From the President's Desk

Another academic year closes and a renewal time begins for faculty. We contemplate the current and future missions of the Academic Women's Network. We honored two excellent Washington University School Of Medicine female graduates, Arielle Stanford MD and Audrey Ettinger PhD, with the Academic Women's Network Leadership Awards. We have studied the feedback from our first Women's Health Issues Symposium and are planning this as an annual event. Mark your calendars now for December 10, 1999! Topics that will be presented this year include gender-based research, domestic violence, prenatal screening, lipid metabolism, aging of skin, and adolescent ObGyn. Continuing education of peers and colleagues in the medical community is perhaps one of the most beneficial and influential professional services we perform. We are working with the new Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, Lynn Cornelius MD, to formulate a more detailed study and increase communication of faculty concerns identified in the Task Force Survey. We continue our partnership with our Hilltop colleagues of the Association of Women Faculty by actively sharing our experiences and support. The Academic Women's Network and individual members have been proud to contribute to the challenge grant for the endowment of a chair in Women's Studies. While these achievements are laudable, membership in AWN has declined. A relatively small core of dedicated individuals has accomplished these works which benefit both female and male faculty.

It is time to infuse this organization with the new energies of all members. On September 28, 1999 the Academic Women's Network will host a meeting of the entire membership in the King Center at 4 PM. At that time all members should voice their opinions regarding issues we should be addressing on behalf of our missions of mentoring, collaboration, and faculty development. We will re-examine the goals of our existing committees, standing and Ad Hoc, [http://pathbox.wustl.edu/~awn/constitution.html], to determine the interest level among members for these special focus groups. New committees may be necessary to address our professional challenges. This is an excellent opportunity to help define our direction(s). The meeting and reception will also welcome women faculty who may not (yet) be members to join the Academic Women's Network and actively contribute ideas and perspectives to the issues confronting women faculty both in research and clinical practice at the medical school. I encourage each current member to bring two colleagues, one who is a member and one who wants to see what we're about before she joins.

In closing, I have been honored to represent this brilliant and talented group of colleagues this past year and will continue the work for our advancement. Dr. Diana Gray assumes the Presidency of AWN for the 1999-2000 academic year. Please pledge to her your strength and enthusiasm as we proceed to the next era of our development.

Barbara Zehnbauer, Ph.D

President, Academic Women's Network

The women professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology presumed that their numbers were low for the reason everyone had accepted as fact: Girls just don't like science. Then they took out their tape measures. Sneaking around the nation's most prestigious institute of science in 1994, 15 women went office to office comparing how much space MIT awarded women with what men of equal status got. It was less by about half. Salaries were less, too. As was the research money given to women. And the numbers of women on committees that made decisions about hiring and funding. There were no women department heads and never had been. And while MIT lavished raises on men who got job offers elsewhere, it simply let the women leave. They might have been expected to leave, anyway, since MIT had made most of them so miserable.

Like most universities facing complaints of bias, MIT at first resisted the women's charges of inequity, resisted even giving them data they asked for. But unlike schools that have waited for lawsuits to act, MIT did something rare in academia: The institute looked at the numbers and admitted it was wrong. And in a report that will be presented to the faculty later this month, MIT's top administrators, all white men, will admit they have discriminated against women for years, in ways that are subtle and unintentional but very real. MIT has done more.

In the four years since the women faculty first suggested there was bias, the institute has raised women's salaries an average of 20 percent, to equal men's; increased research money and space for women; awarded them key committee seats; and increased the pensions of a handful of retired women to what they would have been paid if the salary inequities had not existed. It's all because three unhappy women professors happened to compare notes one day.

The story of how these women got MIT to recognize and acknowledge bias offers a portrait of how discrimination works, often so subtly that many women themselves don't believe it exists. "I have always believed that contemporary gender discrimination within universities is part reality and part perception," MIT president Charles M. Vest wrote in a letter prefacing the report. "True, but I now understand that reality is by far the greater part of the balance."

It might have been easy in 1995 to dismiss the numbers as a reflection of the national picture. A full academic generation into the women's movement, only 26 percent of tenured faculty nationwide were women, compared with 18 percent in 1975. It's not that women aren't entering academia; in 1995, 43 percent of faculty in tenure-track positions nationwide were women, according to the American Association of University Professors. The problem has been especially pronounced at elite universities. Because the numbers were so small, a woman who suspected discrimination might as easily conclude that she was the victim of circumstances particular to her case.

