Rosalind Franklin (8/15/03)

I think many members would be interested in the following article about Rosalind Franklin published this month in Physics Today. The author, Lynne Elkins, comes to our meetings on occasion, and I have collaborated with her on history of women in science projects. She has interviewed Watson, Crick and virtually all the major players in the DNA discovery. Her analysis is very interesting.

Check out the following article: http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-56/iss-3/p42.html or try: www.aip.org/pt/ to get to Lynne's article about Rosalind Franklin that appears in Physics Today in March

Win Your Next Job With Three Essential Interview Skills (8/1/03)

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With competition for good jobs at an all-time high, candidates who conduct their job search as a sales campaign consistently win out over those who don’t. When job seekers practice the skills of sales experts they learn to apply the strategies of a sales presentation to their job interviews.

To get to the top of the candidate list, you’ll need these three essential sales skills:

1. Pre-interview preparation

2. Finding and using the interviewer’s “Hot Buttons”

3. Closing on the next step of the interview process

1. Pre-interview preparation

Every great sales presentation starts with pre-sales preparation which includes client research, and product analysis. Job seekers prepare for interviews similarly: research on the prospective employer and a thorough catalog of their own accomplishments to illustrate their potential contribution and worth to the employer.

Thanks to the internet, company research is relatively easy, especially on publicly held firms. A few good sources are Yahoo, Hoovers, Wall Street Journal archives as well as company web sites. Information on privately held companies is often readily available as well. One of the easiest ways to get such information is simply enter the company name in your favorite search engine and see what pops up.

Minimally, you’ll want to find out company size, products or services, major competitors, branch or head quarters and any recent news items. Time allowing, it’s also very helpful to know some of the major players in their organization; a little history on them and future products, markets or growth objectives.

Once you’ve done the research, prepare to communicate your value through your accomplishments. Examine your career for examples of how you have solved problems, saved money, increased revenue, or created revenue opportunities for your former employers. As much as possible, dollorize or quantify your contributions. Do not depend on your ability to “wing it” through your interviews. Ask any high-producing sales profession, they will tell you that it is impossible to wing your way to success. It takes preparation and practice.

Once you’ve prepared for the interview, don’t forget the next essential sales skill:

2. Finding and using the interview “Hot Buttons”

An interviewer’s hot button is his/her unspoken concerns or wishes.

It’s your job as the interviewee to uncover the interviewer’s hot button. If you don’t ask, he/she probably won’t tell you. There are two magic questions that will reveal the interviewer’s hot buttons.

1. “What do you see as the greatest challenge for this position?”

2. “What qualities do you see as most important for this position?”

Once you’ve asked the all important questions—shut up and listen!

After the interviewer has revealed his/her hot buttons, use the information to frame your answers to his/her questions. You’ll connect with the interviewer much faster once you sell yourself based on his/her motivations.

Now that you have their attention, don’t forget the most important skill:

3. Closing on the next step of the interview process

The term “closing” as a sales term that means influencing one to agree to take certain action (as in signing a contract or writing a check.) A complex sale involves a number of small closes before the ultimate closing purchase. The interview process is a series of closes leading up to the final job offer.

If you’ve purchased a car lately you know that the sale starts with the text drive and moves forward through a series of carefully crafted questions such as “do you prefer silver or black?” “Which of you will be the primary driver?” “Shall we park this in the sale-pending area” “Do you wish to trade in your car, or shall we finance this 100%” The effective sales person knows what closing steps must take place—attempt to skip the steps and he may loose the sale altogether.

As a clever sales person identifies the small closing steps needed to move the sale forward, so must the job seeker understand the closes necessary to keep the interview process moving forward toward a job offer. Those steps look something like this:

1. The cover letter must entice the reader to read your resume.

2. The resume must motivate the reader to call you in for an interview.

3. In the first interview ask for a second interview.

* “When would you like to schedule our next meeting”

* “Is there any reason you wouldn’t consider inviting me back for second interview?”

* “Who will I meet in the second interview?”

4. In the second interview ask to speak with the decision maker.

* “Who, besides yourself, will make the final hiring decision?”

* “When is convenient for Mr. /Ms. Decision Maker to meet with me?”

* “Is there any other presentation materials I should bring when I visit with Mr. /Ms. Decision Maker?”

5. When speaking with the decision maker ask for the job offer:

* “Are there any objections that prevent you from extending an offer?

* “When would you like me to start?”

* “What challenges would you have me tackle first?”

Asking for the next interview or the job offer may seem bold, but try it. You’ll find yourself invited back more often and feel much more in control of the interview process.

Once you’ve mastered and applied the three essential sales skills for effective interviews you’ll see your job-search efforts accelerate and your confidence soar.

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Deborah Walker, CCMC

Resume Writer ~ Career Coach

888-828-0814 or Deb@AlphaAdvantage.com

Call for FREE resume critique

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Regain Your Job-Search Optimism with Three Easy Steps (8/1/03)

If you’ve been in a job search for more than a few months, you already know that one of the greatest challenges is maintaining a positive attitude. Without it, going through the motions can feel as demotivating as running a race in lead boots. You begin to think “What’s the use? I’ve already sent out 50 resumes this week with nothing to show for it.”

If you find yourself in an emotional slump, here are three things you can do to regain a positive, optimistic outlook:

1. Write out a job-search action plan including these four areas:

* Search and respond intelligently to online and print job openings. To optimize your results take the time to customize your cover letters to each opportunity.

* Research potential employers to contact proactively in search of not-yet-posted job leads. Make sure your research includes contact names of key executive within the organizations. Again, customize your cover letters to illustrate your interest in their company and/or industry.

* Contact members of your personal network of friends, former colleagues and professional association members to let them know of your search. Continually build your network through new professional associations, job fairs, trade shows and business networking events. Involve yourself with others who will tell you of job leads in the “hidden” job market.

* Invest in an online resume distribution service that allows you to target your resume to employers and recruiters most likely interested in your qualifications. You’ll see quick results, allowing you to jumpstart your interview activity level.

Once you have your action plan, schedule these activities just as you would if employed on the job. Plan your work and work your plan.

2. Choose an accountability partner and support group. These are essential to keep you motivated and on track with your action plan and schedule. An accountability partner helps you reach your activity goals. A live support group (vs. online chat group) keeps you actively involved with others who understand your situation and can lend emotional support. Caution: avoid negative groups of job seekers who will drag you down by their pessimistic outlook.

3. Allow yourself to enjoy simple pleasures. Spend an evening with a great book. Take a walk on a sunny afternoon. Play football with your son. Meet a friend at a coffee shop for a long chat. Often job seekers think they don’t deserve any fun until they’ve found a job. The truth is there is more time for simple pleasures while unemployed than any other time in life. Once you’ve put your job-search action plan into practice and you’ve spent your time wisely in productive activities, reward yourself a little. You deserve it!

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Deborah Walker, CCMC

Resume Writer ~ Career Coach

888-828-0814

Visit the job-search article archive at Deb@AlphaAdvantage.com

Call for FREE resume critique

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Postdoc Network (1/26/03)

This month's Postdoc Network (PDN) highlights- All PDN articles are FREE. http://nextwave.sciencemag.org/pdn/ -Postdoc News Bytes- Stipend increases in jeopardy and a discussion about postdoc training. -Postdocs in High School Want to increase science literacy? Invite science postdocs to work with high school teachers and classes to develop science curricula and understanding. -PDN Bytes-A postdoc survey reveals that the postdoctoral experience is quite different for men and women and updates on tax policy for postdoc fellows.

Career Choices: Planned Happenstance You cannot plan chance events, but you can generate and take advantage of unexpected opportunities throughout your career.

Succeeding as a Minority Scientist: A Heart for Science The work of minority mentors can be an enormous stimulus for the next generation of minority scientists.

Interdisciplinarity and Tenure These days, universities and medical schools just love to hire young interdisciplinary scientists. But the honeymoon can be short, as many institutions fail the test of evaluating interdisciplinary research. Here's how to improve the odds of a fair tenure evaluation. http://nextwave.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2003/01/08/8

Juggling Work and Study Going back to school after several years of work isn't easy. But this determined young technologist isn't ready to give up her dream.

January's Feature: **Going Multidisciplinary** This month Next Wave's staff has put together a series of articles that will give you a snapshot of the opportunities for early career scientists in multidisciplinary research and of what it takes. The index is FREE at http://nextwave.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2002/12/30/3

GrantsNet: January News Advice for applying for NIH K awards; a review of FinAid, a scholarship resource; and the latest biomedical funding news. http://nextwave.sciencemag.org/awards.dtl

Unusual Ways to Catch a Recruiter's Eye Our Insider's Edge columnist reveals some of the unusual sources that recruiters exploit to find the best candidates.

The GrantDoctor A primer for foreign nationals and advice for researchers moving to another institution.

Bioview Women in Science Articles 1/16/03

BioView.com has several original articles on Women in Science that could be helpful to AWIS members.

Here are the links as provided by Holly Larsen of BioView.com:

The url to all the articles is:
http://www.biolinks.com/cgi-bin/list?category=articles&type=women&td=women


Urls for specific original articles follow:
A Commitment to Breast Cancer Research: Dr. Allison Jablonski discusses the ups and downs of an academic career
http://www.bioview.com/channels/wis/article_breastcancer.html
A Science Career with a Twist: A discussion with Dr. Mary Helen Barcellos-Hoff
http://www.bioview.com/channels/wis/article_careertwist.html
From Computers to Life Sciencehttp://www.bioview.com/channels/wis/article_computers.htmlRewriting the Story on Women's Salaries:Negotiating tips for your next interview
http://www.bioview.com/channels/wis/article_negotiate.html

MIT women faculty members were cited as top scientists 1/16/03

Seven MIT women faculty members were cited as top scientists by two well-known magazines. Check out this website: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/2002/women.html If any of you have girls in school, or work with young girls, this might be a good article to download. We need to encourage more young women to go into science-related fields. Thank you.

 Bush administration names first woman to head CDC (7/31/02)

Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children (6/16/02)

SHOW: Talk of the Nation

DATE: April 8, 2002

NEAL CONAN, host:

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington.

The past 30 years have offered women unparalleled economic opportunities, chances for meaningful professional lives that, in many cases, were simply not available to their mothers. That, in turn, created a new problem: how to balance motherhood and career. A new study finds a disturbing pattern. Many successful women are childless, and only some of them by choice. Many who waited to have children until their careers were well-established discovered they had waited too long.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett is the author of the study and of a new book called "Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children." She writes that, `Feminism and the pill have given women more choices, but cannot change medical realities. Few women over the age of 40 will be able to conceive and bear children easily.' She advises the next generation of young women who want to have a family to reorder their priorities.

But what happens when you postpone your career? How does that affect you economically? Is it easy to get back into the work force? Given the options, will more women choose a career anyway, even if it means foregoing a family? And how are these choices redefining what it means to be a woman? Childlessness--is it a crisis or a choice? Which is it for you? And what about alternatives? Our number here in Washington is (800) 989-8255, (800) 989-TALK. Our e-mail address is totn@npr.org.

And Sylvia Ann Hewlett joins us now from our bureau in New York. Welcome to TALK OF THE NATION.

