|
AWNings
The newsletter of the
Academic Women's Network
at Washington University
Vol. 2, No. 3 September 1993
New AWN Board Elected
|
Elections for AWN
officers and counselors for the academic year 1993-1994 were held
in June. Helen Donis-Keller was voted President-Elect. Sue Cullen
was re-elected as Secretary. Deborah Gersell was elected as Treasurer.
The two new counselors are Penny Shackelford and Jessie Ternberg.
Ellen Li assumed the post of President and Diane Merritt and Elaine
Krul are serving the second year of their terms as counselors.
Congratulations to all and thanks to everyone for their participation
as the Academic Women's Network enters its third year!
|
AWN Sponsors Address
by the Surgeon General
|
On September 16,
Dr. Joycelyn Elders, newly-confirmed Surgeon General of the United
States, addressed a standing room only crowd from the Washington
University Medical School community in Clopton Auditorium. In
her talk, Dr. Elders cited numerous startling statistics regarding
the health and well-being of children in the U.S. For example,
she noted that 1 in 4 children lives in poverty and that homicide
is the second most common cause of death in Americans between
the ages of 15 and 25. She indicated that she would focus her
energies as Surgeon-General on improving the health of children
and that she was particularly interested in reducing the number
of teen pregnancies. Her lecture was punctuated with personal
stories of her experiences as a pediatric endocrinologist and
as the Director of Public Health for the state of Arkansas. She
likened the fight for good public health to dancing with a bear--you
can't get tired and sit down.
Dr.
Elders talk was sponsored by the AWN and was followed by a reception
for AWN members and a small number of medical students. Dr. Elders
answered additional questions primarily from the medical students
and again cited the need to begin programs to promote the well-being
of children. She noted that laying the foundations for child health
reminded her of an old Greek proverb which says "A society becomes
great when old men plant trees in whose shade they will never
sit."
Special
thanks to Diane Merritt who invited Dr. Elders and was in charge
of her visit.
|
______________
|
AWN's Parenting
Resource Hand-book was published over the summer. All members
should have received notice of where they could pick up their
copy of this helpful handbook. The Handbook was provided to many
departments and offices within the University that deal with incoming
faculty and staff and has been well received by all. If you have
any comments, suggestions or additions for the Parenting Resource
Handbook, please direct them to Jo Seltzer, Chairman of the Child
care/Maternity Leave Committee.
|
Upcoming AWN-Sponsored
Events
|
September 30
- Receptor for women medical students, 4 p.m., King Room
November 3
- AWN Brown Bag Lunch - Juggling Motherhood and a Career.
Plans
are currently being made for the AWN Fall Dinner to be
held sometime in early November. Watch for the notices in your
mail!
|
Kudos
|
Dixie Anderson
was promoted to Professor in the Dept. of Radiology.
Cheryl Coffin
was promoted to Associate Professor in the Dept. of Pathology.
Ursula Goodenough
was elected President-elect of the American Society for Cell Biology.
She was featured as the ASCB Profile in the Society's newsletter.
Susan B. Mallory
received the Teacher of the Year Award for the 1992-1993 academic
year. The award was given by the Dermatology residents.
Diane Merritt
was promoted to Associate Professor in the Dept. of Obstetrics
and Gynecology.
Elizabeth Smith
(Dept. of Psychiatry) was featured in The Scientist for her work
with disaster victims. She will be studying the immediate responses
and long term recovery of this summer's flood victims. Smith also
received the 1993 American Academy of Clinical Psychiatrists Clinical
Research Award for best published paper of the year. The paper,
published in the June 1992 issue of the Annals of Clinical Psychiatry
journal, was titled "A Systematic Study of Mental Illness, Substance
Abuse and Treatment in 600 Homeless Men."
Isolde Thalmann
was awarded a 4 year RO1 grant from the NIH for work entitled
"Macromolecules of Cochlear Nonsensory Tissues and Fluids". She
is also co-investigator on a 3 year RO1 NIH grant titled "Proteins
of Organ of Corti and Surrounding Fluids."
|
The
Myth of the Math Gap
|
The assumption of
innate male mathematical superiority has been challenged by the
fifth- to twelfth-grade girls of UMTYMP--The University of Minnesota
Talented Youth Mathematics Program, a special five-year sequence
of accelerated after-school math courses.
