
to carry on their graduate work virtually without interruption. The
center, caring for children from ten weeks to three years of age, was an
experimental site with a capacity of eight children. Although there
were a few other facilities for older children affiliated with the
university or located in the neighborhood, child care is still a major
concern for parents. It has received more attention from companies
than universities in recent years (NRC, 1993).
RESISTANCE TO CHANGE
If the objective is a significant increase in the number of women
pursuing high-powered scientific careers, institutional accom-
modations will have to be made for women who wish to combine
family with career. Accommodation is currently made for faculty
members, typically men, who found corporate firms or research
centers; however, these time conflicts usually occur after tenure has
been attained, whereas women’s time conflicts involving family
responsibilities tend to occur earlier in their career trajectory, prior to
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tenure, placing them at risk. While time conflicts at later career stages
may affect colleagues’ views of a department member, they seldom if
ever damage the career.
To achieve equality it is not just a matter of opening up opportunities
but of changing the structure of the academic system. Simply put,
women are more vulnerable than men prior to tenure. Accommo-
dation for time conflicts must be made for women faculty members
with children. Women who wish to pursue traditional female roles
along with a scientific career must be accommodated by allowing a
longer time span before the tenure decision. This accommodation had
been promised to one faculty member in our sample but subsequently
was not allowed.
Even under the best of circumstances the academic structure is
resistant to accommodating family needs. A female faculty member in
another department was able to arrange a modest reduction in official
time commitment involving a reduced teaching load. She reported
that, in her department, ‘The faculty have been very supportive of me
having children. After my review I’ve had people say, “How can you do
that and have children too?”’ This professor adopted the strategy of
reducing her work load and lengthening the time period before the
tenure decision.
She said that, ‘The university policy allows you to work part-time to
have children . . . that part-time work stops the tenure clock for the
percentage of time you are not working. Because of tenure, I didn’t
want to cut my [research] back by 50%, so I made an arrangement to
work 70% and cut the teaching load. Everybody assumed, including
the chair that this time off would not count for tenure. A year before I
was supposed to come up for tenure the chairman brought it up to the
provost because [it was found that] the clock was still running. If it had
stopped, I should have had an extra year before I was up for tenure so I
would have more time to publish and get my research done. I decided
not to fight it because I was concerned how going through a fight would
affect the tenure decision. I was quite worried when the case went
before the engineering school who are all older men who were all
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looking at me not having worked full time.’ In this instance, the
outcome was favorable but the anxiety level, normally high about
tenure prospects, had been raised even further by the difficulties that
the academic structure had in recognizing the presence of children in
her life.
A few years later she was involved in an effort in the Senate of her
university to make reduction in work load for women with children an
official option. Some of the participants in the debate suggested that it
should be among a list of limited choices in fringe benefits, or that it
should be equally available to men and that therefore it was too costly
to be made available at all. This suggests that the academic system is
still resistant to accommodating women’s needs. This is not a call for a
‘mommy track’, with different and lower expectations of achievement
and rewards, but a serious effort to accommodate the significant
number of women who are not willing to forgo family and children
prior to tenure. It is unrealistic to expect significant numbers of
women to follow the male model. If the goal is to substantially increase
the participation of women in high-level academic science, a female
model will have to be legitimated. Acceptance of an alternative career
model is crucial both to placing more women in faculty slots in the
immediate short term and to providing relevant role models for a
broader range of female graduate students.
Efforts at reforming the academic structure by reducing the ‘time
bind’ for women are fraught with danger as arguments in behalf of
change are often turned into negative reflections on women’s scientific
abilities. Even in the absence of accommodation to their needs, the
relatively few women in the system have maintained their
productivity (Zuckerman and Cole, 1991). One female professor has
spoken up in faculty meetings in favor of extending the time before
tenure review for women with children. She sees this recommendation
as a double-edged sword, however, as pressing for reducing the
demands made on women with children might jeopardize their status
by supporting the notion that women with children cannot be
productive. Of course, the extension could be made gender-neutral,
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with the same provisions offered to men with extensive
responsibilities for child-rearing. Nevertheless, in practice, this would
likely be seen as a measure to accommodate women. Without
structural reform, barriers to entry and achievement will deter all but a
highly persistent few.
TENURE STRESS
The definitive goal for all junior faculty members is the attainment of
tenure. Its real and representational meanings cannot be minimized,
so, it is relentlessly anxiety-provoking. The subtle and not so subtle
differences around professional acceptance of women, as well as the
unique stressors with which they cope, arouse and heighten anxiety for
women, leaving them wary and overly self-observing.
As pioneers in departments which previously had no female faculty,
for many there are no signposts by which to get a bearing. In an
unreliable environment, a chemist describes how she looks ‘and sees
that there are no women around and I know tenure doesn’t come easy.
The faculty are older. Perhaps the younger ones see things differently. I
can’t ever know for sure what’s in the back of their minds.’ A young
engineer is careful what she says, noting, ‘They’ve never tenured a
woman in this department. So it is tricky approaching senior people
and not have them get offended by what you say when you’re waiting
for your tenure decision.’
Between colleagues, the strain and fear around tenure decisions
manifests itself in one other significant way. To protect themselves
from feelings of disappointment, loss and possibly anger directed at the
department if a junior woman is denied tenure, some tenured women
who wish to reach out and befriend junior faculty self-protectively
avoid forming such relationships. Two tenured colleagues in the same
chemistry department, now closest of friends, describe avoiding any
social interactions before they received tenure. One admits that she
‘didn’t want to take the risk of seeing her go if she didn’t get tenure.’
Considering the detrimental affects of isolation for those solitary
women without female peers, tenure is experienced as so uncertain
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that it can impede much-needed relationships and connections where
they are possible.
It is near or at the point of tenure that some of the most disturbing
indications of different treatment of women by the power structure
occur. These range from remarks by a chair implying that a woman
physicist should not worry whether she was granted tenure or not
because ‘you have two salaries. You have a husband’ to an emerging
picture that some young professors suffer reprisals for being too
proactive on behalf of women students, resulting in denial or
postponement of tenure. After learning that the chair had postponed
her tenure decision, and had laid out a plan for the coming year that
‘sounded like a thirty-year career plan’, this activist faculty member
finds herself wondering ‘if he resented that I was serving as a faculty
advisor. Did he resent my role as an advocate for the students? Did that
have to do with being a woman, or a bit of a rabble-rouser?’
In a highly competitive academic environment gender differences in
faculty experience are often ascribed to the normal workings of the
system, even by some of the women who are discriminated against.
There may be a simple lack of awareness of unequal treatment when
some parameters are equal. For example, a committee representing
senior female faculty members at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology recently found, to their initial shock, that they had lower
salaries and smaller offices than their male counterparts.
When confronted with these findings, MIT President, Charles Vest,
broke with long tradition of academic denial of gender discrimination.
He pledged the full weight of his office to redress these specific
grievances and undertook a commitment to broader change. However,
more than a decade ago, a committee of graduate women in the
electrical engineering and computer science department at MIT
produced a report detailing their similar experiences of gender
discrimination (Goldberg, 1999; Spertus, 1991; Female Graduate
Students and Research Staff, 1983).
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11 Differences between women in
science
Overlying the differences between the male and female scientific
worlds is another split, one within the female realm, that mirrors and
refracts the larger gender division. Women scientists’ perception of the
obstacles in their path, and their response to them, create two
dichotomous camps. One group is predominantly made up of an older
generation of resilient women who stress a highly competitive,
individualistic style that mirrors the traditional male stereotype. In
contrast, younger up-and-coming junior and newly tenured women
faculty members emphasize a more relational, collaborative approach
within their research groups. We call the first group of women
‘instrumentals’, and the second ‘relationals’, reflecting their respec-
tive work styles. Notwithstanding such important differences, women
faculty members who have thrived appear to have in common two
significant characteristics. Firstly, they all identify sufficiently
positive relationships with their own graduate school advisors as
crucial to their past and present level of self-confidence, perseverance,
and success. Secondly, although each is influenced by their own
perception of a scientific style, all of these dedicated women labor to
interpret an appropriate role as advisor to their female students.
Inescapable tensions exist for all successful women scientists,
regardless of personal philosophy, around the role of advisor. The
perceptions, attitudes and values which comprise a ‘style’ of advising
and doing science are frequently a product of, or a response to, an earlier
powerful relationship with one’s mentor. The attitudes and values of
the mentor-advisor are internalized by the apprentice and become the
core structure by which an individual comes to form, and perhaps later

modify, their own identity as a scientist. The tension between the
relational and instrumental styles of women faculty reflects not only a
generational shift among women scientists, but also the changing
values of a new generation of male scientists. Influenced by attitudinal
changes on gender issues experienced in their own personal lives, their
relationships with women, and perhaps the feminist movement, some
of these (usually) younger men have taken up a relational style. The
differences among female academic scientists emerge most clearly in
their role as advisors to students.
THE CONTRADICTIONS OF BEING AN ADVISOR
There is an increasing recognition that serving as a role model is
complex and requires more than just ‘being there’ as a physical
presence. Especially for younger tenured and non-tenured female
faculty no issue presents more conflict or is filled with more angst than
that of the role of advisor. How one advises, and particularly how one
advises women graduate students, can become the very locus of self-
definition. Not only can it bring forth the difficult issues and related
feelings of being a woman in science, but it can produce a sense of
responsibility for the next generation. Thus the needs that were or
were not adequately filled as a student, or now as a faculty member –
issues around birth and child care, balancing work and an outside life –
will all be evoked through this role.
For men who have not been directly affected by these difficult issues,
the role of advisor is not laden with these subjective meanings nor is it
as emotionally charged. Women faculty tend to be deeply affected by
their impact on their students, particularly on the women. This
emphasis on relatedness and wish of many women faculty to nurture
their students is more than simply a consequence of cultural
‘socialization’. It may also be part of the dynamic of female adult
development and the importance placed upon personal attachments
and connections that transcend utilitarian motivations (Chodorow,
1978). At the same time, there is also a counter-pull on personal
resources deriving from their own need for professional survival. As
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competitive players in a competitive business, women faculty
members find a tension often builds up between their needs and the
needs of others, particularly when they strongly identify with the
issues faced by their female students. For the majority, it is a role not
taken lightly nor is it without internal conflict.
The role of advisor is a complex task, requiring a great deal of
emotional and intellectual energy. Women advisors constantly
struggle with a varied range of issues, including finding a balance
between acting for their students and becoming viable professionals
themselves. On one hand, female faculty members must negotiate a
competitive and judgmental environment and cannot afford to make
themselves vulnerable. On the other, there is confusion as to what
kind of relationship to establish with female students and what role to
play in both their scientific and emotional lives. As one scientist
summed up the dilemma, ‘I’ve been asked to do a lot. To talk to
undergraduates, graduate students, women’s groups, all sorts of things.
But if I’m not here in three years, then I’m not going to do anybody any
good. So I can only do so much because I’m more worried about my
retention. I try to do what I can. I think one of the reasons I wanted to go
into academia was to be able to have an impact in one way or another on
women’s issues. I really want to, but I really can’t do much better.’
Accepting realistic limits on the time they can devote to women’s
issues is an especially hard lesson for female scientists committed to
advancing the cause of women in science.
Current funding pressures increase the tension between the wish to
mentor and provide support, and the need to remain productive and
competitive. The competitive push sometimes makes it ‘easy for me to
forget that I had support.’ However, inner conflict frequently arises
when one knows the kind of advisor one wishes to become, but cannot
afford to be, particularly around attempts to meet the child-care needs
of graduate women. Although sensitive and responsive to the needs of
one of her students, this biologist describes the inescapable inner
turmoil provoked by her own needs: ‘I’m trying to help her, but I feel
like an ogre. It’s a difficult one for me. I’m trying to be as supportive as I
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can, but then the work’s not getting done fast enough.’ The conflict
between the demands of scientific productivity and family life requires
adjustments in the organization of science in the university that
transcend the advisor–advisee relationship.
Some advisors feel caught between wanting to meet legitimate
needs and wishing for students to be assertive and competitive in order
to succeed. ‘Faculty have an ambivalent relationship with their
graduate students. They want them to be one way for their own needs,
as well as they want them to be a certain way because that would be
good for [the student’s] career.’ Some faculty members guard against
repeating the destructive characteristics of their own advisor since
many are aware that ‘you do as was done to you . . . sometimes the way
I treat my group I’m shocked because I sound exactly like my advisor.’
Moreover, some women despair of being able to play any significant
role for women students because they feel helpless to change the
academic structure to make it more amenable to combining work and
family. As one female academic analyzed the emerging female
graduate student perspective on future faculty life, ‘they see [my
colleague] under all this incredible stress. She’s trying to have a baby
and these guys [male faculty members] give her a terrible time. So even
when students get along with their advisor, when they look at her life,
they don’t like what they see.’ The difficulties that female graduate
students see their female professors encounter make them think
twice, if they do not deter them entirely from undertaking an academic
career at a high-powered research university.
Many faculty worry about how candid they should be with female
students about their own difficulties in science. Concerned that they
will frighten them, many say nothing at all. At the core there is an aura
of helplessness as to how to not be discouraging. For instance, this
advisor felt ‘grateful’ that a younger colleague had her baby at 30 rather
than at 40 like herself so that her students would not become
disheartened. She said, ‘The students look at me and think, I would do
anything other than have a life like she has. I admit that I communicate
my difficulties, and I don’t know how positive that is for encouraging
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other women. I worry a lot about it.’ Again, the issue for the advisor is
to find an appropriate balance between realistically depicting the
barriers that women in science encounter, so that female students will
be prepared to deal with them, and avoiding turning them away from
scientific careers.
Some female faculty members, who heretofore did not take women’s
issues into account, have come to question their effectiveness as role
models in the past. This reconsideration of previous practice often
leads to new attempts to advise differently. A 42-year-old tenured
woman acknowledges, ‘It never occurred to me [at that time] that there
were differences in men and women. In retrospect, I can see a thousand
of them. When I got my first job they questioned me closely about
whether I was serious about science, was I going to have kids. At the
time I left there and came here, I never thought about these issues. I was
moderately successful and I believed that the best thing that I could do
for women was to be a successful professor. A lot of women still believe
that.’ The notion that it is sufficient to do good science to pave the way
for future generations of female scientists is increasingly questioned.
When women students drop out, even female scientists who
previously stood apart from women’s issues may begin to re-interpret
the advisory role. More attuned to the negative experiences of their
students, they become more self-aware: ‘I’ve been successful and
something of a loner, and somewhat independent. Now that I have
students of my own I’m worried. It’s not unusual for successful and
independent women to start out thinking they don’t need anybody. But
then they see the young women they care about and realize they might
need support.’ This realization has led some female scientists who
previously adhered to the ‘male model’ to rethink their position.
Lastly, without collegial interactions to help understand similar
experiences, young faculty members are left to re-invent how best to
manage, supervise, role model, mentor, and do research . . . even when
a critical mass of female colleagues is present. Since younger
academics highly value interpersonal effectiveness, when problems
arise they can be experienced as personal failure. Many young
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professors discuss the importance of relationships in their labs:
‘Nobody trains you how to be an advisor. They don’t teach you how to
teach either. I found human problems are the most difficult part of this
work. Science is easy in comparison.’ In another context, at a Cold
Spring Harbor conference on the biotechnology industry, seemingly
completely apart from issues of women in science, a female scientist
noted how useful a course on lab management would have been as a
part of her graduate training. Long past that stage, she had to learn it on
her own.
Women’s emphasis on the role they wish to play in behalf of younger
women cannot be underestimated. The empathy for students’
difficulties with self-esteem and self-confidence comes from their own
experiences as women in science, and mentoring around these issues
evokes painful feelings and creates vulnerability. The most profound
struggle is whether to permit the close connection wished for by both
student and advisor, or to sustain what is a psychologically protective
distance for the self. As described by a biologist:
‘I struggle with the issue of how strongly I model for other women.
It seems that enabling young women to express what they think
and how they feel is an important goal. When I think, would I do
that . . . that would be hard. I’m starting to cry because there’s a
part of me that really wants to maintain a certain amount of
distance because I identify so completely with them that I almost
become overwhelmed.
This inner debate about what it means to be a woman in science is
matched and modeled by an exterior debate between proponents of two
opposing world views about how to conduct oneself as a female
scientist.
THE INSTRUMENTAL STYLE
Many older women scientists who have conformed to the traditional
‘instrumental’ male model find themselves confused by their
relationships with a new generation of young women who seek change
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in the social relations of science. While these older women faculty
recognize how the support of their own advisors was crucial to their
development, they become confused and sometimes frustrated by new
demands that women students make of them. Their students wish
them to engage with them on a personal as well as a scientific level and,
most importantly, to advise them about how to combine the roles of
science and family. Instrumentals are forced to defend old beliefs in the
face of new demands, admitting, as did this woman physicist, ‘I have
behaved like a man. If I got one of these [women’s] surveys, I would
throw it away . . . I don’t discuss women’s issues. I don’t have time to
get involved. I’m not involved. I went to their meeting and the women
wanted to talk about day care. I don’t have time. It’s enough to keep on
going.’ Thus, many older women find themselves in a conundrum in
which the notion of support is highly valued, but the demands made
upon them to attend to issues of importance to female students seem
alien, uncomfortable, and unprofessional.
This older generation of women faculty typically received support
and strategic assistance from male advisors who were intensely
competitive and individualistic. These men exclusively focused on
their science, and expected and rewarded the same in their students.
Even to consider having a family before tenure would impede such
super-human efforts. Child-bearing and child-rearing during the early
stages of a scientific career were declared non-issues. As this physicist
recalled, ‘My advisor sat down with me and said “No babies during
graduate school . . .”.’ The senior generation of female scientists never
denied the reality of gender bias, but their only solution was to work
harder and become a superstar in order to ‘prove’ it fallacious.
THE RELATIONAL STYLE
As a new cohort of female faculty has entered the scientific arena, they
have brought with them a more collaborative experience with their
relatively younger male advisors. These men are frequently married to
professional women, often with young families of their own. Not only
are effective interpersonal relationships viewed by these younger men
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as an important strategic component to production within their labs,
but issues of family, childbirth, and sensitivity to gender bias are
treated as valid and often informally incorporated into the mentor
relationship as relevant for strategic planning. As women assume
junior faculty positions, they must evaluate how they will preserve and
transmit these values while safeguarding their tenuous status within
the department.
Whether tenured or not, women exemplifying the ‘relational’
approach emphasize collaboration and community within their own
groups. Relationships among the members of the lab are important to
research strategy, as faculty members treat each student as an
individual with different needs and strengths. As an electrical
engineering professor described her laboratory:
We are all creating and taking and sharing responsibilities and
experiments so we can interact together and contribute the
expertise of each student so that they can feel like they are
valuable . . . when I add people to the group, even if they are a 6.0
student [that is, off the measurement scales], if the chemistry is
not right I will not add them in. We do things together . . . that
make us know each other on a social scale. Then to reinforce the
group activity in the lab, we have a buddy system . . . we will
rotate the buddies so that everyone is working together . . .
The social organization in such a lab is lateral, in contrast to the
traditional hierarchical model of the faculty member operating
through a ‘lieutenant’, typically a post-doctoral fellow, in supervising
each graduate student’s work.
In contrast to the more singularly focused, instrumental women
faculty, these younger women empathize with their female graduate
students around issues of pregnancy and child-rearing, sometimes
sharing the same dilemmas and even looking to their students for
insight. For many senior women, however, obstacles such as these only
exist subjectively; if you buy into them, you view yourself as a victim
and cloud your scientific focus with extraneous concerns.
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To the younger generation, prejudice and obstacles are not only
perceived as real but are further exacerbated by conflicts over the
compatibility of science with family and other roles. These contrasting
modes of being a woman in science frequently give confusing signals to
young women who seek role models whom they can emulate and who
will provide them with the necessary ‘truths’ in order to succeed.
SUMMARY
In our analysis of women’s graduate school and faculty experiences, we
have focused on women’s exclusion and disappointment within the
structures of organizations where women are recruited, trained, and
evaluated (Baron and Bielby, 1980). Our arguments focused on how the
organization of science, particularly at the department and university
level, differentially treats and disadvantages women and illustrated
how women with human capital and career aspirations equal to or
greater than their male peers are disadvantaged in their graduate school
careers. We also noted how the women’s conflict over balancing their
family and professional lives creates unique needs because societal
norms and routine practices work against women’s careers even as
men and society benefit from the traditional structures.
It is through this experience that the number of girls who pursue
science decreases as children progress through the school system,
while the loss of women increases. We may ultimately come to view
women’s withdrawal from science as a wholesomely adaptive
response to marginality, based on such destructive experiences. We
may also come to understand better the mechanisms used by an older
generation of women in order to persevere, as well as appreciate a new
generation of scientists who have begun to re-interpret science as a
genderless and collaborative endeavor.
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12 Social capital and faculty
network relationships
If a man can write a better book,
preach a better sermon,
or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor,
though he builds his house in the woods
the world will make a beaten path to his door.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1855)
In Chapter 6, we argued that differences in the network of contacts
that a person has for exchanging resources and learning – their social
capital – explain why and how women students are socially isolated
and limited in their opportunities to form relationships, produce
science, and gain support for their careers. In Chapter 8, we extended
the argument to explain the experiences of newly minted women
scientists who experience many of the same biases they did as graduate
students, compounding the negative effects of their graduate school
relationships and laying the groundwork for a perpetuation of the
status quo. In the complex and political world of science, exclusion not
only decreases a person’s ability to acquire the knowledge needed to
build a better mousetrap, but also decreases the ability of others to
learn about and adopt it.1
In this chapter, we use original survey data on the social networks of
men and women faculty members to further explicate our argument
1The ‘Waldo’ hypothesis is interesting in that it so squarely places human capital at the seat of
innovation and success. Yet Emerson’s own success appears to have been greatly shaped by his
accumulation of social capital. Burt (1998) notes that Emerson was born into a poor family and
through cultivated ties became noticed by Harvard’s ministerial studies department. After
graduation, he changed his name to Waldo, built his connections through lectures and the
minister’s association, and married the daughter of a well-to-do family whom he met at a
speaking engagement. The question is would an equally qualified person who did not go to
Harvard, have access to the minister’s association, or marry well have enjoyed equal success?