That began to change in 1994, when MIT told Nancy Hopkins, a prominent DNA researcher, that it would discontinue a course she had designed that was now required for 1,000 students a year. She had worked for five years to develop the course; in the previous two years, a male professor had joined her in teaching it. The man, MIT informed her, was going to turn the course into a book and a CD-ROM - without her. Hopkins drafted a letter to Vest about how she felt women researchers were treated, which she described as her "enough is enough" letter.

When Hopkins discussed it with a woman colleague, she asked to sign it, too. They got to talking about their situations, and eventually the discussion expanded to a third tenured woman on the faculty. They decided to poll every tenured woman in the School of Science - one of five at MIT - to see whether what they had experienced were individual problems or part of a pattern. They were surprised to find out how fast they got their answers.

Within a day, they had talked to all 15 tenured women (there were 197 tenured men) and agreed that there was a problem and that something had to be done. True to their fields, they looked first at the data. The proportion of tenured women on the faculty had not moved beyond 8 percent for two decades. There was little hope for change: Only 7 women were on the tenure track, compared to 55 men.

Plenty of women were entering science in the first place. In half the six departments in the school of science, there were more women undergraduates than men. Was child rearing part of the problem? Certainly, childbearing years coincide with the years when most women get tenure. And, true, of the women with tenure, half had children, which is statistically low. But that was a minor part of the story. The main part was resources.

Much of the problem had to do with the way MIT paid salaries, requiring professors to raise a portion of their salaries from outside grants. And women were required to raise twice as much in grants as men. Getting the information the women needed was not without struggle. When they asked for information on space awarded to women, MIT insisted they got the same space as men. But when the group checked the numbers, the women realized that was only because the institute had counted office and lab space for women, but only office space for men.

Individually, some women said they had sensed discrimination but feared that they would be dismissed as troublemakers or that their work would suffer from the distraction of trying to prove their point. "These women had devoted their lives to science," Hopkins said. "There was a feeling that if you got into it, you weren't going to last; you'd get too angry." But the hurdles in getting research money, space, or support were already costing them time. "It takes 50 percent of your time and 90 percent of your psychic energy," Hopkins said. "Time is everything in science. Six months can cost you the Nobel Prize."

Within a few months, the women presented a report to Robert Birgineau, dean of the School of Science. "The unequal treatment of women who come to MIT makes it more difficult for them to succeed, causes them to be accorded less recognition when they do, and contributes so substantially to a poor quality of life that these women can actually become negative role models for younger women," the women wrote. In short, they said, they were so miserable that any young woman looking up at them would think, "Why would I want that?" All 15 women crowded into his office to present the report.

"There are many unhappy faculty at a university, so for each one, you might be able to rationalize why that person might be unhappy," Birgineau said last week. "But meeting this whole group of women together, it was very much the whole was more than the sum of the parts. You could not rationalize their situations as based on the idiosyncrasies of individuals. It took this set of women coming together and speaking in one voice to see what the issues were.

" Birgineau", Hopkins said, "became a total convert." He did his own quick investigation to see if the numbers were correct. (They were.) And he made quick remediation. Immediately, he boosted women's salaries an average of 20 percent and eliminated the requirement that women raise part of their salaries from grants; MIT is moving to eliminate the system for men, as well. He began aggressively recruiting more women faculty. He also moved to set up a committee that would investigate gender inequities further, as the women faculty had requested. While the women had anecdotal evidence of similar bias in the four other schools at MIT, they and the dean decided, to save time, to limit the investigation to the School of Science.

But merely setting up the committee took six months, as Birgineau struggled to persuade department heads that a problem existed. The department heads suggested that the women simply didn't do as well in the masculine, competitive culture of MIT. Finally, with a push from Vest, the department heads agreed to participate. The committee consisted of a woman from each of the six departments in science - except for math, because there were no women math professors - and three department heads. One woman told the committee how her department head had withheld the fact that she had children when her name came up for tenure; it would be a strike against her, he told the woman. Another told how she told her male supervisor she wanted to run a larger lab. "Do you think you can?" he asked.