Mathematician
Harvey Keynes, Ph.D., the director of this 15-year-old program,
admits that "for ten years, we had fewer females than males who
qualified and enrolled in our accelerated classes. Girls were
more likely to drop out, and their performance was lower than
the males."
Choosing
to assume that "the problem was not with the innate abilities
of the students, but with the whole learning environment," Dr.
Keynes and his colleagues tried to figure out what exactly was
holding the girls back. The problems, it turned out, were social,
not mathematical.
To
make the girls feel at home in what felt to them like a boy culture,
Dr. Keynes introduced all-girl events such as movies, bowling
and pizza parties. Because the boys outnumbered the girls, he
created some all-male classes, so the girls could be in classes
that were 50% female.
"A
big change occurred," says Dr. Keynes, when there were enough
girls so they could form real friendships. Without that support,
the girls seem to be more vulnerable to social stigmatization--the
'nerd factor'--than the boys."
Through
regular counseling with parents, they addressed two related problems
that were more pronounced in female than in male math students--lack
of parental encouragement and lack of self-confidence.
Within
three years of introducing these changes, the girls' enrollment
in the program increased from 22 to 40 percent, and the retention
rate of girls at all levels became even higher than the boys'.
Most telling, however, is the girls' current performance. During
the first two years of the program--the equivalent of four years
of high school math--Dr. Keynes says there is not "absolutely
equal performance of males and females by any reasonable measure."
To enter the next level of the program, which covers two years
of honors college calculus, the students take another, very difficult
screening test. "In the past," say Dr. Keynes, "most of the top
performers were male, but last year for the first time the percentage
of females in that top 25% was higher than their percentage in
the course. And the top scorer was a female."
From
Glamour Magazine, April 1993.
|
Women's
Health Update
by Helen Kornblum
|
For several years
Rep. Patricia Schroeder has said "Our goal is to make sure that,
by the end of the decade we know as much about women's health
as we know about men's. One of our new challenges will be to take
on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). We had the GAO do an
analysis of them last year and it determined that FDA was not
asking gender-specific questions of any of the drug companies
as they prepared drugs to go on the market. For example, we have
a very high percentage of young women in this country on oral
contraceptives, yet the FDA never asked how any new drug would
interact with them. The same is true with estrogen and other drugs.
That's an oversight that's really quite large. We need that information."
Finally,
on July 22, 1993 the FDA issued new guidelines on the participation
of women in clinical trials. Responding to growing concern over
the last decade that its policies may have contributed to low
levels of participation by women in drug development studies,
and thus to a paucity of information about the effects of drugs
in women, the Food and Drug Administration issued new guidance
on the participation of women in clinical trials and the analysis
of gender differences in the evaluation of drugs.
The
announcement reverses a 1977 FDA policy of excluding fertile women
from early studies of drugs, and reflects the agency's belief
that the risks of fetal exposure can be minimized by patient behavior
and laboratory testing, and that determinations of risk, furthermore,
are properly left to patients, physicians, local institutional
review boards and sponsors. The new guideline also reminds drug
developers that new drug applications should include analyses
of potential differences in drug actions or efficacy between the
sexes. Though the guideline language specifically focuses on the
drug development process, the agency intends the policy to apply
to the development of medical devices and biological products
as well.
In
addition, Reps. Patricia Schroeder and Olympia Snowe will introduce
two bills on September 14 to strengthen the FDA's policy for including
women in clinical investigations. The Pharmaceuticals Interactions
Safety Act, H.R. 2694, would require that clinical investigations
of drugs or biological products submitted to the FDA must include
investigations of the "possible interaction" of the drug or biological
product "with relevant female or male hormones or related substances
unless there is substantial evidence that there are no significant
interactions ... or the inclusion of such investigations is otherwise
inappropriate" under regulations to be developed by the Secretary
of Health and Human Services. The Pharmaceutical Testing Fairness
Act, H.R. 2695, would require the inclusion of women and members
of minority groups in clinical investigations of new drugs, biological
products, and medical devices.
These
two bills are part of the 32 bills that comprise The Women's
Health Equity Act. Among the new bills for the 103rd Congress
are those that deal with health professional education and how
it integrates women's health into training, the environment
Women's
Health is Controversial:
"You
can't look away any more" was the title of the story in the New
York Times Magazine, August 15. The cover featured a self-portrait
of Matuschka, a New York artist, showing her own mastectomy-scarred
chest. The reaction ran from outrage to shame to praise. I happen
to think the NYTs and Matushka did women a great service!
