Erika Crouch was chosen as Course Master of the Year by the Class of 2001.

Rosa Davila received a Distinguished Service Teaching Award from the Class of 2001.

Leslie Kahl received a Distinguished Service Teaching Award from the Class of 2001.

Susan Mackinnon received a Clinical Teacher of the Year award from the Class of 2000.

Karen O’Malley was promoted to Professor in the Department of Anatomy.

Jane Philips-Conroy was promoted to Professor in the Departments of Anatomy and Anthropology. She was also voted Professor of the Year by the Class of 2002 and was elected as a preclinical representative to the Executive Committee of the Faculty Council.

Don’t miss the Second Annual Continuing Medical Education Program Sponsored by the Academic Women’s Network.

The program includes:

• Sex Matters: What the Model 70 Kg Man Can’t Tell You About Women’s Health
• What Every Prospective Mother Wants to Know About Prenatal Screening
• What’s up Down There? A Guide to Adolescent Gynecology
• Screening for Partner Abuse: It IS Our Business
• Women, Lipids and Heart Disease: Reducing the Risk
• Breast Cancer: Early Detection, Diagnosis, and Treatment
• Panel Discussion: Skin and Aging

The sessions are free to Washington University faculty if you do not desire lunch or CME credit. There is a $35 fee for persons wishing to attend the luncheon.

The National Forum held in Washington, D.C. on November 1-2 was the first opportunity to showcase the accomplishments of the Centers. The Office on Women’s Health sponsors 17 National Centers of Excellence (CoEs) in Women’s Health, designed to be models of integrated and comprehensive care for women. All 17 are located at academic medical institutions. OWH began selecting the Centers in 1996, based on a competitive contract solicitation, in which Centers had to show their strength or potential strength in 5 areas:

• Clinical care that includes health strategies for the "whole" woman (far beyond reproductive health.
• Inclusion of women in clinical research
• Community education and outreach
• Promoting leadership for promising women in medicine
• Education and training of private and public health care professionals about women’s health issues.

Nearly half of the nation’s academic medical institutions attended the Forum at which keynote speakers included Dr. David Satcher, Assistant Secretary for Health and Surgeon General, Dr. Wanda Jones, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health and former Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder.

Dr. Susan Wood, from the Office on Women’s Health, introduced Congresswoman Schroeder. She reminded the audience (mostly women) that when the Congresswoman first came to D.C. as a wife and mother of 2 young children, people questioned how she could handle her new role. She was quoted as saying that "women have both a brain and a uterus and they can use them both."

Schroeder’s remarks were energizing. She said that the attitude in Congress has been, when it comes to women’s health issues, "Oh, women’s health, we did that last year." She said, "This isn’t like painting the parking lot." One of he points was that when they fund anything for women, it’s supposed to be a "gift". For so long nothing was done for women so that when they (Congress) do something, it’s considered a "gift". She stressed that the work is not done and we must keep pushing—women pay taxes! The goal had been to know as much about women’s health as we know about men’s health by the end of this century. Schroeder said, "We didn’t make it, although we are closing the gap." She reminded the audience that women are still not a "critical mass". In Congress, while we are over 10%, we need to be at least one-third she said.

The second meeting of the Women’s Health Research Coalition was held also on November 1^st. The Women’s Health Research Coalition was created by the Society for Women’s Health Research as an advocacy network of leaders at academic, medical and scientific institutions to advance coordination and funding of women’s health research.

Speakers at this meeting stressed the importance of not only including women in clinical research but that data must be analyzed by sex to see if there are sex differences between women and men. The word "sex" was used when speaking of "inside factors" or biologic factors and "gender" was used by speakers referring to "outside" factors that influence disease. For example, is the fact that two-thirds of cases of depression occur in women a brain biologic reason or due to gender (that women seek help more readily, while men turn to alcohol)?

Speakers emphasized that research at NIH must be science-driven and must be translated into clinical practice. Women want a multidisciplinary approach not to be disease entities. It was pointed out that a woman spends most of her life trying not to get pregnant: the average age of menstruation is 10-11 years and the average age of death is 84 years. We can’t think of women’s health as reproductive issues.

A play not to be missed in "The Vagina Monologues." Eve Ensler has performed her one woman show all over the world and she’s now back in New York. Anita Gates wrote in her review of the show in the New York Times that "If Ms. Ensler is the messiah heralding the second wave of feminism, and a lot of people seem to think that she is, it is partly because she’s a brilliant comedian. The Vagina Monologues is alternately hilarious and deeply disturbing. But as important as the serious monologues are—the tribute to Bosnian rape victims, an eyewitness report about the wonder of childbirth—humor is the show’s real strength." "The whole problem with saying the word vagina is introduced with a dare-to-tell-the-truth attitude. It sounds like an infection at best." In collecting her material for the "Monologues," Ensler said that she interviewed more than 200 women from all walks of life, with the idea of creating "a community, a culture of vaginas, because there’s so much secrecy surrounding them—like the Bermuda triangle."