and show that exclusion and access measurably affect not only
perceptions of difference, but also career performance. Our research
strategy triangulates our qualitative findings with survey data from a
sample of male and female faculty members of science departments at
an elite Midwestern university, a setting in which gender differences
should be least likely to matter (Sonnert and Holton, 1994). By
examining data on men and women faculty members who work side-
by-side we can directly compare their experiences and the conse-
quences of their experiences and explore the representativeness of
conclusions.
We demonstrate that the cumulative effects of negative graduate
school experiences and tenure-track positions that we described earlier
shape attainment and work experiences, even among the select
women scientists who have been able to cross the threshold from
graduate student to untenured professor. We show that women
experience more exclusionary and tokenistic practices in their
collegial relationships than their male peers, that their networks are
more isolated and alienating, and that these differences are associated
with barriers to performance, even when no differences in human
capital exist.
The chapter is organized as follows. First, building on the social
capital concepts introduced previously, we review how social capital
and network structure influence the careers of current female and male
faculty members. Second, we describe the differences in the social
capital of female and male faculty members. Third, we test the
argument and show social capital’s effect on the success of scientific
careers in the ‘publish or perish’ world of contemporary science (Cole,
1992; Pfeffer, 1993).
SOCIAL CAPITAL AND DEPARTMENTAL RELATIONSHIPS
In previous chapters we argued that men and women faculty members
experience separate scientific worlds. The male world is characterized
by stronger social and professional ties than is the female world.
Typically, men form close social ties with other male colleagues
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within and beyond the department that facilitate access to collegial
resources and information, which in turn help them to identify
promising studies, manage labs, or learn the politics of tenure and
publishing. In contrast, women typically report the obverse: their
relationships with male colleagues tend to lack the close personal
relationships and high levels of reciprocity they observe in male-to-
male relationships within their departments. In this sense, the
scientific worlds of women and men faculty who work side-by-side
creates an ironic duality. Whereas male faculty work in closely knit
social networks of exchange – in ‘kula rings’ – that belie the conception
of the lone scientist finding truth in isolation from outside influences,
this lone scientist conception is imposed on women, undermining
rather than enhancing their ability to succeed.
In earlier chapters, our interviews with women faculty members
discovered that men’s and women’s relationships varied along two
dimensions, which we might broadly refer to as ‘colleagueship’ and
‘reciprocation’ – dimensions similar to those found in other
professional environments (Podolny and Baron, 1997: 675–6).
Colleagueship affected a person’s sense of exclusion or isolation from
their department and colleagues and was manifested in two ways. One
indicator of colleagueship was the level of social support or friendship
in the relationship. Did colleagues form friendships and exchange non-
professional or private information in social settings that helped to
manage the stress of publishing, teaching, and office politics? The
other indicator related to how important the relationship was for
conferring a positive professional identity. Did colleagues reflect
expectations and sentiments that reinforced a positive image of one’s
ability to be a good scientist and to do good scientific work?
Relationships high in colleagueship were reported to be important
because they tended to reduce stress and provided a second opinion in a
world where the quality and value of one’s work is subjectively
evaluated and commonly takes years to have a visible impact. The
qualitative research suggested that men tend to have ties that are
more socially supportive and confer more positive social identity
SOCIAL CAPITAL AND FACULTY NETWORK RELATIONSHIPS
159

than women, creating feelings of empowerment and inclusion in male
faculty, and estrangement and resignation in women faculty.
Reciprocation affected a person’s ability to access and exchange
tangible professional resources. It also was manifested in two ways. One
symptom related to the degree to which the relationship was
characterized by an imbalance of exchange of resources. In particular, we
found that women scientists were typically tokens in departments and
often experienced ‘token overload’, meaning that women often had to
shoulder tasks and responsibilities that their male peers did not. For
example, did colleagues expect their papers to be proofed, exams to be
proctored, or grants to be reviewed but not expect to do the same in
return? Did women have to take on more committee work for the
purposes of providing ‘female’ representation? The other symptom
related to the degree to which the relationship was characterized by
power imbalances. Did colleagues view the person as a professional equal
or unequal? Did women have to work harder to prove their worth and gain
the favor of colleagues than did male peers? In the next section, we reveal
the results of our survey of male and female faculty members, with special
attention to how the qualities of their department relationships differ.
GENDER DIFFERENCES IN QUALITY OF DEPARTMENT
RELATIONSHIPS
To examine the differences in the relationships of male and female
academics and their effect on attainment, we surveyed faculty
members in six hard science departments (biology, biochemistry,
chemistry, computer science, engineering, and physics) at a top-
ranked, elite U.S. university. The questionnaire provided systematic
data on the quality of the departments relationships along the
dimensions of colleagueship and reciprocation. A social network was
defined as the ‘people you go to for vital professional advice or social
support regarding work related activities.’ Our constructs of Social
Support, Professional Identity, Token Overload, and Power Imbalance
were measured using the following items and a five-point Likert scale
respectively.
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(1) ‘How important to your personal feelings of well-being is
[contact’s name]?’
(2) ‘To what extent does this contact [name of contact]
understand your particular needs as a faculty member?’
(3) ‘If the following person [name of contact] asked you to do an
activity that had no direct benefit to you (e.g. doing committee
work, running an experiment, or proofing a manuscript),
would you?’
(4) ‘Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? I
sometimes exaggerate the qualities (e.g. experience or
expertise) of [contact] to show that I value their relationship.’
Other characteristics of the sample, design, and methods used in the
survey are described in the appendix.
Consistent with our arguments and field data, we found that women
report lower levels of colleagueship and reciprocation in the
department relationships than do their male peers. Table 12.1 shows
the means of our four measures of relationship quality. We present the
relevant comparisons by three categories: all faculty, untenured
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161
Table 12.1 Quality of department relationships
All faculty Untenured Untenured
faculty women faculty
Department Critical
relationships Men Women Men Women mass
Tokens
Social support 3.7* 3.2 3.7* 3.2 3.4* 2.8
Professional identity 4.0 4.1 4.5* 4.2 4.2 4.0
Token overload 3.9* 4.3 3.9* 4.3 4.3 4.5
Power imbalance 3.7* 4.3 3.8* 4.4 4.7* 3.7
Note: An asterisk indicates significant differences in men’s and women’s
responses by category and relationship type.

faculty, and untenured women in departments of critical mass and
token status. Departments of critical mass and token status were
defined in accordance with prior research (Kanter, 1977; Ibarra and
Smith-Lovin, 1997). A department has a critical mass of women faculty
if women compose more than 15% of faculty members. A department
has a token status if women make up 15% or less of the faculty. (A
department has a majority status if women make up more than 60% of
the faculty.) Table A1 in the Appendix shows the exact percentage of
women in each of the departments we sampled and indicates that
biology and biochemistry have a critical mass, whereas chemistry,
computer science, engineering, and physics have token status.
The results reveal that on average untenured men experienced their
contacts as being more supportive of their psychological well-being
than did untenured women. Similarly, untenured men scored their
contacts as more enhancing of their professional identity than did
women. These results suggest that within the department, male faculty
members maintain relationships that provide more social support as
well as conferring greater levels of professional identity than do women,
a finding that reinforces the conclusions of our fieldwork. Furthermore,
these differences suggest that men have more outlets for reducing stress
and are empowered to achieve higher goals. Moreover, while these
effects may be intangible their importance is hard to overstate because
of the unique character of academic careers. The intense stress of tenure
and the postponed feedback one receives about one’s work means that
these factors can both ease the psychological costs as well as
maintaining aspiration levels of a serious scientific career.
The results also reveal that women report lower levels of
reciprocation in their relationships. This finding is consistent with our
interview data and suggests that the problems of colleagueship are
compounded by relationships that provide few tangible resources.
First, in terms of token overload, women report that they dedicate
more resources to their contacts than are likely to be received in return.
This finding is consistent with our interview data, which suggests that
women faculty are expected to dedicate more resources to their
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relationships to compensate for the false perception that their
intellectual contributions are lower than their male peers. Second, the
data reveal that women are more likely than their male peers to have
unequal power relationships with their colleagues. Women are
statistically more likely than their male peers to experience the need to
work relatively harder to prove their worth and gain the favor of
colleagues.
Like the results regarding the level of colleagueship, these findings
suggest that women’s department relationships provide fewer of the
tangible resources that are important for academic success. Their
relationships required more time and resources to sustain than do
those of their male peers, with apparently no offsetting level of
resource inflows. Thus, they allot more time or effort to com-
municating and explaining their accomplishments and failures than
do the men who are part of the demographic majority (Kanter, 1977).
The implications of these findings are that women carry a double
burden of meeting the requirements of academic success as well as the
added provisions of token overload and unequal power relationships.
We also found that these problems were most acute for women in
departments where they had token status (Kanter, 1977), and that a
critical mass of women faculty members improved these problems but
failed to reduce them to a level where male and female faculty
members rated their ties similarly. This is an important extension of
our findings and suggests that critical mass has positive effects on
women’s experiences in science, even though an increase in size may
result in divided subgroups of women who are at odds with one another
(Kanter, 1977). Indeed, this dividedness is partly suggested by the fact
that critical mass improves women’s perceptions of relationships but
not up to the level of male faculty.
Finally, Table 12.1 shows the relevant comparisons by token versus
critical mass status. Consistent with our argument, the data show that
women in departments of critical mass are more likely to report
relationships that have higher levels of social support and identity
enhancement than are women in departments where they are a token
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163

minority. Similarly, their contacts provided more reciprocation than
in departments where women were tokens, but were still less positive
than men’s. Conversely, the results suggest that women in
departments where they have token status have a double disadvantage:
they are less likely to receive either social support or important
productive resources via their relationships. This suggests that while
critical mass may be one factor that can overcome the barriers to
success of women, other interventions are needed. We return to this in
Chapters 13 and 14 where we compare different models of graduate
education and their relative successes in reducing gender-related
barriers.
GENDER DIFFERENCES IN DEPARTMENT NETWORKS
Our comparison of department relationships also contrasts the
number of department ties that men and women faculty members
report having for professional or social work-related advice. This
analysis supplements our analysis of perceptual measures of
relationships with a behavioral indicator – the assumption being that
perceptions should correspond with actions (Marsden and Campbell,
1984; Ibarra and Andrews, 1993).
Our fieldwork suggested that faculty who named an intermediate
number of contacts tended to have relationships with these contacts
that were characterized by high levels of colleagueship and
reciprocation. At first blush, this view seems counter-intuitive
because more ties are normally assumed to provide better
connectedness and access to information and resources. Our research
and that of others on scientific careers suggests, however, that
although a large network of ties beyond a department may be
uniformly beneficial, a network of ties within the department that is
too small or large may signal problems of integration into the
department (Powell et al., 1998). This is because an intermediate
number of department ties strikes a requisite balance between having a
set of collaborative relationships on the one hand and the ability to
sustain meaningful relationships on the other hand.
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As we argued in earlier chapters, a network of department contacts
that is few in number lacks a wide enough base of social and
professional resources to be effective even if the ties within the
network are close, giving, and supportive. These kinds of networks are
too insular. Our fieldwork suggests that women are more typically in
these kinds of department networks than are men. Conversely, a
network of strong department contacts that is too large requires a large
investment in time and energy to maintain – draining important
resources away from other productive activities (Uzzi, 1998). For
instance, these processes were exemplified by a woman professor who
commented on the compromise between forming many close
attachments within department and the need to spend time and
resources on other professional activities or building ties to people in
other departments. She said, ‘The bigger concern is whether energies I
spend here are energies I don’t spend somewhere else. And somewhere
else being things that affect the nurturing outside [relationships].’
Table 12.2 displays the number of strong department contacts
named by our respondents. Strong ties were measured by asking
respondents, ‘What faculty in the department would you feel
comfortable approaching for important personal or professional
advice?’ Table 12.2 suggests that men and women untenured faculty
members have similar distributions of strong ties in their departments.
Consistent with theory, men tend to have an intermediate number of
strong ties – the modal number is three. Somewhat surprisingly, the
women in our sample also reported having an intermediate number of
strong department ties. However, when these results are disaggregated
by critical mass and token status, they suggest that a critical mass of
women promotes the development of a well balanced network of
strong ties, a finding consistent with our expectations about the role of
critical mass. Although the actual numbers make unambiguous
inferences troublesome, they suggest, in line with our fieldwork, that
in departments with critical mass, women’s strong tie networks look
like those of their male counterparts. They have neither too few nor too
many strong ties within the department. In contrast, women in
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165

departments of token status tend to have either too few or too many
strong ties – suggesting that their networks may lack the capacity for
collaboration or have high maintenance and opportunity costs. Thus,
the patterns of results from our interviews, the quantitative data on the
perception of the quality of department ties, and the quantitative data
on the number of close department ties converge on a similar theme.
Women in departments of token status, as opposed to women in
departments of critical mass, lack the strong tie networks that promote
empowerment and opportunities for academic success within the
department.
GENDER DIFFERENCES IN INTERDEPARTMENTAL
NETWORKS
Our fieldwork also argues that interdepartmental ties play an
important role in the careers of women faculty. While departmental
ties are important for colleagueship and the reciprocal exchange of
information and resources, interdepartmental ties are important for
subfield visibility as well as access to novel or specialized information,
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Table 12.2 Number of strong department contacts named
All faculty Untenured faculty Untenured women
faculty
Ties in the Critical
dept. Men Women Men Women mass Tokens
Number Freq. % Freq. % Freq. % Freq. % Freq. % Freq. %
1111300415000000
2101132300327343250
3 39 46 3 23 16 59 3 27 1 14 0 0
49100027000000
5 15 17 7 53 5 19 5 45 3 43 2 50
Total 84 100 13 100 27 100 11 100 7 100 4 100

needed for research breakthroughs but not represented in the
backgrounds of local faculty specialists. Consequently, inter-
departmental ties are critical for building reputations and accessing
expertise that is unrepresented at the department level. Our fieldwork
suggests that women’s networks of ties beyond the department were
significantly smaller and less diverse than men’s faculty – a
consequence of the accumulated disadvantages experienced in
graduate school and their faculty experiences after graduation – and a
barrier to their attainment.
In Chapter 2, we illustrated the importance of interdepartmental ties
for gaining information when we described how they promoted
Watson and Crick’s discovery of the microstructure of DNA. In
contrast, the absence of interdepartmental ties inhibited a similar
accomplishment by Rosalind Franklin despite the fact that her
laboratory had produced the first photos of DNA’s structure.
Specifically, Watson and Crick’s interdepartmental ties to chemists in
other laboratories (in particular the chemist who found the mistake in
the chemistry text) opened up new opportunities for discovery by
providing channels by which to import exciting new ideas and
methods from other fields. And while the discovery of DNA’s
microstructure is an extraordinary case, the same principle holds in
many ordinary cases that are arguably as consequential because of their
prevalence. For example, a female graduate student recounted her
experience of forming a tie with someone outside the department and
described how it became a unique and valuable source of professional
knowledge and advice.
[I] . . . went to a grant writing workshop and saw a woman [from
another department] there who actually stood up and asked
questions. I actually went up and asked her, how do you do this?
I’m fine on a one to one, but not in a big group . . . She said, “I sit in
the front of the room. Then... It’s just me and the other person
talking.” What a great idea. Later on I called her and I told her I was
feeling very isolated and I’m wondering if you’re feeling the same
SOCIAL CAPITAL AND FACULTY NETWORK RELATIONSHIPS
167

way. She took the time to help. That makes me more likely to help
someone else. I felt very touched by it and very lucky.
Our arguments explain the benefits of interdepartmental ties by
building on and extending research on the social networks of
professionals and entrepreneurs. Consistent with our fieldwork, these
approaches have found that the social networks of professionals are
made up of two types of connections that can be called strong ties (i.e.,
intradepartmental) and bridging ties (i.e., interdepartmental).2As
noted above, strong ties are characterized by frequent interaction and
usually involve collaboration (e.g., reading papers, doing conferences
together, sharing committee assignments, co-authoring) or sensitive
information (e.g., hidden dress codes, department politics, secrets).
Unlike strong ties that require substantial resources to maintain,
bridging ties require relatively infrequent contact and usually involve
professional acquaintances. The key characteristic of bridging ties is
that they are more likely to exist between persons in different
professional circles, thereby becoming bridges over which new ideas
flow between two otherwise disconnected research teams that could
benefit from one another’s knowledge. Moreover, bridging ties access
information widely because they are likely to link local department
networks together, and thus provide crucial viaducts to resources in
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2A fuller treatment of these theoretical concepts can be found in Granovetter (1973), Burt
(1992), Bian (1997), Podolny and Baron (1997), and Uzzi (1997; 1999). Readers from the hard
sciences should see D.J. Watts and S. H. Strogatz’s 1998 article in Nature, which explores the
mathematics of networks in biological oscillators, Josephson junction arrays, excitable media,
neural and genetic control networks, spatial games, and other self-organizing systems. Their
insight is that connections between persons are ordinarily assumed to be either completely
regular or completely random. But many types of networks lie between these extremes. On the
basis of this assumption, the authors explore simple models of networks that can be attuned to
this middle ground: regular networks ‘rewired’ to introduce increasing amounts of bridging ties.
They call these reworked systems of local and bridging ties ‘small-world networks’, by analogy
with the small-world phenomenon popularly known as six degrees of separation. The small-
world phenomenon suggests that two strangers anywhere on the planet, such as a falafel maker
on a street corner in Jerusalem and Marlon Brando, can be connected by a minimum of just six
intermediaries (e.g., a friend of a friend and so on). This notion underscores the social network
principle that the right contact can help individuals gain access to resources and information
circulating in worlds very distant from their own.

fields like science where knowledge is fragmented and dispersed
among many persons.
Our fieldwork suggested that bridging ties position a researcher to
learn of new breakthroughs, to get important papers before they are
published, to learn where competing researchers are investing their
resources, or to import techniques from other disciplines into their
own. A large network also generates channels for presenting work,
educating users about its importance, and disseminating ideas prior to
formal review. Finally, because bridging ties, unlike strong ties,
require only modest amounts of resources to maintain, the larger the
number the higher the faculty member’s social capital. Faculty
members who have only strong local ties to members of the
department are likely to be cut off from these important channels of
information and knowledge because their local department contacts
share comparable viewpoints and resources.
A women professor approaching her tenure review revealed a sharp
and vivid example of the benefits of a rich network of bridging ties. She
commented on the importance of having a social network composed of
both strong local ties as well as numerous bridging ties to faculty in
other departments who would referee her case.
So there are two issues, one what the inside letters would look like
and what the paper case would look like; that is, the vita. But then
there is also what the outside letters are going to look like . . . The
way that I am supposed to decide officially from whom to solicit
letters is by who knows my work well. I actually have a friend who
came up for promotion who picked the seven most important
people in his field. Needless to say he didn’t get promoted. You
just don’t do that. You pick people to whom you have been
sending your publications; you pick people who really know your
work. My sense of how you do this is you have a sense from these
people whether they are going to write you good letters. That is, at
least you know that they think your work is good. You don’t have
to walk up to someone and say what kind of a letter will you write
me, you know what that person thinks.
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PATTERNS OF MEN
’
S AND WOMEN
’
S
INTERDEPARTMENTAL TIES
Table 12.3 shows the distributions of the number of bridging contacts
outside the department. Bridging ties were measured by asking
respondents to name the individuals outside the department that they
could call if seeking professional information. In line with the previous
section we break down the analysis by gender, untenured, and critical
mass categories. Consistent with our fieldwork and qualitative
interviews, we find that women cite fewer bridging contacts than men
do for both the full faculty category and untenured faculty category.
Women in departments of token status also report fewer contacts than
women in departments with critical mass. These findings show that
women, especially in departments of token status, have fewer bridging
ties than men, suggesting that they are weak on a key dimension of
professional success.
Taken together, a comparison of male and female faculty network
within the department and outside the department converge on a
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Table 12.3 Bridging ties: Number of faculty contacts named outside the
department
All faculty Untenured Untenured
faculty women faculty
Number of Critical
bridging ties Men Women Men Women mass Tokens
Mean 9.2* 6.3 4.7 4.4 7.0* 4.7
Standard deviation
of mean 15.7 6.4 4.9 3.2 7.7 1.2
Minimum 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 3.0
Maximum 99.0 25.0 20.0 10.0 25.0 6.0
Note: An asterisk indicates significant differences in men’s and women’s
responses.

similar and crucial finding: women’s networks tend to be poorer in
social capital than those of their male peers. While this finding is
expected given the fieldwork, the quantitative analysis reveals the
sources and patterns of difference along gender lines. Moreover, it
demonstrates that the self-reports of women faculty members capture
their reality as well as their view of the reality of their male peers.
Finally, the triangulation of results reinforces our fundamental
conclusions about the sources of women’s disadvantage in the hard
sciences, and establishes pointers to underlying biases and strategies
for overcoming them. In the next section, we examine the
consequences of social capital.
ARE GENDER DIFFERENCES IN SOCIAL CAPITAL
EXPLAINED BY DIFFERENCES IN OUR HUMAN CAPITAL
?
Table 12.4 presents the mean differences between women and men
faculty members along our three analytical categories: (a) all faculty by
gender, (b) untenured faculty by gender, and (c) untenured women
faculty by critical mass of women faculty in the department. Table A2
in the Appendix shows that men and women differ little in their
human capital, a finding consistent with prior research on gender
stratification in the professions (Pfeffer and Ross, 1982; Davis-Blake
and Uzzi, 1993; Schneer and Reitman, 1993; Stroh and Brett, 1996;
Uzzi and Barsness, 1998). Age and education level of the sample does
not differ significantly when broken down by gender, tenure, or critical
mass. The ages of the men and women show no significant differences,
except for the difference between untenured women in departments
with a critical mass and token status. Our three measures of work
experience – years since the Ph.D. (professional age), number of years
employed, and number of years in a post-doctoral fellowship position –
show no significant differences. Both untenured men and women
faculty members have had approximately five to six years of work
experience and have spent two or three years as a post-doc before
starting their present tenure-track position. Similarly, this sample of
untenured women and men are approximately one to two years from
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171

their tenure decision which suggests that their understanding of their
department is comparable and unlikely to change significantly before
their tenure decision.
Several comparisons of the backgrounds of the women and men were
also conducted. As expected, the education levels show no statistical
differences by gender. The schools where faculty members received
their doctorates are of similar status, and their Ph.D.s are usually from
an institution within the top-ranked 15 universities. This is most
likely a consequence of the fact that the hiring institution is a
prestigious school. Married male faculty members are more likely to
have children than are their female faculty peers (no single or divorced
faculty members reported having children). Eighty-three percent of the
untenured men versus 55 percent of the untenured women (p< 0.8)
have children. The average age of the untenured women in this sample
(41 years) suggests that these women have chosen not to have families,
if they do not already have them. One reason for this effect may be that
the sample represents ‘survivors’ (i.e., all women who wanted to start a
family have left the sample). Another interpretation is that this sample
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Table 12.4 Respondent’s human capital characteristics
All faculty Untenured Untenured
faculty women faculty
Variables Men Women Men Women Tokens Critical
mass
Age 49 46 45 42 36* 45
Professional age 21 18 16 15 9 18
Years employed 14 10 6 6 7 5
Years in post-doc 3 2 3 2 3 2
Note: An asterisk indicates significant differences in men’s and women’s
responses by category and characteristic.

of women have self-selected themselves into positions predicated on
the assumption that they would forgo raising a family.
Finally, 83% of the untenured women in departments with critical
mass (p< 0.005) have children versus zero percent among untenured
women in departments without a critical mass. In sum, there are no
significant differences in human capital among members of the same
sample. They are all talented and well educated, and share similar
work histories. However, there is an important difference between
men and women in that a significant larger number of women than
men participate in the tenure race without having children.
SOCIAL CAPITAL AND RESEARCH PRODUCTIVITY
The final question we explore is whether differences in social capital
translate into differences in research productivity, holding constant
human capital. We review the results of a regression analysis that
linked social capital differences to research productivity using the
popular convention of number of publications. While this measure
does not account for conditions of work and job fulfillment, it is the
dominant measure used to study career attainment and plays a
disproportionately large role in promotion decisions (Zuckerman and
Merton, 1972; Seashore et al., 1989; Cole, 1992; Pfeffer, 1993).
In organizing our analysis, we look at three aspects of women’s and
men’s networks that follow from our above examination of the quality of
collegial relationships, number of strong ties, and number of bridging
ties. First, we examine the predictive effects of token overload and power
imbalance on publication rates, two empirical indicators of our
underlying relationship constructs of collegiality and reciprocity
respectively. We expect both of these factors to decrease a faculty
member’s publication success because both represent a lack of
reciprocity in exchanges of tangible resources that are crucial for
producing research. Following previous research, we do not hypothesize
effects for social support or identity enhancement because these factors
have been found to affect job turnover and job fulfillment rather than
productivity per se (Podolny and Baron, 1997). (In analyses not shown,
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173

these variables did not have a statistically significant association with
productivity.) Second, we examine the effects of the number of strong
ties in the department. We expect faculty members who have insular or
expansive department ties to have less attainment than those who keep
an intermediate number of department ties. Our argument is that faculty
members who keep too few ties are marginalized socially and/or
politically in the department. Those who maintain large numbers of
contacts experience alienation because their relationships tend to be
shallow and low in trust. Third, we examine the effects of bridging ties
and expect that bridging ties will be positively associated with
publication success. We also include in our analysis standard control
variables for human capital and department characteristics to isolate the
net effects of social capital on research performance. The Appendix
provides a full description of our statistical model and measures.
Table 12.5 reports the results of our regression of research
productivity on social and human capital. Model 1 is the control model
and contains variables that measure an individual’s human capital and
control for the statistical properties of their networks. It is presented to
demonstrate that the predicted variables hold net of controls. Model 2
contains all the network, human capital, and statistical control
variables. A positive and significant coefficient for an independent
variable in these models indicates that it is positively associated with
the level of research output.
Consistent with our expectations, we found that relationships high
on power imbalance tend to reduce academic productivity. We also
found that too few or too many strong ties negatively affect
attainment, while an intermediate number of department contacts is
positively associated with attainment. This suggests that either an
under-investment in strong ties or an over-investment in strong ties
hurts research productivity. Having too few strong ties decreases
possibilities for collaboration and support, while too many strong ties
have maintenance costs that override their benefits. Finally, we found
that measures of both weak ties (number of contacts beyond the
department) and number of co-authors are positively associated with
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SOCIAL CAPITAL AND FACULTY NETWORK RELATIONSHIPS
175
Table 12.5 Ordered logit regression of social and human capital on
research productivity
Model 1 Model 2
Social capital
Token overload –0.2542
(0.3412)
Power imbalance –0.5258*
(0.270)
No. of strong ties 30.140***
(10.080)
No. of strong ties squared –0.615***
(0.1712)
No. of bridge ties 0.0880**
(0.0420)
No. of co-authors 0.0696***
(0.0206)
Human Capital
Gender (1=Male) 1.05* 0.0939
(0.616) (0.6938)
Tenure (1=Yes) 10.54*** 10.062*
(0.497) (0.5726)
Professional age 0.036 0.1197*
(0.056) (0.0690)
Age –0.009 –0.0899
(0.054) (0.0728)
Controls
Network turnover –0.019 0.1588
(0.149) (0.1673)
Average duration –0.006** –0.0068
(0.003) (0.0042)
Research budget 0.001 0.0008
(0.000) (0.0012)

research success. Consistent with our arguments, these results suggest
that a large network of bridging ties aids timely access to intellectual
capital.
These effects suggest that one of the underlying barriers to the
success of women scientists is the structure of their social networks.
Results of both structure and relations point in the same direction.
Network structures composed of an intermediate level of strong
department ties and a large network of bridging ties beyond the
department are consistently associated with publishing by improving
the ability of a researcher both to gain access to novel information that
is circulating in other networks and to collaborate productively with
close ties within the department on research projects.
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Table 12.5 (cont.)
Model 1 Model 2
Post-doc (1=Yes) 0.128 –0.0898
(0.462) (0.5362)
Model log likelihood –930.452 –680.668
Pseudo R20.1232 0.3557
Low productivity cut point –20.28 –50.047
(10.82) (30.279)
Medium productivity cut point –0.015 –20.004
(10.76) (30.259)
High productivity cut point 10.60 0.558
(10.76) (30.248)
*p< 0.1; ** p< 0.05; *** p<0.01. Standard errors are in parentheses. N=97.

