In August, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp that will do more than get your letter from one place to the next. The stamp, which costs 40 cents instead of the standard 32 cents, covers first-class postage plus eight cents for breast cancer research. The design by a Maryland woman who has had breast cancer is the first "semi-postal"-part postage stamp and part charity-in the U.S. The charity part of the stamp's cost, which is projected to total as much as $16 million over two years, will be divided between the Department of Defense (DOD) Breast Cancer Research Program and breast cancer research done under the auspices of the NIH.

A new Website designed as a national clearinghouse for women's health information was celebrated by Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, members of the Congressional Caucus for Women and Women's Policy, Inc. on October 7. Applauding the "true bipartisan spirit" of the Caucus, Secretary Shalala said: "When it comes to issues important to women, we know it's not a matter of left or right-but forward or backwards-you can always count on the Women's Caucus." Check it out at: www.4woman.gov and by phone 1-800-904-WOMAN.

Viagra is a $50 million Pentagon budget item, the New York Time's reported this month: "The Pentagon estimated that it would spend about $50 million in the coming year to provide the impotence drug Viagra to American troops and military retirees. The cost-roughly the price of two new Marine Corps Harrier jets or 45 Tomahawk cruise missiles-is among the unexpected military expenses that Pentagon officials recently told Congress had emerged since they made their original 1999 budget requests." Contrast this with the fight that it took to get this Congress to finally agree to allow contraceptive benefits for women covered by Federal health plans.

"In an unprecedented and extremely important win for supporters of women's health, budget negotiators agreed to provide insurance coverage for prescription contraceptives to the roughly 1.2 million women who rely on the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program."

Gender Troubles at Adolescence

Olin Conference hosted Peggy Orenstein, journalist and author of Schoolgirls, Young Women, Self-esteem and the Confidence Gap. Orenstein's talk, "Girl or Woman? The Status of Female Adolescents", was motivated by the disturbing findings of a 1990 study from the American Association of University Women. It revealed that girls' self-esteem plummets as they reach adolescence, with a concomitant drop in academic achievement-especially in math and science. By sixth grade, both boys and girls have learned to equate masculinity with opportunity and assertiveness and femininity with reserve and restraint. In her attempt to delve more deeply into this phenomenon, Orenstein observed and interviewed dozens of young girls inside and outside of their classrooms. She found that when teachers made a point of keeping track of how often they called on boys and girls-to be fair-the boys experience this as calling on them less. This obviously also applies to health issues. When trying to correct the imbalance, men generally feel they are getting less. It makes sense-when half the population is used to getting more than half of the pie, when it's divided equally, it feels like less than half.

The Senate has voted to make Dr. Jane Henney the first female head of the Food and Drug Administration. Senate Majority Whip Don Nickles (R-OK) had originally placed a hold on her nomination because he objected to her views on tobacco regulation and RU-486.

The Dept. of Health and Human Services has announced the establishment of six new National Centers of Excellence in Women's Health, the third generation of model centers that will provide integrated and comprehensive women's health services to women across the country.

The Public Health Service's Office on Women's Health has awarded $1 million for the development of six centers focusing on health care for minority women. The National Centers of Excellence will be located at:

Harvard University in Boston

Tulane/Xavier University in New Orleans

University of Illinois at Chicago

University of Puerto Rico in San Juan

University of Washington, Seattle

University of Wisconsin at Madison

Located at academic institutions, the centers will serve as one-stop shopping models targeted to the unique health care needs of women. The National Centers of Excellence will provide the following:

--An integrated "one-stop shopping" model for the delivery of clinical health care services to women with an emphasis on prevention and early detection.

--A multi-disciplinary research agenda on women's health issues, fostering collaborations across academic departments and promoting strategies to encourage women to participate in clinical research trials

--Coordination and linkage between clinical services in academic centers and surrounding communities

--Educational programs and materials for the general public and health care professionals on women's health, using cutting edge technologies and tele-medicine approaches

--The integration of a women's health focus into medical school curriculum

--A "Women in Academic Medicine Leadership Plan" to foster the recruitment, retention, and promotion of women in academic careers

--Networking within the community to form alliances with business groups, consumer groups, scientific organizations and public policy leaders; and

--An evaluation plan to assess project outcomes and effectiveness.