Conflict is energizing," Dr. Linda Moore declared. "It enhances creativity and you get better solutions." Many women find Moore’s assertion unnerving, because most of us were taught to be understanding, receptive to the needs and feelings of others and put others first. She blamed the socialization process for leading many women to avoid dealing with conflict, which contributes to overwhelming stress.

Moore spoke at the Righting the Standard conference in San Diego in June, 1999, sponsored by the American Association for Women in Community Colleges (AAWCC) and the National Institute for leadership Development (NILD).

Learning how to confront and resolve conflict is a necessary skill not only for leading less stressful lives, but for effective leadership. "Women have to learn how to be in conflict, to be comfortable with it and know that we won’t die of it," said Moore. Because of our fear of conflict, many women don’t want to risk jeopardizing a relationship, and instead try to save the relationship by giving away their personal power.

Women can learn to feel more comfortable with conflict by understanding the different types of power and their healthy uses. Positional power has to do with an influential job title. More used the example of the wife of the founder of Hallmark Cards who, because of her husband’s position, could pick up the phone and get any CEO immediately.

Personal power is different, coming from charisma. "Your internal authority is your personal power," explained Moore. Although she encourages women leaders to give away some of their positional power through delegation, instead it’s personal power that women tend to give away.

Because women are socialized to give away their personal power, keeping it is easier said than done. "We are taught to make relationships the center of our universe, our primary focus," explained Moore. "Men, on the other hand, are socialized to see work or tasks and themselves as the center of the universe." In the workplace, 75% of women are pushing to come together in relationships while 60% of men are pulling to be autonomous.

While the male way of dealing with conflict may be threatening, women also don’t handle conflict well between each other. For example, if you’re working with another woman on a project and you’ve completed your section and she hasn’t, you want to express your anger and stay in communication with her. But if you get upset and scream, her response will most likely be "What’s wrong with you?" Then, instead of doing the work, she will want to fix the relationship.

If you agree with her belief that the relationship needs fixing (as opposed to her needing to do the work), then she’s off the hook. Focusing on the relationship rather than on the issue eventually means you lose personal power.

Powerlessness doesn’t happen all at once, Moore acknowledged. "It’s more like soil erosion—a little bit at a time, day after day, event after event."

Feeling powerless can result in erratic or over-reactive behavior. For example, if you’re feeling powerless and a colleague gets the raise or promotion you expected, you might react the same way as you would if a car cut you off on the way to work. Some would sulk and slow down; others might choose a variation of "road rage." Over time, the unpredictable behavior begins eroding your effectiveness, leading to even more powerlessness.

Powerless people lose the ability to influence or have an impact. And they often relinquish their power to people who may not have their best interests at heart. Many women admit to having a committee of people—spouse, kids, boss, relatives, neighbors—deciding how they should run their lives. "Pretty soon your realize that you’re not in charge of your own life," said Moore.

Feelings of powerlessness can occur when women have achieved positional power before adequately developing their personal power. "I believe this is a set-up for failure," said Moore. "And if not for failure, then for tremendous amounts of stress.

"If personal power hasn’t been developed, it means that we are uncomfortable or ill at ease in our positions of power," she added. "We have some difficulty in making things happen, in telling people what to do, in taking risks." External factors cause some feelings of powerlessness in women. "Powerlessness is a key part of the cultural inheritance of women," said Moore. "The lives we lead are in part, defined by a belief that women have no power."

Those external factors can manifest themselves in a variety of ways, such as in pieces of business equipment that are created for men rather than women. Moore pointed to her clip-on microphone as an example. "This microphone was made for men wearing neckties," she noted. "For women, it’s a symbol of powerlessness because women have nothing to clip the microphone to."

While feelings of powerlessness contribute to stress, the mistaken belief that being in control is the same as being in charge also plays a role. Moore said there’s a vast difference between the two. "Control needs other to do what we do, to think what we think," she said. Control also represents holding in, much like the feeling you get when you tighten your muscles and constrict your breath.

When you attempt to control something, you shut down your ability to think clearly, act rationally and be open to new ways of doing things. Moore suggested that women try "exchanging your need to be in control for a goal of being in charge." Being in charge is relaxing. It is being aware and open and growth and unrestricted.

