*************************************************************************** In 1995 I attended the NSF Conference on Women and Science in Washington DC. This is a talk I gave on it to the Research in Physics Education Group at UNL. The parentheticals refer to transparancies that are not posted here - sorry. ***************************************************************************



A Report from the
National Science Foundation Conference Women and Science
"Celebrating Achievements, Charting Challenges"
by
Lynda Williams

On December 13-15, 1995 the National Science Foundation held its first conference on the status of women in science which I was privileged to attend as a representative of Dr. Fuller and the Research in Physics Education Group (RPEG) at UNL. Dr. Evelyn Patterson of RPEG also attended. Today I would like to summarize what was presented at the conference as well as some of my own experiences and opinions, especially as they relate to the status of women in physics.

As the subtitle suggests, the theme of the conference was twofold: to celebrate the achievements women have made in science and to address the challenges facing women in science. However, since the achievements women have made in science wane in number as compared to the challenges they face, the focus of the conference was primarily on the challenges. But before I describe these, let me briefly set the stage and introduce the characters of the conference.

The conference was held in Washington D.C. at the lavish Sheraton Hotel. Ironically, there was another conference at the hotel at the same time on "National Emergency Preparedness" or something to that effect in which senior members of every branch of the military and office of the Pentagon was in attendance. It was a strange juxtaposition of admirals and educators running around trying to prepare the country for future challenges. In addition, the NSF conference attendees, who were primarily white and upper middle class, were served by hotel employees who were exclusively ethnic minorities. In a way, the setting provided a subtext for the conference by representing the divisions that exist between the prevailing power structure, the academic elitists and the working class of our society - divisions that contribute to the very challenges women and minorities face in science. It was a bit surreal.

Over 600 men and women attended, all of whom are scientists and educators who are or have been involved in NSF funded projects that relate to the subject. There were mostly women present, I would guess about 95% women. At first glance one might think that this is a gross gender imbalance but, as you shall see, this conference was intended to be a brain storming session between folks in the know rather than an educational outreach effort. And although at times it felt like the clergy was preaching to the pulpit, it would have been a terrible waste of time to have to constantly argue over feminist issues that everyone seemed to agree upon such as the need for Affirmative Action. What I did find to be a severe oversight was the exclusion of young women and girls as well as women from other disciplines who have had more success making strides in their respective fields. After all, most of the challenges facing women in science are societal in origin and I think we can learn a lot from women in other fields such as the social sciences and so called "soft" sciences. More on this later. Back to the conference.

The essence of the conference was this: NSF gathered all the scientists and educators they have funded for women in science related projects, provided a list of issues for them to discuss and then said: you are the experts, tell us how to better serve women in overcoming the challenges they face in science. As Anne Petersen, Deputy Director of NSF, said in her keynote address: "We need to hear the voices of all who will be participating and build from the information that the participants bring to us in order to chart the course of the future."

In order to give you an idea of what sort of information NSF was after I would like to share with you a series of questions that the attendees were asked to answer prior to the conference. Responses were compiled and bound in a book that was distributed at the conference. (see "Questions") Let's take a moment to consider some of these questions now and then you can compare your ideas with those that came out of the conference.

Now that we sense of the theme, lets get back to the conference. The conference was high end and high powered. Hillarly Clinton gave a recorded video welcome on opening night. Every high powered female scientist in the country was a keynote speaker. Here are a few of them. (see "Speakers") These women are superwomen. Not only are they highly successful scientists, they serve on government committees, they are presidents of universities, they are authors, wives and mothers and in their spare time they fly planes and climb MT. Everest.

Although they have not won Nobel prizes they epitomize the success women can have as scientists and the contribution that women can make in leadership positions in both science and in society. Hearing them tell their stories of how they succeeded against the odds was an inspiration and a celebration of women in science.

The activities of the conference were structured around a program that included large group meetings with keynote speakers in the morning followed by smaller thematic breakout sessions in which participants could engage in discussion and debate. At the end of the conference the mediators of these sessions reported the results to the entire group. Here is a list of topics addressed in the breakout sessions. (see "List") I attended the "Mathematics & Physical Science" session and the "Shattering Preconceptions" session. I will summarize the results of these sessions a bit later.

Let's return to the main themes of the conference. First, what are the achievements of women in science? As all of us know that , for most of its history, science has been the exclusive entitlement of men. Denied education and excluded from universities women have only gained entrance into the field and labs of science this century. So how far have women come in a century?