The report, stripped of the most damning stories about individuals, was released to faculty members on the institute's Web page this week and will soon be released in a faculty newsletter. It acknowledges that there is evidence of "subtle differences in the treatment of men and women," "exclusion," and, in some cases, "discrimination against women faculty." The inequities, the report said, extended to salaries, space, research, and inclusion of women in positions of power. An underrepresentation of women making key decisions had bred male "cronyism" that for women meant "unequal access to the substantial resources of MIT." While junior women faculty were generally supported, their supervisors began to marginalize them as they advanced. "It's not as if this was an institution that didn't want women," said Molly Potter, a cognitive scientist. "There's acceptance of them in general. "But when it came to decisions about who gets what, who succeeds, who gets the creamy appointments, who gets the awards that can be distributed by recommendation or the will of the department head, it's the buddy system," Potter said. "The men were the buddies of the men."

The report dismisses the argument that women didn't succeed because they weren't good enough. "The opposite was undeniably true," it says, noting that 40 percent of the 15 women have been named members of the National Academy of Sciences or the Academy of Arts and Sciences.

It wasn't just men who raised talent as an explanation for women's failure to thrive; some women had secretly worried it might be true about themselves. And that was precisely what made it so hard for them to speak up for so many years. "It's very tough, because the whole debate about affirmative action we're having in this country is based on the fact that along with affirmative action comes the feeling on the part of the recipient that 'maybe I only got here because I am a woman or a black or something,'" said Lotte Bailyn, the dean of the MIT faculty and a professor at the Sloan School of Management who studies barriers to women and minorities in the workplace. "It's clearly not true here, as I think in most places, but many women don't want to get caught in the possibility that they or other people might think so."

MIT has responded, as one woman said, with "more progress in one year than was accomplished in the previous decade." In addition to salary, space, and resource increases, Birgineau said he expects to have a 40 percent increase in the number of women with tenure next year, bringing the percentage to above 10 for the first time. The institute corrected some pensions, one by $130,000, the other by $80,000.

MIT is also looking at ways to allow women to incorporate child raising into scientific careers, with, for instance, a provision allowing them to stop teaching and then get back on the tenure track without penalty. Significantly, Birgineau said, five of the six women expected to get tenure this year have children.

The report urges the establishment of committees in the four other schools at MIT and a similar effort to consider why minorities have not made progress in science. A cynic could argue that the institute addressed the problems only because it realized it might soon be looking at a lawsuit. The federal government last month filed suit against Stanford, for instance, for not doing enough to aid the progress of women.

But among the women, any cynicism yields to gratitude. "I was unhappy at MIT for more than a decade," one woman told the committee. "I thought it was the price you paid if you wanted to be a scientist at an elite academic institution. "After ... the dean responded, my life began to change," she said. "My research blossomed; my funding tripled. Now I love every aspect of my job. It is hard to understand how I survived - or why."

This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 03/21/99. Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company. The MIT report can be accessed online at http://web.mit.edu/fnl/women/women.html

In March, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a document called "A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT," which reported on gender discrimination against female faculty members in its School of Science. The process that produced the report began five years ago, when some of the tenured female faculty members in science -- of whom I was one -- started to collect evidence that their male peers had received a disproportionate share of laboratory space and resources for research.

That evidence led to the creation of the Committee on Women Faculty in the School of Science, which in turn documented that -- through subtle and largely unconscious discrimination -- most of the senior female professors in the school had received lower salaries and fewer resources for research than their male counterparts, and had been excluded from significant roles within their departments. Once the committee presented its preliminary findings to Robert J. Birgeneau, the dean of the school, in 1995, he took prompt action to redress inequities.

He first addressed problems that can seriously impede productivity in research and teaching, and he redistributed more equally the benefits that signal institutional respect for faculty members. For example, a number of senior women who had been underpaid received salary increases; several women who had not received discretionary funds from the administration for years got money for research; some women got more space; and some got funds for renovations of their labs or offices.

Birgeneau also worked with department heads to insure that female professors were asked to join committees involved in hiring new faculty members, and he helped several departments recruit new senior female professors.

