President Tilghman emphasized the role of science in building a strong nation and focused on women's importance in this field in a panel discussion Wednesday night.
"We need to be tapping into the largest talent pool that we can, and this includes women," she said.
Tilghman recounted her own childhood experiences with math and science — growing up "in Canada, on the prairies, in the snow, just in love with numbers."
She has been outspoken on the topic in recent months as fallout continues over the comments of Harvard President Larry Summers, including in a talk on women and science at Columbia last week.
About 40 students and administrators gathered in the Rockefeller College common room on Wednesday night to participate in the discussion, which was titled "Women in the Sciences: A Panel on Gender Perceptions and Realities."
Panelists and audience members deliberated for almost two hours on the importance of women in the sciences and other professional disciplines. They also discussed why women have tended to avoid scientific careers and how to better recruit women.
The cross-disciplinary panel featured presentations by Tilghman, ecology and evolutionary biology professor Dan Rubenstein, Dean of the Faculty David Dobkin, history professor Angela Creager, psychology professor Deborah Prentice and politics professor Tali Mendelberg.
"We didn't want just a cheerleader-for-women panel," said Charlotte Weiskittel '06, who organized the event. The panelists looked at the origin of specific problems concerning women in the sciences, and how best to fix the setbacks, she said.
Despite this need, the University's numbers show women faculty are not only underrepresented in the natural sciences, but across many other departments as well.
In 2002, only 16 percent of tenured professors in the natural science departments were women, compared to the 18 percent and 25 percent of female tenured professors respectively in the social science and humanities departments, Mendelberg said.
"There is clearly something going wrong here that has nothing to do with skill sets," she said.
All the panelists disagreed with Summers' remarks that "intrinsic aptitude" could account for the difference in male and female success in the sciences.
"I think it's important, given the prevalence of stereotypes and people trying to generalize, that people try to pay attention to social scientific literature," Creager said. She reprimanded Summers for drawing information largely from anecdotal — not scientific — data.
A few panelists discussed various social reasons that have dissuaded women in various fields, calling on statistical support.
Prentice questioned the audience as to what could lead women to not identify with the natural sciences.
According to societal perceptions, Prentice said, "science is just not a female thing to do." This perception leads women to feel an extra pressure and anxiety that they must overcome to perform well, she explained.
She also described the subtle social punishment both women and men feel when they violate social norms, which then can act as a deterrent for them to participate in specific fields.
"It's incumbent upon us to make sure that women don't fall out of the pipeline," Rubenstein said. Administrators have done this by actively recruiting women and making sure they have a broad female applicant pool for each position.
"It's our belief that if we have the right applicant pool, then the departments will to the right thing," Dobkin said.
Dobkin added that he hoped that a positive outcome would result from the Summers controversy.
"What I had hoped was Larry's comments would cause people to wake up and say what are we doing wrong, and how can we fix this?" he said.
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