A panel led by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) recently claimed there are far fewer tenured female science and engineering professors than men, even though the number of female students in medical and technical fields is steadily increasing.
Women earn 20 to 30 percent of the nation's doctorates in science, but they receive less than half that number of full professorships in science and engineering fields, according to the panel.
Princeton's numbers are less dramatic than national figures. Last year, women filled 16 of 33 entry-level teaching positions at Princeton, while five out of 12 new faculty members in the sciences and engineering departments were female, Dean of the Faculty David Dobkin said in an email.
In May 2003, the University's Task Force on the Status of Women Faculty in the Natural Sciences and Engineering reported that the percentage of women teaching in engineering and the sciences has increased since 1992. The percentage of women teaching in engineering increased from three to 14; in the natural sciences, the percentage rose from 11 to 18.
But Dean of the Engineering School Vincent Poor said these numbers weren't good enough. "We still have a long way to go," he said.
President Tilghman echoed Poor's assessment. "The challenges remain," she said in an email. "We are making slow and steady progress."
'Aggressively' recruiting at Princeton
Dobkin said the University was working hard to address gender imbalances in the faculty.
"We take the recruitment of women very seriously in my office and have worked to achieve greater gender balance and to diversify the faculty," Dobkin said.
The University has already adopted several measures towards these ends. A Target of Opportunity committee works to help recruit a diverse faculty. The University has extended the tenure clock for junior faculty members who become parents, and it has developed a backup care plan to help faculty juggle family and work. It has also designated a special assistant to the Dean of the Faculty — psychology professor Joan Girgus — to oversee these efforts.
To further target female academics in scientific and technical fields, Princeton has followed in the footsteps of other universities like Columbia, which created its "ADVANCE" program "to increase the recruitment, retention, and advancement of women scientists and engineers at Columbia University," according to its website.
An equivalent program, the Faculty Team on Engineering Diversity (FTED), was formed at Princeton a year ago, under the direction of electrical engineering professor Margaret Martonosi.
It is "a grassroots effort to work specifically on diversity issues within the School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS)," Martonosi said.
Last year, FTED informed department chairs about how they could foster diversity in the hiring process. This year, their goal is to focus on faculty retention, Martonosi said.
Tilghman said in an email that "there are two barriers" to eliminating the gender imbalance in the sciences. "First, there is the perception among young women that it is difficult to balance a competitive scientific career with family obligations. The second barrier is the culture of the laboratory, where a 'winner take all' attitude can overwhelm the pleasure in discovering new things about the natural world. Women more often find that culture unappealing."
"We need to educate search committee members and remind them that searches that don't consider strong women candidates risk being turned back by the dean, and then we need to ... aggressively recruit women who are recommended by those search committees," Tilghman added.
Students in Engineering and Science
Even with institutional changes and initiatives to diversify faculty, the time it takes to earn a doctorate makes the female recruiting process challenging.
"Progress in diversifying the faculty is slower than at the student level due in part to the long timescales of academic careers," Poor said.
The percentage of women has increased from last year in both incoming undergraduate and graduate student engineering classes. This year's entering class of engineering students, Poor said, is approximately 35 percent female, up from 31 last year, while the graduate student class is approximately 27 percent female, up six percent from last year.
"These numbers are good by national standards, but they are not good enough, and we are working to improve them," Poor said.
Joanna Billings '06 studied civil and environmental engineering at Princeton and is now working toward her master's degree in structural engineering at Stanford.
At one summer internship, she was the only woman working at the civil engineering firm but was not uncomfortable. Often, she said, supervisors told her they preferred having women work with them on projects.
"They found it very beneficial to include women in projects in order to have different ways of approaching tasks and problems, leading to more efficient and/or more effective solutions," Billings said in an email.
She is optimistic about finding a job after she completes her studies, partly because she knows that women are being actively recruited by engineering firms.
But like many other women, Billings worries about a future struggle to balance marriage, children and her career.
"I am unsure of how a career will fit into these plans, and if I will be able to pursue more competitive positions with [my family] in the back of my mind all the time," she said. "It seems that women trying to earn tenure or move up the career ladder are making sacrifices that men do not have to make."
National Academy of Sciences study
Despite these difficulties, the NAS panel found that the gender gap in math and science is decreasing. Disparities remain, however. According to the panel, it is not a lack of female students of science and engineering that has created the skewed numbers in professorship fields. It is, instead, cultural practices built into institutions that create an "arbitrary and subjective" bias. Minority women, the panel added, are at a further disadvantage.
Poor said he strongly agreed with the panel's recommendation to ensure that science and engineering faculties adequately represent the increasing numbers of women studying in the field.
"In addition to the important issue of equity, the diversification of the engineering and scientific communities is critical to maintaining the vitality of these fields," Poor said. "We simply cannot afford to underutilize any part of our talent pool."
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