Not surprisingly, the ways women think and feel about power have changed over the years. When Moore asked audience members how many felt powerful, about 90% raised their hands. "If I had asked the same question 20 years ago in a group this size (125) about three women would have said they feel powerful," she noted.

How much power you have depends upon your perception. "If you said, ‘I feel pretty powerful,’ ask yourself how big the gap feels on where you are and where you need to be," said Moore. "You might feel powerful, but if you think about it, how much power do you really have?"

And how much power you need depends upon what you hope to achieve. When Moore asked the audience how much power they needed to enter the new century, applause filled the air when one woman responded: "As bloody much as you can get."

Moore encouraged her audience to assess what kind of gap they have between the power they need and the power they have. "We women are not as good at analyzing systems as we are at analyzing ourselves," she explained. That’s because we haven’t the information. In hierarchies, people are stingy with information."

For women whose positional power might be lacking, Moore pointed out that personal power can help a woman lead from where she is at the moment.

And the perception of power is just as important as actual power, as any "assistant to" can testify. She related a story of a little girl who, when told she was too small to sit in the front seat of the car, climbed in the back seat and asserted: "This IS the front seat."

While a promotion may not be on the horizon, women can gain more power by starting to reclaim the personal power they’ve given away.

• Learn to be assertive. You know what you think, feel, believe and can do
• Learn to negotiate in a positive way. Define the problem, decide what you want, design a strategy and do it.
• Set goals. Focus on understanding what you are striving for, what you want, what you need and begin to write it down and say it aloud.
• Establish priorities. This will gently push you in the direction of being straightforward and honest, at least with yourself, and will help you use your time wisely.
• Create a visual image of your goal
• Learn conflict resolution and conflict management skills
• Meditate regularly
• Exercise rigorously and aerobically
• Choose healthy eating habits.

It’s a myth that in order to be power-full, someone else must be power-less, Moore said. "The reality is that each of us can have as much power as we'll need and as much as we are willing to risk getting for our use."

Excerpted from Women in Higher Education, September 1999

It took more than a year of fussing with tape measures, typing out a 13 cm stack of [pleading memos, and haggling with her department chair, dean and provost, but Nancy Hopkins finally won an additional 19 square meters of lab space to expand her promising work on the mutagenesis of zebrafish. It wasn’t until a few months later, as she sat writing a grant proposal on a cold Saturday morning in early 1994, that the ignominy of the experience hit her.

"I suddenly realized by own insignificance, my lack of value" in the eyes of her colleagues, recalls the 56-year-old tenured molecular biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She reran in her mind a long series of unpleasant incidents that had dogged her 26 years at the institute—from the big fight for a little lab space to an ongoing battle with male professors over ownership of an undergraduate course she had developed. And for the first time in her career, she felt that the common thread was gender—that she was of less account than her male colleagues and that her accomplishments were all but invisible in a primarily male world. "It was as if I didn’t exist. It was a very strange sensation and very unpleasant. Fortunately, it turned to anger."

The fruits of that anger landed Hopkins on a White House dais this past April, where she discussed gender inequities in her workplace as she sat between an admiring U.S. President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary. Even more surprising was the astonishing admission just weeks before by MIT President Charles Vest that the university had been guilty of systematically depriving distinguished women scientists like Hopkins of their fair share of salary, lab space, and other resources.

Hopkins’ sudden celebrity coupled with MIT’s admission and an accompanying report are part of a new groundswell of concern about the status of women professors in the sciences. A congressionally mandated committee is holding public hearings on the issue, a series of recent symposia have focused attention on the small number of female researchers, and faculty women and sympathetic male colleagues around the country are debating the matter more openly with administrators.

In contrast to the bitter affirmative action battles of the 1970s and ‘80s—marked by legislation and angry marches—the new challenge to university administrators is quieter but potentially more formidable, for it is being mounted by respected professors with tenure. They have chosen to spend their careers inside the academic enclave—and so are lock in, as Virginia Woolf put it—but now they find themselves frustrated by the glass ceiling that many male and female academics say still separates the sexes at universities. "We probably won’t be as radical as previous activists, since we want to work within the system rather than be confrontational," says Cynthia Friend, the sole woman chemist on Harvard’s faculty and co-founder of a new panel seeking to increase the number of women researchers at that university.

Their task is quite different and in some ways more difficult than that of their predecessors. Rather than confronting open opposition from institutions, they are struggling with subtle inequalities stemming from the unconscious attitudes of individuals.

