Gender gap persists in sciences

Thirty years later, women make up 32 percent of the faculty, up 2 percent from two years ago. Though shrinking, the gender disparity persists on campus.

The University is “doing all [it] can to diversify” its faculty, Dean of the Faculty David Dobkin said in an e-mail.

But Girgus, who also serves as special assistant to Dobkin, said the pipeline of women in higher education still “leaks.”

Over the years, a number of theories have been cited to explain the dearth of female faculty in academia. In 2005, then-Harvard president Lawrence Summers sparked outrage when he said that “innate differences” were responsible for the small female population in academia, particularly in the sciences.

But the reality is more complicated, said Girgus, who has investigated the gender gap in university faculties.

“I don’t hold much with the innate differences and the ability to do math and sciences,” Girgus said, adding that “most data are pretty clear that if men and women have the same experiences and training and educational opportunities, then their performances are the same.”

In 1992, eight of the 13 science and engineering departments had no tenured women. By 2002, 13 of the then-14 such departments had at least one tenured woman and only the recently formed Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering had no women faculty at all, according to the 2003 Report of the Task Force on the Status of Women Faculty in the Natural Sciences and Engineering at Princeton.

Girgus instead attributed the lack of women faculty, especially in fields such as chemistry, to gradual attrition throughout the female academic experience.

In the University’s chemistry department, only four of 41 professors are women.

“If you start with everybody in AP Chemistry, about half are women and half are men,” Girgus noted. She explained that though the balance is maintained during the undergraduate years, men outnumber women two to one by the time they reach postgraduate study. The imbalance becomes even more extreme at the faculty level.

Historically, academic careers in math and science have been viewed as “something that men do but women don’t,” Girgus said.

Girgus said that the stereotype has now been broken, and the taboo against women in the sciences no longer persists.

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But for other reasons, gender inequality continues.

The requisite time commitment of pursuing a tenure-track professorship often conflicts with domestic and familial duties for women, Girgus said.

“On the transition from being a graduate student to being an assistant professor, many women are at a point in their own personal lives where they are thinking about family formation,” she explained, adding that “being an assistant professor is an enormously time-consuming task.”

Sociology professor Katherine Newman also characterized a tenured professorship as “an all-consuming career.”

Newman said she was fortunate to be able to choose her workplace while she was an assistant professor so that she could work from home if necessary.

Newman provided her own rationale for the leaky pipeline phenomenon in academia, explaining that private industry, rather than universities, is more conducive to juggling personal and professional life.

“It’s not the case that women aren’t interested in [the sciences],” Newman said. It’s just that “industry labs are set up and the hours are more suitable” for raising a family, she noted.

Princeton has enacted special programs to retain assistant professors who are struggling to balance their commitments to family and career.

Dobkin explained that the University grants course relief to primary caregivers for the first year of a child’s life, in addition to extending assistant professorships by a year if a professor or his wife gives birth to a child.

“We provide funds so that a faculty member going to a professional meeting can either get extra child care or take their child with them,” he added.

Princeton also tries to confront the gender disparity head-on by hiring more women where the imbalance is the greatest.

“We provide incentives to departments to hire Targets of Opportunity (which would include women in the sciences and engineering, minorities in other fields and potential faculty who are so exceptional as to represent a real opportunity) in the form of contributions to salary or start up packages,” Dobkin explained.

Newman said that during her time on the Target of Opportunity committee, which considers racial and gender diversity in faculty hiring, the chemistry department made offers to four senior female chemists. None of them decided to come to the University.

Nevertheless, Newman said she finds the department’s attempts heartening. “I am proud of what our science departments are doing to attract more women,” she said.

History professor Linda Colley said she also believes women are asserting a greater presence in academia than in years past.

“Most American universities now are ... more actively concerned about diversifying faculty in all sorts of ways than would have been the case 25 to 35 years ago,” she said.

Colley, who taught at Cambridge and Yale before coming to Princeton, added that she thinks American universities are more attuned to rectifying the gender divide than their international counterparts.

“[Princeton] is more generous in providing assistant professors with time off to do research [than most other schools],” she said, adding that the University’s unique “preceptor program for assistant professors” is also immensely helpful to rising faculty.

But Newman noted that for women who do receive tenure and become associate professors, the path to full professorship is often longer than for men, for reasons that remain unclear.

“More attention needs to be put there ... [in] the kinds of support and encouragement associate professors need,” Newman said.