SUMMARY
The role of kula rings outlined in earlier chapters is symbolic of the
structure of relationships in contemporary science. Like kula rings
that are founded on exclusivity and selective access to critical
resources, relationships among faculty members follow the same
principles of exchange and produce similar outcomes. In the popular
parlance of science, the kula ring creates and allocates, through
connections among scientists, the social capital that transforms their
human capital into productive assets and conditions the experience of
their work lives.
This chapter reinforces our conclusions about the social structural
conditions that prevent women’s full participation in scientific
careers, even for those select women who attain faculty status despite
having endured the barriers of gender socialization, overt
discrimination, and conflicts between work and personal lives. A next
step is to focus on the sources and consequences of social capital, and
the strategies that can overcome its dark side and increase its benefits
for women. Younger male faculty members express an understanding
and interest in building more productive cross-gender and gender-
inclusive networks, yet new strategies are needed and other problems
exist. While women fare better in departments with a higher
proportion of women, an increase in the number of women in a
department sometimes, paradoxically, does not automatically
produce positive effects when women split on key issues, some allying
themselves with traditional male faculty members. Next, we examine
what strategies have been used, what strategies furnish new
possibilities, and what strategies are likely to overcome the problems
we have identified.
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13 Negative and positive
departmental cultures
Ultimately departmental reform is the means to overcome the
exclusion of accomplished women from full membership in the
Republic of Science. In our most recent study, we were interested in
identifying the characteristics of those graduate departments which
showed the most and least improvement in the recruitment of women
and conferring of the Ph.D., based on National Research Council
(NRC) statistics from 1974 to 1990. In electrical engineering, the
number was too low to generate meaningful data before 1977, and
computer science had not been separated as a distinct discipline until
1978. In light of this, the time periods considered for these two
disciplines were 1978–1990 and 1977–1990 respectively. What
emerged was a range of departmental cultures. At that end of the
spectrum where numbers of American women graduate students
and/or degrees conferred were lowest, was what we call the
‘Instrumental Department’. While most departments that we studied
reflect the negative attitudes toward women in science, we also
identified several ‘Relational Departments’ where positive cultural
shifts are occurring.
THE INSTRUMENTAL DEPARTMENT
Not surprisingly, morale was lowest and isolation of women highest in
instrumental departments. Many had no programs for women
students and if they did, fear of stigma around joining was high. As a
tenured woman preparing to leave for industry described the situation,
‘How many faculty hires in the last 10 years? Zero. How many women
interviewed? Zero. How many women students are supported? There

was one several years ago. Maybe one now, or is it zero? The numbers
are extremely grim.’ It was not unusual for there to be only one woman
faculty member present in the most depressed environments. As the
lone woman professor, waiting for tenure for seven years in one such
department, said, ‘Who do I talk to? I feel lonely. I’ve always felt like
that . . . I feel good seeing my picture in the front of the building, but
there is only one [female].’ Although numbers of women on faculty in
all departments only rarely reached parity with males, instrumental
departments had especially low levels of females or even none at all.
The severely instrumental department reflects a power structure
which resides in the hands of a much older group of eminent male
scientists who ‘are resting on their Nobel Prizes . . . the imperial clan is
always watching.’ In the most hostile departments, generational
attitudes were cited rather than that of gender. ‘One of my biggest
problems here is gender bias from the older faculty,’ said one female
professor. ‘I never have worries like that from people of my own age.’
Anxiety and feelings of powerlessness are very high and there is a sense
of not ‘ever knowing for sure what’s in the back of their minds.’
Nevertheless, the strong presence of instrumental attitudes among an
older male generation of scientists and their relative lack among the
younger generation augurs a significant change, favorable to female
scientists.
Earlier studies of personality correlates and emotional character-
istics of mature, distinguished scientists using projective tests (Cattell
and Drevdahl, 1973; Eiduson, 1973; McClelland, 1973) shed some light
on the experience of women faculty members in those least hospitable
departments. Briefly, scientists were found to be more withdrawn than
the general population, emotionally constricted, and controlling. As a
group they avoided or were ‘disturbed by complex human emotions’
and were ‘intensely’ identified with that which was masculine. Lastly,
the proving of oneself and the construction of identity through
scientific work served to ward off sociability needs. Regardless of
discipline, the overwhelming majority of departments in our study in
some way reflected aspects of this model.
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THE RELATIONAL DEPARTMENT
We have also identified a few ‘Relational Departments’ with a collegial
and cooperative atmosphere that provide the safety to take the risks
necessary for innovative work and the collaborations necessary for
networking. Graduate and faculty women have created a grapevine to
pass on information about departments with a relational culture that
are often highly ranked but not at the very top of their field. Since some
of the most talented researchers are women and men who want to
follow a non-traditional path, departmental reform can be an academic
mobility strategy, as well. A number of tenured women faculty who
had struggled for recognition and status in prestigious graduate schools
and post-doctoral programs that were highly competitive and
hierarchal also reported accepting faculty appointments in more
relational departments, hoping to repair the isolation and stress they
had previously encountered. As advisors to graduate students, other
successful women are directing their students to such departments
as well.
Typically, departmental culture changes when an individual male,
with a key role in the power structure, acquires feminist values. Such a
personal transformation can translate into organizational change,
especially when colleagues experience similar life changes. Women
students and faculty members report being attracted to relational
departments by interpersonal interactions during interviews, a sense
of personal concern by the faculty committee, and an impression of
‘happiness’ and well-being among members of the department. Thus,
relatedness, emotional closeness, ‘the expectation of mutuality and
the sharing of experience leading to a . . . sense of well being’ (Kaplan
and Surrey, 1984) are not only intrinsic criteria for choosing the
department, but also describe elements of female developmental
theory of the ‘self-in-relation’. Most significantly, these milieus are
relatively free of the enervating stress associated with the anxiety and
defensive maneuvers required to be accepted and acceptable in highly
instrumental departments.
In an instrumental department, interpersonal interactions are
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181

minimal and open communication avoided; the opposite condition
holds in a relational department. Reflecting on her past experiences
before joining a more women-inclusive faculty, a biologist felt that she
‘had been in all-male environments long enough to know that it was
important to minimize their anxiety. I became very good at only talking
science and calming them down. It was energy consuming.’ By contrast,
a female faculty member in a relational department reported ‘ . . . a
collective understanding. When I speak to [male faculty] I have the
feeling I’m communicating with them as people. There is a recognition
of the value to be had from cooperation. The emergence of individual
empires is discouraged. A strong belief here is to preserve an
environment which is as cooperative as is possible.’ Following the model
of relational research groups, there is an active commitment to sustain
this milieu through the careful hiring of like-minded academic staff.
At a university in which both the chair of the department and an
upper-echelon administrator were minority group members, women
felt that their personal experience with discrimination encouraged
empathic dialogue regarding women’s problems. Moreover, this
leadership diminished the power of the old boy network and supported
affirmative action hires. ‘Those people in their lives had really
experienced discrimination and it changed how they behaved and
made an enormous difference to us. We didn’t always agree with [the
chair], but we always felt that we were having the same conversation.
This guy understood what we were talking about. That made a huge
difference to this department because he never wanted to go out and
hire honchos. He always wanted to hire young people and build them
up. It is an open search.’ The chair functions as a representative in
relational departments, discussing issues with all faculty members
before taking action.
Through personal contacts at scientific meetings and reports passed
over e-mail lists, women are increasingly aware of ‘good’ and ‘bad’
departments and direct their applications accordingly. While the
science being done in the department or by a faculty member often
initiated a candidate’s interest in the school, the emotional
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gratification of the interview process, together with a preference for a
collegial research environment, influenced the candidate’s final
decision. Thus, selecting this particular department was a means of
recapturing a significant professional and personal growth experience
that had promoted self-confidence and emergence of a scientific self-
identity. In the department mentioned above, a female academic
model based on interpersonal relationships, affiliation, and nurturance
had become accepted as legitimate and had even become the
departmental norm. This was in strong contrast to another research
site, where women’s expression of a need for these characteristics in
the laboratory environment was derided as a desire for dependence and
emotionality by the adherents of the patriarchal system that was in
place.
The context into which reforms are introduced is critical to their
acceptance; the culture and organization of departments plays an
important role in whether reforms will be accepted or rejected. A
professsor who can mobilize a strong network on behalf of equality can
transform a department. On one campus, the women all agreed that the
ethos of a physics department had been changed through such an
individual’s efforts. As a female graduate student put it, ‘My
experience is that one person in an influential position can make a huge
amount of difference.’ This individual’s goal had been to convey
confidence and to help every student get through. According to a
female graduate student, this individual was ‘ . . . a tremendous
influence on the whole tone of the department which made the place
actually wonderful and people told me about this department. I never
realized how much it was tied up with this one person.’ On the other
hand, grass-roots efforts can be undermined by ‘old boys’ if their power
is entrenched and their numbers large. In another department, the
chair ‘created . . . [a positive] atmosphere here. He provided a strong
presence. The conflict was with the people over 50: the old Guard. [The
chair] finally resigned.’ Strong networks can resist as well as assist
change; those in power in a department can legitimize or delegitimize
female affiliation.
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ALTERNATIVE SCENARIOS
We identified several different scenarios of female faculty experience
depending upon fit or lack of fit with departmental structure. These
included female scientists who were attempting to follow (1) a
relational style in an instrumental department, (2) an instrumental
style in a relational department, and (3) an instrumental style in an
instrumental department. There is a tripartite model of tension in
which one of three scenarios is possible in any given department
depending on its social construction. Each model describes an internal
dilemma with which women faculty may struggle even when there is
an apparent fit between an individual and their department.
Relational advisor/instrumental department
The tension in this situation is typically between a younger female
faculty member who advocates on behalf of her female students and a
senior woman faculty member who embraces the intensely
competitive instrumental style. Sometimes relationships can be
established far more easily with younger male faculty ‘who share the
same values.’ Although she understands the history behind their
behavior, this tenure track biologist describes her discomfort with
older, pre-eminent women in her department who reflect the male
model: ‘I always end up not liking a lot of the women who make it to
this level of science, enough to really not want to hang around with
them. You just have to go through a lot of shit sometimes to really get
there. Sometimes that means that you don’t really care about anything
else or anyone else. Sometimes that means that you face taking on the
persona of a male scientist you don’t think a whole lot of in terms of
being aggressive and competitive.’ Inexperienced, untenured women
are not only alienated, but in several instances where their relational
and proactive style has been conspicuous, tenure has been delayed or
denied.
Instrumental advisor/relational department
For a female faculty member whose previous personal experience has
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been that she must prove herself to be exceptional and put aside all
non-scientifiic interests, a department with a collaborative approach
to mentoring induces a different inner turmoil. Such women view any
detour from the individualistically competitive way of doing science
as a disservice to their students. To recognize the personal issues that
female students struggle with is experienced as a betrayal of what they
believe is necessary to succeed. This lends itself to tension not only
with their women students, but the department itself.
Professional pressures in tandem with forgetting early support
systems of their own may also blur the picture, as reported by a veteran
woman advisor. ‘Sometimes it’s easy for me to forget that I did have
support. I think in retrospect you tend to forget the insecurities. The
time you needed something extra.’ Instrumental advisors, even in a
relational department, may still be struggling with how to negotiate a
competitive scientific environment and may not be able to afford to
expose their own vulnerability.
Instrumental advisor/instrumental department
Women faculty members who identify with the traditional ‘old boys’
are perpexed about the tension that arises between them and female
graduate students. Periodically such women find themselves with all-
male laboratories and are at a loss to understand why female students
gravitate to younger male advisors. Although this older advisor is
cognizant of the self-doubts of her female students and recollects her
own need for support, as lab director she becomes defensive about
interpersonal demands she does not always understand. ‘They think
you are going to be very warm and supportive. I think I am a nice
person. I certainly care a lot. But a professor has a certain duty to say
“You have to get back on track or this is it . . .” If you’re going to be in
this field then your job is to criticize yourself every day and never get
too down on yourself.’
However, as female graduate students have become more forceful in
articulating their needs, women faculty members are forced to
question their belief that women should work harder than men in order
NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE DEPARTMENTAL CULTURES
185

to prove their worth. Having ignored the women’s movement of the
early 1970s, owing to their exclusive scientific focus, senior women
may find that the vicissitudes of young incoming faculty and students
provide an ‘eye-opening experience’. As a result, senior women faculty
have had their consciousness raised by their women students in a
number of such instances.
A heightened consciousness of discrimination is, of course, only the
first step. Once individual attitudes change, the next step is to effect
organizational change, which can be more difficult. The high powered
academic science department with its competitive identity is typically
highly resistant to change. Nevertheless, some improvement for
women in science has taken place in recent years. In the next chapter
we delineate several change-making strategies, their costs and
benefits.
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14 Initiatives for departmental
change
This chapter provides descriptions of the classes of interventions – top
down, bottom up, and idiosyncratic – that occur in academic
departments attempting to bring about gender equality. We analyze
the pros and cons of each of these types of intervention. Our proposal is
to help administrators and policy analysts understand what kinds of
interventions, given their limitations and advantages, bring about the
best outcomes under different circumstances. Later in this chapter, we
explain in detail how departments can use specific practices to change,
develop, or enhance these interventions through task redesign, social
networks, or university–industry relationships.
To study programs systematically, we delineated four groups of
departments in each of the five target disciplines: biology, chemistry,
physics, computer science and electrical engineering. The first group
of departments had initiated programs whose stated objective was to be
more inclusive of women. The other three groups were delineated on
the basis of outcomes, as recorded by the National Research Council’s
(NRC) annual compilation of doctoral degrees granted. In each of the
five fields for the decade-and-a-half up through 1990, we selected the
ten departments that had graduated the highest proportion of female
doctorates, the ten that had graduated the lowest, and the ten that
showed the most improvement in women’s graduation rate across that
period. We then selected the two departments from each group that
displayed the most consistent numbers and trends.
TYPES OF PROGRAMS FOR WOMEN IN SCIENCE
Programs are interventions from above and below that attempt to

repair the quality of women’s educational experience, partially making
up for significant deficits in the course of attaining the Ph.D. degree.
Sometimes programs provide encouragement and advice, substituting
for informal social venues in the department that exclude women.
Other programs provide academic support, providing a parallel
structure of study groups for women. Still others combine both
characteristics, making available mentors to supplement gaps in the
department’s advisory system or counteract poor treatment of women
by official academic advisors.
The basic root of all programs is the presence of a skilled individual
to provide to women support, guidance and an independent
perspective that compensates for the faculty’s inability to do so. A
discussion group leader described how
the women talk about their problems and the thing that comes up
most often is “How am I going to have an academic career and
have children? How am I going to do both?”. They’re being taught
by the males in the department about this standard of excellence
and how they’re going to go out and be the cream of the crop. Well,
they’re quite aware of the amount of work that their advisors do.
The other female [faculty] member in the department is not
married, she has no children, works constantly and the women are
quite aware of that. Are they going to be required to give up any
thought of a family life [when] they don’t want to?
A female graduate student said
Maybe it’s particular to the sciences, but you get very closed in
and you need someone to say, “I’m here” to make your path a little
smoother. As a woman, if I knew there was somebody there I could
talk to or would involve other students, that would change my
perspective on the environment. I would feel that it was more of a
community and more supportive. Even if I never took advantage
of that service, I would know it was there.
A scheme to foster female graduate students’ personal and professional
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development and an ethos of inclusion from an official departmental
position is the next step.
The failure of many departments to adequately mentor women,
whether arising from an unwillingness to take women seriously as
scientists, or to take into account their needs to balance work and
personal life, or both, has occasionally been redressed by initiatives
from women themselves or the university. Whether arising from the
‘bottom up’ or ‘top down’ several typical components can be identified
that substitute for formal advising or informal support structures, or
both. These include: a series of regular meetings with discussion topics
based on issues of graduate education; presentations of both student
and visiting scientists’ research, including opportunities for feedback
and discussion; seminars to present research to peers; a counselor to
provide advice on the requirements of graduate education as well as
issues specific to the graduate experience for women; and the presence
of female professors who are balancing work and personal life as role
models.
The classic issues of ‘systemic or piecemeal reform’, changing
people to fit the system or changing the system to meet the needs of a
broader range of people are at issue. If the graduate education system
worked for women as it does for men there would be little need for
programs to make up the difference.
BOTTOM UP PROGRAMS
Understanding the origins of support schemes and how they develop
provides insights into departments’ treatment of women. Some
programs stem from the ideas of graduate women and function initially
as social movements, relying on volunteers and the commitment of a
few dedicated persons. Such programs typically experience a crisis in
leadership succession when its founders graduate or leave the
department. It is at this point that independent funding must be raised,
professional staff hired and other necessary steps taken to
institutionalize the program. Programs that become dependent upon
volunteer labor are always in jeopardy and unlikely to survive, given
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189