Ms. SYLVIA ANN HEWLETT (Author, "Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children"): Good to be here.

CONAN: I understand that you started to write this book not the book that you ended up writing, but rather a very different one.

Ms. HEWLETT: You know, in a way, this book was an accidental book. Five years ago, I started off on something quite different. I was fascinated by the lives of the breakthrough generation, and in 1997, I started interviewing a whole group of these women to find out questions, like, how they had leant on feminism. Were mentors important in their lives? What were their strategies for breaking through those glass ceilings? After all, it was a remarkable generation. As you pointed out, these were the women that came of age in the '70s and broke through all those barriers and took a much deserved place in the professional world, which previously had been pretty much, you know, reserved for men.

But 15 interviews into this project, I turned around and realized the amazing fact that none of the women I was talking to had children. So I went back and did a second round of interviews and asked the obvious, which was, you know, had they wanted children, and if they had, what had gotten in the way? And I guess that's when this particular book was born. Because the majority of these women were full of regret, pain and at least some bitterness, because they knew that their male colleagues faced a very different reality. And what that triggered in me is a need to know what was really going on nationwide. And so I spent a couple of years, you know, raising the money to do a nationwide survey so I could see what professional women across the board were doing on this front. And I really looked at two generations, the breakthrough generation, which was this pioneer generation if you like...

CONAN: So that would be women now in their 50s.

Ms. HEWLETT: Well, I defined it as kind of 41 through 55.

CONAN: OK.

Ms. HEWLETT: And then I looked at younger women, 28 to 40, those who were embarking on their careers.

CONAN: And what did they say about the childlessness issue?

Ms. HEWLETT: Well, you know, let's start with some of the main findings. If you look at these professional women across the nation, and it's a representative sample, in the older age group, somewhere between a third and a half don't have kids. It depends critically on which profession they're a part of, because some are much more permissive of the balancing act than others. When you...

CONAN: For instance?

Ms. HEWLETT: Well, I mean, one of the surprises to me--and, you know, there's some very useful information here--is that if you want a career and a family, you probably shouldn't become a professor, because academia, it turns out, is very inhospitable to the balancing act. Forty-three percent of women in education at these higher levels don't have children, and the reason seems to be that the tenure clock, you know, coincides with the last stages of that biological clock, and that these careers are very kind of peripatetic in their early stages, and you might be, you know, two years at Santa Cruz and then a year at Vanderbilt and then a year at Brandeis. And it seems that particularly women in the academic fields find it very hard to sustain relationships and then have families.

Interestingly enough, doctors do rather well because there's a lot of part-time work available for doctors. But the group that do best of all are women entrepreneurs, the self-employed folks out there who, although they work long hours, have much more control over their lives. And 80 percent of self-employed women over this bar of earnings that I chose to define professional life actually are able to have both a career and children, and I found that kind of fascinating that there were these differences.

CONAN: Well, in general, childlessness is up by--well, it's doubled, right?

Ms. HEWLETT: Yes. In all income groups, yes.

CONAN: And why is that happening, do you think?

Ms. HEWLETT: Well, you know, obviously the national averages disguise a lot of variation between groups, and I think the group that is not having kids predominantly is the professional group. I define my sample as any woman earning over $55,000 a year in the younger group or 65,000 a year in the older group. In other words, I'm looking at a wide range of professionals, not just a tiny elite. And as I say, for this group, between a third and a half don't have kids at age 40. And I find that the distressing part of the research isn't so much those figures; is the fact that it wasn't voluntary. I really probed motivation very carefully in this study, and it turns out that about 14 percent of these women planned it that way. For all of the other women, it was a very difficult and painful set of tradeoffs.

CONAN: Our telephone number is (800) 989-8255. That's (800) 989-TALK. Our e-mail address, totn@npr.org. And our first caller is Patty, who joins us on the line from Bend, Oregon.

PATTY (Caller): Well, it's still good--no, it's good afternoon here.

CONAN: OK.

PATTY: Your guest's last comment that this was not a choice by a large percentage of these women sort of took my thunder, because I'm from the age group and the era when I did not have a choice. And I had four children before the age of 22 and then went into a career, and this was all to the detriment of my children, because I did not have the skills. I did not know how to raise children. And I've seen my peer groups now, all of us, going like, `Oh, my gosh, what did we do?' Because our adult children are having a lot of difficulties because of our lack of skills.

The other thing is women in the 40-year age group, which my daughter is one, she just had her first child, and it will be her only child, but she planned that in an 18-year marriage. So as I say, your guest in saying that these women didn't feel they had a choice, was this biological or was it the pressure of that career? And I would like to know that. Were they unable to conceive or did their career circumvent even the idea of having a child?

CONAN: Sylvia Ann Hewlett.

Ms. HEWLETT: Well, you know, the reasons why this happened are very complicated because, you know, real life I guess is pretty complicated, but there was a pattern that emerged. I mean, one woman called it a creeping non-choice, because what she found in her life is that she had a very high-maintenance career which exacted, you know, 60-hour weeks for a whole bunch of time in her late 20s and early 30s, and when she turned around and tried to find a partner in her mid-30s, it proved to be more difficult than she anticipated, because there didn't seem too many kind of available men out there by that point. She finally did get married at age 39, and then she hit infertility, because despite all of the miracle babies and the undoubted progress that, you know, modern medicine has made in terms of solving infertility problems, there's very little change for the 40-odd-year-old woman.

There's now a kind of weight of evidence out there--some of which I collect together and, you know, interviewed all kinds of experts--the 42-, 43-year-old woman, for instance, has something like a 5 percent chance of getting pregnant, even with the most advanced ART techniques. And I think that in a way, we've been sold a bill of goods on that front, because we have an infertility industry out there which is very much driven by the bottom line, by profitability, and they really like to kind of hype the good news. It's very hard to find the real facts, because in a way, they love it when there are, you know, 42-year-olds cuing up to try IVF seven times. It's kind of good for business. But...

CONAN: IVF is in vitro fertilization.

Ms. HEWLETT: Absolutely. And, I mean, we probably all have friends who've gone through this. You know, you can spend tens of thousands of dollars and basically have such a miniscule chance that you wonder why, in the end, you've gone through this.

So I feel that some of the information, not just in my book but, you know, now I think available out there on the real odds, the real risks, because there's a lot of new evidence showing that, you know, miscarriage rates are sky high. There's even an association between birth defects and IVF, particularly in these age groups. And I think that for many women, there's almost a reliance on the fact that, of course, they can get pregnant in their 40s these days, and that is not borne out in reality, and that causes, in its turn, a great deal of disappointment and anguish. For instance, in my survey, I found that, I think it was 89 percent of women felt that, of course, they could get pregnant deep into their 40s, and that just is not true.

CONAN: Patty, I wonder, you had kids very young and you may not have had experience, but you had a lot of energy.

PATTY: Well, yes. But my 40-year-old daughter has a lot of energy, too, and she has the skills, and my poor children drove me insane, and as a result, I was an abusive parent until I got a lot of professional help. And I have to live with that guilt. And I think if you have skills for raising children and you can wait until you're at least 30 to start planning your pregnancy, then I'd like to see the choices, you know, be very great for any woman or man. And maybe we should say that we need a few more house husbands out there, men that are willing to stay home and be the full-time caretaker, if the woman can have a lucrative career and be out there and make that much more acceptable for women and men.

CONAN: Let me just ask you, do you think your abusive behavior would have been mitigated if you had been 10 years older?

PATTY: Oh, for sure, because I did go into a profession--I'm an OB/GYN nurse practitioner, and I'm also a therapist. And if I had been 10 years older, because I was no dummy, I would have gone to school, I would have taken child development and parenting classes and all that stuff, which I think is very necessary. I think every woman who even thinks of pregnancy should go to those classes first and then follow through. And so, no, and as I say, I have to live with the guilt that I was a very abusive parent and only hope that my children have compassion toward me and know that I just didn't have the skills.

CONAN: Well, go ahead, I didn't mean to interrupt you, Sylvia.

PATTY: No, you didn't. That's it, you know, and this...

Ms. HEWLETT: Well, I really feel it's enormously gutsy to, you know, say that and offer, you know, your reflection not just to listeners but to your own family. I think that's an enormously courageous thing to do.

You know, to go back to a comment you made, I'm clearly not advocating that, you know, people have children at 19, 20 or even 23. But I do think that when you have your qualifications in hand and you're out there in maybe your first job, to give more priority to finding a loving partner, starting your family, than my generation did, because I think the advice coming to us--and I think it's still the advice that goes to my daughter, who's 24--is that women are supposed to kind of clone the male competitive model, if you like...

PATTY: Yes.

Ms. HEWLETT: ...you know, to focus like a laser beam on your career for the first 10, 15 years of your mature life, and then, you know, turn around at 35, 38 and try and fix your family goals. And I think that that can be, anyway, a recipe for disaster, because we've really not shifted that biological clock, and it really is true that it's harder to find partners at older ages.

CONAN: Patty, thanks very much for the phone call.

PATTY: Great program. Thank you.

CONAN: We're talking about the growing number of childless women in America and why it's happening. When we'll come back, we'll speak with someone who has interviewed women who chose family first. And we want to hear from you, (800) 989-TALK. It's TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

(Soundbite of music)

CONAN: This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. This hour, we're talking about the growing number of childless women in America and why that is. Our guest is Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist. She's the author of "Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children." Did you choose a career before family or did you choose family first? Are you wrestling with that question right now? Give us a call, (800) 989-8255. That's (800) 989-TALK. Our e-mail address is totn@npr.org.

And joining us now is Nancy Gibbs, editor at large for Time Magazine. She's a mother of two and wrote this week's cover story on babies vs. career, and she joins us from her home in Bronxville, New York, and welcome to TALK OF THE NATION.

Ms. NANCY GIBBS (Time Magazine): Thank you.

CONAN: So you've managed to have a family and, I guess if you're writing the cover story, a high-powered career, too. How did you manage to do it?

Ms. GIBBS: Well, you know, after I had read Sylvia's fascinating book, I came to feel as though I had won the lottery by being able to have both. I think I had, like many of my friends and colleagues, maybe taken for granted how difficult it can be to get the timing and the sequencing right. She talks a lot about the things that employers can do to help both, you know, moms and dads strike the balance more evenly, and I think I've been very lucky in having employers who are quite flexible in their attitudes about, you know, when and how you go about doing your jobs, and that seems to be for many women I've spoken to--being in a kind of profession that allows a certain amount of flexibility, as opposed to one where you're always maybe working with clients that really want you at their beck and call at all times, it contributes enormously one way or the other to how easily you can fit in your family responsibilities as well.

CONAN: Sylvia, just wondering whether--you were talking about which professions were easier. Is journalism one of the more tolerant professions?

Ms. HEWLETT: It can be. I think Nancy's been lucky. Perhaps she's super-able, amongst other things. I've certainly heard tales very recently that the media, in general, has become a little more brutal in terms of insecurities, which, you know, force people to put in more face time, etc. But in the main, because journalism does have many women in it, some of these things have been worked out.