"Since
the number one risk factor for breast cancer is being a woman,
women are coalescing around breast cancer like gay men have around
AIDS," writes Bella English in The Boston Globe. It's every
woman's fear. And that fear, she writes, "has awakened a sleeping
giant." So, if you haven't sent a letter to President Clinton,
please do so. If you have, please make copies of the petition
and have your friends, family, colleagues, hairdresser, etc. write.
The letter writing campaign continues through September.
A woman's
health may be affected by the gender of her physician:
A
study recently reported in the New England Journal of Medicine
shows that women who see female internists are much more likely
to get Pap smears and mammograms, than those women whose internists
or family physicians are male. A finding was that young male physicians
were the least likely to perform Pap smears.
|
______________
Productivity
of Women and Men Scientists
|
Helen S. Astin (UCLA)
studied gender differences in the publication year of the high
impact work of male and female scientists. She was interested
to see if there were any gender differences in terms of three
basic questions: how the research originated; what obstacles were
encountered in conducting or publishing the research; and why
the authors believed their work was highly cited.
Astin
found that women tend to say their Citation Classic work was an
extension of their dissertation projects or the result of invitations
to prepare a review article. In contrast, men say they were driven
by the need to solve a problem. She speculated that these responses
indicate that women are more "passively" motivated by external
circumstances, while men are more "actively" engaged in problem
solving.
As
regards obstacles or barriers to research, only women mentioned
their colleague's lack of support--or even discouragement--of
their research project. Astin notes that this further supports
the suggestion that women scientists tend to be more sensitive
to external reinforcements than men are. Perhaps the most interesting
difference is the way men and women interpret the high citation
frequency of their work. The roles here seem to be reversed. That
is, men attribute their impact to circumstances rather than the
importance of their work--they say it had high impact simply because
of good timing and readability. In comparison, women make rather
positive assertions about their work--they tend to claim it was
the first of its kind, had wide applicability, and/or facilitated
subsequent research in the field. Astin interprets this as being
consistent with the suggestion that external reinforcements--in
this case, peer recognition by citations--are more important to
women scientists. It is important to stress that these gender
differences are largely conditioned by the social structure of
science. Astin speculated that women may be more passive and sensitive
to external validation because of their past experiences of discrimination
in education and the work place. In addition, she cites the well-documented
fact that men's and women's research do not receive equal recognition
or rewards in terms of salaries, promotions, etc. It will be interesting
to see whether these gender differences persist as more women
enter science and the career opportunities and professional rewards
for both men and women become more equitably distributed.
Excerpted
from Current Contents, August 30, 1993.
|
_______________
Sally
Elgin to Receive Distinguished Faculty Award
|
On October
30, Dr. Sally Elgin, Professor of Biology, will receive a Distinguished
Faculty Award. Dr. Elgin studies the interactions between proteins
and nucleic acids that underlie the structure of chromosomes and
upon which the activity of the genes in the chromosomes depend.
In addition to her research, Dr. Elgin has taught many popular
formal courses, served on Admissions and Graduate Advising Committees,
and has organized retreats, symposiums and colloquia. She is also
the Director of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Undergraduate
Biological Sciences Education Program. Her commitment to science
education is reflected in her participation in curriculum design
and development. She has extended her advocacy for improvement
in science education to the local community and to national forums.
Dr.
Elgin was nominated for this award by the AWN. Also receiving
this award is Susan Appleton, Professor, Washington University
School of Law, who has served as a legal advisor to the AWN in
their discussions of the Family Leave Policy currently being established
at WUMS.
|
______________
Interested in
Working on an AWN Committee?
|
Committees for the
1993-1994 academic year are currently. Anyone interested in participating
either as a committee member or a one-time contributor is urged
to contact the chairman of that committee.
Child
care/Maternity Leave
Jo Seltzer
Counseling/Social
Interactions
Rosalind
Kornfeld
Program
Committee
Diane
Merritt
Promotion/Tenure
Sherida
Tollefsen
Publications
Linda
Pike
Recruitment/Committee
Representation
Sondra
Schlessinger
|
|
Have you been
promoted, received a grant, award or other honor recently? AWNings
would like to know.
Name:
Dept:
Award
or Accomplishment:
Please
Mail to:
Linda Pike
Box 8022
Last modified:
September 12, 2003 |
|