Those efforts have led to an increase in the number of female faculty members in science, most notably in tenured positions. They also have improved the professional lives of many tenured women. As one professor told me recently, "I had decided to leave M.I.T., but when they showed that they appreciated me and my area of research, I decided to stay. As a result of the dean's and the department head's actions over the past two years, we have become the No. 1 department in my field in the country. I am extremely happy here now."

"I was unhappy at M.I.T. for more than a decade," another woman had commented earlier. "I thought it was the price you paid if you wanted to be a scientist at an elite academic institution. After the committee formed and the dean responded, my life began to change. My research blossomed, my funding tripled. Now I love every aspect of my job. It is hard to understand how I survived those years -- or why."

Until this March, the work of the Committee on Women Faculty in the School of Science had been largely unknown at M.I.T. Determined that its successes be publicized more widely, Lotte Bailyn, chair of the M.I.T. faculty, encouraged the dean and members of the committee to produce a report on its work that would protect the confidentiality of the data that the committee had collected. That was the report released in March. It was accompanied by comments from Charles M. Vest, president of M.I.T.; Dean Birgeneau; and Professor Bailyn. All three accepted the conclusion that female faculty members had been the object of gender discrimination. Further, the administration praised the courage and leadership of the women who had brought the problem to light.

The response to the report's release was unanticipated. Within days, the report and the administration's endorsement of its conclusions received front-page coverage in The Boston Globe and The New York Times. Numerous articles and editorials soon followed in newspapers around the country. I was invited to the White House, where President and Mrs. Clinton and Labor Secretary Alexis M. Herman praised the courage of the M.I.T. administration and the tenured female faculty members in science, and expressed their hope that M.I.T.'s handling of gender discrimination could serve as a model for other institutions.

The report also elicited an outpouring of e-mail messages to administrators and female faculty members at M.I.T. who had been involved in the study. Many messages congratulated M.I.T. on its honesty; many also reported that gender discrimination is alive and well at the writers' institutions, too. The most moving messages came from women who had conducted studies of gender bias on their own campuses, or who had fought discrimination as individuals, only to be told by their administrators that their perceptions and data were wrong, that there was no gender discrimination. A number of those cases have led to lawsuits.

Together, the messages suggest that gender bias is widespread in academe, and they raise the possibility that it is present in medicine, the law, and business as well. At the White House, where I listened to women who work in diverse occupations, I learned that the problem may be universal in the workplace.

The release of the report has already led to efforts to analyze the status of female faculty members at M.I.T.'s other schools. Robert A. Brown, the provost, and Lawrence S. Bacow, the chancellor, have stated that they are committed to working for meaningful change.

Given the successes in the School of Science; the support of the president, provost, and chancellor; and the positive response to the report, one might think that gender bias has been eradicated at M.I.T. Although I believe the events I have described may prove to be a quantum leap toward a solution, the changes so far have come from above, while the problem of gender bias that the committee documented originates at the level of the departments. Have significant changes occurred at that level?

In some departments where the dean worked closely with administrators to reverse and prevent the marginalization of tenured female faculty members, there appears to be a heightened awareness of gender discrimination. However, within M.I.T., the most striking response to the release of "A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT" has been profound silence. Worse, some administrators have stated that gender bias does not exist in their departments or centers. Thus, at the level where discrimination is practiced, it appears that little has changed. The lack of understanding that precipitated the initiative in the first place, and that apparently has been common at other institutions as well, is still present in some parts of M.I.T.

While disappointing, perhaps such a response should not be surprising. The senior female faculty members and the three men who served on the committee spent many dozens of hours documenting and discussing gender bias. But the roughly 900 remaining faculty members at M.I.T., including about 225 in the School of Science who did not participate in the report, did not have the benefit of that experience. Some faculty members may find it difficult to accept the conclusions of others about the existence of gender bias. Some female faculty members suspect that the silence around us exists because many of our colleagues do not yet believe, or at least do not understand, the results of the report.