You know, one thing, Neal, I wanted to kind of underscore here, in this book, I'm not just talking about accomplished career women having to kind of sacrifice children. I'm also talking about accomplished mothers who have to sacrifice career. And in a sense, part of my life has been in that bag, because in my 30s, I was actually forced out of two careers, because it seemed impossible to both meet the kind of legitimate needs of my then small children and the demands of my workplaces.

And most poignantly, I remember to this day walking out of a corner office at age 39, giving up a job as executive director of the Economic Policy Council because I had a very, I guess, sad three-year-old on my hands who really was not coping well with the power breakfasts and, you know, the trips of Washington and all the rest of the rigid demands of that particular job. And I knew at the time that I was kind of shooting myself in the foot in a big-time way, and sure enough, I've never been back in a corner office. I then, you know, took up a life as a free-lance writer because it fitted in more neatly. But there were three books written in a bedroom in a long, slow slog, you know, as I made some kind of progress in this new career of mine.

CONAN: Well, Nan...

Ms. HEWLETT: So I'm not trying to say that, you know, all the sacrifice is borne by the women who stay in careers. I think women across the board pay a huge price by how hard it is for anyone with, you know, the usual number of hours in the day to actually put together a life that has the same richness of choice as men routinely take for granted.

CONAN: Well, Nancy, you took Sylvia's premise that if women want children, they should plan to have them earlier while they're young and then start their careers. You looked at women who did do that. What did you find?

Ms. GIBBS: Well, you know, just as if you focus entirely on--if you start your career first and then try to do family, that having children may be more difficult, the inverse of that is true as well. If you start your family first, there are things about that choice that may make the career ultimately more difficult. For instance, if you have just come out college or you've, you know, maybe gone to law school but you're still in your 20s and you're trying to start your family then, you may really be a long way away from having the kind of financial grounding that you need if you're going to be raising children. You may still have quite a bit of college debt...

Ms. HEWLETT: That's so important, yeah.

Ms. GIBBS: ...and have not established the kind of earning power at whatever career you have started that allows you to have any kind of financial flexibility. Likewise, even the sort of emotional maturity and stability that I think most of us would say is very important before you start trying to provide emotional support to a child, you want to make sure that you have it yourself and that you've really, you know, done a lot of your growing up. And, you know, we have now extended adolescence so long, actually, you know, well past adolescence and into our 20s, that some of the women we talked to said, you know, `In some ways, I feel like a kid myself still, and it feels a little bit strange to me to be having kids.'

CONAN: And I hate to throw another statistic in here somewhere, but don't roughly half of American marriages end in divorce?

Ms. GIBBS: Well, certainly the combined strain, if you think about it, of, you know, having young children, fledgling careers, financial stresses--that can be a lot for a marriage that itself hasn't had many years to take root. So a lot of the things that can be sources of tension in all marriages of whatever duration, if you're trying to do everything at once when you're, you know, 25 or 26 years old, that certainly can be quite a source of tension.

CONAN: Let's get back to the phones, (800) 989-8255. Our next caller is Lisa, who's with us from Ann Arbor, Michigan.

LISA (Caller): Yes. Hello.

CONAN: Hi.

LISA: Hi. Yeah. I just wanted to make the point, I agree absolutely with what the speakers are saying. I'm an attorney and I have an eight-year-old daughter, and my point is just that I think that anybody who says that you can have it all is just wrong. I've been able to continue working, but as an adjunct professor instead of going like the tenure track with a more prestigious-type position, so I am still able to work, but there's no way I could put the time in that would be necessary and do justice to my family and my career like that.

Ms. HEWLETT: You know, Lisa, I think you put your finger on one very important point. You see, when I think about having it all, I really think in terms of the basics: love and work; some shot at family, some decent shot at work that you find fulfilling. I don't mean the bells and the whistles. I mean, obviously, it's awfully hard to be CEO of Hewlett-Packard and also have three children. I think that one has to give up quite a lot at the edges.

But what I feel is so unfair in America right now is that women, even if they are able to bend at the edges, are finding it so difficult to even get together the elements of what they consider to be their preferred life. And part of the problem is that we live in an incredibly, I think, difficult set of circumstances in terms of the family-friendliness of our communities and our workplaces.

For instance--I'll just throw out one of these other nasty statistics--41 percent of working women in America still don't have the right to even unpaid parenting leave when they give birth to a baby, because they work for small companies, and small companies were exempted from that 1993 legislation that Clinton passed. I mean, we're the only country in the world that doesn't have really fairly good paid parenting leave. And as a result, the childlessness rate in America is way higher than any country in Europe. I mean, Europe has low birthrates, but it's much more a situation--if you take Spain, for instance, you know, 90 percent of all women have kind of one child each, kind of. Here, you know, we have this huge number of accomplished women who feel very bereft because they were not able to fulfill what is a fairly basic dream of most people.

CONAN: Lisa, I wonder, do you feel as if you had to give anything up?

LISA: Oh, I--well, actually, I'm just very pleased that I can have the flexibility that I do, and I recognize a lot of women do not have that. And I certainly couldn't be in a 40-hour-a-week job where I had no leave like that. Absolutely not. I have my summers, I pretty much can have my schedule around my daughter's school time. It's wonderful. But I know that I'm lucky for that, and most women don't have that. I couldn't do it otherwise.

Ms. GIBBS: You know, I think we are seeing a generation of women now who, because of confronting the kinds of tensions and balancing that Lisa's talked about, that many of the women Sylvia interviewed and that we interviewed for our story talked about, that you're seeing a generation of women that is being exceptionally creative in the way...

Ms. HEWLETT: Yes.

Ms. GIBBS: ...they are trying to think about their jobs and the sorts of negotiations they are trying to have with their employers, you know, to what extent is it at all possible to trade, you know, time for money, to be flexible about your work time, your commuting schedule, your, you know, job sharing, all of the different ways that women are trying to make their jobs more family-friendly. And in many cases, this is happening one conversation at a time, one negotiation at a time between, you know, one employee and her employer, trying to fashion some kind of system that will work.

LISA: I agree with that completely.

Ms. HEWLETT: And, you know, I...

CONAN: Well, Lisa, thanks very much for the call.

LISA: Thank you.

CONAN: OK.

Ms. HEWLETT: Thank you, Lisa. You know, Neal, I think that we're at a point right now where we're almost kind of entering a kind of new generation of workplace policies. For a lot of the time in the '80s and '90s, there tended to be an emphasis on things like benefits, some help with subsidized child care, certainly this parenting leave. And I think that at least in large companies, much of that is in place, and it's deeply appreciated and very necessary.

But the next challenge is to somehow give ourselves the gift of time because there's been such speed-up and there is such overload in our workplaces, no matter what profession you're in. For instance, in my survey, I found that a third of these women were working up to 20 hours a week more than they were five years ago. And no matter what your benefits package, you know, you cannot deal with conjuring up the magical energies you need to be a good parent if you've just put in a 12 1/2-hour day. It's almost impossible.

And so I think what I do, amongst other things, in this book is I found some companies and some sectors where these time-enhancing policies were really beginning to take root and I could show, I think, you know, through the analysis I did that this actually had an impact on women. For instance, one company that I use as an example is Ernst & Young, which has some very, I think, rich programs in terms of reduced-hour schedules, special schedules in the summertime so that you can deal with school holidays, etc. And as a result, about 70 percent of the senior women at Ernst & Young have children, which is actually, you know, a much higher figure than elsewhere.

So I do want to underline the point that, you know, the private sector and its policies matter enormously in terms of the real options facing women. And I think that one thing I would like to have happen is that we get a little bit organized in terms of the demands that we start making because I think right now, as Nancy pointed out very correctly, it's almost kind of one conversation at a time, one company at a time. But since this, in the end, is good for everyone, it's even good for productivity and the bottom line for the company, there's absolutely no reason why we shouldn't do a more systematic job of getting them in place.

CONAN: That is Sylvia Ann Hewlett. She's an economist and the author most recently of "Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children." Also with us on the line, Nancy Gibbs, an editor at large at Time magazine. We're talking about the growing number of childless women in America, particularly the growing number of professional childless women. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

Our next caller is Christina, who joins us from Chicago, Illinois.

CHRISTINA (Caller): Hi there.

CONAN: Hi.

CHRISTINA: Hi. I'm at an age where I pretty much have to decide whether or not I'm going to be having children. I'm in my early 30s. And I am a full-time graduate student. I'm pursuing an academic career. I come from a very large Italian/Irish-American family. I'm the youngest of seven, and everyone's got kids. I even have one brother who's got five kids. And I feel a lot of pressure, especially from family and from friends that already have children, like, it's as if, well, you truly don't know the meaning of life until you have children--I get a lot of that--and a lot of pressure saying, `Well, you know, Christina, you better get cracking. You know, you better get started.' And I don't see where children really fit into my life right now, and I feel--it's hard to explain. I feel like there's this enormous pressure on me to decide when I know I still have at least five or six years of school ahead of me that I really would have to devote to an academic career before I could even think about children. And as your guest said earlier, academics is not really the place you want to be if you want to have a family.

CONAN: Yeah.. Sylvia, you hit the tenure wall at exactly the wrong time, didn't you?

Ms. HEWLETT: Yes, I did. Yes. So I deeply empathize with this dilemma and my heart goes out to you. It's not easy.

CHRISTINA: And what I really dislike is the way people kind of look upon women who choose to be childless, and it's not like I've decided for sure that I'm not going to have children, but when I tell people that I'm not sure--and really, I don't understand why people would even ask other people questions like this anyway because it's none of their business. But when it does come up when I speak to members of my family or people I know who have children, there this attitude that `Well, if you don't want to have children, then you must be selfish.' And in my opinion, you're not doing your children any favors by having them if you're not sure that you want them. I don't think that would necessarily make you a very good parent.

Ms. HEWLETT: I think you're absolutely right there.

CONAN: Yeah.

CHRISTINA: So I have a lot of trouble dealing with just the everyday `Well, you know, you better get started because the biological clock is ticking, and if you don't have them in the next five years, well, there's going to be a lot of trouble.'

CONAN: It's awful to be in that situation and at the same time feel like a cliche a little bit, too. Nancy Gibbs, I heard you trying to get in here.

Ms. GIBBS: No, I was just thinking that it sounds as though one thing that you're having to wrestle with is pressure that's coming from multiple sources--you know, one from, as you say, a family that puts a great emphasis on having children, a society and friends who put great emphasis on it, and then--which is sort of--those are more subjective pressures, but the objective one that there's no arguing with or getting around is the biological one of just the hard fact about at what point this decision essentially gets made for you. And so I think, you know, having to juggle all of those at once when you're trying to work out how you think you would like your academic career to go and where you think children might fit into that--it's a context that is not conducive to sort of smooth and easy decision-making, I think.

CHRISTINA: I think it's particularly difficult for women in their early 30s because that's really the pivotal age, I think. I think if you've reached 38 or 40, then a lot of times women will just say, `Well, you know, I've decided not to have them,' and there's a lot of problems that one can have having children that late. And I think if you're in your 20s, there's still plenty of opportunity. And I think early 30s, you really have to make a decision.

Ms. HEWLETT: You know, if I can just come in there...

CONAN: Quickly.