Until very recently women suffered blatant discrimination and were shut out of academia. Many great women of our century such as Emmy Noether (Noether's Thm) , Lisa Meitner (nuclear fission) and Chien-Shiung Wu (parity violation) made significant contributions in physics but were denied faculty positions in Universities or given due credit for their accomplishments. Both Meitner and Wu were excluded from sharing the Nobel Prize for work they made primary contributions to. Since they were instituted in 1901, over 400 men have won science Nobels but only 9 women have, and only 2 of those for physics - Marie Curie (1903) and Maria Goeppert-Mayer (1963).

And although Marie Curie won 2 Nobel prizes, she was never accepted into the French Academy of Sciences - the bastion of male science - and all her life she was dogged by insinuations that her creative work had been her husbands. Here is a picture of Marie with the "Architects of Modern Physics" (see "Solvay") at the Solvay Institute in Brussels in 1927. She is the sole woman present. How have things changed since then? (see "Lisa") Here is a photo from the Atomic Symposium held at UNL in 1994. It's hard to see but I will tell you there is only one woman in the group, Lisa Wiese. Progress is slow, that is certain. And if you talk to women who earned their degrees in the 50's and 60's you hear all sorts of horror stories ranging in scope from being exluded from shop or the lab to being denied teaching assistanships solely on the basis of being a woman. When you realize how bad things were for women in science just 30 years ago it makes you appreciate the progress we have made.

Conditions for women in physics, indeed for women in all sciences, has improved tremendously since the 1970's. (see "Stats 1") Between 1966 and 1993 the number of Bachelor's degrees in physics awarded to women went from 2,172 to 4,764 - a 200% increase but constituting only roughly 30% of the total awarded. (see "Stats 2") The total number of PH.D's increased from 120 to 783 - an increase of nearly 650% but constituting less than 20% of the total number awarded. In 27 years, the total percent increased from 5% to about 20% . On average that's an increase of .5 % per year. If we continue at this rate I calculate that women will reach number equality in physics PH.D's around the year 2066. Is this fair? Is this the goal? These are difficult questions we will consider momentarily. But first lets take a look at the numbers for faculty members (see "Stats 3").

At every level of academia women are grossly under represented. Women constitute only 8.2 percent of physics faculty at research and doctoral institutions. Even as recent as the early 1970's, many of the top universities would not hire women as faculty members until they were forced to by antidiscrimination laws. Not until 1992 did a female physicist gain tenure at Harvard1. And here at UNL, in 1996, there is not a single female faculty member in the physics department although Dr. Kirby told me that this statistic might be changing in the near future. We are certainly producing sufficient numbers of women to fill the faculty positions. What is the problem?

Perhaps, as some may argue, there are not enough first rate women to fill the jobs. But as nuclear physicist Fay Ajzenber-Selove points out in her recent biography, "there are plenty of male faculty members at Harvard, or anywhere else, who are second rate." She goes on to say, "I will believe that discrimination against women has stopped when I observe that second-rate women are given tenure.2"

Although great strides have been made in recent years, the statistics show that physics remains dominated by men. As sociologist Harriet Zuckerman states in The Outer Circle: Women in the Scientific Community, "science remains dominated by men, not only numerically, but in the exercise of authority, power, and influence." This brings us to the second theme of the conference, namely, the challenges that women face in science.

I would like to categorize these challenges under what I saw to be two main problems that emerged at the conferences: 1. How to improve the status of professional women in science, and 2. How to improve education for girls in order to produce future generation of women in science. It is the second issue that I am most interested in and which pertains mostly to this group so I will quickly summarize some of the ideas that emerged from the conference on how to deal with the first issue.

There are many factors at play in the dynamic of gender bias and discrimination in our society in general and in the professional scientific community in particular. Problems range from blatant sexual discrimination and harassment to subtle forms of discrimination such as "old boy" forms of networking and differences in styles of communication and social interaction. Many women expressed that having mostly male peer reviewers on journals, and hiring and grant committees is inherently biased against women. There have been many studies done that show that given the same qualifications, men are systematically hired over women. Many of these problems can be addressed through education and Affirmative Action.

So what can NSF do to help remedy the situation? Since NSF is a funding agency, the conference attendees appropriately suggested a slew of ideas I like to call the: "PUT YOUR MONEY WHERE YOUR MOUTH IS NSF!" agenda. It was suggested to NSF that they require all funded institutions to implement a Sexual Harassment Policy and to provide faculty education on sexual harassment and discrimination. It was also suggested that the NSF review institutions fairness in hiring practices and to require funded projects to hire or at least show an effort to hire a certain percentage of women for the project itself. Aggressive recruitment of women could be rewarded as well. At the home office, NSF should aggressively recruit women for committees and peer review boards.