the strong demands on female graduate students and faculty to pursue
their research and attend to other academic and non-academic
responsibilities.
A department’s willingness to accept responsibility for maintaining
a student-initiated program is an obvious indicator of its stance toward
women. Several female graduate students at the University of
California at Berkeley initiated a ‘Re-entry’ program for women taking
up computer science after a gap in their academic careers. The ability of
the program founders to gain seed funding from the university
administration and financial support from corporations in the region
for fellowships greatly improved the chances of faculty acceptance. As
it gained the sponsorship of the department, the effort was broadened
to include minorities and provide services to other graduate women.
Female graduate students in other hard science disciplines as well as
other computer science departments in the region viewed the Berkeley
support system, with a professional staff member to provide
counseling and organize meetings, as a model for their departments.
Even so small a gesture as the program director organizing an event in
honor of women receiving their Ph.D. was noted from afar.
An important type of bottom up program that we typically observed is
one that has the characteristics of a social movement. Some of the most
successful programs that encourage women to persist and attain Ph.D.
degrees are informal in their structure and encourage affiliation among
the female graduate students, faculty, and outside role models, with
discussion around issues of mutual concern even when there is an
invited speaker. A female staff member took it upon herself to organize a
series of informal dinners: ‘It was really in response to women coming to
me with problems and it was obvious from their discussions with me
that they were feeling very isolated. There are only 10% women in the
department and once a woman gets to a research group, it’s more
common than not that she is in a group with no other women. At the
meetings all of a sudden someone will say, “you mean it’s not me!” and
there’s comfort in knowing that they’re not responsible for either
attitudes on the part of their co-workers or on the part of their
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supervisor.’ Such informal exchange demonstrates the universality of
seemingly individual experiences and keeps issues from being perceived
as personal deficits. By objectifying a negative experience and its
subjective consequences, the way is opened for problem solving.
Succession of leadership is a crucial factor in the continuity of a
successful program, especially grass-roots programs based on graduate
student leadership. A history of mutual support and achievement can
help fend off a negative reaction to a program and provide a culture
which is handed down to succeeding members. Program meetings
walk a fine line between women feeling free to express their feelings
and share their experiences, many of which involve negative treatment
by male faculty and students, without degenerating into ‘man bashing’
and a progression of ‘one upping’ horror stories that become the sole
focus of discussion. By keeping the focus on specific problems of
graduate education and how to address them, gatherings can be
prevented from deteriorating into sessions for mere negative venting of
anger, without offering a positive recourse.
In the face of an often fierce competitive and confrontational
stance by males that is experienced as overwhelming and deflating,
women valued opportunities to present their research in a non-
confrontational, supportive environment. In practice presentations, in
front of women only, technical questions were not experienced as
threatening. Within this safe place women developed the skills and
confidence to present before a larger group outside the university. A
female graduate student said, ‘When I gave my presentation, the most
difficult question I was asked was by a first year woman in the group.
She was very sharp . . . I don’t know if that question had come from a
man that I would have been able to handle it as well. I was able to tell
myself, “Well, you know this.” Later, I then presented a paper in
Washington D.C., and it went well. I got favorable comments. I just
needed a little practice.’ Opportunities to develop professional
consciousness, build self-confidence, and counter hopelessness are
especially important for those women who are the most vulnerable and
at risk of dropping out.
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There is a need to expand the opportunity for women to articulate
their research in familiar settings, settings that are familiar in the way
in which they exchange information among themselves and present
ideas. This familiar setting may be different from men’s but it allows
them a chance to incubate ideas and gain skills and confidence that
then help them in a broader range of settings, particularly those in
which male-dominated behaviors are most characteristic. On this
point, a female graduate student said, ‘I would like to see the women
have an opportunity to just get together and talk about their research. I
know other women have said that the guys in their group just get
together and chat about what they’re doing. And [the women] have felt
that they have missed out on being helped because they’re not part of
it.’ A talk by a visiting female scientist provided an opportunity:
‘Everyone gave a little tidbit of their research and I was just sweating
bullets waiting for my turn. She had a lot of good questions . . . I
discovered I really knew what I was talking about!’ A nurturing
environment is desired: ‘When you’re done with your paper there’s
someone asking you, “How did it go? How was your presentation?”
You feel a sense of belonging. That someone cares about you. This is
very important.’ The creation of such informal venues for scientific
training helps female students consolidate a professional identity
within a hostile or indifferent environment.
In summary, bottom up interventions are flexible, low cost, and
allow for local monitoring at the departmental level. They effect
change without the help of administrators and can be customized to
meet the different moods and conditions that exist in the department.
Moreover, they do not burden universities with new financial costs
related to special scholarships or rule enforcement. Consequently, we
have found that a strategy for the success of bottom up programs
explores how resources can be gained from support outside the
department or university. This is a more entrepreneurial way in which
to solve the problem. As the Berkeley faculty showed, it can be
extremely successful in funding a re-entry program by going to donors
outside the department who are interested in bringing more women
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into the department. Moreover, this kind of effort can help mitigate the
problems of succession and raises the legitimacy of programs and their
success by receiving validation and support by the ‘market’.
Bottom up programs also have weaknesses. These informal
interventions do not respond well to successions of key persons
because it is hard to recruit someone who is willing to donate a
comparable amount of energy in order to keep the ball rolling.
Another difficulty is that they have few budgeted resources and thus
cannot create wider-scale changes that need things like research
funding, bringing in visiting faculty or setting up special programs and
research tracks for women faculty. Thus, they are effective at having
speedy responses but can be fragile when, inevitably, key people
depart.
TOP DOWN PROGRAMS
Other programs are initiated from above: by departments, centers,
university administrations and outside sources such as government
research funding agencies and corporations. The programs that we
identified ranged from a token yearly dinner, regular informal lunches,
scheduled meetings mixing scientific presentations and discussions
of women’s issues, orchestrated mentoring initiatives, to an
independently funded and professionally staffed organization. At the
University of Washington, administrative staff were given the
following mandate by their director: ‘A program must be run by
educators and social scientists because women professors [in the
natural science and engineering] don’t want to be identified with this
kind of program. They want to be known for their research.’ To support
this initiative, a ‘Student Steering Committee’ composed of fifteen
undergraduate and graduate students identified as their priorities
isolation, competition, low self-confidence, child-bearing and child-
rearing, and lack of role models. Together with the director and
assistant director, both with backgrounds in the social sciences, they
organized four projects to address these issues: tutoring, peer
mentoring, professional mentoring, and a support group. Objectives
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were stated, brochures designed and printed, ‘marketing strategies’
developed, and events scheduled and evaluation forms created.
Some of the ‘programs’ were found not to be especially targeted at
graduate women. For example, even though much of its content was
provided by feminist consultants on gender issues in organizations, a
program at an NSF-sponsored center in the physical sciences was
primarily directed at men. A female participant in the discussion
groups and retreats said, ‘I didn’t feel I could raise issues that were
important to me.’ The program mainly helped to broaden male
participants’ career goals beyond attaining faculty positions in an elite
department. In other cases, even when programs did effectively target
women students, they did not necessarily work as anticipated. For
example, one initiative, a residence hall for undergraduate women
interested in scientific careers, employed graduate women as mentors.
By requiring an extensive commitment from the mentors, the program
actually impeded their graduate studies. As a result, the mentors’
workloads were subsequently reduced. Another program also utilized
graduate women to mentor undergraduates. As a result of interviews
conducted as part of this study, the program began to focus attention on
the needs of graduate women, as well. Heretofore, the implicit
assumption had been that a woman, having made it into a Ph.D.
program, could take care of herself.
The AT&T program, an exemplar of what could be undertaken,
provided stipends, a summer research position and an industrial
mentor. The commitment of the program founders to demonstrating
success led them to take unusual steps to insure that the ‘cream of the
crop’ women selected for the program and its well funded fellowships,
were not deterred by obstacles in their path. When an academic advisor
refused to support a dissertation topic, permission was obtained to
have the woman complete her research at then AT&T Bell labs. When
problems with an advisor arose, AT&T mentors would pay an informal
visit to discuss the issue as an ancillary part of a campus visit. More
important than the money, the AT&T program placed the prestige and
power of a highly respected industrial laboratory on the side of female
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graduate students, providing an often essential counterbalance to
overcome negative experiences in their department. Unfortunately, as
corporate resources for women and minority programs have declined
in recent years, the former AT&T programs (now Lucent) are less well
supported than in their early years.
While top down approaches offer many benefits in bringing about
change in departments, they appear under-utilized. An initiative to
assist female students that merely provides an outlet for women to
discuss their problems or lacks administration is inadequate. Top
down approaches provide a formalized means for bringing about
change. Without issues being formulated and struggles made for
change, a mechanism for resolving problems is lacking. A program
cannot be successful without advocacy for change as was
demonstrated at one university where problems were aired but not
resolved. A female administrative assistant to the department chair
served as a sounding board for female students, providing a place to
‘vent’. The result was that students reported problems anonymously,
fearing reprisals because they viewed her as powerless.
The conditions for successful program implementation were:
support from above; a designated director who is not on faculty;
adequate budget; help in fundraising; faculty involvement; continuous
evaluation and student involvement in design and implementation. In
the strongest formal program that we identified, the Director and
Assistant Director played a strong advocacy role from an independent
base outside the science departments. Both women made themselves
available to students and had exceptional counseling and leadership
skills. There was a general consensus that the qualities required of a
program leader were those of a clinical social worker, rather than
scientist, although a minority questioned whether a non-scientist
could understand the special issues of academic science. However, on
one campus, effective group meetings were initiated for women
scientists by the Student Counseling Center in response to individual
requests, all reflecting similar difficulties in one hard science
department.
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Perhaps the most important element for systematic and long-term
success of a program intervention of any type is support from above. As
one program founder put it, ‘I started [the program] because of what I
saw and because there was a positive enough atmosphere. [The chair]
thought it was a good idea. Without him I wouldn’t have done it. He
funded it the first year.’ Without such support, women may be
denigrated for participating in a program. Indeed, expectation of
criticism from the men in a department deter many women from
participating. On the other hand, support from above creates a
legitimized and safe space in which female graduate students and
faculty can initiate their own projects for change. As a female scientist
explained the situation: ‘We were able to start the group because of the
positive environment.’ Speaking of an influential professor who served
as the department ombudsman, a fifth-year student describing his
vigorous advocacy and personal interest in women’s graduate careers
explained it simply: ‘You must have leadership from above . . . what
you really need are tenured people with guts.’
In summary, the top down intervention has the benefits of creating
an incentive structure that promotes faculty to make changes by
providing research funding, special tracks for women’s development
and special programs in funding to bring women into the department.
In this way, faculty members see an economic incentive to change
their behavior and one that can benefit the department more widely.
The top down approach also has the benefit of legitimating the change
and creating enforceable rules for persons who resist change. Top down
interventions are, however, difficult to implement because of their
financial and political costs. Finally, on a less tangible dimension, top
down interventions force universities to admit a problem.
Consequently, the added visibility of creating a top down intervention
and the costs of monitoring and managing the politics often create
generic barriers to their creation and success.
One way that these kinds of problems can be overcome is for
administrators to go to outside agencies and organizations that rely on
the university for the creation of scientists. The early AT&T program
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is an exemplar of this kind of activity. Not only does going to a
prominent and successful scientific company like AT&T bring
legitimacy to the change effort, it also tends to assuage the risk of
admitting a problem because a company that relies on top-notch
science has endorsed it financially and publicly. Thus, a way to make
top down approaches more effective is to create networks to powerful
and resource-rich organizations that can provide tangible and
intangible resources to the university for supporting the programs.
IDIOSYNCRATIC PROGRAMS
Idiosyncratic interventions are neither informal bottom up inter-
ventions that rely on the teamwork of individuals nor top down
approaches in which administrators bring to bear their formalized
power. Rather, they occur when a single individual within the
department attempts to make some localized changes or to fill a gap in
the present system for the treatment of women.
As a novel strategy, a few departments seeking to achieve gender
equity and upward mobility have adopted a strategy of attracting
highly qualified women. In such a case it was reported that the new
leadership of a department ‘ . . . had just gone through a revolution
together, had thrown out the previous director.’ There was a feeling of
camaraderie and an understanding of women’s issues in the
department and its ‘culture of inclusion’ became a marketing tool to
attract the best female students.
Occasionally, university administrations take direct measures, for
example to encourage these kinds of strides by offering to make
positions available if women or minority faculty members can be
recruited. At other times, these steps have encouraged departments to
hire their first female faculty member, but usually, these types of
interventions rely on individuals acting on their own initiative and
resources. ‘We had a graduate program director who took this issue up
as a personal cause,’ said one interviewee who reported that it was most
important to be stringent on sexual harassment so that everyone knew
it was morally and legally wrong, officially and unofficially. Nearing
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the end of her tenure the dean regretted not having set in motion
more programmatic innovations to institutionalize her personal
commitment.
In another instance, a graduate student in psychology was hired for a
half-time position to initiate a program and was later given a full-time
staff position. The Dean purposely chose the program director from
outside of the department and provided her own physical space,
telephone, computer, copier, fax and graduate students as staff
members, using money from the teaching assistant budget. A ‘Gender
Equity Task Force’ was established to provide a framework for the
program, with the expectation that it will be expanded to additional
departments.
Often, female administrators become substitute advisors who help
women graduate students negotiate political and resource constraints.
One said: ‘This is not a formal role that I play within the department.
The students have a lot of contact with me; they’ve probably learned
word of mouth that I can be trusted [because] I have no direct power or
control. I am basically a facilitator so they don’t have to worry that
I’m going to cancel their RA [research assistantship].’ Female
administrators sometimes save women from giving up the pursuit of a
doctoral degree and the chairperson can identify them as the
department’s ‘program,’ without making a commitment of resources.
Providing informal support for female Ph.D. students was an
overload on these female administrators’ work responsibilities,
lacking in official status and recognition. An administrator said, ‘It’s
frustrating because I don’t have the power to do much about any of this
. . . ’. Nevertheless, a female graduate student said: ‘One of the people
here who really softens the blows is —. I’m not exactly sure what her
position is. She’ll say, “Oh, you need another week on your thesis.” It’s
very important to have her here.’ Another said, ‘One thing that
— [graduate student administrator] told me when I got here was don’t
have your academic advisor be your thesis advisor. Have at least two
people.’ With two faculty members to rely upon, if something goes
wrong or is lacking from one, there is at least some possibility of
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recourse. Since the normal workings of the Ph.D. training system place
individual students in a virtually ‘feudal’ relationship of dependency
upon their professor, female departmental administrators and
secretaries, in providing an underground support structure for graduate
women, mitigate some of the failings of the system.
In summary, idiosyncratic changes are the most fragile because they
rely completely on an individual who is acting out of a personal cause
and taking an individual leadership position but without resources.
Moreover, much of their knowledge and understanding of how to
improve the system is not imbedded in any institutional framework
but is simply information that they have on hand and that is kept only
with them so that when they leave so does their knowledge.
Conversely, where these kinds of programs can be successful is when
the efforts of the individual become visible to other powerful
individuals in the organization who then see the idiosyncratic changes
as a model for changes in other programs.
STRATEGY FOR DEPARTMENTAL REFORM
A chair’s leadership can influence departmental culture and climate.
In some instances, however, department values and attitudes are
controlled by a cadre of prominent senior male scientists whose
capacity to bring money into the department overrules the status of the
chair. When the values of those in power are discordant with the values
of women faculty, tensions are inevitable. A ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’
dynamic can develop in which some women faculty inadvertently
collude with the indifference of those in authority. After publicly being
the object of overt bias by male colleagues, one lone woman chemist
asserted, ‘The chair is probably not aware. I don’t like to bother people
about things that are probably not all that important.’ She went on to
add, however, that in fact she is ‘sure he is aware that some of the senior
faculty don’t say the nicest things about me or to me.’ Attitudes of
community and collaboration, as well as biased attitudes against
female faculty members, emanate from the top down.
There is no specific point where change takes place through increase
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in number alone except in a very few areas, primarily in the biological
sciences, where the significant number is 50% or parity. In a few
traditionally female fields, women have attained majority status in
some departments and achieved positions of power. When equality is
reached, it usually indicates a change in power relations as well, but
this can also occur at a much lower numerical level. Whether change
originates bottom up or top down, intervention from above is the most
salient factor to making it last. It is not necessary for reform to be
initiated by the leadership of a department or the university, but it has
to be supported by them to endure.
Through the improved quality of life for those women who have
gravitated to relational departments, when the structure strives to
support all its members, participants are freed to do optimal work. This
final model, relatively free of tension, appears to demonstrate the
potential for a new social organization of science. It requires energy
from those who have departmental power, particularly the chair. It is
vulnerable to power groups within the structure who seek to maintain
the status quo. However, when a critical mass of like-minded women
and male faculty feel sufficiently safe to wrestle with issues around
gender, family concerns, the tenure clock, and the many obstacles
which have affected the entry into science of females (and sometimes
males), the scientific endeavor is only strengthened.
CONCLUSION
:
INTERACTIONS AMONG PROGRAM
TYPES AND DEPARTMENT CHANGE
We found that informal programs, while valuable, could be extremely
vulnerable to subtle and overt prejudicial attitudes without the
support of department leadership. Those informal grass-roots
programs which not only survived but flourished did so because of
positive influence from above which then set the tone within the
department. In this way a domino effect was created in which strong
leadership among students and faculty members could safely emerge
and creatively develop a grass-roots program in which other students
and faculty members would then feel free to participate. Thus the stage
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appears to be set from the top down by enabling a sufficient reduction
in stigma to allow for programs to develop and expand.
The issues faced by women in science in the United States are
mirrored in the experience of their colleagues in other countries.
Nevertheless, significant differences, both positive and negative, can
be identified among scientific institutions globally in their treatment
of women. This variance reinforces our conclusion that organizational
and cultural factors depress or improve the number, status, and
achievement of women in science.
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15 International comparisons
In recent years the question ‘Why are there so few women in science?’
posed more than a quarter of a century ago by sociologist Alice Rossi,
has been raised by her counterparts throughout the world, including
the late Virginia Stolte-Heiskanen (Finland), Esther Hicks (the
Netherlands), Fanny Tabak (Brazil), Mary Osborne (Germany) and
Pnina Abir-Am (U.S.), among many others. Several intriguing
anomalies in women’s experience in science emerge from analysis of a
range of contrasting national and social circumstances in the work we
draw upon here. For example, female scientists and engineers in India
have been found to be more productive than their male counterparts, as
measured by numbers of research papers and patents produced, while
Venezuelan women researchers are slightly less productive than men
(Lemoine, 1994).
Women have attained greater access to higher-level positions in some
southern European countries than in northern Europe (Talapessy,
1994). The nuclear family, characteristic of advanced industrialized
societies, in the absence of substitute support structures, typically
places a strain on women scientists. The traditional extended family,
still commonplace in developing countries, provides significant
support for female scientists in countries such as Brazil and Mexico.
Seeming contradictions are intertwined with unexpected findings
about gender and science. Women have made the greatest gains in
participation in technical fields under conditions where science is
relatively low in status in comparison to other professions, for example
in Turkey. A shortage of men due to their diversion into military
service has also opened up scientific careers to women, in the United
Kingdom (Mason, 1991) and Portugal (Ruivo, 1994). A rapidly
expanding higher education system, propelled by industrialization and

modernization, also works to open up scientific education, and to a
lesser extent, scientific and technical careers, to women. Conversely, a
declining academic economy also results in a feminization of the
university as men leave for higher-paying positions in industry,
especially in fields such as computer science (Lopez, 1995; Carrasco,
1995).
Using the available literature, and through interviews with
researchers on women in science in a number of countries, we compare
women’s experience in science in developing and highly industrialized
countries, in northern and southern Europe, and in socialist and
capitalist contexts. We address the following questions. Is women’s
limited participation in science an inevitable feature of the persistence
of traditional gender roles? What difference does social structure
make? Under what conditions do barriers to women in science fall (or
at least shrink)? The paradox of women’s participation in science is
that their numbers appear to increase most under contrasting
conditions of system expansion and economic decline, with even the
advances reflecting, to some extent, continuing inequalities among
men and women in science.
WOMEN SCIENTISTS IN DEVELOPING AND
SEMI
-
INDUSTRIALIZED COUNTRIES
In developing countries, with the notable exception of a few nations,
there are many fewer women in science and engineering fields in
higher education than in health, education and law (United Nations,
1995) Although cross-national data on women in universities are
limited, an international research consortium of agricultural research
institutes provides an interesting indicator of women’s participation
in scientific careers. Some women were on the non-scientific staff or at
the trainee level but few could be found at the senior scientific level or
in managerial posts. Nevetheless, there are intriguing anomalies such
as mathematics where women can be found in university positions at
higher proportions in such countries as Columbia, India and the
Philippines than in many developed countries.
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Turkey: Class is stronger than gender
In Turkey, the question of women in science can almost be reversed
and instead of asking ‘why so few?’ one author has asked ‘why so
many?’ (Oncu, 1981). The answer lies in part in the country’s history of
westernization in which advancement of women was part of the
‘kemalist’ ideology. Despite its association with modernization,
science was not as closely connected to the centers of power in society
as law and political science, fields in which women continued to have
extremely low rates of participation. The answer is also class-based.
The creation of large numbers of professional positions with the
founding of the modern state meant that there were insufficient upper-
class or upper middle-class men to fill them – hence the openness of
technical fields to upper-class women who were typically encouraged
by their fathers to pursue high-level careers.
An ideology of modernization combined with the carryover of a
traditional support structure for child care, or simply the financial
ability to obtain assistance, enhanced the ability of well-to-do women
to pursue scientific careers. However, the attenuation of the founding
ideology of the state since the 1950s, combined with the expansion of
the university system during the 1980s into more traditional
provincial areas of the country, has produced an unanticipated
reduction in the participation of women in academic science (Acar,
1991). Nevetheless, even in the metropolitan universities where
women have long had high rates of participation and access to high-
level positions, there are still strong differences between men and
women. For example, women report that they tend to be excluded from
informal sources of communication.
Despite the ameliorating factors discussed above, women
experience conflict between work and familial roles. An indirect
indicator is that a higher proportion of women scientists than men are
single and without children. A significant number of women,
especially those who rise to high-level positions, are apparently
following the ‘male’ model of science. Behind the façade of higher rates
of participation and promotion in some sectors of the Turkish
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205

academic system, female scientists in Turkey face many of the same
informal and subtle barriers found elsewhere.
Brazil: The significance of traditional gender roles
Despite differences in level of development, academic tradition, or
world region, women face similar disabilities in pursuing scientific
careers. A recent examination of the situation of female scientists in
Brazil exemplies this conclusion (Tabak, 1993). From 1970, data were
collected at five-year intervals on female participation in the hard
sciences at the Federal University of Rio de Janiero. In addition, three
focus-group interviews were conducted with women scientists. The
number of senior female faculty members in the hard sciences at the
university is negligible.
In Brazil, as elsewhere, women encounter a workplace with a rigid
structure that does not take into account their need for flexibility so
that they can combine career and family. Similarly, an authoritarian
‘male’ style of laboratory leadership, which discourages cooperation, is
commonplace. In addition, women were often excluded from career
opportunities, such as invitations to participate in conferences. Some
conference organizers simply assume that they would not want to
come since they had small children at home.
These unequal conditions in the workplace are an overlay on
unequal gender roles in the larger society and a ‘machismo’ ideology
that works against women in science by condoning sexual harassment
and legitimating their lack of promotion to higher positions in the
scientific community. There are also tensions created in a patriarchal
society by women’s occupational success. If their husbands are not as
successful as they are it creates a difficulty and tends to lead to
separation. In one instance a woman completing her Ph.D. dissertation
did not appear at a party in her honor, as her husband had left that
evening. A supportive husband sharing in the tasks and
responsibilities of the household was important to Brazilian female
scientists’ ability to carry on research but was not always available.
Male bias toward women in science is exacerbated by women who
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follow the ‘male’ model themselves and act negatively toward female
colleagues who do not follow this model. The single female member of
the Brazilian Academy of Sciences does not believe that women face
any special difficulties. On the positive side, the Brazilian National
Research Council has taken an interest in gender issues and monitors
women’s enrollment, graduation rates, participation in professional
careers and access to positions at universities and research institutes.
Mexico: The effects of gender socialization
In Mexico, women’s participation in science increased to the level of
24.3% by 1990 propelled by the growth of female students in higher
education (Blazquez, 1991). From 1969 to 1985, as higher education
enrollment expanded more than fourfold, the rate of growth for women
was almost three times that of men, with women constituting 44% of
the undergraduate population in 1990. Although the data are not
broken down by disciplines, a good indicator of the growing
participation of women in graduate education is the increase from 23%
to 33%, from 1971 to 1989, of scholarships awarded to women by
CONACyT, the national research funding agency. Of course, these
figures also show a gap between the increase in the proportion of
women at the undergraduate level and the lower but still significant
number at the graduate level. A gender analysis of two of the country’s
leading scientific institutions showed that women represented 26% of
the researchers in the schools and centers of the National Polytechnic
Institute and 30% of the scientists at the Autonomous National
University of Mexico (UNAM). However, women represent only 2% of
Mexico’s scientific managers and policy makers.
In several ways the experience of women in science in Mexico is
similar to Turkey. Most female scientists grew up in well-to-do, highly
educated families. As children they received two cultural messages:
(1) a traditional gender expection to marry and have children
complemented by (2) strong encouragement to become highly
educated themselves. Parental advice to advance the knowledge of
their future children placed the education message in a traditional
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207

gender context. However, by the time these future female scientists
arrived at the university, the message to educate oneself had taken on a
life of its own. Women expanded upon the injunction to become
cultured by developing the goal of contributing to the advancement of
knowledge themselves. In doing so, these women did not neglect
traditional gender roles, they merely tried to make them compatible
with their new career goals. This process was aided by the
circumstance that many female scientists married men who were
researchers themselves. Also, as in Brazil, the extended family was
often available to assist with child care (Blazquez, 1996).
Women very seldom are found in high level scientific posts in
Mexico. Even when women attain such positions, a man is still usually
in charge and handles external relations while the woman manages the
internal aspects of the organization. One reason offered for the lack of
women in high positions is that they are typically not interested in
engaging in the politicking required to achieve senior status. Many
women, no doubt, eschewed this informal aspect of scientific
advancement because of the constraints on their time imposed by
family obligations. However, another factor, the particular nature of
women’s scientific formation, an indirect effect of discrimination, can
also be inferred to play a role in their concentration on scientific
research itself rather than its ancillary political and organizational
aspects. To be taken seriously as a potential scientist, women had to
demonstrate a greater knowledge and research ability than their male
counterparts (Blazquez, 1996). To do so meant an extreme
concentration on securing their knowledge base, with a concomitant
effect on their style of research. Women typically develop their
research findings more fully than men before publishing, a
phenomenon that has also been noted in the U.S.
Portugal: The loss of males
Under certain conditions of great exigency, women’s rapid entry and
advancement in the scientific system has proved possible, at least to
some point. In Portugal, colonial wars in the 1960s and early 1970s
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removed large numbers of men from the university system
temporarily, opening the way for women’s participation even in
disciplines heretofore largely male-dominated. By the 1980s, this
enlarged pool of female graduates in the sciences had been translated
into a high rate of Ph.D. production, with women the majority of new
Ph.D. recipients in such fields as chemistry (77.8%), mathematics
(54.5%), physics 58.8% and biology (71.4%) (Ruivo, 1987: 387).
Nevertheless, women had not yet gained entry into the higher levels of
the research or science policy-making systems.
One hypothesis for this difference between increase in participation
at the lower levels and continued exclusion at the higher levels was
women’s lack of social power in Portugal. On the other hand, in
industrialized countries with lower rates of Ph.D. production and
presence in the mid-ranks of researchers, some women have attained
high science policy positions, perhaps owing to the general increase of
women’s social power in these countries (Ruivo, 1987). Another
hypothesis to explain the increase in women’s participation in science
in semi-industrialized countries is that science is still viewed as a
cultural endeavor, with little relevance to the economic and political
centers of power. In societies where men retain virtually total control
over the levers of power, women’s participation in areas of society that
are considered marginal locally, if not internationally, may be
unexpectedly high. This produces such anomalies as higher rates of
participation of women in some scientific occupations in southern
than northern Europe. Nevertheless, women in southern Europe
experience some of the same disabilities female scientists encounter
elsewhere, along with an additional cultural overlay of resistance to
their full participation at the higher levels of science.
Greece: Traditional gender roles
The condition of women in science in Greece is influenced by two
factors: (1) the traditional weak position of women in Greek society;
and (2) newly emerging government initiatives for expansion of
research capacities to further economic development. Although three
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out of five persons entering an expanded university system in the late
1980s were female, this has not yet translated into changes in the
composition of research groups or participation in higher degree
studies. Most women continue in traditional female fields such as
languages. Although there has been some increase in women entering
medicine and dentistry, these are not research-intensive fields in
Greece. One hopeful sign for the future is the increased number of
women pursuing degrees in mathematics, an important precondition
for access to technical careers.
Greece appears to be in an earlier stage of the transition noted in
Portugal. In the Portuguese case, a significant increase in female
university enrollment occurred earlier in the 1960s and spread more
rapidly to the sciences due to the high proportion of men called into the
military. In Greece, as elsewhere, the paucity of women in high science
policy positions, and the lack of programs to encourage women to
pursue research careers in science and technology, retard change.
Neverthless, an underlying condition driving change is present: the
need to develop human resources to make the transition to a higher-
tech economy. Sooner or later, the realization that half the potential
talent is not being fully utilized will help drive change and improve the
condition of women in science and engineering in Greece, as it has in
other industrializing countries.
There are also particular characteristics of the Greek higher
education system that work against women’s increased participation
in academic science careers. For example, geographical mobility, a
factor long noted as a prerequisite for success in traditional ‘male’-
oriented science systems, in the Greek context means not just
relocation to another university or region as in the U.S. but typically to
another country for advanced education. This higher geographical
barrier exists because Greek universities have not yet organized formal
graduate programs, with course work and so forth. Since national
degrees are not yet taken seriously, acquisition of a foreign doctorate is
virtually a prerequisite for appointment to an academic position in the
sciences. This is yet another instance of a seemingly meritocratic
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practice working against women in science. Family pressure for young
women to stay close to home is an overlay on other pressures that
reduce geographical mobility. The highly politicized nature of the
Greek academic and science system also works to exclude women,
who are largely left out of political decision making (Cacoullos, 1991).
GENDER DYNAMICS IN HIGHLY INDUSTRIALIZED
COUNTRIES
:
THE
E
UROPEAN EXPERIENCE
Despite variations in culture and politico-economic systems across
Europe, female participation in the labor market and in higher
education has risen considerably, yet the common contradiction of
women in science and other high-status professions persists. Science
follows the general rule that ‘the higher one goes up the ladder of the
occupational status hierarchy, the fewer the women’ (Stolte-
Heiskanen, 1991: 3). Moreover, despite the existence of extensive
social support systems in many European countries, female scientists
still face the inflexible constraints of the scientific research system,
including the coincidence of child-bearing and child-raising years with
the expected period of high research productivity.
There is a self-defeating dynamic at work at the intersection of
gender and human resource policy in science and technology. All
European countries give high priority to the production of new
knowledge and the education of knowledge producers, yet they do not
realize the full value from their investment. Although these human
resource policies are not directly focused on gender, since women
constitute at least 50% of the potential target of the policy initiatives
there is inevitably an impact. The expansion of higher education
during the past forty years has opened up new opportunities for women
and men. Although women are increasingly being educated in
formerly male-dominated fields in the sciences and engineering,
improvements in access to educational qualifications have not opened
up career opportunities to the same degree (Stolte-Heiskanen, 1994)
There is a lag between the attainment of equality in access to
education, and its translation into jobs and especially into higher-level
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scientific positions. A comparative study of research groups in six
European countries found that the small proportion of female unit
heads made comparison of male and female leadership impossible to
analyze quantitatively. The fewest women were found at the highest
level and the greatest number at the lower levels of the group where
‘the sex distribution is more even, or even reversed’ (Stolte-Heiskanen,
1983: 65). In parallel with U.S. findings (Rossiter, 1978), improvement
in women’s participation in scientific research groups was greatest in
faster-growing areas such as biology and chemistry and least in slower-
growing fields such as physics and mathematics. One notable national
difference, the tenfold greater number of women in mathematical and
engineering research groups in Hungary than in Austria, both former
members of the same political unit in the not too distant past,
illustrates the historical variability of women in science and its
amenability to policy influence (Stolte-Heiskanen, 1983: 66).
Austria
Research on women in science in Europe confirms that a ‘pipeline’
policy of insuring access to scientific training is a necessary but not
sufficient condition to overcoming the barriers to participation of
women in science. For example, in Austria women gained access to
higher education a century ago but only in the decades following the
Second World War, when there was a push to raise the level of Austrian
science to higher international levels, did women’s participation
increase significantly as a result of general policies to expand the
proportion of the population participating in higher education.
However, in academic research settings women predominate at the
lower levels as assistants but at the upper levels represent only a very
small proportion (1.5%) of the directors of research units in the natural
sciences (Gaudart, 1991: 18).
From the 1960s, as the result of pressure from the Austrian women’s
movement, the issue of women in higher education and as a topic of
research and teaching came to the fore and became linked to a related
debate on the role of research in national development. A new Ministry
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of Science and Research was established in 1970, headed by a woman,
Hertha Finberg. Having a woman in a leadership policy position helped
insure attention to the promotion of women at the working level of the
research system. The national organization of university heads, the
Rectors Conference, also directed by a woman, established a working
group to remove barriers to women pursuing careers in academic
science at the highest levels. Although most professorships in the
sciences and most university managerial positions are still held by
men, the hopeful trend is the transformation of the ‘anti-feminine
climate in, and masculine dominance of, academic circles’ (Firnberg,
1987, quoted in Gaudart, 1991).
Finland: A ‘motherhood myth’
Another small European country, Finland, also experienced an upsurge
in the percentage of women enrolled in higher education in the mid-
1980s, reaching 52% of the student population. Yet the proportion of
women in teaching positions lagged very far behind. Females held 3%
of the associate professorships in engineering in 1986 and 2% of those
in the natural sciences. Women represented 4% of professors of natural
science while the percentage in engineering was too low to register.
Women were fairly well represented in lower-level teaching positions:
24% of the teaching assistants in the natural sciences were female, as
were 15% of the engineers. The percentage of lecturers was 16% in
engineering and 9% in the natural sciences. At each step of the career
ladder, women are older than men as a result of time devoted to their
families (Stolte-Heiskanen, 1991).
A majority of female Finnish scientists are married and more than
half have children by the time they receive the Ph.D. (Luukkonen-
Gronow, 1987). Not surprisingly, with each additional child, the time
available for professional work decreased. Women scientists reported
that, even though they had to cope with most household and child-
rearing tasks, family life provided the sustenance to make up for the
‘disadvantages and emotional stress experienced in their professional
environment’ (Luukkonen-Gronow, 1987). Beyond the general 1987
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213