Besides not having had the benefit of participating in in-depth discussions of the data, many faculty members have had few opportunities to observe gender bias at M.I.T. We have learned that recognizing discrimination -- no matter how egregious -- against a single woman is difficult. Nor is it usually sufficient to open one's eyes to understanding how unconscious assumptions concerning gender can result in inequalities between male and female faculty members. Because most departmental administrators deal with only a few female professors --who are rare at M.I.T. -- they can easily fail to see the pattern of discrimination that emerged when data for all of the tenured women in science were pooled. Many administrators assume, incorrectly, that they will be able to detect bias if it is occurring in their departments. Not only is that untrue, but those individuals may even be a source of bias.

If many faculty members and administrators are still unable to recognize subtle gender bias, how can the changes that took place in the School of Science be made permanent? The committee recognized that reforms could easily be undone if Dean Birgeneau and many of the committee members were to leave the school. Therefore, the members wrote a set of recommendations to try to institutionalize the progress that has occurred. Those recommendations include continuous monitoring of data by administrators and female professors to insure equity, placing female faculty members on search committees and in decision-making positions within departments, and removing administrators who knowingly discriminate against female faculty members.

It was to help insure permanent change by educating faculty members and by making it impossible for administrators to claim ignorance that Professor Bailyn pressed for the release of the report in March. She also called for all of the schools at M.I.T. to establish committees to monitor gender equity. The deans of the four other schools are working now with female faculty members to set up those committees.

I believe that the public commitment of powerful administrators at M.I.T. -- particularly President Vest -- to eradicate gender bias there by working with female faculty members is a milestone in the long struggle to end gender discrimination in academe. In the end, it will enable M.I.T. to make institutional changes that will alter behaviors at the departmental level even if some hearts and minds lag behind.

The 15 tenured female faculty members in science at M.I.T. who first collected evidence of systematic discrimination against women were highly unpolitical individuals. We were motivated primarily by our desire to facilitate our research and teaching. When some of us resorted to tape measures to quantify the unequal distribution of space between male and female professors, we were seeking only to prepare a study so convincing that no one could deny us equity.

Recently, I asked President Vest why administrators at M.I.T. had worked with the women, accepted the study, and even agreed to make it public. "It's the scientific mindset," he replied. "Give us convincing data, and we go with it." Dean Birgeneau has said he was primarily motivated by a sense of fairness: "The women were being treated unfairly, and this was simply wrong."

It seems surprising that a group of scientists intent only on getting back to the laboratory should have uncovered what appears to be the need for a true social revolution. Civil-rights laws and affirmative action got women in the door of the academy and allowed a few to become highly successful scientists. But, as we have finally learned after 30 years, women were seldom granted equality. Even progressive policies could not completely erase a form of gender discrimination that, as Professor Bailyn wrote, is "subtle but pervasive, and stems largely from unconscious ways of thinking that have been socialized into all of us, men and women alike."

We have known for decades that few women have participated in making the important decisions that shape our universities. Further, as professors of science, we have long known that although we admit nearly equal numbers of male and female students in many areas of science, and although scientific talent and brilliance are equally distributed between the sexes, the career prospects for men and women are not equal. When we began our study, in the summer of 1994, I was amazed that after 25 years of affirmative action, there were only 15 tenured female faculty members in the six departments of science at M.I.T., compared with 194 tenured men. By the time we had finished the study, I was amazed that there were so many tenured women: It is notable that even 15 had succeeded in the face of such odds.

Looking back on what I have learned, I wonder now if there could be a better place for a social revolution to begin than at an institution of science and learning. Perhaps the ability of a handful of science professors to quantify gender bias, and the willingness of a few M.I.T. administrators to support their findings, will help open the way to true equality in the workplace.

Nancy Hopkins is a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

(From the Chronicle of Higher Education)

To further promote and expand the understanding and knowledge of women's health throughout the life span, the U.S. Public Health Service's Coordinating Committee on Women's Health proposes a framework for articulating, developing and implementing women's health research, services, and education throughout the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The theme of this framework is 'Women Living Long, Living Well.'

The report (January 1999) stated that "in the second decade of the next century, this nation will experience an unprecedented wave of women turning 65. By the year 2030, 1 in 4 women in the U.S. will be 65 or older. Ensuring that women reach that milestone healthier than ever is as critical to the well-being of this nation as it is to the women themselves.

"One of the benefits of biomedical research is data to drive national health policy. The Healthy People 2010 process is no exception, and numerous opportunities for expanding into new areas of focus, particularly related to women, were identified."

