In her first public remarks since the incident, President Tilghman, the only Ivy League president who is a female scientist, criticized Harvard President Lawrence Summers' comments about women in science, saying they ignore the "enormous progress" women have made during the last 25 years.
Tilghman, an outspoken critic of the gender imbalance in science, said there was an "absence of good social science research that would support the view that innate differences between genders explain their differential inclusion in science and engineering."
Summers touched off a firestorm of criticism at Princeton and around the country for suggesting that "innate differences" between men and women might in part explain the lack of women in top science faculties.
After protests by prominent female scientists and women's rights groups, Summers pledged last week to strengthen recruitment and support of women faculty at Harvard.
He appointed Drew Gilpin Faust, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, to set up task forces to determine how to better support women faculty. The groups will examine issues including the hiring and promoting of women and mentoring for young faculty.
The task forces will be similar to one Tilghman created at Princeton in 2002 following a landmark meeting with the heads of eight other research universities. At the meeting, the presidents pledged to work toward the equitable treatment of women in science and engineering.
The task force issued a report in September 2003 saying that despite improvements over the last decade, the University must step up efforts to hire women in the sciences. Following the report, Tilghman appointed psychology professor Joan Girgus as assistant dean of the faculty to oversee gender equity.
Since then, Tilghman said, "We have been very successful in appointing very distinguished women to the faculty at all levels."
Girgus said that since her appointment, some improvements have been made, but much remains to be done. She spends most of her time consulting with departments, mentoring assistant professors and giving practical advice to recently hired faculty.
"We help new faculty figure out how to organize their lives in Princeton," she said. "That simply wasn't done before."
Progress
Summers' controversial remarks came at a Jan. 14 conference of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in Cambridge, Mass. He later told reporters that he had been trying to "add some provocation" by proposing that biological differences may partly explain why fewer women succeed in math and science.
But presidents must be aware that they are always public figures, Tilghman said. "A university president inevitably speaks in public forums for his institution, especially when the subject touches on educational matters," she said.
Summers had already come under criticism for the steady decline under his administration in the proportion of tenure offers to women. In Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences last year, 13 percent of tenure offers went to women, compared to just under 50 percent at Princeton.
Some female professors and administrators here noted a more welcoming environment for women in science and criticized Summers' comments.
Maria Klawe, dean of Princeton's School of Engineering and Applied Science, called the remarks "irresponsible and damaging."
"They have added credibility to beliefs frequently held in our society that women are less able to succeed in science and engineering," she said in an email to The Daily Princetonian. "I'm grateful to be at a university like Princeton where the President (and other senior administrators) are working hard to create an environment in science and engineering where everyone (independent of race, gender or socioeconomic background) is encouraged and expected to succeed."
Several women faculty and graduate students echoed the notion of Princeton as a supportive environment for women scientists. Mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Emily Carter said there has been a "concerted effort to reach out and find leading women scholars all over the world and bring them to Princeton."
Alluding to Tilghman and Klawe, as well as to a recent initiative to help faculty with child care when they present work at conferences, Carter said that "more universities need to listen carefully, to follow in trying to implement the things that need to be done to diversify the faculty."
Despite a lack of female role models on the physics faculty, physics graduate student Monica Skoge said that her interactions with faculty here have been "welcoming and encouraging and completely indifferent of my gender." Some work remains to be done, however, particularly for "people to be more self-aware of prejudices they may have about women being inherently disadvantaged at math/science and more education in the adverse social conditions that existed for women," Skoge added.
'Wrong Direction'
Amid such improvements in support for women in science faculties, most female faculty and graduate students said Summers' comments were a step in the wrong direction.
By focusing on hypothetical biological differences to explain women's underperformance, Summers ignored the known social influences that often discourage women from pursuing careers in math and science, Girgus said.
"To dismiss the socialization issues in the performance gap flies in the face of the data," she said. "When you talk about it in an unsophisticated way — and this is not his field — it gives a misimpression about what we know and what we don't know."
Carol Armstrong, director of the University's Program in the Study of Women and Gender, added that while provoking discussion is good, it must be done with caution.
"In the position he holds, he should be more careful in the opinions he expresses," she said. "There's provocation that's useful, and there's provocation that isn't."
Social influences
Much of the criticism has centered around Summers' claims that genetic factors are responsible for the underrepresentation of women in the sciences.
Psychology professor Emily Pronin, whose research focuses on bias and stereotyping, said that there is much more evidence suggesting that social and cultural influences, as opposed to innate biological factors, play a role in determining women's performance in math and science.
"One important reason for underperformance on the part of women in quantitative pursuits results from anxiety and concern about being judged according to negative stereotypes (about female mathematical ability) and about having one's performance viewed as confirmation of those negative stereotypes," Pronin said in an email.
Besides, even if there are innate differences, women should "capitalize" on them, environmental engineering graduate student Sarah Gasda said. "We should embrace these differences and think of ways to nurture girls in science and engineering classes so that they don't get discouraged in the white, male educational box."
Work versus career
At the NBER conference, Summers also suggested that women may be underrepresented in math and science because many choose not to accept the sacrifices that accompany 80-hour work weeks.
Girgus called this statement "worrying," saying, "We have to think about whether the 80-hour notion is the only way to be successful in a research university. We're losing a lot of talent to people who do feel that they have to make that choice."
With a responsible spouse, money for child care and flexible hours, Klawe said it is feasible to combine a successful career with children.
"When I talk to high school students about careers in science and engineering, I tell them that when I was their age the myth was that women couldn't be good at math and science," she said. "The new myth is that women can't combine a successful career in science or engineering with having children. And just like the old myth, this one is false too."
Tilghman, herself a female scientist and longtime proponent of eliminating the gender imbalance, argued at a recent conference that to compensate for the fact that women faculty with small children will be less productive, institutions must recognize "quality, not quantity."
"In the end, what pushes science forward?" she wrote. "It is not the 22 papers in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications (BBRC). What pushes science forward are the seminal papers, the extraordinarily creative, imaginative, groundbreaking piece of work. If we as a field reward quality and not quantity, women at all stages of their careers will compete extremely effectively."
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