Equal Rights law, there are no specific policies to improve the
condition of women in science. Although an official committee
established in 1981 to address problems in women’s research careers
put forward a series of recommendations for increased appointment of
females to research posts and provision of social services such as day-
care centers for children, follow-up actions were not taken (Stolte-
Heiskanen, 1991).
Some movement towards equality in household tasks has been
identified but with ambiguous effect on scientists’ family life. A seven-
country comparative study showed that Finland had the most equal
division of domestic labor. Nevertheless, research on younger Finnish
women scientists found that ‘women primarily bear the burden of
responsibility for the reproductive activities of the family’
(Luukkonen-Gronow and Stolte-Heiskanen, 1983: 273). Apparently,
the women studied were well aware of this eventuality and had
adopted the strategy of scheduling their first child during the writing of
the MA thesis, a phase presumed to be more compatible with
pregnancy, and their second child before beginning their careers. Of the
scientists interviewed, 79% of the women and 51% of the men stated
their belief that the main reason there were not more women in science
was the difficulties that reproductive and familial responsibilties
engendered for a research career. The authors suggested that these
scientists were buying into a ‘motherhood myth’. Nevertheless, their
own data showed the obstacles that women had to overcome to
maintain their scientific productivity on a par with men.
Italy: Persisting marginality
As with other European countries discussed thus far, Italy experienced
a marked increase in the participation of women in higher education
during the post-war era. Although women entered the initial career
levels of the university system in similar proportions to men, their
participation declined rapidly at the upper levels. Women also held few
leadership positions in the laboratories of the national research
system. A qualitative study of the work histories of sixty male and
ATHENA UNBOUND
214

sixty female Italian researchers, undertaken in 1988, provides some
provocative clues to understanding this divergence between
educational and employment achievement. The study first showed
that men and women scientists demonstrated similar levels of
productivity in their scientific output across different types of
publications (national, international, conference presentations etc.)
and thus ruled out differences in research achievement as an
explanation of career outcomes (Palomba, 1993).
Nevertheless, the researchers concluded that gender-related effects
were indirectly responsible for the virtual exclusion of women from
upper-level positions in Italian scientific institutions. Interviews
with female researchers revealed that they were straining, albeit
successfully, to pursue their research programs while fulfilling tradi-
tional domestic roles and meeting family obligations. Male researchers,
on the other hand, were freed up by these same traditional family
environments to successfully pursue their research while also having
the time to engage in the ‘laboratory politics’ necessary for ascension
into managerial positions. Like their Mexican counterparts, Italian
female scientists concentrated their work efforts on their science,
maintaining their research productivity at a high level, while devoting
their political and managerial talents to balancing the demands of
research and family. The persistence of traditional sex roles contributed
to a gendered division of labor in the scientific community, largely
excluding women from managerial and policy roles.
The Netherlands: A continuing dilemma
Why are there so few women in upper-level scientific and technical
positions in the Netherlands? A study of the female professoriat in
Dutch universities found that many of the women who have achieved
high academic positions in the sciences and engineering are childless.
‘Ironically . . . they are implausible role models for the potential
combination of career and family. Indeed, the majority were of the
opinion that a research position and a family is a difficult to impossible
combination’ (Hicks, 1991). The incompatibility of the ‘male’ model of
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215

science, with its long hours, and the policy goal of opening up scientific
research careers to larger numbers of women comes up against the
strictures of the traditional sexual division of labor. Combining two
careers with stringent demands – scientific research and motherhood –
is a difficult task. Only a few women may be able or willing to pursue
both roles simultaneously, at least as they are structured at present.
Men’s long hours in the laboratory are made possible by female
responsibility for the ‘private sphere’. Women’s research time is
truncated unless they give up that private sphere. Since most women
are unwilling to do this, the prospect of overcoming their small
numbers at the top is highly dependent upon ‘ . . . erosion of the norm
that women have sole responsibility for family and household
maintenance’ (Hicks, 1991). The restructuring of the scientific work
role, making the emerging ‘female’ model (limiting time at the
workplace) the norm would also appear to be a prerequisite for change.
Other partial alternatives include Alice Rossi’s idea for a ‘technical
fix’, professional household care firms that remove some of the
burdens of home maintenance from both men and women. Expanded
child-care facilities would also reduce the ‘ . . . alienating choice
between home and profession’ (Hicks, 1991: 186). Perhaps ironically, it
may be easier for an upper middle-class female scientist to pursue a
demanding scientific career in a Third World country where a personal
support structure of extended family and servants is assumed. Indeed,
the most difficult career point for many female scientists from
developing countries is the years they spend in a developed country,
bereft of such assistance.
Israel: A few women at the pinnacle
Despite obstacles in their path, a small number of women do attain the
highest level of formal position in academia: the full professorship. In
Israel, where traditional expectations of female responsibility for child
care are strong, a recent study found no diminution of scientific
productivity, according to such measures as number of papers
published, due to combining a demanding career with family roles
ATHENA UNBOUND
216

(Toren, 1991). Approximately two-thirds of the Israeli female full
professors were natural scientists. Among the explanations for the
lack of negative impact of heavy child-raising responsibilities is, of
course, the fact that the smaller number of female full professors may
have higher abilities than their larger number of male counterparts.
Child-raising was noted to decrease participation in international
meetings and the ability to take advantage of fellowship and research
opportunities abroad, both activities especially important to advancing
a scientific career in a small peripheral country. The unexpected high
productivity of these female full professors demonstrates the invalidity
of myths that propound an inherent contradiction between demanding
scientific work and marriage and family.
Denmark: The difficulties of balancing
Although many women scientists develop creative strategies to
overcome the handicap of burdens placed upon them by their having
primary responsibility for raising children, this should not be taken to
mean that they do not experience career and personal difficulties along
the way. A recent study of tenured female scientists in Denmark
illustrates the impact of motherhood on a successful scientific
career. A first-order effect, similar to the one identified by Cole
and Zuckerman among female scientists in the U.S. (1987), is that
‘... they sleep less and skip many leisure activities’ (Nielsen and
Elkjaer, 1991). A second-order effect is the loss of research oppor-
tunities because their work schedules are ‘reduced to normal working
hours’. In contrast to the Israeli cultural pattern of having children
early, some female scientists in Denmark report that they delayed
having their first child and ascribed part of their career success to their
ability to arrange child care. In Denmark as in Israel the traditional
ideology of the family is strong, with women having primary responsi-
bility for maintenance of the emotional relations of marriage as well as
more mundane household tasks. These Danish women scientists, who
aspired to successful careers and family life in tandem, had to juggle the
demands of both research and motherhood in contrast to their male
INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS
217

counterparts whom, they felt ‘ . . . can better devote themselves to
research, because they are not mainly responsible for the family’.
WOMEN IN SCIENCE IN SOCIALIST COUNTRIES
What difference does a socialist system make to the position of women
in science? As in Austria and Finland, the former German Democratic
Republic experienced a similar sharp increase in females educated in
science and engineering after the Second World War. However, the
increased flow of women through the ‘pipeline’ did not readily
translate over time into anywhere near similar proportions of women
occupying leading positions in scientific institutions. Even when their
numbers grew close to parity (40%), this was not reflected in
attainment of significant numbers of higher-level positions. Greater
numbers, by themselves, did not bring about change. Nor did the
availability of social support such as child-care facilities and generous
family leave policies. Instead, the persisting patriarchal culture of the
scientific workplace, with inappropriate patterns of communication
and work organization for women, was identified as the problem that
impeded career advancement (Radtke, 1991).
Similarly, in Bulgaria, where access to a scientific career improved
greatly during the post-war era, coincident with the period since the
Socialist Revolution, nevertheless there remained the overall delay in
the promotion of women within the scientific system. Also, a gender
division of intellectual life persisted, including a continuance of a
traditional association of women with teaching. Female scientists
report that they face a heavy load of family duties, with some
assistance from their mothers for child care. Again this household
burden makes it difficult for women to combine scientific
achievement with administrative advance. Two out of three roles
appear to be possible in tandem: for female scientists it is typically
research and family; for males, research and politicking. Even when
women achieved some measure of advance into higher-level policy
positions within the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences it was typically
accomplished through election to the position of scientific secretary, a
ATHENA UNBOUND
218

role in accordance with the traditional domestic supporting role of
women (Ananieva, 1991).
In the former Soviet Union the proportion of female scientists
reached 40% during the 1970s and 1980s (Koval, 1991). Indeed women
represent 58% of the engineers and 67% of medical doctors.
Nevertheless, ‘ . . . there is a hierarchical difference in the division of
labor between the sexes.’ As found elsewhere, men monopolize the
decision-making positions while women predominate among the
second level as assistants. Again family duties and child-rearing are an
overlay on career responsibilities. Women are also viewed by men as
less able to do science with the consequence that their lack of career
advancement becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Participation of women in scientific research groups was found to be
highest in socialist Hungary and Poland where the integration of
women into research positions, if not promotion to leadership roles,
was a general policy tenet. Women attained high rates of participation
in many science and engineering fields in Eastern Bloc countries during
the socialist era but are losing their positions at higher rates than men
during the post-socialist era. However, even during the socialist period
when official ideology prohibited direct discrimination, female
scientists typically filled the middle ranks of support researchers
working under the direction of a male laboratory chief.
Despite significant variation in the organization of scientific
institutions, differing socio-economic systems appeared to have little
effect on the condition of women in science. In both capitalist and
socialist countries, women were deterred from promotion to the
managerial and policy levels of science and found that their family life
provided satisfaction that at least partially made up for problems in
work life. There was a common deficit of female scientists in the
higher levels of research organizations. The exception to this rule in
both systems was associated with the position of science in society.
Even when, as in the former Yugoslavia, women achieved significant
positions in scientific research institutions, this advance was
associated with a decline in the position of science in society. ‘As it
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219

became less and less prestigious, science opened up to women’
(Blagojevic, 1991: 75).
MOVEMENT TOWARD CHANGE
The situation of women in science in Spain exemplifies the principle
that women make significant advances in a rapidly expanding system.
In the later 1980s, a period of substantial growth in R&D investment,
the number of women researchers increased by 180% in comparison to
an increase of 88% for male researchers. Female researchers were, of
course, starting from a much smaller base but, when opportunites
expanded, it is interesting to note that women actively took advantage
of them to pursue careers in research science. As in other countries, the
proportion of women in research training programs is significantly
higher than the proportion in research positions. Thus, it will be
possible to expand upon the successes of the late 1980s when women’s
share of research positions grew fom 22% to 26%. Whether such
expansion will actually take place, without a continued increase in
research funds is debatable.
The entry of women into the engineering professions in Spain has
not taken place without some ironic contradictions. A tightening of
admissions procedures led to an increase in the proportion of women in
telecommunications engineering. Although their numbers were still
low, some improvement was generated by policies that limited places
and favored secondary school students with higher grades. Since the
relatively small number of women tended to get better grades than
men in science subjects, ‘...whatever the original intentions behind the
admission policy, the priority given to overall academic criteria has in
fact led to a feminisation of the student body enrolled in university
technical programmes’ (Alemany, 1991: 219). Despite academic
harassment by men, women do significantly better than men in
examinations and show a ‘greater commitment to [their] studies’ (Ibid.
224) in electronic engineering, in part, they are impelled to achieve in
order to counter the effects of discrimination.
The rapid increase in educational attainment of women in science in
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220

southern Europe has given rise to expectations that there will be a
quick throughput into the staffing of the academic system. However,
the experience in northern Europe where numbers of trained women
have been available for a longer period of time suggests that this will
not necessarily be the case, at least not without some intervention to
open the system up to fuller participation by women. The gap between
men and women in science in both Germany and England expands at
the point of entry into the first real academic position after post-
doctoral training (Osborn, 1993; Moxham and Rogers, 1993).
THE U
.
K
.
EXPERIENCE
In the United Kingdom, this bifurcation point leads to the formation of
a dual track system of independent and dependent tracks in academia.
A higher proportion of men enter the independent track where they
attract research funds, grow research groups, and pursue their own
research interests. A dependent track, existing in parallel and
symbiotic association, has a higher proportion of women. Members of
this lower-status track are limited to short-term posts where they
become dependent on the research funds of others as subordinate
members of their research teams (Moxham and Rogers, 1993).
Women are marginalized by the persistence of these ‘ . . . gender-
related hierarchical structures’ that inhibit them from pursuing
independent scientific careers. Reistance to women increases with the
height of the academic ladder. More than twice as many men as women
become senior lecturers and, as late as 1991, there were no female full
professors of chemistry (Mason, 1991). The intensity of feeling against
admitting women into the inner circles of science can be seen in the
decades-long struggle to open the Chemical Society to women (Mason,
1991). This battle was finally won in 1920, after women unmistakably
demonstrated their competence during the First World War by filling
positions formerly held by men.
Nevertheless, covert resistance to women in science persists to this
day and is expressed in the drastically lower levels of women in high
academic and science policy positions. For example, only 22 of the
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almost 500 professors of biology in the U.K. are female. The issue of
paucity of women in senior positions, even in fields such as biology in
which women had achieved significant representation, was taken up
in The Rising Tide (Lane et al., 1994), a report identifying actions to
allow women to realize their potential in science and technology in
Britain. Following upon an earlier science policy report, Realising Our
Potential, recommending the increased utilization of science and
technology to enhance industrial competitiveness, The Rising Tide
also linked its recommendations to an economic theme.
Not only did the loss of female technical talent impede ‘national
wealth creation’ but continuing gender bias was also counter to ideals
of equity. The authors proposed a dual strategy of a push from below
and a pull from above, modeled upon successful initiatives elsewhere,
as the means to accomplish change. Thus, the Committee suggested
extending to England the Scottish format of secondary education that,
on the one hand, did not require early specialization, and on the other,
placed science courses in a broader context. Both policies had been
found effective in encouraging a larger number of young women to take
the preparatory educational steps toward scientific and technical
careers. The Rising Tide also proposed that government set targets of
25%, introducing external pressure on academic and governmental
institutions to promote women and include them in policy-making
bodies in signifcant numbers.
Many policies that would improve the condition of women in
science are also applicable to other professions and, indeed, all working
women and men. Expanding U.K. child-care facilities and teleworking
opportunities were among the proposals with such broader
implications. Proposals of even a prestigious government sponsored
commission are likely to remain just that, unimplemented
recommendations on paper, without a build-up of political pressure
and highly publicized protests from those most affected and their
supporters. One recent example is the ‘Oxford Revolt’ in which
business as usual in the distribution of academic positions was rejected
by female academics who protested in favor of specific measures to
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increase women’s participation in the professoriat of Oxford
University.
Follow-up to the Rising Tide report suggests that the issues of
women in science will not go away without steps taken for their
satisfactory resolution. A 1995 Forum on Gender Policy for British
Science, sponsored by the Science Policy Support Group in London,
signaled that the issue of women in science has been raised from the
isolated concern of a few pioneers to a general matter of science policy.
Nevertheless, government attention has its limits. The representative
of the Conservative government at the conference expressed interest
only in policy measures that could be undertaken at no financial cost.
However, the broader significance of the report and associated events is
that women scientists are organizing themselves to represent their
interests. One of the leaders of the Committee on Women in Science,
Engineering and Technology (SET) and chair of its working group,
Cambridge Zoologist Dr Nancy Lane, prefaced a call for new policy
ideas with a report on her meeting with the then British Prime
Minister, John Major.
The ability of female scientists to access the highest level of political
leadership is an indicator that the issues of women in science are
moving to center stage in U.K. science policy making. The Forum
participants came up with a range of ideas to build upon the
recommendations of The Rising Tide. Valerie Ellis called for the
systematic introduction of networking and mentoring in the
workplace to assist women scientists to overcome the constraints that
tend to limit them to lower positions. A call was made to take gender
differences into account in the teaching of science in the schools by
giving science more social context; girls want to understand the social
contribution while boys tend to be satisfied with abstractions. The
importance of organizational leadership in improving the lot of women
in scientific institutions was noted by Jan Harding who presented an
example of success due to a department head’s commitment to change.
The fate of these and other ideas to improve conditions for women in
science in the U.K. is still in doubt. Nevertheless, the issues have
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received a recent spate of legitimation from policy makers such as
William Waldegrave, the cabinet minister responsible for science and
technology. Based upon such statements as Waldegrave’s that ‘It is
obvious that we are not using the resources of half of our people
properly’, they are now part of the accepted repertoire of science policy
issues (Dickson, 1993). Gender and science policy has also become the
topic of academic seminars and public policy meetings well beyond
traditional feminist circles. Indeed, there is now a recognized
intersection between the two discourses. This is a significant advance
over the polite disinterest expressed just a few years ago by science
policy groups who, until recently, exemplified Nancy Lanes’
statement that ‘One problem is that men may not entirely understand
the barriers that women scientists face.’ It can no longer be said that
female scientists have not publicly brought the issues of gender and
science to the attention of the U.K. scientific community and its
sponsors in industry and government.
A series of studies and reports produced by international,
multinational and non-governmental organizations, such as the
United Nations, the European Union and the Latin American and
Caribbean NGO Forum, has also heightened the international
visibility of the inequalities among men and women in science. In
addition, individual scholars, both natural and social scientists, in
various countries through their scholarship and advocacy have
provided the data and analytical frameworks for these broader efforts.
Organizations of women scientists and technologists such as the Third
World Organization of Women In Science, The Association of Women
in Science in the U.S. and Women In Science and Engineering (WISE) in
the U.K. strengthen the social ties of their members and represent their
interests. It is increasingly recognized that the issues of inequality of
women in science and technology transcend gender and equity
interests, since all the human resources in a society must be used to the
full to achieve economic and social development.
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16 Athena Unbound: Policy for
women in science
‘For women there are undoubtedly great difficulties in the path, but so
much the more to overcome,’ exulted Maria Mitchell (1818–1889), the
first female professor of astronomy in the U.S., at the then newly
founded Vassar College. More than a century later, on the 175th
anniversary of her birth, women’s scientific aspirations are still
restricted by ‘tradition and authority’ (Enna, 1993). Few female
scientists are as happy as the nineteenth century astronomer Mitchell
to have put up a brave front in the face of a host of gender-related
problems. Despite significant improvement, especially in the numbers
of women who wish to enter scientific careers, many of the
organizational structures of science, and some scientists, continue to
resist women’s full participation. Additional steps are necessary,
beyond encouraging women to take up science, to insure that science is
open to them (Lovitts, 1996).
In this final chapter, we discuss the policy implications of our
findings in terms of motivators and inhibitors that shape the
experiences of women and conditions of inequality in academic
science. First, the arguments behind each thesis are described and its
accomplishments and shortfalls reviewed. Second, we argue for new
policy recommendations related to department reform, the factor that
is most relevant to the organizational issues explored in the preceding
chapters and that we have identified as a means by which programs for
change can be implemented.
Five strategies have been suggested during the past thirty years to
promote improvement of the condition of women in academic science.
These include: calls for equity, expectation of personnel shortage,