This announcement brings to 18, the total number of centers being supported by the Office of Women's Health. In October 1996, the Office of Women's Health established the first six vanguard model Centers:

Allegheny University of the Health Sciences in

Philadelphia, PA

Magee-Women's Hospital in Pittsburgh, PA

Ohio State University Medical Center in Columbus, OH

University of CA at San Francisco

University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA

Yale University in New Haven, CT

The second generation of Centers of Excellence, established in October 1997, include:

Boston University Medical Campus

Indiana University Medical Center

University of California at Los Angeles

University of Maryland at Baltimore

University of Michigan Medical Center

Wake Forest University School of Medicine

in Winston-Salem, N.C.

The U.S. Public Health Service's Office on Women's Health provides national leadership in advancing women's health, public policy, research, service delivery and education. The office serves as a catalyst for developing national and regional initiatives to improve women's health.

In the last 30 years, women have taken their place alongside men in just about every endeavor from the assembly line to the Supreme Court. But a large study out recently suggests that female physicians still are hitting brick walls of sexism at every level of their careers.

Physician Erica Frank and colleagues at Emory University's School of Medicine analyzed data from the Women Physicians' Health Study, a questionnaire distributed nationally in 1993 and 1993 and answered by 4501 female doctors. They found that "despite large and increasing numbers of women physicians in practice, experiences of sexual and gender-based harassment remain widespread."

Nearly half the respondents, 48%, reported having experiences harassment based on their gender-from being called "honey" in front of patients to being told medicine is not a fit career for women-and more than a third, 37%, said they've been sexually harassed.

The study, which appeared in the Archives of Internal Medicine, is unusual in that it separates sexual harassment, including touching or overt sexual language, from gender-based harassment, "which means being harassed because you're a woman, Frank says.

That's a lot harder to pinpoint, says Frances Conley, 57, a brain surgeon who upset the medical establishment six years ago when she resigned her tenured position at Stanford School of Medicine in protest of what she saw as ongoing sexism and hostility toward women in her profession.

In the post-Anita Hill era, when even entrenched male chauvinists have learned that blatant sexual harassment can get them in trouble, "you're not going to have the brash-type discrimination that women in my generation saw," she says. "But the verbal taunts, verbal degradation is going to continue."

The effects can be devastating, Conley says. She returned in 1993 to the position as professor of neurosurgery at Stanford and is acting chief of staff at the Palo Alto Veterans Health Care System. She has written about her experiences in a book, Walking Out on the Boys.

Of greatest concern, she says, is the study's finding that young women are most likely to report being harassed, a suggestion that things are not getting any better.

"It's enculturation," Conley says. Young doctors absorb the attitudes of those who teach them and women in the ranks of medical faculty are a minority. "We tend to perpetuate the badness of our profession."

She sees it often, she says. "People who get into positions of leadership tend to get there by walking all over people. Young men see the personal characteristics of their elders and copy them."

Her experiences offer insight. As a young intern, she thought behavior she now sees as outrageous was part of the terrain, something she had to put up with to get into the elite corps of surgeons. She shrugged off "lewd remarks and jokes," and "in the operating room, I did not consider having my neck massaged or kissed while scrubbing , the friendly arm draped across my shoulders, the playful tickling of my rib cage as anything other than innocent affection," she writes.

She recalls being in the operating room when a male colleague burst in and said, "How's it going, honey?"

"All at once, I was no longer the neurosurgeon in charge. I had become one of his 'honeys'."

When discrimination is subtle, "it still is a destructive force," she says, one that not only affects doctors, but patients as well. "What you want (in a doctor) is a person able to make decisions for you, having the self-confidence to say we're going to work this out together to the betterment of your health. If you (as a physician) look in the mirror every morning and say, 'Hey, am I good enough?" that erosion of self-confidence is disturbing."