The Health People 2010 Objectives are available for review online at web.health.gov/healthypeople/2010

The National Cancer Institute has taken the lead in sponsoring a 1-day workshop on the long-term health effects of exposure to DES. The workshop is a follow-up to a meeting held in 1992. The workshop will provide an update on research and on progress in responding to the recommendations from the 1992 meeting, as well as a platform for discussion of current and future needs and recommendations for addressing those needs. For more information: FAX: (301) 650-8676.

The National Action Plan on Breast Cancer will sponsor a day of dialogue about the future of breast cancer. The Breast Cancer Action Plan is co-led by Fran Wisco, President of the National Breast Cancer Coalition and Wanda Jones, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Women's Health. The day of dialogue is scheduled for Sept. 27-28.

Also in the future-"The U.S. Public Healh Service's Office on Women's Health is planning a National Forum on the National Centers of Excellence in Women's Health to be held in Washington on November 1-2, 1999. The purpose of the Forum is to describe how other academic health centers can replicate a Center of Excellence in Women's Health program in their community. This program (COE) mandas to establish and evaluate a new model health care system that unites women's health research, medical training, clinical care, public health education, community outreach, and the promotion of women in academic medicine around a common mission-improving the health status of diverse women across the life span." (Surely, a representative from WUMS will be there?)

(--or Some Things Never Change)

In a recent New York Times article, Deborah Tennen wrote "Listening to Man, Then and Now: boasts have yielded to humor, but women are still the audience." Tann wrote, "In our era, the tactic of wooing by verbal performance takes a funny turn. Etiquette books of the 50's instructed young women to be good listeners if they wanted to win their men, and you need only look around a restaurant to see many women attentively listening to talking men. In place of battle yarns, what I hear, over and over, is that a woman fell in love because 'he makes me laugh . .'". "I don't hear the same explanation from men as to why they fall in love. What I hear is the corresponding one, as for example when Woody Allen said of his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn: 'She's a marvel. And she laughs at all my jokes'." (It's a short leap to extrapolate from the social scene to the work place.)

And, also from Tannen, who is quoted in the biography of Madeline Albright: "This need to prove that she is as smart as men at the bargaining table is one shared by many professional women. Prominent men are considered smart until they are proven stupid. Women tend to be considered stupid until proven smart. The suspicion is that they do not deserve to be there."

There's no point asking why it has taken St. Louis so long to have the Komen Race for the Cure. It will finally happen here? June 19 at 8:30 A.M. The race will raise funds for national (now international) and local breast cancer initiatives through the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, the largest private funder of breast cancer research in the nation. Having the race in St. Louis will increase public awareness about the epidemic, as well as raise funds for research. The BJC Health System is a major race sponsor. Call 747-0359 for an application and run, walk, and support the cause.

"Writing the past, claiming the future" is being designed to further conversations begun at previous conferences among historians of science, medicine, and technology. These discussions made explicit how much historians of science, medicine, and technology can learn from each other. It is intended to invite greater interchange among the disciplines, while recognizing the uniqueness of each.

Conference themes will include, but not be limited to, personal and external factors that empower or inhibit women's participation in the scientific, medical, and technological disciplines; scientific, medical, and technological ideas that have influenced ideas about gender and gender roles in the disciplines and in the wider society; and the relationship between gender and conceptions of knowledge and the practice of science, medicine, and technology.

Individual papers and panels are solicited on topics that explore the interdisciplinary relationships of women and gender and science, medicine, and technology. Conference organizers strongly encourage the submission of panels of two or three papers. We are particularly interested in panels that encompass a range of perspectives and stimulate "crosstalk" among scholars of different disciplines.

Proposals must include two copies of a one-page abstract and a one-page curriculum vitae. For proposals submitted as a panel, an abstract and vitae are required for each panel member. Proposals are due by January 1, 2000. If you have any questions or would like to be put on the mailing list to receive the conference brochure, please contact Charlotte G. Borst, Chair, Local Arrangements Committee (Department of History Saint Louis University 3800 Lindell Blvd. St. Louis, MO 63156). Conference materials will be available after August 1, 2000. Send proposals to: Writing the past, Claiming the future. c/o Charlotte G. Borst, Ph.D.