The numbers tell part of the story. After nearly 2 decades of struggle, resulting in considerable gains, women still make up only 12.5% of senior faculty in the natural sciences and engineering at all U.S. universities and 4-year colleges. In the top 90 U.S. research universities in 1995, less than 10% of senior faculty were women. And at the very top of the academic heap, the numbers are particularly lopsided: In 1995 less than 5% of Harvard’s senior faculty were female, and at the MIT campus just down the street, women made up only 6.2% of the top ranks.

The fact that women tend to leave the scientific track at much higher rates than men is well-documented. Now there is disturbing evidence that even the highly successful women who remain in academia and prosper may feel desperately unhappy and out of the loop with their colleagues. That unhappiness gets transmitted to younger women starting out and may help scare a new generation away from academia many researchers warn.

The situation may be most acute at leading, where, for reasons that are under debate, senior women tend to be fewer and thus more isolated. The way these top schools deal with the problem of women faculty will have national effects. "When an institution like MIT say, ‘Yes, we have a problem,’ it puts a lot of pressure on everyone else," says Marc Kastner, chair of MIT’s physics department.

Hopkins is an unlikely ringleader for women’s rights. "Feminism?" she asks. "I avoided it like the plague throughout my entire career. I thought it belonged to a previous generation." Nobel Prize-winning biologist Barbara McClintock, who befriended Hopkins early in her career, tried to warn her. She said that in terms of discrimination, "to be a woman scientist is worse than to be black in America," recalls Hopkins, who was aghast at the comparison. In a 1976 letter to her young colleague, McClintock noted that "successful competition with men is just out of the question . . . even when the woman is intellectually superior." At the time, Hopkins thought the message too harsh. "I didn’t want to hear it. I felt totally accepted."

It wasn’t until nearly 20 years later, secure in an MIT tenured professorship, that her first real doubts were sown as she struggled for the additional lab space. Then a course she had developed was taken over by other (male) professors, who wanted to commercialize it, and she stopped teaching entirely in protest. After her realization in January 1994 she decided to send a letter to Vest spelling out her mistreatment, and she asked a politically savvy female colleague to read it first. When that woman, whom Hopkins declines to name, asked to sign it as well, "I was completely dumbfounded. I wasn’t alone anymore." With trepidation, Hopkins and two other colleagues began to talk with the other 14 tenured MIT women scientists among a total science faculty of 280. "I was so embarrassed—these were very distinguished researchers, and I worried they would think I was one of those feminist types who just isn’t good enough so I’m complaining," says Hopkins.

The women had never before met as a group, but they quickly discovered common ground. Within weeks, all but one agreed there was a problem that required immediate action, and they scheduled an audience in August with Robert Birgeneau, dean of science.

Birgeneau was ready to listen. To the dean, the meeting in his conference room that August day was "akin to a religious experience." Each woman took a turn discussing her career at MIT, relating stories of condescension from male colleagues, a veil of invisibility that seemed to drape their accomplishments, and general frustration over benefits, resources, and administration support. The women agreed that the slights were typically not overt but rather stemmed from unconscious attitudes. Senior women simply did not get as much respect from their colleagues as senior men. "Death by a thousand pinpricks" is how one woman describes the experience.

The effect on Birgeneau, she recalls, was electrifying. "It was not possible to explain why the vast majority were extremely unhappy people" because of purely individual experiences. "I became convinced that this was a systemic issue." He agreed that the women could form a committee to gather data.

But department chairs were reluctant to admit that there was any kind of discrimination—conscious or unconscious—and strongly opposed the creation of the committee. But the effort went forward, thanks in large part to Birgeneau, who with the support of Vest brought the two sides together. Hopkins recalls an impasse at a 27 September 1994 meeting between the women and the seven male department heads in which six of the seven remained opposed. "They just sat their looking stony," says Hopkins. But Birgeneau brokered a deal to add several distinguished male scientists to the committee, defusing the opposition, and the panel first met in February 1995.

The data the group gathered over the next 3 years with the dean’s assistance surprised even the tenured women. In one department, for example, they discovered that although both male and female junior faculty members had roughly 185 square meters of lab space, senior male faculty members had about 280 square meters, whereas their female counterparts had the same amount as their juniors. The number of university-granted awards within departments was often similarly skewed as well.

Perhaps the most shocking statistic was the most obvious: The total number of female faculty members in the sciences had not changed much since the days when McClintock had written to the young Hopkins. For more than 10 years, from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, the figure had hovered around 20, out of about 280, or about 7.1%--a period during which the national pool of female science Ph.Ds grew steadily.