Part of the problem is the intense high-stress environment in which medicine is taught and practiced, says Andrew Thomas, 29, resident trustee on the board of the American Medical Association and third-year resident at Ohio State University Medical Center. "Sexual harassment, personally, I think is decreasing," he says. "Almost everybody 'gets it', in terms of sexual harassment, but the other issue, gender-based harassment, I think is truly a problem." It's being addressed in some programs, he says, but "the argument that residency training or medical school lends itself to this, based on hierarchical structure, is somewhat true."

He wonders, though, how much perceived harassment is the fallout of working long hours under high pressure. Sicker patients and busier doctors mean more emotional stress, he says. "People are more likely to transfer some of that angst to others when they're more stressed. Because of the environment, there's always going to be some feeling you're being worked harder than you should and not being given any credit. There's no way you can work 90 hours a week and not feel harassed."

Still, says Kavita Patel, 24, a medical student at the University of Texas Health Science Center, and president of the American Medical Students Association, women in medicine face an extra hurdle. "Every single woman training to become a doctor at some point feels their gender come to surface" as an issue, she says.

Sometimes it's overt: One of Patl䴜s classmate threatened legal action against her school after an attending physician grabbed her breast and made offensive comments. More often, though, sexism is expressed "in terms of feeling someone thinks less of you as a doctor," she says. "It makes you feel very weak and stripped of the empowerment and knowledge your years have acquired. You have to pick yourself up and know your confidence in your abilities."

Melissa Schiffman, 25, a co-author of the Archives article and a first-year resident at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, agrees with Thomas that all med students endure long hours and hard work. She cites a study that asked medical students of both sexes whether they felt they'd been "treated inappropriately" and "something like 95% said they had been," she says.

Sexism today is "maybe less overt" than it was a generation ago, she says, "and it may be that women have a higher standard than in the olden days, so they're more likely to interpret once-accepted behavior as harassment.

But, she says, "I think a lot of things happen that people don't talk about. It's unfortunate that it might sway women away from particular career areas, like surgery, where more harassment might happen."

The study found that women in specialties where men far outnumber women, such as surgery, were more likely to experience harassment. "A lot of women in my class were interested in surgery," Schiffman says, "but didn't go into it because they were so badly treated in that rotation. Once you pass through the training, you䴜re fine because you're higher in the hierarchy. But unfortunately, women might be steered away thinking they'd be subject to that through their career."

That the problem seems most acute in training, where more than 75% of faculty members are men, is worrisome, says William Jacott, 59, an AMA trustee and head of the family practice department at the University of Minnesota medical school.

He says what surprised him most about the study's findings was "that we weren't improving, that it wasn't necessarily a reflection of an older faculty that has older, more traditional ways."

What's needed most is "more women in leadership positions-department heads, deans, provosts-because it starts from the top down."

Female leaders, he says, would be role models and would help alleviate sexism in medical schools and training programs.

"They would set the tone," he says. Sexism "is perceived as a power thing, but I think it's really a leadership thing. We need the kind of leadership that recognizes we can educate by collaboration and working together and treating one another as colleagues."

(excerpted from USA Today, Feb. 23, 1998)

Virginia Valian, a professor of psychology and linguistics at Hunter College in New York, normally studies how children learn language, but years ago she came across an academic monograph that practically left her speechless. The report demonstrated how the same professional credentials are evaluated differently depending on whether they are possessed by a man or a woman -- with the woman being the loser.

Since then, Dr. Valian has analyzed many hundreds of studies on the status of women in the professions, science and academia. She has now pulled the vast and ragged literature together into a compelling book called "Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women," published by the M.I.T. Press.

On a recent summer afternoon, as construction workers clattered and hammered outside her office door, Valian, a sturdy, dynamic woman with thick white hair and thick dark eyebrows, talked about women's professional progress, and what might help pick up the pace.

Q. Your book is about the progress of women in academia, in science and other professions, and its very title, "Why So Slow?" starts with the assumption that women are not getting ahead at the rate they should. Are women really going so slowly? What is the evidence?

A. The cleanest and most thorough data we have on the course of women's careers is for women in academia, but a similar pattern holds for lawyers and business people. Several agencies have tracked the progress of male and female Ph.D.'s in the sciences and the humanities and looked at how they fare on the professorial track. What seems to happen is that men and women start out on roughly equal footing. They get almost the same salaries, and they begin at the same rank, assistant professor. But if you look several years down the line, the differences in their career paths become apparent.