Ms. HEWLETT: ...I think the only thing to make sure is that you, you know, have all the information out there at your fingertips and you know, you know, what the critical decision points are for you in a way to try and screen out the lots of advice that you're getting from family and friends and just look hard at your own future.

CONAN: Christina, we're running out of time, but I wanted to wish you good luck before we left.

CHRISTINA: Bye-bye.

CONAN: And, Nancy Gibbs, thanks so much to you.

Ms. GIBBS: Thank you very much.

CONAN: Nancy Gibbs, editor at large at Time magazine.

We'll take more of your calls when we come back from a short break. This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

(Announcements)

CONAN: This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington.

Tomorrow at this time, Secretary of State Colin Powell's trip to the Middle East appears to be an uphill endeavor. We'll discuss what hopes there are to calm the violence and bring stability to the situation and the tools that diplomacy can apply.

Today we're talking about the growing number of childless women in America. Our guest is Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist and author of "Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children.." I've had an opportunity to glance at the book jacket of her book, so I know that the answer to the question many of you have, `Where is that accent?' it is a Welsh accent. Am I right?

Ms. HEWLETT: It is. It's a little diluted by this point, but I grew up in the Welsh mining valleys. I think at the moment no one claims me. I'm kind of mid-Atlantic.

CONAN: OK. Well, joining us now is Kim Gandy. She is president of NOW, the National Organization for Women, and she joins is by phone from here in Washington, DC.

Welcome to TALK OF THE NATION.

Ms. KIM GANDY (President, National Organization for Women): Good afternoon.

CONAN: I'm sure you've seen the statistics that Sylvia Ann Hewlett has popularized in her book, and she was on "60 Minutes," I think, last night on TV and it's also on the cover of Time magazine. What do you make of them?

Ms. GANDY: Well, I've only seen a few reports of the numbers. When I actually tried to get the book, I was told that it wasn't out yet and that the reporter only had an advance copy of it.

CONAN: OK. Well...

Ms. GANDY: So I haven't actually seen the book, but certainly some of the items that I've seen reported are, in fact, true, which is that there a lot of women later in life who wish they had children for a variety of reasons and don't. And I was interested to see that sort of coincidentally, with all this, an article by Liza Mundy in The Washington Post talking about the role that men play in this, you know, compared to the implication that it's all about women and women's choices.

CONAN: Well, ultimately it does come down to women's choices, though, doesn't it?

Ms. GANDY: Well, her article was interesting because she was talking to her friends, and it obviously wasn't a study, but she was saying, `Now I'm looking for some women, you know, who were older, who delayed childbearing and, you know, now they can't have kids,' or whatever, you know, delayed childbearing because of their careers, I think was where she was headed with the article. And the people that she talked to said, `Well, you know, I can't think of anybody in that category, but I can tell you of a dozen women who delayed childbearing because their husbands weren't ready yet and almost waited too long,' or their boyfriends weren't ready or they--you know, it was very interesting. It was a whole new take on it, and she said, you know, `All this time I'd been thinking it was really all about women's choices, but there are often two people involved in making that decision about whether and when to have kids.'

CONAN: Sylvia Ann Hewlett's suggestion is that younger women might want to think about where they're going to be at the age of 45 and make their planning decisions accordingly. Of course, if you choose not to have children, that's one thing, and you can go ahead and do what you're planning to do anyway. But if you are a younger woman, she's suggests, and you do want to have children, you may want to get it done earlier.

Ms. HEWLETT: Well, you know...

Ms. GANDY: Well, I've certainly heard that suggestion, but for different women different things are right. I know women--my best friend had her children very young--she's the same age I am--and she's a grandmother four times. My daughters are six and eight, and we're exactly the same age. So women make lots of different choices about their childbearing. and I think that that's the key, is that it is our decision to make, weighing all the factors. But it's no doubt that society and the workplace and the decision makers in the country could make it much easier for us to make good choices about our families and our lives.

CONAN: Sylvia, I cut you off there. Please.

Ms. HEWLETT: I wanted to go back to a point that Ms. Gandy was making about men because I also did a kind of sister project when I did this survey because I did a small survey of men just to get their perspective and also, you know, the joint decision-making kind of in the mix there. And one of the most distressing findings of the book is how little progress has been made on the home front in terms of the division of labor. And, you know, I'm actually married to a rather wonderful man who is very liberated on this front, so I personally was very almost shocked by what I found out: that, for instance, 43 percent of professional women felt that their husbands were a net burden...

Ms. GANDY: Yeah.

Ms. HEWLETT: ...in that they created more work around the house than they contributed. That question on the questionnaire, which was, you know, `What was the net situation?' prompted the most amazing e-mails because a minority of women, you know, wrote, you know, whole paragraphs about how wonderful their husbands were. But for 90 percent, it released the floodgate in the opposite direction. And the actual figures are actually quite startling. For instance, only 8 percent of husbands take prime responsibility for helping children with homework. And if you take meal preparation, it's at the 12 percent level. And I had, you know, nurtured the hope that we had made more progress than that because clearly women are really dealing with both overload at work and overload at home, which is why, you know, so many highly qualified mothers are forced out.

Again, you know, one of the shocking figures--22 percent of women with MBAs and MDs in this country are not in the workplace at all because of family responsibilities, and two-thirds of them want to be back in. I mean, we have a career highway with all kinds of off-ramps and no on-ramps, and I think that is one of the problems.

Ms. GANDY: I think this is one--it certainly is one of the problems, and the fact that the way our employment is structured makes it very difficult for both women and men to balance their lives and to balance their families. There was a survey recently that said both women and men, by very substantial numbers, would be willing to take pay cuts if it meant they could spend more time with their families, yet there's this magic number that's a 40-hour week. I mean, somebody at some point in time made up the number 40 and decided that's how many hours in a week that people ought to work and it's really become a magic number, and it's almost impossible to work 30 hours a week and get three-quarters pay at any kind of job that brings you significant advancement and satisfaction.

Ms. HEWLETT: And, you know, that's why these companies like IBM, you know, Merck, Ernst & Young, the companies that are on the forefront of the reduced-hour career, I think, are really pointing the way, because that has to be part of what we're all working towards.

Ms. GANDY: Except that the people who make those choices then don't have career advancement.

Ms. HEWLETT: Well, you know...

Ms. GANDY: It's essentially a parent track and, in most cases, a mommy track, and there's really no reason for that. There's no reason that you can't contribute in your 30 hours at the same percentage as someone who contributes 40 hours.

CONAN: Can...

Ms. HEWLETT: Well, except that...

Ms. GANDY: You know, you can have four vice presidents working 30 hours instead of three vice presidents each working 40 hours accomplish the same amount of work for the same amount of money, and everybody is happier. In fact, maybe you get a lot more work out of it. But what happens is that you don't get to that level unless you're putting in 50 or 60 hours a week, and that's a drawback for men and women who want to give more time to their families.

CONAN: Kim Gandy, I wanted to thank you so much for joining us today.

Ms. GANDY: My pleasure.

CONAN: Kim Gandy is the president of NOW, the National Organization for Women, and she spoke to us from Washington, DC.

I wanted to read some e-mail comments we've received. `I am a 32-year-old married woman,' writes Rebecca. `My husband and I are both professional. We are not having children. We're very happy with our decision. It's a mistake to assume that all women want children. In conversations with my friends, it's come to light that most of us are childless not because we just want to pursue the corporate ladder, but because by the time we graduated from college and started our careers, we had too much time to think about the impact children would make on our lives.'

Next, this from Steve Muldoon(ph). `As a child, I would not want a 60-year-old parent who is not able to interact in my life as well as a younger parent.'

Here's an e-mail from Misty Hull(ph) in Valdese, North Carolina. `I am 23 years old. I've been married going on four years. My husband, age 27, and I have decided to wait a few more years before children. I'd like to wait till I'm 30. A woman must surely gain more patience by then. When,' she asks, `is the ideal age to have kids?' And I would hesitate to speak for our guest, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, but I suspect there is no ideal age to have kids.

Ms. HEWLETT: Well, it's not a situation where one size fits all. What I'm really recommending is that particularly young women, but also young men, should just arm themselves with the facts out there, not just what happens, you know, to our biological clocks and when it becomes impossible to have those children, but also, you know, which companies are the good ones to work for, which sectors of the economy make it easier. And hopefully, I've provided some very useful information which will enable people to get what they want out of life.

CONAN: You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

Go back to the phones. Our next caller is Martha, who's on the line from Sacramento, California.

MARTHA (Caller): Yes. Good afternoon. This subject is fascinating for me. I did some research some years ago regarding the happiness and happiness adjustment of women who were childless by choice and they were childless by default. And since then, I have been really very interested in this subject.

Now besides that, as you can hear from my accent, I'm not a native American, and I found sometimes very amusing the situations that happen with professional couples. For instance, I know a couple, they're both surgeons, she and he, and they're prestigious surgeons, they have good salaries, and sometimes on the weekend they have arguments about who is going to do the laundry. And I think that they are completely out of place. They are supposed to have help at home. They are two people very involved doing a very precious job for society, and it will be completely reasonable that society provides for them somebody who can help with those minor tasks. I don't think that that happens--in underdeveloped countries, actually, we women have an advantage, and it's that families, husbands, they do not expect that the professional woman will come home and do everything. They are supposed to have help because you are already in a different status. Of course, you oversee everything that is going on and you put your time on the children, not in cleaning floors or doing laundry. That's not for you.

CONAN: See if we can get a comment from...

MARTHA: You're a mother and a career woman, so you do things that are proper for a mother and for a career woman.

CONAN: Martha, let's see if we can get a response from Sylvia Ann Hewlett.

Ms. HEWLETT: Well, you know, Martha, I do appreciate what you're saying, but I don't want to reduce this dilemma to kind of the servant problem because, you know, this is a nation that has lots of machines, but, you know, a lot of people don't have nannies and maids. The way in which I asked this question in a survey was, take responsibility for certain tasks. Now obviously, perhaps in terms of cleaning the house, the income bracket was such that they did delegate it, but what I'm saying is that the men in general did not take responsibility for it, and clearly they would not want to delegate the homework help or, you know, the various child tasks, which again were very disproportionately done by the women. So I think my comment there is we need, I think, to think very hard in terms of how we bring up our sons. I have a 17-year-old son and a 21-year-old son, and it really warms my heart when they clear the table or do their own laundry, which they absolutely do do, because I think across the board in our culture right now, all of those tasks remain very disproportionately on the shoulders of women and that, I think, really impedes their ability to play an equal role.

CONAN: Finally, an e-mail question, this from Jay Primak(ph) in Minneapolis, Minnesota. `I understand many women have lost out on the chance to have their own biological children. What consideration has your guest given to the role that adoption can play to allow many women the chance to be mothers?'

Ms. HEWLETT: I think that's a wonderful question. I was responding to a 39-year-old woman just yesterday who had discovered that she herself could not have children. I think that the ability to adopt a child either here or from some other country who truly you can make a huge difference to in terms of the opportunities and the love that you can give that child is one of the most amazing opportunities of our age. And it absolutely is a route that all kinds of midlife folks can take.