The committee also interviewed each woman professor in depth. They found that although junior women had relatively few complaints, tenured women felt marginalized and excluded from the workings of their departments. For example, several said they were excluded from search committees and encouraged to do more teaching than research. "The data part of the report has been overrated," says Birgeneau. "The descriptive part is as important. If these outstanding and high-achieving people are miserable, that is a crucial kind of data point." Much of the unhappiness, he says, originated in "daily insults—mostly unintended—and in obvious things like space."

Birgeneau didn’t wait for a final report to move on the most obvious problems. "They started fixing things immediately," Hopkins says. "Salaries, space, awards . . . they got right on it. The dean also focused on building up the numbers of female faculty members: "I put a lot of pressure on the department heads to make sure they were working hard to find women candidates—and that has been very successful." And indeed, since 1994, the number of women faculty in the school of science has grown more than 50%, from 22 to 34, as the number of men dropped from 252 to 222. The administration clearly took the women’s concerns seriously, and although the 150-page report was deemed confidential, a summary was made public last spring, generating an unprecedented wave of publicity for MIT. That publicity culminated in Hopkins’ trip to the While House.

MIT is now setting up similar committees in the other four schools. Each will examine teaching loads, search committee membership, and benefits, along with salaries, space and award issues. "We want this effort to spread," says Gibson, who leads the engineering school’s women’s committee. She says she feels that the administration is committed to doing so, although she worries that some areas, such as benefits—which many women say are out of step with the realities of two-career marriages and child care—require a more dramatic overhaul than MIT has been willing to consider. Gibson adds that the spotlight of publicity will help ensure continued change: "If they don’t keep moving, they will look hypocritical."

Just two subway stops away, Cynthia Friend says she has no complaints about salary, resources, or benefits. But she and a handful of other female as well as male senior faculty members echo the chief concerns of their MIT colleagues: too few women and too little respect and power for the few who are there.

Friend is in fact quite isolated: She is the sole woman among Harvard’s 21 chemistry and one of only 10 tenured women, out of 156 tenured professors, in the natural sciences. One-third of Harvard’s natural science departments have no senior women at all, and nearly half have no junior female faculty members.

None of this particularly bothered Friend as a junior professor. It is only as a mature faculty member, trying to have an impact on the institution, whether in organizational issues, hiring, or student requirements, that she has become frustrated. "This isn’t about quality of life; this is really about power, about respect from colleagues," she says.

As a first step, Friend set out to change the statistics. She joined forces with other tenured professors and gained an audience with Jeremy Knowles, the powerful dean of Harvard’s arts and sciences faculty. He welcomed their initiative to encourage the hiring of more women scientists at both the junior and senior levels. Their plan is not to force more hires but rather to meet with department chairs to create a strategy for increasing the pool of women candidates in each discipline.

Knowles is under pressure from above as well as from below. The university’s board of directors last spring urged Harvard President Neil Rudenstine to take specific steps as quickly as possible to increase the number of women faculty in all departments. The board said that the numbers were deplorable. "This has been a gnawing problem for too long, and something should be done," particularly about the stagnant numbers of junior women faculty members.

Ultimately, tracking progress and encouraging action fall to those at the top and some are skeptical that hiring women is a priority at Harvard’s most senior levels. "Saying this is a departmental issue is really passing the buck," says one female former junior professor who left Harvard after no getting tenure. "The has to be a clear and specific directive at the level of the dean and the president. "The attitude here is ‘Oh yes, we would like more women,’ but because no one is focused on this attitude, change is very slow, " says one Harvard Chemist.

The winds of discontent at MIT and Harvard appear to be spreading south and west. One MIT physicist visited the University of Texas, Austin to discuss research matters. She was ushered into an auditorium of 250 people eager to hear about the MIT report and her experiences as a woman scientist. Hopkins reports similar reactions during her visits to universities. "The universality of these issues is astounding," she says.

Meanwhile, the congressionally chartered Commission on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in Science, Engineering and Technology Development is holding public hearings and is formulating a report on specific strategies for how to deal with the slow pace of change in academia as well as business and government.

Hopkins maintains that universities and science as a whole will be the ultimate beneficiaries of the push to boost the numbers and improve the lot of women researchers in academia. Improving the lives of female professors will also likely have a long-lasting effect on the career choices of the next generation, advocates say. If role models feel marginalized, female students are likely to opt out of academia.

Certainly students encountering Hopkins today will get a different picture of life in academia than those who met her 5 years ago. Although she still worries that recent gains are fragile, the change in attitude toward women at MIT has in turn transformed her own attitude. "I used to be so unhappy much of the time," she says. "Learning how to access the resources of MIT, my own life has become a fairy tale. I feel incredibly lucky to be here now."

Excerpted from Science, Nov. 12, 1999