The men are earning more, and they are being promoted at faster rate than the women are. There's one very good study in which researchers looked at a subset of Ph.D. scientists who had won prestigious postdoctoral fellowships. Their question: In this group of people with outstanding early promise, will the men and women advance equally in academia? Even here, answer was no. After 10 to 12 years, the men were almost a full rank ahead of the women.

Q. Why are the men pulling ahead?

A. One factor that people often raise in explaining the discrepancy is, men in academia publish more than women do, and publications, as we all know, are essential to academic success. Yet there are two points to be made about publication rates. First, even when you control for productivity, men still advance more rapidly than women do. Second, although men publish comparatively more papers, women's papers have a higher citation rate -- that is, they're referred to more often by other scientists So women publish less, but if you take citation rate as a measure of quality, women publish better work. Unfortunately, university boards don't often explicitly consider publication quality when making decisions on promotion and tenure.

Q. Why do women emphasize quality over quantity in publishing

A. Women may fear or suspect that their work will not be evaluated in same way a man's is, so they need more documentation to back up what they are saying. Men may be more willing to take a flier, to come up with some intriguing hypothesis for which they have relatively meager data and just put it out there to be proven true or false. Women may believe, perhaps correctly, that they are less likely to be given the benefit of the doubt, and that their off-the-cuff ideas will be dismissed as foolish. We associate risk-taking behavior with men, and we may be tolerant of intellectual risk-taking in women.

Q. A core thesis of your book is that we all have ideas of men and women generally behave, and that these gender can work against women's professional advancement. Why not just call these schemas stereotypes?

A. I prefer the term schema to stereotype because stereotype such negative connotations, as though we shouldn't have things in the first place. But we can't get along in the world without some framework, some generalizations about social groups and events.

We need a way to predict what will happen, and to know how to behave appropriately in various situations. If you're a college student, you need a schema of what a professor is. A professor is supposed to show up for every class, be there on time, stay the whole period, be competent in the material, grade people fairly, and so forth. A student knows that you don't bribe your professor, that's how things work.

When we get to male and female schemas, well, then, we're all self-styled experts. You can take a person at random and list a bunch of adjectives -- "assertive," "has high leadership ability," "is kind to children" -- and the person would have no trouble matching them up with one sex or the other.

Q. If gender schemas are not necessarily bad, how do they hurt women?

A. In many professional situations, our gender schemas have effect of making a man seem slightly more qualified competent than he is, and a woman and slightly less.

A number of studies have demonstrated this tendency in action. Take the "head-of-the-table" experiment, in which researchers showed college students pictures of five people sitting a conference table. When the people depicted were of the same sex, all-male or all-female, the students reliably labeled whoever sat at the head of the table as the leader of the group. When it was a mixed-sex group, and the person at the head of the table was male, again the students reliably chose him as the leader But when it was a mixed group, and the person at the head of the table was female, half the time the students chose her as the leader, and half the time they chose a man who was sitting somewhere else at the table. This is a small example of something that happens repeatedly to women.

Q. You talk in the book about how there's no one big factor responsible for women's lagging progress, but rather a series of small nicks along the way.

A. What makes it hard to understand women's slow advancement is that nothing seems overtly wrong in most work situations, especially in academia and science, where the meritocratic ethos is so prominent. People are often unable to perceive or assess how small imbalances can really add up.

One computer simulation showed what happens in an organization with eight levels of hierarchy, when it is staffed initially with equal numbers of males and females, but the men are given a tiny advantage in the promotion process -- a mere 1 percent. The programmers continued the simulation until there had been complete staff turnover at their fictitious organization. At the end, the top level was 65 percent male, 35 percent female. Any single instance of bias is likely to be tiny, and might say, you're making a mountain out of a molehill. mountains are molehills piled one on top of the other.

Q. So what do we do about our gender schemas and the little molehills we stumble over? It sounds as though just getting more women into the pool will not necessarily help.