In addition, women have a hard time balancing career with family. Often it comes down to making a choice between haveing family and obtaining tenure. Thus there needs to be more support for women taking time to have children.

Of course we have not discussed why women should be entitled to equal opportunity in physics and science or if and why the sense of urgency in achieving this equality is warranted. Clearly women should be entitled to equal opportunity in every human endeavor merely on the grounds of fairness. As long as women are marginalized in science and physics, they will not be able to play a significant role in determining what goals science and physics will try to realize. Since science and technology are critical factors that shape the political and economic aspects of our society. having power in science directly translates into having power in society. But beyond the simple idea that women have a right to participate fully in the shaping of our social goals and policies, there is the argument that women in science is good for science itself.

As philosopher of science Sandra Harding argues "Women and men cannot understand or explain the world we live in or the real choices we have as long as the sciences describe and explain the world primarily from the perspectives of the lives of the dominant groups." As has been demonstrated in biological sciences, women often approach problems differently than men, which lead to new insights and new solutions. As diversity is good for a gene pool, so is diversity good for the mind pool of science. Male phycisists should be scrambling to recruit women into their ranks not only because it is the socially correct thing to do but also because it is good for science. Who knows what problems revolutions in scientific thought will occurr once we reach a critical mass of women in science. Of course will never know until we try it!

Finally I would like to address the second major theme of the conference which is how to get more girls into science in the first place and then keep them in it. Retention at every level of academia is a major problem for women in science. If we do not keep producing new generations of women scientists then the issues we just addressed of providing them equal opportunity becomes a mute point. So the main concern at the conference regarding this issue was: "Why are women abandoning science and what can we do to change that trend?"

It is a well documented fact that girls out perform boys in math and science until the age of adolescence at which time their scores and interest in science plummet. There is a tremendous amount of research trying to determine why this is and how to counteract it. The consequence is that significantly fewer girls continue to study science and math in high school and thus do not get good SAT scores or adequate preparation to succeed in science in college.

Let me list some of the main obstacles facing girls today. Socializaion is the most significant barrier for girls. We live in a misogynistic culture which eroticizes violence against women and proclaims the goal of women is to "Look Good At All Costs!" In attmept to achieve the supermodel physique, eating disorders are common amid teenage girls. Role models in the media support Looksism rather than Doism or Thinkism. Consequently girls are trained to value themselves soley on their appearance and not on their accomplishments. Even when female science characters appear in the media they are often sexy and submissive. Science is not taught as being a "Female" or "Feminine" job. In 1992, Matel's first talking barbie was programmed to say "Math class is Tough." Girls are taught that to be aggressive and opinionated or to fight for their rights is to be a bitch. Feminism is a dirty word. The message is women are powerless in our society and are nothing but beautiful trophies for men. Accept it at shut up."

The point that Mary Pipher makes in her book Reviving Ophelia is that girls become aware of all these messages and pressures when they hit puberty and trying to manage them along with the physical impact of their changing bodies, adolescent girls don't have much time or energy to think about school. Some suffer such a blow to their self esteem that they may never fully recover. Our socializaion is very effective in keepin women in their "place" - which, as we have not seen, is in science.

Bias against girls in our schools has been extensively studied and reported by Myra and David Sadker in Failing at Fairness: How our Schools Cheat Girls. It is well documented that teachers favor boys by giving them more attention, encouragement, and feedback. The very structure of the classroom is biased toward boys as girls tend to do better in cooperative learning settings where they can work in groups rather than working alone. The absence of women, role models and mentors from curriculum hurts girl's self esteem and sense of inclusion and empowerment in society.

These were some of the many issues discussed at the conference. Here are some of the suggestions attendees came up. What are others? I suggest that the image and goals of science discourage girls and women from pursuing careers in science. I think that in many ways the 18th century mythical personification of science as FRANKENSTEIN still lives on in our culture. Science is often percieved as the henchman of industrial greed and political lust for power. Science as Frankenstein, science as atomic bomb, science as Dr. Strangelove, science as dispassionate DATA, science as vivesector and destroyer. These images of science may not be attractive to girls who are socialized to be care givers and life givers.

The epistemology and ethics of science are predominantly constructed from men's perpective of logic and ethos. Therefore I believe that the most important step we can take to create a culture of science that will encourage girls to participate in it is to get more women involved in cocreating the goals and agenda of science to more justly reflect the goals and sensibilities of all of humanity.

Copyright Lynda Williams 1996,2000

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