CONAN: Have you found that women, for example, who were involved in expensive and lengthy attempts at in vitro fertilization and other techniques, that they go to adoption?

Ms. HEWLETT: Many of them do, Neal, but interestingly enough, if you've just spent all your resources and all of your psychic energy on a seven-year useless battle with infertility, you might be very depleted, you know, at 45 or 47. And one of the real reasons for just getting the information out there and making sure women at age 39 understand the odds against them is that it would enable them to go perhaps straight to the adoption route without spending five years, you know, doing all kinds of expensive, useless treatments, and that might be good for everyone.

CONAN: Sylvia Ann Hewlett, thank you so much for joining us today.

Ms. HEWLETT: Thank you.

CONAN: Sylvia Ann Hewlett is an economist. She's the author of "Creating a Life: Professional Women and Their Quest for Children." If it's not in a bookstore now, it will be soon. Don't worry. She spoke to us from our bureau in New York.

In Washington, I'm Neal Conan, NPR News.

FACULTY COUPLES:  Two brains are better than one (6/3/02)

By Amelia DelaPaz adelapaz@stanford.edu Wednesday, May 1, 2002

While some may see research as a highly individual enterprise, for many Stanford professors it's a family matter.

Stanford is home to several highly qualified professors who are united by matrimony as well as academia.

The widespread presence of professor couples on campus is a relatively new phenomenon, though.

Eve and Herb Clark, professors of linguistics and psychology respectively, arrived at Stanford in 1971. At that time there were relatively few couples on the faculty here. Stanford has been hiring more in the past 30 years.

"You meet a lot of couples now. It isn't rare,"Herb Clark said. Eve Clark attributes the increase of faculty couples to the increase in female professors since the 1970s.

Although women make up less than half of both Clarks' departments, the fraction of women in each department is much larger than it was 30 years ago.

"To some extent I think it's due to the gradual dawning on people that women can be smart, and that smart people tend to be attracted to each other so that perhaps more than one member of a couple can be good enough to hire," said Penny Eckert, a linguistics professor and director of the Program in Feminist Studies.

Eckert and her husband, Ivan Sag, also a linguistics professor, are another faculty couple. Unlike the Clarks, they met at Stanford - he was a professor and she was a visiting professor.Eckert was teaching in Chicago until 1994, so they had a commuting relationship.

Often situations like this occur because two positions at the same university are not open at the same time. "Getting two jobs at once is complicated," said Herb Clark. It can be especially complicated when couples require two jobs in the same department.

Some academic couples work around this problem by looking for jobs at universities in close proximity to each other. A common pattern at Stanford is for one spouse to work here and one to hold a position at the UC-Berkeley.

Raising children is another common problem facing faculty couples. The difficult working years before professors receive tenure are, for the most part, the same years that non-academic couples are starting their families. Therefore academic couples must either have children earlier or later than they otherwise would have.

Matthew Scott and Margaret Fuller, both professors of developmental biology and genetics, are an example of a faculty couple who had their children relatively late. That decision, however, did not solve all their problems.

Now they must worry about how to arrange for adequate day care while they are busy with their jobs. Although preschool has become better and more common at Stanford and around the country, Fuller sees day care as an "issue that Stanford could do a lot more about."

Scott and Fuller send their 4-year-old daughter to the Bing Nursery School and their older son to elementary school. Yet they say that this is still not adequate. The Bing school only runs for half of the day, so they must arrange care for their daughter in the afternoons. In addition, they often have trouble coordinating their vacations with those of their children.

Faculty couples must also deal with unfounded assumptions about their relationship by people both inside and outside the university. The Clarks were often treated as if Herb worked at Stanford and Eve did not.

"There is a very general stereotype that women don't work and men do," Eve Clark explained. She also said people make this assumption less frequently than in the past.

Fuller and Scott said that people will assume whatever Scott knows Fuller does as well. Nevertheless, for the most part the two "operate independently and people recognize that," Fuller stated.

In the long run, however, for many professors the benefits outweigh the few difficulties faculty couples might face.

"The ability to understand and appreciate what the other person is doing is very helpful," Scott said.

---------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------- TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR LISTSERV is a shared mission partnership with the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) http://www.aahe.org/ The National Teaching and Learning Forum (NT&LF) http://www.ntlf.com/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------

Women in Science Survey (3/14/02)

Visit an online survey of  women in science. 

http://echo.gmu.edu/surveys/contribute.php?survey=wscience

WOMEN CLOSE GAPS IN SOME, BUT NOT ALL,
SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING FIELDS (11/6/01)
Women and girls are making progress in scientific professions
and in education, respectively, over the last two decades, but
some of these gains have stalled or "eroded," in recent years,
says a report by the National Council for Research on Women
(NCRW) that was funded, in part, by the National Science
Foundation (NSF).
The NCRW studied a range of issues, statistics and ongoing
programs to evaluate how women are being assimilated into
scientific and engineering professions, and how young women are
responding to educational opportunities. Its report, "Balancing
the Equation: Where Are Women and Girls in Science, Engineering
and Technology?" reveals that "despite over two decades of an
expanding pipeline," the percentage of women holding scientific
leadership positions in some fields is still in the single
digits.
"The report also shows us examples of efforts that have
sparked enduring change, and reveals that a piecemeal approach
doesn't work. We must change the system itself," said NSF
director Rita Colwell. A new NSF program, ADVANCE, she said,
focuses on core leadership issues that will support system-wide
changes to provide a more positive climate for women to pursue
academic careers in science and engineering.
The Alfred P. Sloan and Patrina Foundations and the Prentice
Hall School Division also provided funding for the council's
report. [Bill Noxon]
For excerpts of the report, see: http://www.ncrw.org/research/iqsci.htm

OPENING TO DIVERSITY: WOMEN AND MINORITIES  (10/30/01)

The history of American higher education has been one of an ever growing and diversifying group of participants. Until the nineteenth century, students and faculty alike were overwhelmingly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males from middle-to-upper-class families. During the nineteenth century, colleges and universities began to admit men of less affluent means and some women. Black and women's colleges emerged after the Civil War. In the early twentieth century, urban universities began to admit new immigrants, particularly Jews, who, by 1918, were 48 percent of the enrollment at New York University, 21 percent at Columbia, and 10 percent at Harvard. This prompted a transformation of the curriculum: the creation of general education courses to teach these bright young men the traditional preparatory school curriculum quickly. Campus life, though, changed very little.

Between 1920 and 1930, earned bachelor's degrees increased from 48,622 to 122,484, or two and one-half times-the fastest decade of growth in the twentieth century, except for the fifties. Much of this growth came from women. In 1920, 16,642 women earned BAs; in 1930, 49,869, almost three times as many. In 1920 , 31,980 men earned BAs; in 1930, it was 73,615, almost two and one-third as many. In 1930, one and one-half times as many men as women earned the BA. In 1900 the ratio had been 4.23 men to 1 woman. It was not until 1970 that this ratio was reduced to 1.32. By 1980, parity was reached at last.

As we can see, most of the "feminization" of the classroom had occurred by 1930. However, society's view of educated women as wives and mothers responsible for managing the home did not change significantly until the 1970s. The separate and unequal division of gender roles was reflected in higher education through different curricular for men and women, and through different faculty attitudes and expectation.

As was the case during previous wars, World War II briefly expanded options for women. They enrolled in more science courses; they entered medical school. But the return to normalcy meant a return to domesticity. Whereas 12 percent of medical school graduates were women in 1949, 5 percent were women by the mid-1950s. Arguments against professional training for women resurfaced. Helene Deutsch's Psychology of Women (1994) and Lundberg and Farnham's Modern Women: The Lost Sex (1947) both cautioned against professional aspirations in mothers. Women's behavior, however, quietly belied tradition. In the 1950s and 1960s, more and more women graduates worked for most or much of their adult lives. Although most male professions remained closed, the expanding economy accommodated larger numbers of women.

The first significant movement since suffrage developed in the 1960s, as social reform became an important national issue. The civil rights movements, in which many women participated, gave impetus to women's demands for greater equality. Vocal African-American and white women activists denounced the subordinate role of women in civil rights, free speech, and antiwar activism launched the new wave of American feminism. The impact of the women's movement on campuses took various forms: the formulation of new regulations to decrease discrimination against women faculty and staff, the growth of women's athletics, the development of women's centers providing a broad array of services, and a reappraisal of the knowledge base on which scholarship and teaching had been premised, a knowledge base that excluded half the human race. By the end of the 1970s, woman's rights and women's difference had a stronger footing in the academy than ever before.

After World War II, the GI Bill provided support to large numbers of mature men, and some women, from diverse backgrounds. However, it was not until the 1960s, thirty years after the feminization of campuses, that the number and percentage of African-Americans, the second wave of ethnic diversity, increased significantly. Responding to the civil rights movement, higher education opened its doors wider. In 1965, there were 274,000 African-Americans enrolled in institutions of higher education in both undergraduate and graduate programs, 4.8 percent of the total enrollment of 5,675,000. In 1970, this rose to 522,000, or 7 percent. By 1976, the increase mounted to 848,000, or 9.8 percent, and it peaked in 1980 at 1,107,000, or 10.2 percent. By 1982, African-American enrollment had begun to ebb, dropping to 1,101,000, or 9.2 percent.

The wave of students of Hispanic origin is more recent still and lower than that for African-Americans. In 1976, the Nation Center for Educational Statistics reported 384,000 people of Hispanic origin enrolled in undergraduate and graduate programs, 3.5 percent of the total. By 1980, this had increased to 472,000, 3.9 percent of the total, and by 1986, Hispanics numbered 623,000 and 5.0 percent of all enrollments. Another report indicates that the percentage of Hispanic high school graduates enrolled in college declined in the second half of the seventies. The aforementioned increase, then, is due to the growth in the number of college-age Hispanics.

The increase in Asian-American enrollment is quite dramatic. In 1976, 198,000 students constituted 1.8 percent of the enrollment. By 1986, 623,000 students constituted 5 percent of all of the students in American higher education. The Native American student population has remained constant at .07 percent even though it has increased absolutely from 76,000 in 1976 to 91,000 in 1986.

On American campuses, the experience of increased racial and ethnic diversity is barely twenty years old. Until most recently, it was limited to the increased presence of African-Americans on white campuses. It was the community colleges that saw the greatest influx of minority students and adapted the most to their needs. By the end of the 1970s, despite increased access, minority students still did not attend college in proportion to their numbers in the population as a whole and had higher attrition rates than white students. However, the issue of minority access and achievement had become a top priority in the higher education world.

Ironically, the arrival of more African-Americans on campus coincided with a change in attitude toward difference that was international in its scope. In America, by the 1970s, the aspiration to assimilate had lost ground against new affirmations of racial and ethnic pride. The idea of "America (as) God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot" has never recovered. The 1970s also saw the growth of white resentment of affirmative action. These attitudes crystallized in the 1977 Allen Bakke case. Denied admission to a University of California medical school that had accepted African-American applicants with lower test scores, Bakke sued and won.

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Pay Gap Remains for Women in Life Sciences (10/26/01)

By NATALIE ANGIER

In the robust and decidedly lively field of the life sciences, at least one verity refuses to die: for every dollar that a male scientist earns, a woman earns not quite 77 cents.