national economic competitiveness, generational transition and
departmental reform. Equity, of course, is based on the moral grounds
that women were excluded in the past and as a matter of right they
should be included in the future. Shortage, or expectation of too few
recruits to science and engineering, engenders initiatives to broaden
the recruitment of scientists. This typically leads to consideration of
drawing more women and minorities into the scientific enterprise.
Economic competitiveness or the realization that science is
increasingly closely connected to developing future high technologies
is the mirror image of the ‘shortage’ theme.
Failure to make full use of the talent in the national population
creates a potential economic deficit, especially in comparison to other
countries that make fuller use of their available talent pool.
Generational change is based upon the expectation that a new
generation of male scientists, feeling some of the same pressures to
take responsibility for home and family life, will support change to
realign science with changes in family structure. Departmental reform
is the injunction to ‘solve one’s own problems’ before being forced to do
so by external authorities. Leadership by the department’s power
structure is essential to this approach.
A MORAL AND LEGAL IMPERATIVE
Laws prohibiting discrimination are on the books of most
industrialized nations, and although they apply to academia, they are
seldom vigorously enforced (Carson and Chubin, 1992). From the
1970s, efforts to increase the number of women in U.S. academic
science departments have largely resided in affirmative action
programs, requiring full consideration of female and minority
candidates. However, in the 1980s lack of vigorous enforcement
reduced the spirit of the law into a bureaucratic requirement that
became a routine part of the paperwork of the academic hiring process,
often with little or no effect on recruitment and no impact upon
retention.
Nor did this strategy, focused on getting entrants into the system,
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address the hidden inequities of academic departments. Many
academic scientists and engineers are aware that the Defense
Department’s strong interest in military contractors hiring women
made a significant difference. Indeed, a dean of engineering proudly
pointed this out as an instance of women’s advancement in
engineering. But when asked if the same measure could be applied to
the academic environment with similar results, he admitted the ‘logic’
of the suggestion but expressed a lack of interest in the experiment.
Affirmative action creates a formal procedure that helps insure that a
broader range of candidates are considered for a position but often
without the expected result of a significant number of positions filled
by women and minorities. Despite the presumption that minorities
and women are insured positions through this process, a selection
committee always has the option of certifying that its choice was best
qualified. Since women and minorities often follow careers that are
lightly off the beaten track, it is easy to find fault with their career
choices. For example, a senior male respondent questioned the hiring
of a female physicist by a prestigious research institute on the grounds
that she had deviated from the normal academic career path by
becoming an astronaut.
Most diversions from the track are much less spectacular but even
accepting a less than optimal post-doctoral fellowship because it is
close to home can be the basis for exclusion from a short list. Thus, the
effects of affirmative action procedures in promoting the interests of
minority and female candidates are debatable. A respondent said, ‘I
have never seen affirmative action in the sciences, never seen it
achieve equal employment.’ He questioned whether implementation
of affirmative action policies at his university was much more than a
bureaucratic façade in which invitations were issued for job interviews
to minority and women candidates with little real intention of
recruiting them.
Affirmative action is a double-edged sword that creates a double bind
for women and minorities in the sciences and engineering. It modestly
increases the numbers in the system but then is used to denigrate
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blacks and women and keep them down. As one respondent put it, the
implicit and sometimes explicit message is that ‘if we weren’t being
good guys, you wouldn’t be here.’ Those few minorities and women
who do get into the system are presumed to be of lesser worth than their
peers. The most subtle and insidious aspect of the exclusionary process
for faculty women at all levels is the virtually inevitable stigma. When
women attempt to initiate mechanisms to achieve symmetry with
their male colleagues, it is used against them. The most glaring
example is attributing a faculty appointment as a ‘quota’ hire.
An unintended consequence of efforts to empower women is that
they may provide ammunition for devaluing women as needing special
support. Thus, providing a mechanism for affiliation, a program can
instead encourage attrition. Support of programs by senior faculty
members deters this: a program that is legitimated by an authority
figure escapes the presumption of deviant behavior that is often the
fate of women in graduate departments who suffer reprisals for
engaging in even the most modest collective activities. An initiative
that is protected by an individual or group with the power to advocate
or at least accept change can also be the first step to creating a
supportive ethos for students in a department. Such experiences have
led to a re-valuation of affirmative action among many of those it was
designed to assist.
Affirmative action has at times been transformed from a public
intervention on behalf of women and minorities into a private
instrument used against them by some of the very people whose
discriminatory practices it was designed to thwart. This experience
has, not surprisingly, driven some minorities and women to the
conclusion that the existence of affirmative action procedures does
them more harm than good. They themselves become opponents of
such policies, and the unlikely allies of the very persons who have
turned affirmative action into a discriminatory weapon against them.
It is important to note that affirmative action is currently in a
retrenchment trend that may permanantly wither the system. A good
example is the present ruling of the regents of the University of
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California to abolish affirmative action in recruitment and hiring. The
system’s visibility and prestige will surely stimulate mimicking by
other universities which now have cause to view the system as
delegitimated or politicians who will seize the opportunity to
eliminate affirmative action for their political gains rather than the
gain of the wider system. Furthermore, affirmative action has a
systematic problem: it does nothing to affect the ‘feeder pool’ of
qualified applicants. Because it is designed to equalize opportunity for
individuals with the right credentials, it suffers from an inability to
insure that persons from minority groups will get credentials in the
first place. This is a central problem because it gives rise to the
argument that affirmative action promotes the hiring of unqualified
minorities, which in turn, defines them as ‘quota hires’ and intensifies
feelings of animosity by the majorities.
At best, affirmative action is a necessary but not sufficient condition
for inclusion of minorities and women in the sciences. It has too often
become a method of protecting an academic department from protests
against its lack of diversity. It allows the appearance of a neutral
double-entry bookkeeping system in recruitment efforts: an overt
procedure with white males and women and minorities interviewed,
covering a hidden decision-making process in which white males are
typically offered positions. A department head at a major university
reported that his wife, who was head of the County Equal Opportunity
Employment Commission, did not like to investigate academia
because its employment practices were arcane and difficult to fathom.
Certainly, a reinvigorated affirmative action effort and enforcement of
existing federal laws could make an important difference to the
advancement of women in science (Chubin and Robinson, 1992).
THE EFFECTS OF SHORTAGE
Recruiting from underrepresented groups, such as women and
minorities, is always suggested as a potential solution whenever a
shortage of scientific and engineering personnel appears. The First and
Second World Wars opened up opportunities for women that largely
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closed down with the conclusion of hostilities. A human resources
deficit became a national policy issue in the U.S. during the Cold War
when availability of sufficient technical personnel was viewed as
essential to national security (Pearson and Fechter, 1992). The issue
arose most recently in the US during the 1980s.
In the mid-1980s, Erich Bloch, then director of the National Science
Foundation, called upon social science knowledge to help resolve the
dilemma of too few women in science. The then director of NSF’s
Sociology Program, Dr Phyllis Moen, was asked to analyze existing
research on women and science for clues (Moen, 1986). In addition,
NSF commissioned new studies (including some on which this book is
based) to fill gaps in knowledge through its research funding programs.
NSF also established a number of programs to improve scientific
education for girls and to encourage female scientists by making
fellowships and visiting professorships available.
In the short term, an open immigration policy was put in place as a
temporarary solution to expected technical personnel shortages. This
policy was retained during the aftermath of the Cold War in part
through bureaucratic inertia but also at the insistence of ‘high-tech’
employers seeking open access to international labor markets.
Combined with a surplus of scientists and engineers in some fields
produced by the decline in military and military-related research and
development spending during the post-Cold War era, the policy
impetus to address the issue of unequal gender participation in science
has largely dissipated. Projected shortages of scientists and engineers
turned into an oversupply, exacerbated by some overly pessimistic
estimates that, coupled with highly optimistic retirement
expectations, led some university presidents to predict a Ph.D.
shortfall that has yet to occur.
One shortcoming of policies for immigration and recruitment is that
they are applied on a temporary basis: they are put into place only after
a shortage problem has been identified. This lag disconnects the
benefits of the policies (ample supply) from the periods in which they
are needed most. Also, this policy ignores the dictum that ‘supply
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creates its own demand.’ As such, in countries such as India, Israel, and
China, the investment in scientific training programs has stimulated
growth in scientific as well as technical and entrepreneurial fields that
spring up when the demand within science wanes.
Deficits in women’s participation in science attract heightened
attention from policy makers during periods of expected personnel
shortages, such as the mid-1980s (Moen, 1988). A cyclical pattern can
be identified, with alternating themes of equity and ‘national needs’
utilized to justify efforts to improve the condition of women in science
(Office of Public Service and Science, 1994). When the moral
injunction of equity is enforced by self-interest, the way is open to
change, especially for groups that are currently underrepresented
(Campbell, Denes and Morrison, 2000).
ECONOMIC COMPETITIVENESS
The third thesis to advance the cause of women in science is one of
economic competitiveness. Highly trained human resources are the
key to future economic development. A society that neglects the
native talent in any sector of its population does so to its detriment. In
the emerging information economy, universities and other
knowledge-producing and disseminating institutions are the ultimate
source of wealth, just as mineral deposits and ports were in the past.
So much of the prospect for future economic advance now rests on
knowledge that any nation that does not utilize all its talent runs the
risk of falling behind other nations that do.
Until the present the U.S. has been the greatest repository of talent in
biotechnology and software, providing the basis for leadership in those
industries. As other countries gear up their universities to produce
more Ph.D.s locally, the need to study abroad will become less
pressing. Science, of course, will remain international, but in the
future, U.S. Ph.D. graduates will be just as likely to be found in
attractive post-doctoral positions in countries such as Sweden as will
their Swedish counterparts in the U.S. Indeed, the current abundance
of research funds in Sweden, which is upgrading its ability to translate
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research into economic development, is proving a strong attractor to
junior researchers elsewhere to relocate. Swedish professors are also
importing intellectual guest workers, including underemployed
American post-doctoral fellows, in order to carry out their expanded
research programs.
Certainly, it is easier and perhaps cheaper for technology
entrepreneurs to recruit from abroad, rather than address the long-term
causes of this shortfall in technical human resources at home. Beyond
the sometimes narrow perspective of individual firms and universities
eager to attract the best current talent from whatever source it arises,
there is a longer-term dynamic of scientific mobility to consider. Such
flows of people and talent can reverse directions. This fact should give
pause and lead even those companies that wish to encourage
immigration to take a longer-term view. Even in the medium term,
many scientists and engineers who stayed in the U.S. after completing
their education to teach in U.S. universities or work in high-tech
companies are returning home, often encouraged by special schemes to
attract them back to head up new research units in Singapore or found
companies in Taiwan.
As the international mobility of technical labor becomes reciprocal
and more equal, any country that excludes a portion of its population
from scientific or technical careers, whether de jure or de facto, will
operate at a disadvantage. In Japan, for example, it is expected that the
approaching demographic decline will produce an opening for women
to enter scientific and technical careers, from which they have
heretofore been largely excluded. This population problem, coupled
with a national science and technology strategy that increasingly relies
on an academic science base to enhance high-tech industrial
development, creates an opportunity. Nevertheless, demography only
creates a possibility. Without the necessary social and political
impetus to translate this into schemes to recruit those formerly
excluded, and modify scientific institutions to make them more
attractive and welcoming, the status quo will persist.
Each country must focus on increasing the participation of its
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population in science and engineering in order to maintain national
competitiveness in high-tech industries. Hoffman and Novak (1998)
recently argued that ‘[If] a significant segment of our society is denied
equal access to the Internet, U.S. firms will lack the technological
skills needed to remain competitive.’ If such a conclusion is warranted
for Internet use, then surely it should be applied to the users, with
appropriate implications drawn for the training and employment of
minorities and women as scientists and engineers.
GENERATIONAL CHANGE
The thesis of ‘generational change’ is based on the assumption that a
younger generation of male scientists, facing some of the same family
pressures as women, will help reform the academic structure in ways
that benefit both women and men. Institutional reform that takes into
account the needs of female scientists also benefits men by introducing
some flexibility into career paths. The traditional structure was that an
individual scientist devoted themselves to their career completely,
without much attention to the details of life. A spouse normally would
be at home and take care of the private sphere. This allowed an
individual, virtually always male, to spend 70, 80 or 90 hours per week
in the lab. They could establish their lab, build their career and have a
firm basis for their later stability that fit with the model of the family
and the model of work structure that was then universal in society.
What may be happening at present is that the traditional model is
eroding in the U.S. The women’s movement has encouraged more
openness to dual career families, with men having to share some of the
burden of housework. At least there is a cultural movement in this
direction, even if it is not always in place in fact. The previous model
virtually precluded women who wished to have a family from
assuming professorships, given the demands of the position. It was
very difficult to combine home responsibilities and an academic
career. Recently, an awareness has grown that the traditional model
not only discriminates against women but gives rise to complaints
from younger male academics as well. They are feeling much more
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pressure and, in part, it is because their own home situations are no
longer organized according to the traditional model.
This introduces a stress into the system that did not previously exist.
This stress is related to deeper changes in family structure and in the
structure of work that has brought women into the work force in
unprecedented numbers during the past three decades. Thus, there
may be a shift from a single focus on strictly career issues, not just for
women who are trying to move into the system, but also for younger
male academics who find it intolerable to try to manage both the
traditional academic jobs and their new home responsibilities. This
may create pressures to modify the system in a way that universalizes
it a little more than in the past. There is some evidence that this shift is
beginning to happen in the U.S. To the extent that it does take place it is
not only a gender issue but also a generational cultural issue.
Nevertheless, the thesis of generational change has its limits. It
certainly exists on the level of wishes expressed by younger scientists,
both female and male, for a less pressured way of life. However, the
pressures for publications, for raising funds, are becoming even greater
as competition increases, especially at the highest-status universities.
This is not due to a decline in research funding, which has indeed
recently been increasing, especially in the biomedical sciences. But
there is increased competition for these funds, from additional
universities in other parts of the country, trying to establish themselves
as research centers. As scientific research is seen as increasingly closely
related to future economic growth, competitive pressures increase,
even though some of the most competitive people, especially among the
younger generation, would like to see these pressures reduced. Despite
their wishes, as the competition increases, they are forced to write more
grant proposals and feel pressured to spend more time at work. These
young scientists feel themselves under an even greater strain even
though they would prefer a different system (Etzkowitz, in press).
The stresses revealed in the coevolution of the institutions of family
and work may also recreate new and possibly greater pressures towards
inequality if not managed properly. University scientists are currently
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experiencing intensified budget constraints that put even more
pressure on research productivity and premiums on time. Universities
have also placed new demands on faculty time in regard to teaching
quality, widened access to students for faculty time, new electronic
teaching materials, web pages, Internet class discussion groups, and
university-wide published teaching assessments. All of these trends
intensify the risks of starting and successfully managing an academic
career, which may be more likely to ‘double bind’ Athena, rather than
unbind her.
Another factor related to the coevolution of family and work is that
professions that have increased the number of women often suffer a
decrease in status and mean pay because of an increase in the effective
labor supply. If this happens without an attendant increase in the
demand for services, it is likely to decrease the incentive to pursue a
scientific career in the first place. However, there is a counterbalancing
force that may improve the condition of women in science, the opening
up of new opportunities and positions in firms based upon academic
science.
University science is becoming more entrepreneurial as evidenced
by the number of academic scientists who are starting their own
businesses, taking equity stakes in part-time businesses, or partnering
with their university to start businesses that share university
resources (Powell et al., 1996; Murmann, 1998). Consequently, in
creating firms that span the boundary of the university into the private
sector, it is likely that models and accepted practices in the private
sector will begin to be imported into academia. This suggests that the
better gender balance (demographically speaking) and the stronger
expectations for equal treatment and pay for women in the private
sector are likely to flow over into academia. Thus, while these
coevolutionary pressures lack the intentionality and organized
features of the movements are most likely to accelerate positive
change, the growth in the private sector and the power of the
commercial market to pick winners will offer women more
opportunities to use their skills.
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ORGANIZATIONAL REFORM
A thesis of this book has been that macro-economic and social
indicators tell only part of the story of disadvantage for women.
Through triangulation of theory on professions and inequality, original
fieldwork, and statistical analysis we have found that much of the
process by which disadvantage is created and reinforced occurs within
organizations and at the level of the department. It is at this level that
recruitment, socialization, learning through networks, and access and
referral benefits are created and combined with human capital factors.
In this sense, we follow similar sociological literatures to the
conclusion that the seat of change is at the department and
organizational level, rather than in the environment or in human
capital, because it is the organization that connects human capabilities
with environmental requirements (Baron and Bielby, 1980; Baron,
1984).
RESISTANCE TO CHANGE
What are the forces for change to achieve gender equity in science and
the countervailing forces for stasis? The organization and culture of
academic science deters many women of high scientific ability from
making their contribution. In those instances where a department has
faced up to this situation and altered its behavior, women’s
participation has improved dramatically. A broader recognition of the
need to change and requisite actions are required to reconstruct male-
gendered science and engineering departments. Indeed, the experience
of In-balance Program at the Center for Particle Astrophysics,
University of California, Berkeley suggests that many of these changes
are necessary for both women and men. Male participants in the
program’s seminars and retreats expressed interest in reducing the all-
consuming pressures of scientific work-life, although they could not
see how this could take place within the strictures of the existing
system.
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MARGINAL DISADVANTAGES
The succession of impediments to the entry of women into scientific
careers that narrrows the stream to an extremely small flow at the stage
of graduate training has been conceptualized as cumulative
disadvantage. However, even given these disadvantages significant
number of women receive degrees in science at the BA and even the
Ph.D. levels. Nevertheless, fewer pursue careers in science and there
are few senior women professors (Moen, 1988). The disadvantages that
accumulate to narrow the flow into the science career pipeline are
supplemented by additional disadvantages, at the margin, that
discourage even the most highly motivated women who have taken
steps to pursue scientific and engineering careers at the doctoral level.
Removal of some or all of these barriers at the doctoral, junior and
senior faculty levels could have an effect, in the short term, in increasing
women’s participation in science and engineering. Taking such steps
could also provide role models to assist in long-term efforts to lower
barriers at the early stages of the life course cycle, thereby increasing the
flow into the science career pipeline. Thus, the importance of focusing
policy intervention at the later stages is twofold:
1. Encouraging the creation of a critical mass of women faculty
members in academic science and engineering departments
that, in and of itself, has an effect in changing academic
cultures and, by implication, lowering barriers for future
generations;
2. Revising the image of high-level careers in science and
engineering for women from anomalous to ‘normal’ thus
providing the incentive of examples of achievement to
encourage younger women to break through the barriers
prevalent at early stages of the career. As we have sugggested
above, sympathetic male faculty members can play an
important role in mentoring women, relieving some of the
pressure on overburdened women.
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These graduate students and professors, after successfully
negotiating the numerous barriers to entry that exclude so many other
women, often pursue less demanding careers than their male peers.
These women are not lost to science. Rather they are women who, with
a few exceptions, are excluded from positions in the top academic
departments in their field. Many pursue research careers in industry;
others have taken appointments in teaching colleges. Whether these
scientists are excluded from high-level academic careers through
discrimination by academic departments unwilling to accept women
as equals, or for other reasons, the result is the same. There is a pool of
women scientists working in industry and lower down the academic
ladder whom their advisors, usually men, agree are the equal of their
male peers who are pursuing research careers at the highest academic
levels. If professorial jobs were made available, qualified women
scientists could be recruited to create a critical mass of at least three
women in each leading academic department. This would provide the
range of female role models necessary to bring forth an enlarged next
generation of women scientists.
Women should be recruited into ‘pivotal jobs’ or ‘linking positions’
in order to formally increase their social capital. A pivotal job is one
that places someone in a position with a lot of crosstalk between other
faculty members, particularly crosstalk that is often not spoken about
openly but is critical to promotion and understanding of how the
system rewards performance. For example, in academic circles, a
position on the personnel and review committee offers great insight
into how the university operates and reviews performance. It also
permits members to gain first-hand knowledge about how outside
letters (letters from external referees) are written, from whom outside
letters should be solicited, and how issues of research productivity,
teaching, and service are balanced in tenure decisions.
If women were consistently placed on such committees it would (1)
widen their network of personal contacts, (2) allow them to display
their competencies, (3) increase their access to information on how
promotion processes work (information that is normally only
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circulated among male ingroups), (4) help them demystify the tenure
process in their own minds, and (5) position them as knowledgeable
colleagues among their peers who will in turn rely on their counsel.
Some universities and professional schools have adopted this system
with great success by creating ‘untenured observer’ positions on their
tenure and review committees. These positions are open to junior
(untenured faculty) for 1-year stints. The untenured observers have
access to the entire decision-making process. They attend all the
meetings, read all the outside letters, observe decision-making
processes (and tenure battles), and learn how the decisions emerge.
At one university familiar to the authors, the expressed public
mission of the observer is to reveal the scepticism felt by outsiders
about the process, and report back to peers and senior colleagues on the
way the system works. Another method of expanding women’s access
to social capital is through arranged mentoring. While it is commonly
understood that mentors offer advice and access, it is less commonly
recognized that assigned or organized mentoring programs can have
effects that are comparable to informal mentoring. In a number of
universities for example, new faculty members are assigned to
teaching and research mentors. These individuals are usually just a
year or two ahead of the new recruits. Their mission is to familiarize
the new faculty members with the idiosyncrasies of the department
and university. They pass down factual knowledge, advice, tips, and
strategies that help bring the new faculty member up the learning
curve more quickly.
Importantly, much of this information is in the form of tacit
knowledge that is rarely available through other means but critical to
success. It could make the difference between speaking to a decision-
maker who interprets policy one way and speaking to one who
interprets it very differently, even though both interpretations may be
right in a formal sense. In this sense, it has the objective results of
reducing errors and increasing efficiency which is good for academic
staff, students, and universities. Mentors also help introduce new
faculty members to others, invite them to social functions, and impart
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advice without the baggage of creating status differences. In this sense,
arranged mentoring helps reduce subjective barriers to entry.
Mentoring should be recognized as an important part of the service
to the department and university, and should be recognized
with remuneration, reduced committee work, or flexible teaching
schedules. At one university we are familiar with, arranged mentoring
has been developed to a sophisticated level on these dimensions. For
example, mentors are rewarded in direct proportion to the success of
those they mentor – creating an added incentive in mentors to produce
productive collective results. Systems like this have shown their
success in the private sectors, particularly in law and consulting fields
which are driven by similar systems of teamwork, interdependence,
and networking.
Luce professorships and the National Science Foundations Program
of visiting professorships for women provide individual permanent and
temporary positions but no program is yet available of the magnitude
to create a critical mass by itself. However, an internal university
commitment can provide the necessary scale of resources for achieving
a critical mass at least in some departments, as in the molecular
biology department that we studied. A more radical suggestion, given
the success of women’s colleges in encouraging women’s participation
in science at the undergraduate level, is the development of graduate
departments at some of these same institutions (Lazarus and Nair,
undated).
Such a bold step would provide a place for faculty members to set an
example of women organizing research groups that function
collegially, effectively and differently than the male model. Serious
consideration of such a course of action might lead existing graduate
programs to re-evaluate their treatment of women since the resources
to initiate this reform of the academic system could well be drawn from
the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and
other agencies that support existing graduate programs.
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POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS FOR DEPARTMENTS
Although culture is generally believed to be highly resistant to change,
our findings suggest a few key points of intervention. Specific steps
could be taken to mitigate the effects of the male scientific ethos on the
recruitment of women to science and engineering. The rigidity of the
existing academic structure and misperceptions of women scientists
among male academics constitute formidable barriers to the entry and
retention of women at the highest levels of academic science.
However, the fact that qualified women who would be interested in
academic research careers are now in industry or teaching colleges
suggests that, should these final barriers be lowered or removed,
women scientists who already exist might pursue careers at the
highest levels of academic science.
Women scientists wish to legitimate an alternative model that will
open up science to women’s full participation. They raise equity issues
in the face of strongly held beliefs on the part of many male scientists
that the existing system produces enough female scientists. Because
parochial ways of conceptualizing, investigating, and organizing the
conduct of science have been accepted, significant sectors of the
population have been excluded from full participation, and alternative
perspectives and organizational styles have been repressed. As we
become aware of such factors as masculine models of gender as the
basis for many modes of doing science, a policy space is opened up
where change can take place. Social movements and support groups
organized by excluded groups, changes in departmental practices
and university policies taken at the initiative of faculty and
administrators, and governmental affirmative action policies and
funding programs are all part of the emerging picture of science open to
all talent in fact as well as by precept.
CONCLUSION
:
SCIENCE POLICY FOR WOMEN IN
SCIENCE
Questions of gender and science have come into the foreground in
sociological theory, feminist research and human resource policy
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(Abir-Am, 1989; 1991). The sociology of science is moving beyond
comparing men and women scientists according to implicitly
masculine criteria, which have themselves come into question. Hyper-
competitiveness has been attacked as counterproductive to ‘good
science’ (Marvis, 1993), leading to premature publication and possibly
to ‘fudging’ and fraud. It has also given us the ‘smallest publishable
unit’, the practice of subdividing findings into numerous articles.
Harvard University has recognized the problem, limiting the number
of articles that can be submitted for tenure review. The definition of
research achievement in terms of number of publications, with article
counts accepted as a primary indicator of productivity and
achievement, is ambiguous. Women publish less frequently than men
but their publications are more frequently cited (Long, 1990). This
finding suggests different gender styles of scientific work, with women
taking a more measured approach to research. Women appear to work
more intensively on a subject before making their work public.
Institutional reform that takes into account the needs of female
scientists also benefits men by introducing some flexibility into career
paths. How can the phenomenon that graduate departments are more
active in organizing programs for undergraduates and high school
students than for their own students be explained? One answer is that
instead of changing a structure that the people in power are satisfied
with, it is much easier to deal with other people’s problems, elsewhere.
Perhaps this is why there are very few programs at the graduate level
even in departments that are active in organizing programs lower down
the academic ladder.
Departmental change to advance the interests of women is unlikely
to be widespread unless there is intervention from above, either from
the leadership in the university or from the funding agencies that
support the research system on which Ph.D. programs are based.
Innovative university-wide policies can change department policies;
for example one might be a department review for diversity issues. Just
as a U.S. university department has an external review every three
years that is meant to assess the department’s research, internal
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dynamics, and links to the wider university, it should have a separate
diversity review (as in private industry), or a diversity assessment
should be made part of the conventional three-year academic review.
The outside referees (usually from comparable departments
elsewhere) should evaluate how well the department is doing on issues
of recruiting, hiring, and retaining women. Just as the review evaluates
a department’s coverage of subspecialty areas in the field (e.g., gene
splicing in biology departments), it can assess a department’s track
record and current gender balance.
This change could have the effect of bringing the systematic
disadvantages of women to the attention of university administrators,
who could then dedicate funds to improving these conditions. It also
opens up channels of discussion among female and male faculty
members about the subject, which can help inform women faculty
about how to choose and locate progressive departments. Finally,
because these reviews are sometimes used in ranking departments,
they tie department status to affirmative hiring of women – reversing
some of the present and reprehensible biases. Related to the idea of an
academic review with a diversity component or simply a separate
diversity review, diversity committees should be set up across
university departments. These committees should have the objective
of assessing issues of critical mass, recruitment, hiring, and retention,
identifying and diffusing models of success, and providing counsel on
issues of bias.
At present, most universities only have avenues of recourse for
women who experience bias or harassment that affects pay (or
promotions – easy to assert but difficult to prove). These programs are
necessary, but lack attention to the processes and experiences of
women that shape job satisfaction and feelings of empowerment that
are needed to sustain a cutting-edge research program. These
committees should be staffed by men and women who are interested
and motivated to effect change. Finally, a network of these committees
should be created across campus in order to increase knowledge
transfer about best practices and to promote the sharing of resources
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243