A. In fact, widening the pool of female candidates does help. Women progress faster through the ranks in those law schools with a high percentage of female faculty members than they do schools where there are few female professors. Studies have shown that when people are asked to rate a female candidate for a managerial job, they rate her more positively if she is one of several women in the candidate pool than if she is the only woman. The explanation for this seems to be that if you're in a tiny minority of women, you're seen in terms of your gender -- and the general view of women is that they aren't so competent professionally. But if there are many women besides you, people stop focusing on your gender and start judging you in terms of your ability.

Being aware of one's gender schemas also helps. I want to emphasize that in almost every study I have reviewed, it's not only men who undervalue women. Women also do it. There are no victimizers or victims. We all have the same basic gender schemas through which we evaluate people. But each time we stop and question our schemas, we're less likely to be swayed by them.

We can improve the conditions under which people evaluate others, in sometimes very simple ways.

One nice experiment showed that when people are in a room with a mirror, which increases self-consciousness, they make decisions more in accord with meritocratic factors than they do if the mirror is covered over. Also, being vouched for by a leader increases how positively people are evaluated.

Leaders can share authority and legitimize authority in others, including in women. That's one very important thing that corporate executives, chairs of academic departments, and so forth, can do.

Q. What about your own life? Do you feel that you have been discriminated against as a woman in academia?

A. I don't like to talk about my own situation. Nobody wants to feel like a victim -- it's too depressing. But what I think is wrong is for people to deal with not wanting to be a victim by denying there's any under-valuation of women in the first place. It's necessary to see things as they are if we're ever to devise effective ways of doing something about them.

September 9, 1998

Dear Colleague,

I am writing to you and all Academic Women's Network members to invite you to make a gift toward the $500,000 challenge to help create the first endowed professorship in the Women's Studies Program in Washington University's College of Arts and Sciences. The AWN board members unanimously voted to make a gift; pooled from our individuals members; toward this effort. This is an excellent opportunity for the AWN to publicly endorse this campaign for a stronger Women's Studies Program and to show solidarity with our Hilltop colleagues and their Association for Women Faculty (AWF) organization.

Women's Studies at Washington University was one of the first such programs in the country when it was founded in 1972. The program offers an undergraduate major and minor and a graduate certificate, for doctoral students. There are now more than 600 Women's Studies programs in the U.S.A. Only a handful have endowed professorships including Duke, University of North Carolina (Greensboro), Emory, Indiana University, and the newly created chair in Harvard's program.

As you may recall Susan Stiritz, a candidate for a Ph.D. in English literature and a graduate certificate in Women's Studies, and her husband, William Stiritz (chairman of Ralston Purina and a University Trustee), have committed a gift of $1 million to fund this endowed professorship. An endowed chair requires at least $1.5 million thus the Stiritz's have issued a $500,000 challenge to the University community. If the challenge is met their gift will go to create the professorship and for critical program support in Women's Studies. A search is underway for a full-time faculty member dedicated to the Women's Studies Program who will be appointed to the Stiritz Professorship. Along with the Women's Studies Fund, the Stiritz Professor will have the resources to move the program forward in a rapid and fundamental way.

We can be part of their important effort to ensure and strengthen feminist thought and the study of women here at Washington University. We hope to count 100% participation from AWN members. Your gift, at a level meaningful and comfortable for you, will be deeply appreciated.

These tax-deductible gifts may be made in cash, credit card, or stock and will be coordinated by the Development Services office. Using the attached form will attribute your gift to the AWN support of this endowed professorship. To ensure that you receive acknowledgment of your gift for income tax deduction purposes, your gift should be made payable to Washington University and sent to Development Services, Campus Box 1082. Enclose a note or write on the check a memo line that your gift is to the Academic Women's Network: Chair in Women's Studies Challenge or use the enclosed gift form for your convenience.

Many thanks for your participation!

Sincerely,

Barbara Zehnbauer, Ph.D

President, Academic Women's Network

Development Office
Campus Box 1082
Washington University

Enclosed is my gift toward the Academic Women's Network contribution for the Women's Studies Program Challenge in the College of Arts and Sciences:

Gifts may be made in cash or stock or by credit card. For gifts by credit card, please provide your credit card number and your signature.

Please contact Mike Juniper in University Investment Accounting (314-935-5761) for instructions on making a gift of stock.