A new survey by the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences of the salaries and comparative career happiness among researchers in biology, medicine and related disciplines offers a mix of the good and the grating.

On the one hand, median salaries for all life scientists increased a generous 7 percent between May of 2000 and May of this year, about twice the standard raise for American workers as a whole. Moreover, life scientists are overwhelmingly pleased with their profession: 59 percent claim they are "highly satisfied," another 27 percent say they are "fairly satisfied," and only 5 five percent fall into the gloomy ranks of the "highly dissatisfied."

On the other hand, women employed full time as life scientists earn some $72,000 a year, 23 percent less than the $94,000 their male counterparts make. That disparity may in part explain why women are more likely than men to count themselves as "fairly" rather than "highly" happy about their jobs.

And though some of the salary discrepancies can be attributed to the fact that more men than women are further in their career cycle, have worked longer and are in the high-income field of medicine, when the survey analysts accounted for these variables, significant income disparities remained. Among full professors in academia, for example, who rated themselves on the survey as being at the "peak" of their career, women earned 14 percent less than men, the size and prestige of the university notwithstanding.

The report, commissioned by the A.A.A.S. - publisher of the prestigious journal Science - and carried out by Shugoll Research of Bethesda, Md., is said by its authors to be the largest salary and job satisfaction study performed of life scientists in the United States. A six-page survey was sent to all 19,000 members of the science association who list themselves as life scientists, either in industry or academia. Some 6,300 men and 2,500 women returned their surveys, a male-female ratio that roughly mirrors employment in the life sciences nationwide. The results of the survey appear in the latest issue of Science.

Women earn less than men in nearly all the subcategories examined: university administrators, professors and instructors at every level, corporate directors and executives, managers and physicians. In only one category, principal investigator in nonacademic laboratories, did women fare surprisingly well, earning an annual median of $97,000 compared with men's $95,000. However, that category was represented in the survey by a relatively small sample size of 130 respondents, 86 men and 44 women, leaving survey analysts unsure of what to make of it.

Recent studies in other disciplines like physics, chemistry and astronomy have found similar pay discrepancies between men and women. And while some observers had hoped that progress would be comparatively swift in the life sciences, where women have toiled in large numbers for decades, the new statistics are not much different from those seen in other smaller life science surveys of the past. "There has been an unexplained gap between male and female salaries since people have been looking," said Dr. Shirley Malcolm, director of education and human resources for the A.A.A.S. "I'm disappointed by the latest results, but they don't surprise me."

Dr. Peter H. Raven, president of the association's board and director of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, said, "If you go back 30 or 40 years, the number of graduate students in the life sciences was about equal between the sexes. That being the case, you would expect they would be equal throughout the spectrum of career positions at this point. In my view, they should be."

Yet for all the familiarity of the pay gap, a clear understanding of its cause remains elusive. The biggest reason offered is the fact that women are more likely than men to take time off for childbearing, and therefore can never quite reach the heights of those who park themselves in the lab without cessation.

In the current survey, 18 percent of the women said they had taken off six months or more for family leave, compared with 3 percent of the men. And even women who take shorter leaves to have children admit that their family responsibilities can dictate their professional choices and limit their flexibility.

"I have three children, and that has undoubtedly affected my career in a number of ways," said Dr. Nancy Leidenheimer, an associate professor of pharmacology at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in Shreveport, and a survey respondent. "Not only did I take three maternity leaves, but I don't travel much. When you don't attend meetings, you don't make contacts."

Dr. Leidenheimer, 42, in no way regrets her choice. Nor does she see any easy way for women in science to solve the perpetual career-child conflict. "I suppose it's possible for women who are extremely talented and don't need sleep to succeed extraordinarily well and still devote a lot of time to their families, but I don't know if I've ever met any," she said. For these and other reasons, she said, "most of the women I work with do not have children."

But other women in science who do have children do not view families as impediments to professional glory. Dr. Mary L. Good, dean of the College of Information Science and Systems Engineering at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, who is 70 and was the only woman in her chemistry graduate program, had two sons fairly early in her career. "How do you manage?" she said. "You manage. You hire a housekeeper."

It also helps to have a spouse who is worthy of a Nobel laureate in fatherhood. "You have to have someone who is pulling his own weight with regard to the household and taking care of the kids," said Dr. Malcolm, the mother of two daughters. "The only way I was able to swing it was that my husband was very much involved."

For women in science, such weight-bearing husbands may be particularly hard to come by. As the current and previous surveys indicate, many more female than male scientists are married to scientists, who are themselves worried about getting to the lab at 2 a.m.

Dr. Raven also believes that much more should be done to ease a woman's re-entry after a family leave. For whatever reason, he says, the men in the survey who took leaves had an easier time than the women in returning to their old jobs: 47 percent of the men said their employers had provisions to ease their re-entry, compared with 30 percent of the women; 55 percent of the men were able to return to their old employer, against 41 percent of the women.

Most women in the field who happen to be mothers deeply resent any suggestion that they therefore are less committed to their work, or are less useful to their employers. Dr. Jennifer Moffat, 36, an assistant professor in microbiology at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, who also responded to the survey, is the mother of two daughters, 4 and 6, and as driven as any archetypal male lab rat.

"I'm committed to success here, and I have a lot of goals," she said. "I want to be chairman of my department. I want an active lab and a fully funded research program. I want to be recognized as one of the top people in my field," the study of the herpes virus that causes chickenpox and shingles.

Motherhood is not the only hypothetical drag on a woman's paycheck and prospects. Although the current survey did not ask its respondents whether they had children, previous studies have shown that even unmarried and childless women in scientific careers are not as highly paid or as swiftly promoted as men. Dr. Moffat and other researchers suggest that women may not be as aggressive as men when it comes to negotiating compensation.

"Women aren't as motivated by salary, and they don't always know that bargaining for a salary is something you can do," she said. "They're just glad to get the job, and they don't want to jinx it."

Assessments of women's overall advancement in science overall vary wildly, from bleak to upbeat. Dr. Bernice Noble, a professor of microbiology at the University of Buffalo who is nearing retirement, and whose analysis in the early 1990's of male-female salaries at her university found similar discrepancies, said she had seen very little change in the status of women in her many decades as a scientist. "I don't see much improvement, and I worry about the naïvete of young women who are just going into science," she said.

At the other psychic pole is Dr. Good. "I've been in this business for 50 years, and the difference is phenomenal, all in the right direction," she said. "When I started, the real issue was access, getting a job. Now there's little question about access, and it's more about upward mobility. And even that I believe is in pretty good shape."

As evidence of an improving climate, she and others cite the recent spate of appointments of female scientists to top-level positions: Shirley M. Tilghman as president of Princeton, Susan Lindquist as head of the Whitehead Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Judith Rodin as president of the University of Pennsylvania.

"I'm an optimist by nature, and I wouldn't have survived so long in this business if I weren't," said Dr. Good. "As my mother used to say, if you're not careful, you'll grim yourself to death."

Postdoc Trail: Long and Filled With Pitfalls (9/5/01)

By JENNIFER 8. LEE

When Dr. Michael Dugan took his first postdoctoral research appointment in 1985, he considered it a steppingstone to a permanent theoretical physics post on a college faculty.

But after three years at the University of California at Berkeley, the postdoctoral stints went on and on: two years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, four years at Harvard and one year at Boston University.

While he was a finalist for a faculty job a few times, he never managed to be the one left standing when the music stopped.

"I stuck it out longer than I should have," Dr. Dugan said. Six years ago, he quit looking. And earlier this year, Dr. Dugan, now 43, joined two other former physics postdocs at Pine Mountain Capital Management, a small financial management firm in Newton, Mass.

As the annual number of doctorates awarded in science nationwide has greatly outpaced the growth in the number of faculty jobs over the last 20 years, scientists like Dr. Dugan are finding that their postdoctoral years are stretching out for a discouragingly long time.

What used to be two or three years of career development often becomes five or more years in one post after another. Many of the postdocs are almost 40 before they start their first permanent positions and begin saving for retirement.

The bottleneck means that the number of university postdocs in science and engineering has grown to an unprecedented size, doubling from 1981 to 1998, to 39,000, with most of that growth in the life sciences.

With the research appointments starting to feel more like long-term commitments, postdocs are starting to organize on dozens of campuses and demanding better conditions, higher pay and benefits like health care and parental leave. On a few campuses, they have even begun talking to unions.

"The postdoc position has basically become outdated," said Dr. David J. Bucci, a psychology postdoc at Brown University, who helped organize a postdoc association there last year.

"It hasn't moved or advanced with the scientific community," Dr. Bucci said. "It's just grown into a holding pattern for people until jobs open up."

The number of faculty jobs in the sciences is not keeping pace with the number of those who seek them. According to a 1998 report from the National Science Foundation, the total number of science and engineering faculty jobs at universities dropped by 1,800 from 1991 to 1995, a time when the number of postdocs increased by 7,000.

"It's a weeding-out process," Dr. Dugan said. "If you produce more students than there are faculty members, then there are not going to be enough faculty jobs for everybody."

About 52,000 postdocs in physical, biological and social sciences - more than half from other countries - are working in universities, industry and government, where they play a critical role in research. While industry and government postdocs are more likely to get the benefits and working conditions of regular employees, about 80 percent of science postdocs are at universities, where their status is more ambiguous.

Postdocs in science are at an age when many people start to balance family and career needs. For example, the average age of people earning their Ph.D.'s in life sciences is 32. And surveys show that one-third to one-half of science postdocs are parents. But the lack of standard policies on family leave, the pressures of academic science and the modest pay make raising a family difficult, postdocs say.

"As postdocs are getting older, we need money," said Dr. Lynn Horton, 34, a mother of two who helped establish a postdoc organization last fall at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. "We need to have better health insurance. We need retirement benefits, and we are not going to wait forever to start a family." Dr. Horton spent six years as a postdoc before finding a temporary job teaching chemistry, which begins later this month.

Forty percent of the science postdocs are women. But in a recent postdoc survey at the University of California at Berkeley, 59 percent of the women with children said they had thought about leaving the academic world, compared with 39 percent of the men with children and 39 percent of the single women without children.

"This is the time in their lives where they are having babies," said Dr. Mary Ann Mason, the dean of the graduate division at Berkeley. "We're not accommodating that, so we'll lose them."

Postdocs often fall through the institutional cracks at universities, largely because of the debate of who should take responsibility for them - whether it is the universities, the individual laboratories or the organizations paying for the research, like the National Institutes of Health.

Last November, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine issued a report that said it was in the long-term interests of American science for postdocs to get better treatment.

"It's really unfortunate that people spend all these times in all these temporary positions and that they are 35 or 40," said Dr. Walter T. Schaffer, a research training officer at N.I.H. "To some extent it discourages very bright people from entering science."

The report said that pay was sometimes "embarrassingly low" and that some postdocs were neglected or even "exploited inappropriately." Postdocs' positions can be terminated at the discretion of their advisers.

Health insurance and family leave policies often depend on the generosity of research advisers, and postdocs can have a difficult time making ends meet. The report called for raising salaries, limiting postdoc appointments to a total of five years and guaranteeing health insurance.