(e.g., to share the costs of instituting talks and seminars by elite women
scientists). Members of the committee should be rewarded for their
participation in annual salary and promotion reviews, with reduced
teaching loads, or guaranteed teaching time slots (to help
accommodate the balance between work and private life).
When departments become more inclusive, there will be less need
for intervention. In the interim, programs have an important role to
play in strengthening nascent female networks. Opening up existing
networks to women is especially important because of the general lack
of formal rules and the resistance to increased levels of formalization in
academic departments. Systemic change in networks creates a level
playing field for networking among both women and men. ‘Normative’
change, in which values informally shift over generations, with
younger male and female mentors sharing non-sexist values, is a
slower mechanism for the distribution of social capital to all,
regardless of gender.
Critical mass was expected to be achieved through affirmative
action, to clear up blockages in the pipeline on the premise that
attracting a sufficient number of persons, from a previously excluded
social category, will foster inclusion of others from that background.
The paradox of critical mass, and the interest of many female scientists
in creating an alternative mode of doing science, suggest that this is not
the case. Encouraging more women to enter the pipeline is fruitless if
so few emerge as professional scientists. In the face of exclusionary
practices, both explicit and implicit, built into the research university
system, many women Ph.D.s, see the writing on the wall and, seeking
to balance work and personal life, seek employment in industry and
teaching colleges. As our observations emphasize, the pipeline, a
‘supply side’ approach, needs to be supplemented by a focus on
changing the institutional structures where science takes place.
In contrast to little more than ten years ago when we began our
research, women scientists are increasingly more able to identify and
reveal their sometimes painful and frequently confusing experience as
graduate students, post-docs and junior faculty. Some middle-aged
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women retrospectively understand their personal sacrifices, adaptive
strategies and defenses as responses to tenuous and hostile situations.
Moreover, some male scientists now not only acknowledge the
presence of bias, but openly attempt to provide women students and
colleagues with strategies and support for success. Ironically, the
endeavors of some male scientists to reduce marginalization shows
that real inequities actually do exist. As mentors they provide the
primary relationship required by every young scientist to learn the
craft, the unwritten rules, and means of entry into social networks
crucial for continued growth. Thus our findings show that in roles of
power and authority, both male and female scientists are able to re-
create departments into genuinely democratic institutional contexts.
However, they are few and far between.
In response to relying on ‘critical mass’ as the panacea for change, we
argue that only in democratic departments does the notion of critical
mass really work. We have found that ‘critical mass’ is meaningless
when women are isolated and unknown to each other, when affiliation
with other women is too stigmatizing, or the female faculty model
available reflects an archaic, male stereotype impossible to emulate or
incorporate into a contemporary professional identity. True critical
mass occurs because an informal grapevine attracts more women
students and staff who are then integrated into the department as a
whole. Rather than a simple statistic of 15% or more, a number that we
have found frequently and erroneously reflects a large proportion of
foreign students rather than American women (erroneously, because if
90% of that 15% are foreign students who remain in their own
subculture, women of each nationality may be very isolated), the true
power in the number reflects a department that is cohesive, inclusive
and not isolating. Without the anxiety of exclusion and lowered status,
women faculty members are not as inhibited in acting on behalf of
female students and, therefore, are able to serve as authentic role
models. Moreover, their energy is not as depleted by defensive
operations around tenure, the burden of tokenism and apprehension of
interrupting their careers to have children.
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A key factor in overcoming the problems posed by the paradox must
be university-wide policies on child-care, parental leave, recruitment
and retention, and slowing of the tenure clock. At the departmental
level, junior faculty who assume responsibilities as mentors and role
models functions should be credited in tenure reviews. Tokenism
must be eschewed: many departments aggressively court a few female
stars while most women languish in continued discrimination.
Nevertheless, the ability of departments to defend traditional
academic practices as ‘gender neutral’ should not be underestimated
nor should willingness to reform be overestimated. For departments
unable to reform themselves, outside pressures provide the necessary
incentive. A representative of WISE (Women in Science and
Engineering at Columbia University) recently suggested that the
National Science Foundation cut off grants to universities without a
minimum number of female faculty members in science and
engineering departments. Indeed, NSF has mandated that absence of
women at conferences that it funds will be taken as prima facie
evidence of discrimination.
Law suits to redress discriminatory acts are expensive and time-
consuming, even when successful. Until quite recently, courts were
generally unwilling to review academic decisions on substantive
grounds; only matters of procedure were typically subject to judicial
review. Gender discrimination has now been accepted as a valid basis
for law suits challenging academic decisions, following widespread
acceptance of its legitimacy in other workplaces. Jenny Harrison, a
mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley, was recently
granted tenure after such a suit. The recognition she received for a
series of significant results made the initial negative decision a matter
of some embarassment to the mathematical community. Special
dispensation for academic institutions, whether in the courts or
Congress Legislatures, is disappearing as universities are held to
ethical, legal, and financial standards common to all public
institutions.
Participation of all groups in society is a basis for the public support
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of science. The legitimation of science, the moral injunction to achieve
equity and the strategic interest of each nation in utilizing talent to its
fullest extent are reasons for change. In the U.S., Neal Lane, the former
director of NSF, has called upon the research community to act in its
own interest and make a conscious effort ‘to integrate itself into the
larger community’ by more closely reflecting the demographic
composition of the population. Equal representation of women and
men in scientific professions would counter the elitist image of science
and hopefully earn increased support for allocation of public resources
to science.
The most important change required is a broader, more flexible,
model of the relationship between work and personal life to make
scientific as well as other highly demanding professions equally open
to all persons of talent, irrespective of gender. The relationship of
scientific work to other spheres of life needs to be rethought, to make it
more compatible not only with female aspirations and socialization
but with emerging male wishes to find a better balance between career
and personal life. As Alice Rossi perceptively put it, ‘marriage,
parenthood and meaningful work are major experiences in the
adventure of life. No society can consider that the disadvantages of
women have been overcome so long as the pursuit of a career exacts a
personal deprivation of marriage and parenthood, or the pursuit of
happiness in marriage and family life robs a woman of fulfillment in
meaningful work.’ How can this goal be achieved?
BEYOND POLICY INTERVENTIONS
Policy change cannot affect inherent attitudes and prejudices. Change
of that nature appears to emanate from those in power within the
department. They become the role model for the role models. In order
for women to cope with the vicissitudes of gender discrimination, they
require the armament of the reality about the paradoxes within the
culture of science. We believe that prior to entering graduate school
young women need the opportunity to interact informally with senior
graduate students and faculty members who can talk candidly about
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these issues. Workshops could be organized to provide knowledge of
the unwritten rules and the strategies required to thrive, as well as a
first-hand experience of the interpersonal connections and acceptance
that are possible among scientists. In contrast to repeated concerns
that bringing the difficulties for women in science out in the open will
only dissuade them from pursuing science, we suggest the opposite.
Making potential problems more immediately recognizable, and
solutions and strategies more attainable, is empowering and inhibits
the debilitating process that all too frequently occurs only after the
student is in a graduate program and has no means to identify what she
is experiencing. That is when the enervating feelings of anxiety, shame
and self-blame begin. We also believe that venues for bringing these
issues out in the open are as imperative for upcoming junior faculty
members as they are for graduate students. Not to speak forthrightly is
only a re-enactment of the denial that occurs in those departments in
which marginalization endures. In such departments rationalizations
are pervasive and change does not occur. Most of all, if it is true as it has
been suggested that women really do need to respond better to negative
‘kicks’ (Sonnert and Holton, 1996), they will first have to know what
those kicks may be.
Our research strongly indicates that until the social context alters,
women will have to understand the critical role of their advisor before
the choice is ever made. Women need to know those personal and
professional characteristics of this uniquely important individual who
will either enhance or diminish their chances of attaining goals and
developing a professional identity. This is crucial since a professional
identity is inextricably linked to a ‘social identity’ in which the esteem
of others provides recognition and serves to enhance self-esteem
(Berger, 1967).
In contrast to earlier assumptions in which all women academics
were perceived and touted as automatic role models and mentors,
young students need to understand and be able to identify the
attributes necessary in a good mentor of either sex. In this respect, the
notion of ‘gender differences’ is again called into question: some male
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advisors can be excellent mentors for all of their students regardless of
sex. We believe that there is evidence that adherence to cultural
prescriptions and proscriptions around notions of gender depends on
the individual and, therefore, is not immutable.
Rather than rely solely on quantitative analysis which frequently
masks what is really going on in people’s lives, we have attempted to
understand the real experiences of women scientists as they have
shared their understanding of their experiences. We believe that
multiple paradoxes abound, potentially double-binding women at
every juncture within the pipeline. It begins with marginalization and
isolation and the demand for autonomous, independent functioning
within an activity which is, for men, highly social and socializing. It is
exacerbated when adaptive attempts for affiliation through women’s
groups are labeled as indicating ‘special needs’. It is compounded when
similarly isolated women faculty members are offered up as a solution
to institutional problems.
It needs to be recognized that some of the solutions and mechanisms
employed by successful women scientists of an older generation are no
longer relevant in a different historical and social context. Until these
and many other paradoxes for women in science can be freely
examined and articulated without the subtle threat that an inherent
and innate ‘difference’ will be exposed, the contradiction between
what too many in the scientific community choose to believe exists
and what actually occurs will continue to impede the growth and
development of too many gifted women.
The late Betty Vetter, founder of the Commission on Professionals in
Science and Technology, pointed out the waste engendered by
persisting barriers that cut short scientific careers in which there has
been considerable personal and public investment. It is high time to
remove the barriers that impede women and minorities from
successfully negotiating the ‘critical transitions’ of scientific and
engineering education and career. Norms of science that incorporate
both traditional male and female perspectives into a broader non-sexist
framework would free both experimentation and verification of
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knowledge from the exclusionary oppositions in which feminine is
automatically conceived of as antithetical to ‘good science’ (Keller,
1980).
Under these conditions, with impersonal evaluation a component of
the social structure of science, Maria Mitchell’s exhortation (quoted in
Enna, 1993) would become a reality: ‘ . . . no woman should say, “I am
but a woman!” But a woman! What more could you ask to be?’
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Appendix
SURVEY METHODOLOGY
Our survey was mailed to the faculty in the departments of biology,
biochemistry, chemistry, computer science, engineering, and physics at
a large private Midwestern University in May of 1997. Emeritus,
adjunct, and visiting faculty members were not contacted because they
are normally peripheral to department activity. Data collection was
completed by September 1997. The survey was diskette-based and
computer-administered and took approximately 30 minutes to
complete. The electronic survey guided respondents through the items
(with appropriate branching) and created a data file on the diskette,
which was returned to us. This procedure reduced errors of data entry by
respondents and data entry assistants, and ensured that all respondents
answered all items. All faculty members were sent a cover letter that
briefly described the purpose of the study, assured confidentiality, gave
references to our previous work in scientific journals of the hard sciences
and at the National Science Foundation, and described the instructions
for the use of the survey. Included along with the cover letter were a
diskette and a pre-addressed envelope for returning the diskette. Table
A1 describes the characteristics of our sample.
Faculty members who did not respond in three weeks or who used
Macintosh computers were asked to set up a time for a telephone
interview by a trained research assistant who entered responses in real
time into a PC. Unfortunately, the biology department used
Macintosh computers exclusively, which lowered the response rate of
this department. Table A1 displays the response rate, which averaged
56% and ranged from 38% to 76%. This response rate is similar to
other network surveys of organizations (Podolny and Baron, 1997; Burt
1992; Granovetter, 1973).

Table A1: Sample characteristics and response rate
Department Number of Faculty Number of Respondents
Men Women % Men Women Response
Women rate
Biology 28 6 21.4 12 1 38 %
Biochemistry 23 13 57 14 9 63 %
Chemistry 25 2 8 17 2 76 %
Computer
Science 8 0 0 4 0 50 %
Engineering 33 5 15 22 1 57 %
Physics 27 3 11 16 0 53 %
Total 144 29 20 84 13
We explored whether there was non-response bias by examining
differences in the demographic background (age, gender, rank, and
income) of faculty members who responded immediately and those
who were interviewed by phone. There appeared to be few differences
across these categories using O’Brien’s method (Stata, 1996). There
also did not appear to be a difference between responders and non-
responders in terms of prestige of Ph.D.-granting institution (most had
received degrees from prestigious schools), although full professors
were more likely to respond after the first mailing. Lastly, the feedback
we received from faculty members who could not participate indicated
that it was due to randomly distributed factors (deadlines, annual
meetings, grants, travel, etc.).
REGRESSION ANALYSIS
We used an ordered logit model to estimate the effect of social capital
on the rate of publication. This model estimates the relationship
between a categorical and an ordered dependent variable – ‘no output,’
‘low output,’ ‘medium output,’ and ‘high output’ – and a set of
APPENDIX
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independent variables (Greene, 1993). An ordinal variable is a variable
that is categorical and ordered, for instance, ‘no output,’ ‘low output,’
‘medium output,’ and ‘high output.’ In an ordered logit, an underlying
probability score of how a one unit change in an independent variable
affects the change in probability of intensity of output is estimated as a
linear function of the independent variables and set of cut points. The
probability of observing outcome icorresponds to the probability that
the estimated linear function, plus random error, is within the range of
the cut points estimated for the outcome:
Pr(outcome j= i) = Pr (Ki-1 < B1xj+... +Bkxkj + uj≤Ki)
One estimates the coefficients B1, B2,... ,Bkalong with the cut points
K1, K2,...,KI-1, where Iis the number of possible outcomes. All of this
is a generalization of the ordinary two-outcome logit model. The
ordered logit predictions are then the probability that outcome j+ uj
lies between a pair of cut points Ki-1 and Ki(Stata 1996).
The attractive modeling feature of the ordered logit is that the
substantive numerical values of the dependent variable are
unimportant (Greene, 1993). In ordinary regression, arbitrarily
assigning the number values of 4 to the ‘high output’ category, 3 to the
‘medium output’ category, 2 to the ‘low output’ category, and so on is
inappropriate because different numeric values (say 10 versus 8 for
‘high output’) would obtain different estimates. This is not true in an
ordered logit model. All that is necessary is that larger numbers
correspond to more intense outcomes or levels of usage.
DEPENDENT VARIABLE
The criterion variable, research productivity, was measured by asking
respondents to indicate their number of publications using the
following interval scale: (1) no publications, (2) 1–2, (3) 3–4, (4) 5–10, (5)
11–20, (6) 21–50, and (7) more than 50 publications. This question was
repeated for (a) articles published, (b) book chapters published, and (c)
books published, in order to capture the range of publications. The
APPENDIX
253

value for each respondent on (a), (b), and (c) was summed and divided by
three to derive an average productivity score. A simple sum of (a) to (c)
produced similar results to those reported in terms of significance and
size of coefficients. The seven preceding categories were united into
four categories by joining adjacent categories and dropping the first two
categories, which had no observations. The use of a four-category
dependent variable made the results more intuitive and produced
results that were similar to the more complex eight-category model.
Table A2 displays the distribution of the dependent variable for all
faculty and untenured faculty. The numerical value ‘0’ corresponds to
the low output category (Less than 4), ‘1’ corresponds to the low-to-
medium category (5 to 10), ‘2’ corresponds to the medium-to-high
category (11 to 20), and ‘3’ corresponds to the high output category
(more than 21). Table 12.4 displays three cut points because one of the
four categories is a reference category, which in this analysis
corresponds naturally to category 0 (see Table A2).
Table A2: Distribution of research productivity of faculty
Number of All faculty Untenured faculty
publications
reported Men Women Men Women
Less than 4 3% 7% 7% 10%
5 to 10 12% 43% 20% 45%
11 to 20 28% 25% 45% 25%
More than 21 57% 25% 28% 20%
INDEPENDENT VARIABLES
Token Overload, Power Imbalance, Number of Strong Ties, and
Number of Bridge Ties were measured using the items and scales
described in Chapter 12. We squared the number of strong ties to
examine our hypothesis that an intermediate level of strong ties is
APPENDIX
254

positively associated with research productivity. Number of Co-
authors was simply the number reported by the respondent.
CONTROL VARIABLES
Following prior research, we controlled for human capital and
demographic factors with the following measures (Seashore et al.,
1989; Cole, 1992). We created an indicator variable, Gender, which was
coded 0 for female and 1 for male, and Tenured which was coded 1 for
tenured and 0 for non-tenured. Professional Age measured number of
years since Ph.D. and Age in Years measured age of respondent. Cole
(1992) reported that Professional Age has been found to have a
statistically significant but small positive effect on getting grants. Age
in Years has similarly been the center of many studies of scientific
productivity. Cole (1992) noted that scientific creativity is commonly
believed to decline with age, but noted that the empirical evidence is
mixed. Research Budget Level controls for the level of the faculty’s
research budget (in dollars divided by 100), a factor positively
associated with research productivity (Seashore et al., 1989; Cole,
1992). Finally, we created an indicator variable called Post-Doc (1=Yes)
to control for the positive effect of a post-doctorate fellowship on
research productivity (Long and McGinnis, 1981).
Two variables were added to control for the synchronicity problem,
which is the condition that the number of publications reported was
probably affected by ties that existed prior to the ties reported at the
time of the survey. One way to deal with this problem is to assess the
historical stability of the network over the period of publishing
reported. Network Turnover measures the level of turnover in an
individual’s network over the past two years. Another control variable
that attempts to mitigate the synchronicity problem is Average Tie
Duration, a variable that measures the average time the respondent has
known the contacts named. The assumption underlying these controls
is that contacts that have endured more than three years are likely to be
long-term ties and in existence over the course of the reported number
of publications.
APPENDIX
255

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Will, J.A., P.A. Self and N. Datan. 1976. ‘Maternal Behavior and Perceived Sex of Infant.’
American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 46: 135–9.
Zuckerman, Harriet and Robert K. Merton. 1972. ‘Age, Aging, and Age Structure in Science.’ In
Aging and Society: A Sociology of Age Stratification. M. W. Riley, M. Johnson, and A.
Foner, eds. Vol. 3. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Zuckerman, Harriet, Jonathan Cole, and John Bruer. 1991. The Outer Circle: Women in The
Scientific Community. New York: Norton.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
267

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academic career gap, for child-birth and child-
rearing 135
academic culture, negative consequences for
women 84–6
academic and family life, mutual exclusion of
88
academic quasi-firms 119
academic structure
actively discouraging women 84
arguments for change, effects of 144
female advisors feel powerless to change
150
and pregnancy 89
resistant to accommodating family needs
143–4
and time extension before tenure review
144–5
active exploration, seen as male activity 40,42
administrators, female, become substitute
advisors 198–9
admission tests, games theory 58
admissions procedure, women lack strategy
to deal with 79–80
adolescence, girls’ scientific interest
discouraged 42–7
adults
perpetuate masculinity and femininity
beliefs 37–8
send differing messages to children 37
advising, gender-related blockages to 78–9
advisor–advisee relationships
colored by sex-role stereotyping 22
female experiences with male advisors 79
negative interactional patterns 78–9
in the Ph.D. program 77–81
power of advisors 77
quality of crucial to success 77–8
suggestion of conference participation 96
advisors 248
contradictions of the job 148–52
female administrators substitute as 198–9
legitimation by 96–7
men can be successful 80–1
older female
may not understand needs of female
students 185
tendency to forget insecurities 185
relationship with crucial 100–1
role of complex 149
style relates to earlier mentor relationship
147–8
suggestion of conference participation 96
younger male, more collaborative style
153–4
affiliation 60–1,190
affirmative action
currently in retrenchment 228–9
does not insure minorities with right
credentials 229
increases then denigrates women and
minorities 227–8
results not always as expected 227
to increase number of women and
minorities in science departments 106
anomie, experienced by women graduate
students 73–4
anti-discrimination legislation, seldom fully
enforced 226
anxiety
coping differences 75–6
and finishing the program 97
may escalate into self-blame 94
Index
Key to index: n following page number indicates information in a
footnote; Ap indicates information in the Appendix. Page numbers in
bold refer to tables.

‘apartheid system’, gendered 86
assimilative strategies, used by girls for
adaptation 41
AT&T program 194–5,196–7
industry on side of female students 194–5
attitudes, come from top down 180,199
Austria, female scientists and gender
dynamics 212–13
autonomous functioning, requirements for
development 86
Barber, Leslie, reflections on mixed
experiences of male and female peers
1–2
belonging and identity, problems of for
women 58
bench science
pressures on women 27
success related to ability to adapt 27–8
biological sciences, attitudes to women
changed 112
bottom up programs 189–93
characteristics of social movements
189,190–1
flexible and low cost 192
weaknesses of 193
boundary heightening 109
boys, young, negative views of women
scientists 34
brain development, and female
characteristics 46
Brazil, female scientists, significance of
traditional gender roles 206–7
bridging ties 168–9,168n,254–5Ap
men’s and women’s 170–1
Bulgaria
access to a scientific career 218–19
gender division of intellectual life
persistent 218
career choice, women diverted from academic
and research tracks 6
career plans, affected by gender socialization
47
Carson, Rachel
biologist and author 21–2
research career stunted 21
shows new type of scientific career 21–2
cascade effect 16,133
challenge 55
moral and intellectual nature of 54
change
normative, too slow 244
resistance to 142–5,236–7
child care 217,245–6
a concern for academic parents 142
effects of expansion 216
traditional support
Mexico 208
Turkey 205
U.K., proposed expansion of 222
child-bearing strategies, Finnish women
214
Cinderella effect 99
co-authors, and research success 176
cognitive capital 117
colleagueship 159–60
lacking for female scientists 137
lower levels of for women 161–2
reciprocation 160
social support or friendship 159–60
College Board examinations 7–8
courses and tutoring for 8
college teachers, should encourage female
students 62
Columbia 204
competition, for grades, male testing process
55
conferences
critical informal transition point for
students 100–1
introductions outside the department 96
positive effects on careers 97
role in socialization of female scientists
95–7
confidence-building, through conferences
96–7
courses
core of college education 51
evaluation role 51
examination, as a sorting mechanism 51
mathematics, attitudes influenced by
parental perception 44
official purpose of 51
Crick, Francis see Watson, James and Crick,
Francis
critical mass 106,162,240
and balanced strong tie development 165
can change male attitudes 111
changing academic cultures 237
contradictory effects of 107
and division of women into sub-groups 111
INDEX
270

fails to equalize social and professional ties
163
improves social support and identity
enhancement 163–4
is it sufficient? 110–11
made meaningless by isolation 245
magical statistic and false numbers 106–7
not achieved through affirmative action
244
only works in democratic departments
245
paradox of 244
overcoming problems posed by 245–6
reliance on difficult 112
critical transitions 26,69–81
and female scientific careers 101
from student to research environment 69
in graduate education 69
informal 100
Ph.D. level 69
cultural lag
myth of the individual scientist 119
used by male faculty members against
female students 71
cumulative disadvantage
and additional disadvantages at the margin
237
and advantage, Matthew effect vs
Cinderella effect 99
rooted in differential socialization of men
and women 91–5
Curie, Marie 17
demand side, effects on women’s entry into
science/engineering 13
Denmark, female scientists, impact of
motherhood on scientific careers
217–18
departmental change, initiatives for 187–201
strategy for departmental reform 199–200
departmental cultures
changes when key male acquires feminist
values 181
negative and positive 179–86
departmental networks
gender differences in 164–6
intermediate number of ties 164
large number of ties beyond 164
strong department contacts 166
too many or too few contacts 165
departmental reform 199–200,226,241
departmental relationships
gender differences in quality of 160–4
more difficult for ‘token’ women 163
and social capital 158–60
women carry double burden 163
departments 132–3
avoidance of change 242
change must come from those in power 247
culture and organization important in
reform 183
division into subdisciplinary groups 111
hidden inequities 226–7
instrumental 179–80
more women, positive effects not always
there 177
overt procedure covers hidden decision-
making 229
policy recommendations for 241
relational 181–3
senior scientists as social capital bankers
122–3
strategy of attracting highly qualified
women 197
university-wide innovation, may change
policies 242–4
women faculty members, divided into sub-
groups 105
developing countries, women in science 204
Dimant, Stephanie, New York Times letter
27
disadvantage
accumulation of 91–5
and organizational reform 236
dissertation, transformation of 71
distribution requirements, US education
system 8
diversity committees 243–4
objectives 243
payment for work on 244
staffing of 243
diversity reviews 243
assess track record and current gender
balance 243
doctoral education
basic social unit of 72
see also Ph.D. program
double-bind situation, for women 58–9,249
dual career families 233–4
economic competitiveness 226
and female scientists 231–2
INDEX
271