"It's a wake-up call to the university," Dr. Mason said.

The National Institutes of Health increased its postdoc stipends, which are often used to set pay standards, by 25 percent in 1999, but the agency is asking Congress for an additional $40 million to $55 million for the next fiscal year so it can increase postdoc stipends by 10 percent. The N.I.H. pay scale starts at $28,260 for a postdoc's first year; for the third year, the pay is $35,196.

Postdocs appear to be taking their lead from graduate students, who have organized on many campuses, like the University of California, the University of Massachusetts and New York University. The postdoctoral associations that have emerged in the last several years are negotiating with university administrators on issues like health insurance, employment status, grievance procedures and training.

The first postdoc association at a major university was formed at Johns Hopkins in 1992. Today there are more than two dozen postdoc associations on campuses like Stanford, the University of Chicago and Brown.

The Sloan Foundation awarded more than $300,000 to help establish the nationwide Postdoc Network, which features a Web site for postdocs at nextwave.sciencemag.org /feature/postdocnetwork.shtml.

Stanford and Berkeley postdocs have even considered unionizing, in part because of the high cost of the Bay Area. "We're barely above poverty level in Silicon Valley," said Dr. Audrey Ettinger, co-chairwoman of Stanford's postdoctoral association.

Mary Ann Massenburg, a representative for the United Auto Workers, said she had handled inquiries from postdocs on several campuses, including Stanford. She said the postdocs were interested in the same issues as other workers.

But some find the overtures toward unionization troubling. "It's useful for students and postdocs to enter into a bargaining agreement with universities," said Dr. Schaffer, of the National Institutes of Health. "I'm much more concerned about the recent trends toward unionization. My concern is that the United Auto Workers doesn't know a whole lot about graduate education."

Pre-empting postdoc unions, a few universities have set up offices to address postdocs' needs. The University of Pennsylvania medical school opened such an office in 1997. The university now classifies postdocs as "professionals in training." That system allows the postdocs to get some benefits, like health insurance. But such programs are still rare.

A fundamental problem for postdocs is that their stipends generally come from federal grants, and such grants often stipulate that the postdocs cannot be considered employees of a university.

"Every single time you turn around at the university, this non employee status kind of hits you," said Dr. Thomas R. Peavy, a postdoc at University of California at Davis.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/21/science/physical/21POST.html?ex=999688 960&ei=1&en=bda3d9934ebdb7d9

Female Doctors in UK Call For Flexible Work Arrangements (7/19/01)

LONDON (Reuters Health) Jun 26 - More high-grade opportunities for part-time and other flexible work and training will be needed to ensure that female physicians fulfil their potential in the medical workforce, according to a report published today.

The report, "Women in Hospital Medicine: Career Choices and Opportunities," was produced by the Federation of Royal Colleges working party on women in medical specialties. It also reveals that many male doctors are looking for a better balance between work and home.

The working party, led by Professor Carol Black, vice-president of the Royal College of Physicians of England (RCP), concluded that accommodating physicians' need for part-time working at some stage in their careers will require an increase in the number of doctors and more investment in training.

"It should be stressed that these changes should be seen in the context of providing the highest possible standards of medical care. In the longer run, a larger number of male and female doctors who are able to lead a balanced working and private life should lead to better health care for patients," says the working party.

The government's current plans include provision for an increase in consultants from 27,000 in 2001 to 40,000 by 2009, but the report says it is not clear whether this takes account of the number of people working part-time. The working party says there is a "widespread and deep concern" that flexible working has not been taken into account.

The report shows that female physicians, who work in 25 hospital specialties, currently hold 17% of the consultant posts and just 7% of professorial-level jobs in academic medicine. The government target for consultant posts is 20%.

There are substantial differences between specialties, with women occupying 29% of consultant posts in genitourinary medicine, but only 6% of posts in neurology and other more "acute" specialties which tend to demand a lot of on-call work outside normal hours. Similar discrepancies are seen in the percentages of women coming up the professional ladder in specialist registrar posts, though the overall proportion is higher.

These differences were reflected in a survey conducted by the working party of doctors who had just passed the RCP's membership examination: 34% of women said the on-call commitment was "very important" to them, compared with 22% of men. A majority of respondents of both sexes — 92% of women and 51% of men — said they would definitely or possibly work flexibly at some point; however, there was agreement that this could or would harm their career.

The working party emphasises as its key finding the need for more properly paid, part-time training and working opportunities at all levels, but it also uncovered discrimination against women.

Comments from the examinees' survey included: "My wife considered orthopaedics but was told outright that it would be very difficult with two X chromosomes" and "It's still difficult to be a woman in hospital medicine." In another survey of trainees examined by the working party during its evidence gathering, a woman on a flexible training programme reported being asked, "How is it being a housewife with an interest in cardiology?"

The working party accepts that the "huge levels of professional commitment and long hours of work" mean that jobs at the very top of the profession may not be suitable for part-time working. But women should have an equal opportunity to apply, the group urges, and universities and NHS trusts should ensure that there is an equitable appointments process for the top jobs.

Sexiest Geek Alive (6/28/01)

Congratulations to local alum Ellen Spertus, MIT '90 (SB), '92 (SM),
'98 (PhD), crowned the Sexiest Geek Alive in a nationwide contest's
finals yesterday in San Jose.  Ellen is currently a computer science
professor at Mills College in Oakland.

For more information....
Pageant Web site: <http://www.sexiestgeekalive.com/>
Boston Globe: <http://www.boston.com/news/daily/21/sexy_geek.htm>
S.F. Chronicle: <http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/06/22/MNL166399.DTL>
Wired.com: <http://www.wired.com/news/women/0,1540,44706,00.html?tw=wn20010622

TLPJ Joins Gender Discrimination Suit Against Livermore Lab (6/28/01)

From: Jonathan Hutson JHutson@TLPJ.ORG (by way of Kitty de Jong)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT: June 20, 2001 Jonathan Hutson, TLPJ, 202-797-8600 x 246 Arthur Bryant, TLPJ, 510-622-8150 x 202 Victoria Ni, TLPJ, 510-622-8150 x 204 TLPJ JOINS GENDER DISCRIMINATION CLASS ACTION AGAINST LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY

Thousands of Female Employees Press Case Over Fair Pay, Promotions

Trial Lawyers for Public Justice (TLPJ) has joined in prosecuting a nationally-significant gender discrimination class action against Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL or the Lab) for depriving thousands of female current and former employees of equal pay and promotions. The suit charges that the Lab, managed by the Regents of the University of California, has documented but failed to correct its discrimination for over a decade.

"A glass ceiling has limited the progress and pay of women at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for far too long," said TLPJ Executive Director Arthur H. Bryant. "This lawsuit is intended to shatter it. Sex discrimination has no place at America's national laboratories."

The class action suit, Singleton v. Regents of the University of California, is currently pending in Superior Court in Oakland, California. James C. Sturdevant and Mark T. Johnson of San Francisco's The Sturdevant Law Firm and J. Gary Gwilliam of Oakland's Gwilliam, Ivary, Chiosso, Cavalli & Brewer are lead counsel.

TLPJ's initial focus in the case will be challenging LLNL's efforts to keep secret its gender equity studies, conducted at the urging of women employees complaining of discrimination at the Lab. The studies reportedly show that women at LLNL received fewer promotions and less pay than their male counterparts across a variety of job classifications and salary scales. The Lab has refused to produce the studies on the basis that they are allegedly protected by the attorney-client privilege.

"We believe that the internal studies the Lab is trying to hide prove that disparate treatment of male and female employees is an ongoing, pernicious problem," said TLPJ Staff Attorney Victoria Ni, co-counsel in the case. "The women and the public should be entitled to review records showing that this national institution has long been aware of gender discrimination and failed to redress the disparities."

The Regents of the University of California run the national security lab under a contract with the U.S. Department of Energy. The six named plaintiffs - female scientists and other professional and technical employees - contend that women earn an average of $2,100 a month less than males of comparable edu-cation and experience. LLNL's Affirmative Action Diversity Program division has acknowledged that there has been limited advancement of women employees at the Lab. For example, the division drafted a 1991 report, Review of LLNL Promotional Opportunities for Women and Minorities, which noted that only 10 female scientists and engineers held scientific management positions, compared with 238 men in such positions. Another LLNL study confirmed that "a salary lag does exist for women and minorities."

"One would think that rocket scientists grasp the principles of equal pay for equal work, and equal advancement opportunities for equally qualified workers," said Sturdevant. "Yet the pattern of pervasive and systemic discrimination continues."

"This is truly a significant case of gender discrimination," said Gwilliam. "Our national laboratories should be dedicated to advancing the best and the brightest regardless of gender. Unfortunately, that is not what they have been doing at the Livermore Lab."

Lead plaintiff Dr. Mary Singleton, a research chemist, says that Lab supervisors denied her promotions and, at one point, paid her $2,000 less per month than comparably qualified male colleagues. Since the late 1970s, Singleton has helped to spearhead efforts to persuade Lab management to recognize and take corrective action against gender discrimination. She and other members of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Women's Association struggled throughout the 1980s to obtain information to confirm the existence of the discrimination they believed permeated LLNL's compensation system. Their requests were largely ignored.

Finally, the Women's Association conducted its own comprehensive salary study, which identified widespread discrepancies between the salaries of male and female employees at LLNL. Only after Singleton, on behalf of the Women's Association, presented the study to the LLNL director in 1988 did LLNL finally agree to examine the issue of gender equity. Thereafter, LLNL's own internal studies confirmed that salary disparities between men and women existed.

Although various committees and task groups were formed allegedly to address the concerns of the Women's Association, no significant steps were ever taken to address the systemic salary differences. After years of unfulfilled promises, Singleton and five of her colleagues finally filed suit in 1998, alleging violations of the California Fair Employment and Housing Act and the California Equal Pay Act. The other named plaintiffs are Gloria Glasscox, a senior management analyst from 1987-1999; Shirley Rogers Jennings, a computer support associate hired in 1981; Jannelle Spann, an executive staff member hired in 1976; Maura Spragge, a senior mechanical technologist hired in 1977; and Katherine Lynette Fritz, a designer hired in 1976.

In January 2001, California Superior Court Judge Ronald Sabraw certified the case as a class of at least 5,000 - and possibly more than 10,000 - former and current female employees. The trial is expected to take place sometime in 2002. The legal team for the plaintiffs also includes Kimberly M. Drake of Gwilliam, Ivary, Chiosso, Cavalli & Brewer.

### Trial Lawyers for Public Justice is the only national public interest law firm dedicated to using trial lawyers' skills and resources to advance the public good. Founded in 1982, TLPJ utilizes a nationwide network of more than 2,500 trial lawyers to pursue precedent-setting and socially significant litigation. It has a wide-ranging litigation docket in the areas of civil rights and liberties, consumer rights, worker safety, toxic torts, environmental protection, and access to the courts. TLPJ is the principal project of The TLPJ Foundation, a not-for-profit membership organization. It has offices in Washington, DC, and Oakland, CA. The TLPJ web site address is www.tlpj.org.