economic deficit, from failure to use all
talents 226
economic and structural barriers, recession 24
emotional energy, to deal with harsh social
environment 93
equality
of representation, in the scientific
professions 247
of treatment
differentiates against women 54–5
private sector, may overflow into
academia 235–6
equity, a moral and legal imperative 226–9
Europe
gender dynamics in 211–18
investment in education not realized
211–12
southern
problems for women scientists 209
will women’s expectations be
successful? 221
exclusion
by departments, an undermining
experience 138–9
due to parochial ways of U.S. science 241
effects of
explicit and implicit 244
on faculty members 157–8
of female minority by male majority 60
from informal sources, Turkey 205
from social ties network and critical mass
123–4
of Italian women from upper-level
positions 214–15
for women in scientific careers 116
extended family, supports women scientists
203
faculty appointments, problems for women
after 16
faculty attitude, towards women’s
competency 69–71
faculty members
critical role in persistence of women 61–2
no difference between men and women in
work experience 171–2
no statistical difference in education levels
172
relationships among 177
see also male faculty members; women
faculty members
faculty status, job search, social capital and
gender 133–5
families, and the scientific career
27,141–2,172
family commitments, factor in colleague
evaluation 87–8
female scientists
achieving faculty status 132
adherents of the male model
Brazil, make male bias worse 206–7
rethinking their position 151
tension with younger female faculty
members 184
areas of gain 203–4
assuming responsibilities for minority
status 140–1
careers
choice versus personal aspirations 15
versus family 134–5
versus relationships 135
contemporary dilemma of 15
devaluation by non-inclusion in
professional events 84–5
in developing and semi-industrialized
countries 204–11
driven to defensive research strategies 16–17
early onset of feelings of isolation,
insecurity and intimidation 59–61
equals of male peers available for
recruitment 238
first year
establishment of relationships essential
for self-confidence 61–2
need for affiliation 60–1
as ‘honorary men’ or ‘flawed women’
2–3
invisible or conspicuous 86
and legitimation of an alternative model
241
must understand critical role of advisors
248
negative treatment effects carry over 140
older
earlier solutions/mechanisms no longer
relevant 249
now more able to reveal past experiences
244–5
share values and work styles of older men
105
post weed-out, mentoring depends on
academic institution 62–3
INDEX
272

scientific heroines 17–22
some indication of change among 131–2
the ‘two-body’ problem 134
UK, access to highest levels of political
leadership 223
see also women faculty members; women
graduate students; women in science
Finland, female scientists, a ‘motherhood
myth’ 213–14
‘flying universities’, training for nineteenth
century women scientists 17
Fox-Keller, Evelyn, effects of lack of social
capital 127–8
Franklin, Rosalind 167
crucial evidence of DNA structure 126
exclusion from a Nobel Prize 125–6
and James Watson 20
prototypical isolated female scientist
126
relatively unacknowledged by male peers
21
funding pressures, effects on advisors
149–50
gender
paradoxes for women 46–7
role reversal 23
and scientific ability 79,98
gender bias
counter to ideals of equity 222
from older female faculty members 140
gender differences
defined in terms of narrow cultural norms
41–2
in departmental networks 164–6
in departmental relationships 160–4
in the early years 37–8
in interdepartmental networks 166–9
no fundamental disparity in personality
structure 72–3
gender disparities, Harvey award lecture
(1997) 23
gender dynamics, European experience
211–18
gender parity, spur to cultural change 66
gender roles
affected by broadening experience 38
and choice to do science 47
culturally defined, persistence of 31
hidden meanings solidified in adolescence
42–3
perceived as ‘all or nothing’ categories 38
gender schema
construction of 34–5
processing dependent on social context 36
gender and sex, concepts easily entwined 31
gender socialization
and undergraduate science education 53–9
women forced into conflict with 56
gender-role systems, opposition between two
embedded categories 55–6
gendered choices 32–3
generational attitudes, in instrumental
departments 180
generational change 226,233–6
introduces stress into the system 234–5
limits to 234
German Democratic Republic, former,
female scientists’ careers impeded 218
Germany
gap between men and women in science
221
high level of social capital among scientists
101
girls, interest in science discouraged during
adolescence 42–7
graduate education
in critical transitions 69
expected behavior 91–2
female students as ‘rugged individualists’
71–2
women need more information prior to
entry 247–8
graduate experiences, a summary 101–3
graduate research apprenticeship model, for a
fortunate few women 49–50
graduate school
choice limited for women 135–6
counterproductive for women 85
informal social relationships, inclusion
important 101
quality of experience 123–4
smaller number of women entering 11
a social-psychological milieu 102–3
graduate women’s programs, interpretations
of 46
graduation 7
Greece, female scientists and traditional
gender roles 209–11
Hawaii, maths, high performance of non-
Caucasian girls 45
INDEX
273

high school, the social scene 7
higher education
Brazil, growth of female students 207
Finland, women lagging in higher teaching
positions 213
Greece, militates against women in science
210
United States see United States higher
education system
human capital 117
little difference between men and women
171
of women scientists, denigrated 16
Hungary, integration of women into research
219
hyper-competitiveness, of male scientists 242
idiosyncratic programs 197–9
In-balance program, Center for Particle
Astrophysics, Berkeley 236–7
indebtedness, in social networks 121–2
India 204
female scientists more productive 203
inequality, between men and women in
science, studies and reports 224
informal channels, for dissemination of news
125
informal exchange 190–1
informal transitions, role of conferences
95–7
insecurity, and negative feelings 92
institutional accommodation
available for business purposes 142
needed by women to combine family and
career 142–3
institutional reform, benefits men and
women 233,242
instrumental departments 179–80
generational attitudes 180
interpersonal interactions minimal 181–2
low morale and high isolation of women in
179
power structure in hands of old eminent
males 180
instrumental style, of advisor 148,152–3
interdepartmental networks, gender
differences in 166–9
interdepartmental ties
importance in women faculty careers 166–8
men’s and women’s, patterns of 170–1
see also Watson, James and Crick, Francis
Ireland, science seen as possible girl’s career
48
isolation 101–2,157
begets isolation 140
of female students in male-dominated
research groups 111
major issue for women at academic level
116
overcoming the effects of 100–1
perpetuation of 107
professional, of post-graduate women
researchers 116
and reduction of opportunities 83–4
of women
by organizational structures 110–11
in instrumental departments
179–80
Israel, female scientists, a few women at the
pinnacle 216–17
Italy, female scientists, persisting
marginality 214–15
Japan, demographic decline opening doors for
women 232–5
job search 133–5
career detours held against women 135
geographical mobility barriers 35–6
impediments for women 133–4
‘kula ring’ of scientific success
115–30,159,177
laboratories
‘degradation ceremonies’ for women 80
lateral social organization in 154
Lane, Nancy 223,224
law suits, for gender discrimination 246
leadership succession, crucial for successful
programs 191
life-course events 87–8
may coincide with academic transition
points 87
loneliness, of female faculty members 138
Luce professorships 240
McClintock, Barbara 127
an outsider operating with competitive
disadvantage 128
majors, U.S. educational system 8–9
engineering/science 9
avoided by women 47
INDEX
274

exclusion of women from upper levels
53–4
male autonomy, illusion of 72–3
male faculty members
more likely to have children 172
social ties superior 162
young, interested in more gender-inclusive
networks 177
male graduate students
attitude to women’s scientific ability 98
and the unofficial Ph.D. program 73
male scientists
changing values of new generation 148
effects of attempts to reduce
marginalization 245
wish for better personal-professional
balance 24
managerial responsibilities, of today’s
academic scientists 119
marginal disadvantages 91,237–40
marginalization, of women 221
marriage
and family, adverse effects on women’s
scientific career 88–91
a limiting factor 136
math anxiety issue 43,44
mathematics 44
concepts understood equally at any age 43
developing countries, women in 204
Greece, increased number of women in 210
Hawaii 45
Hungary, women in 212
test performances 48
Mayer, Maria Goeppert
career on the margins of U.S. academia
19–20
encouraged by Enrico Fermi 20
place in the Manhattan project 20
Mead, Margaret and Metraux, Rhoda, study,
girls’ rejection of science 47–8
medicine, U.S., increase in female students
5–6
Meitner, Lise 17–19
always an outsider 19
excluded from the Nobel Prize 19
informal guidance by 18–19
supported by Max Planck 18
mentoring
arranged, enlarges women’s access to social
capital 239–40
by better male scientists 245
by powerful women 112
either sex may have requisite attributes
248–9
post weed-out, assured for men but not for
women 62–3
University of Washington program 193,194
women’s undergraduate success ascribed to
102
Merton, Robert K., on long-term relative
exclusion of women from science 25
Mexico, female scientists
come from well-to-do highly educated
families 207–8
effects of gender socialization 207–8
seldom found in high level posts 208
military service
effects of 203
Portugal, women, increased scientific
opportunities 209
wars offer opportunities for women 229–30
minorities
easy to marginalize 106
must attain power to overcome resistance
109
Mitchell, Professor Maria, women’s scientific
aspirations 225
mobility barriers 35–6
greater for Greek women 210–11
for women 135–6
National Science Foundation
dilemma of too few women in science,
solutions for 230
loss of funding for discrimination against
women 246
program of visiting professorships for
women 240
shortcomings of immigration and
recruitment policies 230–1
national societies
informational and support networks 66
other strategies 66–7
Netherlands, The, female scientists, a
continuing dilemma 215–16
networking, at conferences 96–7,99
networks
benefits of 116
differential effects on men and women
115–16
opening up to women 244
Norway 48
INDEX
275

nuclear family, strains on women scientists
203
nurturing environment, for a few women in
college 49–50
obstacles, encountered by scientific women
22–3
old-boy networks, entrenched, power of
182,183
organizational structures
reform of 236
resist full female participation 225
organizations, of women scientists and
technologists, strengthening
member’s social ties 224
ostracism
and the breaching of gender uniformity 108
professional and personal, unanticipated at
faculty level 137
parental leave 245–6
parents, behavior influences gender
awareness 38
peer acceptance, and conformity 42–3
personal worth, erosion of 93
personal–professional conflicts for women
26–9
Ph.D. program
based on courses 9–10
finding an advisor 77–81
finished by women 97–8
needs of upper classwomen not met 98
preparation for research 10
qualifying examination 10
unofficial 73–4
less open to women students 73
women excluded from study groups 74–5
vertical and lateral transitions in 95–7
quality of experience as important as
numbers 100
transformed to a group effort 71
women unable to be assertive and risk
taking 85
women see graduate school as stressful for
male peers 93–4
Ph.D.s
attainment of under relative isolation 100
Portugal 209
science and engineering, women’s share of
11,11
women encouraged by fathers 32
Philippines, the 204
physicists, young, effects of political change 2
pipeline thesis
double-binds for women 249
for improving women’s participation in
science 5–14
‘leaky joints’ 5
women leave, at disproportionate rates 6,
50
pivotal jobs
defined 238
women’s recruitment to 238
Poland, integration of women into research
219
Portugal, female scientists, and loss of males
208–9
post-doctoral fellows 98–100
good and bad experiences for women
99–100
women may select on non-professional
grounds 99
women’s careers harmed 98–9
post-secondary education 8
power imbalance 160–2,163–4,254Ap
and publication rate 173,174
and tokenism 160
pregnancy
always the wrong moment for 142
and child-rearing, and younger professors
154
and choice of advisor 69
a disadvantage at critical transitions 87
may sometimes be taken into account 90
problems, aired but not resolved 195
professional identity 160–2
and colleagueship 159
denied 137
neglect hurts development of 138
and social identity 248
programs
important role of 244
informal, grass-roots 200–1
provide support, guidance and an
independent perspective 188–9
qualities needed in a leader 195
and quality of women’s educational
experience 187–9
support from above necessary 196
women’s programs 66
qualifying examinations (Ph.D.)
INDEX
276

closest to a gender-neutral element 76
effects on women 75–6
qualities, of femaleness and maleness, not
rigid 46
quota hires 228,229
‘Re-entry’ program, University of California,
Berkeley
funded outside the department 192–3
success of 190
reciprocity/reciprocation 160
between contacts 129
lower levels of for women 161–2
relational departments 181–3,200
attraction of interpersonal interactions 181
effects of cooperative atmosphere 181
importance of sympathetic leadership 182
improved quality of life for women 200
relational style 148,153–5
emphasis on collaboration and community
154
research
Austria, women in positions of importance
helpful 212–13
importance of bridging ties 169
lab relationships important for strategy
154
Netherlands 216
in out-of-the-way fields 130
productivity and social capital 173–6
success of today’s projects 120–1
in the U.S. departmental model 71
women participate most in areas of fastest
growth 212
women in, Spain 220
women’s, presentations in safe
environments 191,192
risk taking, women lack support for 86
role models 13–14,105
complexities of being 148
felt to be lacking, female Ph.D. students 87
for role models 247
stressing positive or negative sides? 13
through removal of barriers 237,238
Rossi, Alice 1
on marriage, parenthood and career 247
‘technical fix’ alternative 216
on young girls with high ability 44
Science: The Endless Frontier, Vannevar Bush
118–19
Science, article, biological male superiority
and standardized testing 45–6
science
academic, negative female image of 137
conditions for successful career in 124
continual departure of girls and women
from 155
covert resistance to women persists 221–2
dual male and female worlds 137–46
resistance to change 142–5
tenure 141–2
tenure stress 145–6
emergence of female-gendered subfields
112–13
foreclosing on women’s choice to do 47–8
gender inequality and shortage 229–31
girls’ interest discouraged during
adolescence 42–7
graduate experience in 83–103
hampered by long-term relative exclusion
of women 25
high-level careers for women to be seen as
normal 237–8
interpersonal networks differ for men and
women 17
lagging in its inclusion of women 2
low status, aids women’s participation
203,205–6
male culture makes women invisible 99
non-sexist framework, incorporating male
and female perspectives 249–50
open to all talent, an emerging picture 241
paradox of women’s participation 203–4
permeated by male standards of behavior 26
personal qualities needed for success
changing 26
relationship to other spheres of life should
be rethought 247
seen as ‘masculine’ 31,32
sociology of is moving on 241–2
stereotyping of in the primary school years
38–42
boys, use of negative/inappropriate
behavior 40
compliance by girls costly 40
enlightened parents dismayed at sexual
stereotyping 39
girls, teachers less responsive to 39–40
girls tend to avoid lack of structure 41
masculine image already established
38–9
INDEX
277

science – cont.
teachers dismayed at unconscious
stereotyping 39
teachers encourage scientific skills in
boys 40
teachers influence perceptions of
scientific ability 40–1
university science becoming more
entrepreneurial 235–6
‘Science is for Childless Women’, letter, New
York Times 27
science teaching, U.K., to take gender
differences into account 223
science/engineering
bachelors’ degrees, increased number to
women 10
impersonal teaching environment, effects
of 65–6
projected shortages did not happen 230
to succeed women must follow male model
58–9
women feared consequences of bringing
actions 107–8
scientific achievement, high, fallacious
notions 25–6
scientific activity, lack of full membership,
effects of 139
scientific careers, new types of 21–2
scientific contributions, women’s,
widespread devaluation of 84
scientific heroines 17–22
scientific identity, secure, creation of 85
scientific innovation 120
scientific mobility 232
works against exclusion of women 232
scientific production, new order of
118–21
pivotal role of social capital 119–20
scientific productivity
at odds with family life 150
Israeli female scientists 216–17
of Italian women 215
measurement of 253–4Ap
of Mexican women 208
and social capital 252–3Ap
women more frequently cited 242
scientific role
alternative 105
alternative career model crucial 144
division along generational and gender fault
lines 105
scientific role and workplace, gender-neutral,
need for 23
scientists
exchange of ideas, resources and
information 115
image of 47
mature/distinguished, emotionally
constricted and controlling 180
senior
deposit social capital with protegés and
fellows 123
enhancing prestige and power 123
as social capital bankers 122–3
scientists, concept of, very young children 33–7
counteracting stereotypical notions 37
early gender differences in perception of 33
girls, see scientists as doctors 36
indicators of change 36
linking occupations with sex 35–6
power of popular culture on gender images 36
sex-typing 34
selection mechanisms
covert purposes 51–2
overt purposes 51
‘self’
destructive impact of socialization 46
influenced by those close to the child 33
perpetuation of femininity–masculinity
ideals 33
possibility of self-limiting constraints 33
social creation of 32–3
self-confidence
erosion of in graduate school 83,92
of first year female scientists 61–2
lack of 109
low, increased attrition rate 92–3
and a scientific self-identity 183
self-definition, through role as advisor 148
self-in-science, certainty about lost 60
self-worth, enhanced feelings of 129–30
sexual harassment
and critical mass 107
important to be stringent on 197
shortage, effects of on women 226,229–31
sociability, and success in group research 26
social capital 116–17,117n
accumulation often gender-linked 118
and bridging ties 169
critical when evaluation is equivocal 122
defined 117–18
and departmental relationships 158–60
INDEX
278

distribution of at conferences 100–1
DNA and gender 124–8
and faculty network relationships 156–77
gender differences, and human capital
differences 171–3
importance of in scientific production
today 120–1
mobilization of in scientific careers 121–4
pivotal role of 119–20
raising of 128–30
and research productivity 173–6
role increases in a non-linear fashion 118
and scientific productivity 252–3Ap
weak and strong ties 124
women have less access to 16
women’s access to through arranged
mentoring 239–40
social capital banks 130
social networks
access to exclusive information 130
contain social capital that can facilitate
success 122
and critical mass 111
defined 160
differences in shape level of social capital
116
exchange of ideas, information and
resources 121–2
exclusion of women sends negative
messages 122
quid pro quo of exchange 121
structure of, an underlying barrier to
success 176
widened if in pivotal jobs 238–9
women need strong local ties and many
bridging ties 169
women’s, poorer in social capital 171
see also networks
social science, help in resolving the too few
women in science dilemma 230
social support 160–2
from social ties 159
via networks 129–30
social ties
closer in the male world 158–9,159–60
women with male colleagues 159
socialization
diverging experiences of young men and
women 55
and education of girls, should this be
changed? 57
female, traditional
effects of exacerbated 95
not compatible with graduate school
91–2
and political strategies for advance 79–80
and status as male or female 42
of young females and males 46
socializing processes, and differences in
cognitive strategies, boys and girls 41
societies, neglect talent to their detriment
231
sociological anomie,
anxiety–isolation–purposelessness
feelings 74
Soviet Union, former, position of female
scientists 219
Spain
academic harassment by men 220
women advancing in an expanding system
220
women’s entry into engineering 220
standardized testing
effects of ‘biological male superiority’
article 45–6
gap in gender differences narrowing 45
stress, and coevolution of family and work
234–5
strong ties 124,165–8,168n,254–5Ap
too few or too many 174,176
study groups, women’s exclusion from
74–5,102
subfields, female-gendered, emergence of
112–13
direction of women to 112
supply side, fallacy of 12–14
support schemes
function as social movements 189
origins and development of 189–90
survey
control variables 255Ap
dependent variable 253–4Ap
independent variables 254–5Ap
methodology 251–2Ap
regression analysis 252–3Ap
Sweden, research funds attracting junior
researchers 232
Taiwan, influence of stereotypical images
48
teachers, importance of to young girls 44
teleworking, proposed in U.K. 222
INDEX
279

tenure 141–2
allows slower pace only in later years 141
definitive goal for all junior faculty
members 145
uncertainty of impedes much-needed
relationships 145–6
tenure clock, slowing of 247
tenure clock–biological clock contradiction
141–2
tenure reviews, credit for mentoring and role
modeling 246
tenure stress 145–6
eased for male faculty members 162
tenured women, relationships with junior
faculty women 145
Tilghman, Shirley
ability to adapt to competition 28
students felt unable to follow her example
28
time pressures, and the competitive
environment 28–9
token overload 160,160–2,254Ap
and publication rate 173
women compensate for false perceptions
162–3
tokenism 63,163,246
double disadvantage 164
effects of
demographic group power thesis 110
group interaction perspective 109–10
fewer bridging ties reported 170
promotes too many or too few strong ties
166
status as token woman 140–1
top down programs 193–7
could be made more effective 197
could be utilized for change 195
create monetary incentive structure to
promote change 196
difficult to implement 196
transition points
seen as threats 101
significant decrease in women at each 105
transition processes, affected by degree
program structure 70
Turkey, female scientists
class is stronger than gender 205–6
many of same informal barriers found 205–6
upper class women needed to fill
professional positions 205
women and ‘kemalist’ ideology 205
undergraduate education, major a part of 9
undergraduate schools
benefits of working under other women
63–4
may teach survival techniques for graduate
school 64
women’s colleges give greater self-
confidence 63
undergraduate science education, and gender
socialization 53–9
undergraduate teaching assistants, small
state university college 64–5
United Kingdom
dependent and independent tracks 221
experiences of women in science 221–4
Forum on Gender Policy for British Science
(1995) 223
gap between men and women in science
221
government, gender and science 222–4
‘Oxford Revolt’ 222–3
paucity of women in high-level scientific
positions 12, 222
position of women in science and
engineering 12
The Rising Tide, report and
recommendations 222
suggested strategies 222
University College London, a bright spot 12
universities 7
being held to standards of public
institutions 246
feminization of 204
Turkey, effects of expansion of 205
University of Washington program, projects
to address women’s issues 193–4
‘untenured observer’ positions 238–9
untenured women, may have chosen to be
childless 72–3
United States
may lose post-doctoral talent abroad 231–2
traditional male model eroding 233–4
United States educational system 6–10
excels at graduate level 10
general education continues into
university 8
no early career choice 6–7
specialization 8–10
United States graduate education model 70–2
failure to incorporate the German model 70
invention of the department 70–1
INDEX
280

qualifying examinations 75–6
study groups, women’s exclusion from 74–5
unofficial Ph.D. program 73–4
see also graduate education
United States higher education system
beating the system, or being beaten by it
59–63
changing the weed-out system 65–7
gender socialization and undergraduate
science education 53–9
undergraduate schools promoting women’s
interest in science 63–5
weed-out system 49–53
see also higher education
Venezuela, female scientists 203
Vetter, Betty, on waste engendered by barriers
249
vocational choices, in the undergraduate
career 9
‘Waldo’ hypothesis 157n
Watson, James
and Crick, Francis
publication of ill-supported hypotheses
126
social networking paid dividends 126–7
and the discovery of DNA 124–5
and Rosalind Franklin 20–1
weak ties 124
and research success 176
weed-out system 49–53
changing of 65–7
discourages personal contact and support 54
dominant in all science, maths and
engineering majors 50
mechanism to find most able and interested
students 50–1
as a post hoc selection system 52
removes too many women from science and
engineering majors 26,53–4
reverse systems 64–5
students’ awareness of 52–3
women
achieving positions of power 200
avoidance of science and engineering
majors 47
cultural choice between attractiveness and
smartness 58
empowerment efforts may lead to
devaluation 228
increasingly aware of good and bad
departments 182–3
lack mathematical background on entering
college 43
lacking in scientific and engineering
disciplines 1
lone scientist concept 159
lose interest in maths 43
loss of to science 10–12
negative consequences of academic culture
84–6
selected out in competitive
science/engineering courses 53
significant faculty presence provides
female role models 112–13
socialization of and tolerance of
rude/abusive behavior 57
still marginalized by academia 20
women faculty members
affected by impact on their students 148
dilemma for 149
empathy for students’ difficulties 152
importance of interdepartmental ties 166–7
instrumental advisor/ instrumental
department 185–6
instrumental advisor/relational
department 184–5
left to find their own way as advisors 151–2
older
confused/frustrated by women students’
new demands 153
questioning previous beliefs 185–6
reconsidering previous practice 151
support/strategic assistance from
competitive male advisors 153
relational advisor/instrumental
department 184
resources also needed for professional
survival 148–9
thriving, significant characteristics of
147
wonder how to warn without discouraging
150–1
women graduate students
advanced, concerns for the future 98
baby–work bind 89–90
feel less able to take risks 41
and female advisors 148
may be deterred by difficulties of female
professors 150
Mexico 207
INDEX
281

women graduate students – cont.
often excluded from informal training
process 73
problems of acting as advisor to 137
problems with both female and male
advisors 100
results of survey on departmental life 94–5
solidarity among 90–1
undergraduate success related to mentoring
102
use female administrators as substitute
advisors 198–9
women in science
condition of, socio-economic systems have
little effect on 219–20
differences between 147–55
instrumentals and relationals 147–8
a life-course analysis 2–3
movement towards change 220–1
overcoming resistance to 24–6
allies among younger male scientists 24
more aggressive approach by alumni of
Radcliffe College 25
policy for 225–50
beyond policy interventions 247–50
a moral and legal imperative 226–9
science policy for 241–7
resistance to 15–16
in socialist countries 218–20
strategies already suggested for
improvement of position 225–6
successful, positive experiences and
supportive mentors 133
types of programs for 187–9
women’s colleges, development of graduate
departments 240
women’s faculty experiences 131–6
young women, sense of identity sensitive to
extrinsic response 56–7
Yugoslavia, former, advance of women but
decline in science 219–20
INDEX
282