Glycobiology - How Sweet It Is: An Interview with MacArthur Fellowship Recipient Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi (6/19/01)

http://www.labvelocity.com/literature/article.jhtml?advanced=primaryArticle_ Apr

Getting It Right: How Working Mothers Successfully Take Up the Challenge of Life, Family and Career (6/19/01)

The posting below is a commentary on a new book: Getting It Right: How Working Mothers Successfully Take Up the Challenge of Life, Family and Career, Pocket Books, 2001, by Stanford University professor , Laraine Zappert. It is from the April 25, 2001 edition of the Stanford Report http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/report/ Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis reis@stanford.edu UP NEXT: America's Teenagers, Motivated but Directionless

Tomorrow's Academic Careers

--------------- 1, 241 words --------------

TIPS FOR STRESSED-OUT WORKING MOTHERS

BY BARBARA PALMER

If there's one thing Laraine Zappert would like working mothers to know, it's this: You're not the only one eating dinner off your dashboard.

"Everyone struggles," said Zappert, a clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the School of Medicine and author of Getting It Right: How Working Mothers Successfully Take Up the Challenge of Life, Family and Career, published by Pocket Books in February. At Stanford, Zappert also directs the university's sexual harassment policy office and women's support programs in the graduate schools of business, law, medicine and engineering.

Zappert has talked to many women struggling to combine work and family responsibilities who assume everyone else has everything under control. They imagine others are blithely heading up companies and raising small children, "all while doing a little brain surgery and building a house on the side," Zappert said. "That's a fantasy. One doesn't know what goes on in other people's lives."

After two decades of clinical and research practice, however, Zappert knows more than most. In addition to the experience of the women with whom she's worked in her private practice, Zappert drew on a 1996 research study conducted with three generations of alumnae of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. For the study, more than 300 women answered 10 pages of questions about their home and work lives.

Since more than half the women she surveyed work more than 40 hours a week, Zappert had worried that the questionnaire's length might discourage women from responding. Instead, more than half the women who received the survey returned it with the margins covered with scribbled comments or accompanied by more pages filled with comments. "We touched a nerve, " Zappert said. "These are issues women love to talk about."

Her book is not just about the experience of MBA moms, but includes experiences of female teachers, engineers, writers, doctors, lawyers and stay-at-home mothers, she said. But it doesn't address the problems faced by working mothers with lower levels of education and expertise, she said.

"I think what it says is that there's a certain universality of experience that women have. If you make a decision to have children, whether you have an MBA or an M.D. or not, they are a potent, important aspect of your life."

Along with the rewards of motherhood, "working mothers feel despair, anxiety, anger and conflict. But we are not alone in doing this. And too often we try to deal with this in isolation."

It's a common assumption that psychologists research their own neurosis -- and Zappert, the mother of two grown children, said she's no exception. The first woman in the organizational behavior doctoral program at Cornell University in the 1970s, she already had developed an interest in women's issues when she came to Stanford in 1977 with a 3-year-old daughter. Her second child, a son, was born in 1981.

"I remember walking into the VA hospital as an intern, with a cookie plastered to the back of my skirt. We used to laugh about the 'Cheerio line,' which is how far up your suit leg the kids could reach."

Most moms report 'great stress'

Juggling parental and professional roles was difficult for most of the women Zappert surveyed. More than half said they suffered "a great deal of stress" in meeting the demands of career and family. Even so, the mothers in the sample were overwhelmingly happy with their decision to have children -- virtually all of them said it definitely was the right decision. "Clearly, children are primary in the life of professional women," Zappert said.

The women in her sample were making tremendous sacrifices, often at their own expense, Zappert said. "What we do is really hard and we do it well. But we pay for it in terms of our own psychological well-being."

Zappert devotes an entire chapter to guilt, from the "driveway remorse" working mothers feel as they leave their house in the morning to the guilt stay-at-home mothers feel about not using their education. "That's the chapter that most women are focusing on," Zappert said, judging from the e-mail messages she's gotten from readers.

The women in the study wrote to Zappert lamenting their messy houses and the pressure they felt to do things like hosting elaborate birthday parties for children, "to stage Ben-Hur while working 60 hours a week," Zappert said.

Women are likely to feel guilty no matter what they do -- or don't do, Zappert said. Guilt is "very hard to escape, but it wastes a lot of time and energy." The key is to determine for yourself what you and your family need, she said.

The advice that mothers in the survey most frequently offered to other women thinking about having children was to be prepared to spend money to get the childcare and household help they need. Some even suggested that it was worth going into debt to get adequate help, Zappert said.

Finding good childcare was the most significant stressor for many of the women in the study, who earned on average $100,000 a year. "Childcare was a tremendous strain," she said. Even for the high-earning women in the sample, it was not uncommon for women to spend a significant portion of their after-tax earnings to pay for childcare, she said.

Not everyone in the sample was highly paid, Zappert said. Many of the women talked about the stress of diminished financial resources after cutting work hours to part time or having not gone after top-flight positions because of their children.

But even when resources are short or there is very little money, people can allocate resources differently, she said. "Do whatever you can do to take care of yourself. Indulge yourself in ways that aren't financial," she suggested. "Put more money into childcare or household help, if it's at all available, instead of saving it for a rainy day. This is the rainy day."

Parents also should "keep up the pressure on institutions to do better on childcare," she said. Although many organizations and corporations now give childcare issues serious consideration, it takes time to turn talk into action, Zappert wrote.

In the study, the women who had worked the longest were most optimistic about the chances of women successfully integrating work and family, Zappert reported. "Everything doesn't have to happen at once," a Business School graduate from the 1960s wrote. "Taking a longer-term perspective on things is important."

Most women surveyed said that there is no definitive "right" time to have children, although the prevailing wisdom is that women should get their credentials out of the way first, Zappert said.

The youngest women in her survey were planning to have children when their careers are established, but early enough to avoid fertility problems. Many women wrote very poignantly about trying to get pregnant later in life, Zappert said. "It's a huge issue for many women."

Many Stanford women suggested a "sequencing" plan, where women establish their professional credentials first, gear downto less demanding or part-time work while raising children, and then ramp up their careers again later. There's not much information about how that works in the long term, since part-time work wasn't a practical reality for women until recent decades, Zappert said.

In spite of the difficulties they faced, 80 percent of the women in her sample reported being in excellent spirits, Zappert said."This was a very positive group. Most professional women have an enormous store of energy."

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Sex and science (5/16/01)

By Cathy Young

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2001/04/12/science_women/index.html

These days, it's not unusual to see women's names attached to major scientific discoveries. The team of physicists who succeeded in stopping a light beam earlier this year was headed by Harvard professor Lene Hau; astronomer Wendy Freedman was one of the three leaders of the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project, which measured the expansion rate of the universe.

Nevertheless, science remains an overwhelmingly male field: At some leading research institutions, the percentage of women faculty in science departments is still in the single digits.

Now, as the New York Times reports in its quarterly  http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/08/education/08ED-FEMI. html Education Life supplement, a movement that seeks to remedy bias against women in science is sweeping universities.

But is this effort, which the Times says could "change the face of science education," based on facts or myth? And is it championing gender justice or gender politics?

A major victory for proponents of women in science occurred in late January when top administrators and professors from nine major universities -- including Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford -- met at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a symposium on gender equity in science and engineering. They issued a terse, though vague, statement recognizing that "barriers still exist" and pledging to work for change.

The location for the gathering was not chosen randomly. It was at MIT that the gender equity initiative was born a few years ago, from a study that has been hailed as groundbreaking and assailed as "junk science."

GETTING RECOGNIZED - NOT SO EASY TASK FOR WOMEN (5/16/01)

Men are prone to boasting and successful men have become experts in self promotion. To most women, boasting is anathema. A major turning point in most women's careers comes when they recognize that self promotion is part of the game of business.

Why is it so difficult for women to get recognized in corporate America? Actually there are a many reasons, both apparent and subtle and the most obvious answers... ... "take on high visibility projects" and "toot your own horn".. are only part of the solution. Just how does a woman get recognized and get the credit she deserves?

When one is advised to "take on high visibility projects" that translates into an admonition to "perform effectively on a high profile project which will receive a lot of attention".It is one thing to perform effectively, however and it is quite another to be perceived as performing effectively. The answer to being perceived as effective and getting recognized for it does not lie in performance....research shows women perform as well on the job as men, often better...so we have to turn elsewhere for an answer.

One of the most basic differences between women and men in the workplace is in their communication styles. Put another way, men are prone to boasting and successful men have become experts in self promotion. To most women, boasting is anathema. We have been socialized in humility since very early childhood. Hoping to get recognized through increasingly raising the bar for performance is what keeps women on that endless treadmill of seeking perfection in their work but never achieving adequate recognition and never breaking into top management. Men, on the other hand, do the job well enough and move on; they go for the power and supervise someone else doing the job to perfection while they continue to move up the rungs of the corporate ladder. Much of their advancement is accomplished through self promotion. So, for those women who stay hidden in their office, ignoring the first law of corporate survival, who shy away from boasting, remembering what their mothers taught them as little girls.....get over it!

A major turning point in most women's careers comes when they recognize that self promotion is part of the game of business. They find a style of promoting themselves they feel comfortable with and quickly make it part of their everyday repertoire.

As a successful chemist points out in Women Breaking Through by Deborah J. Swiss,"Perceptions of how hard you work and perceptions about your accomplishments are probably, in many ways,as important as what you actually do. I hate to say it but it's true. If you are quiet and, therefore, invisible, you won't be identified as someone who is competent..You won't be perceived as being particularly successful or having good ideas, which may not be valid, but it comes out that way."

So, how do you go about gaining first visibility, then recognition? Start immediately by weaving your accomplishments into your casual conversations. The most successful men in the world have become experts at this and that's one of the reasons they're so successful. Take, for example, wine scion and industry spokesperson, Peter Sichel, getting off a plane from New York to meet some colleagues in the wine business. At the time, Sichel was chairman of Blue Nun, then the best selling wine label in the world. Sichel was probably the best known figure in the wine business, pictured in every book on wine, quoted constantly, on every important industry panel. And the chances of someone in the wine industry not knowing who he was or his accomplishments was exactly zero.Yet immediately after introducing himself, Sichel launched into a story about the night before when he was the surprise honoree at an elegant,formal gala studded with New York City luminaries, hosted by the mayor and the City of New York."My children said afterwards, "We know you're a cool guy, Dad, but we wondered if we shouldn't tell you in advance so you wouldn't have a heart attack." He chuckled.

Sichel was suave, urbane, slender and in wonderful health. He was also more famous and renowned in his industry than most people who are not rock artists or movie stars. But in his first 90 seconds on the ground he had managed to promote himself and make sure everyone got the message about who he was and his professional stature. There was a lesson to be learned here. Doing good work isn't enough. Receiving awards isn't enough. Being rich and famous isn't enough. Making it a habit to get the word out every day, at every meeting to the people along your career path is definitely an important element in an upward career spiral. And it's amazingly easy to weave into a conversation with some subtlety and not seeming to boast unduly:

If someone mentions Washington D.C. or the Vice President or the Secret Service or politics or even the weather, that's your cue to say "Oh, I was invited to the White House last month for that conference on my industry." Just about any topic or mention of a colleague can trigger a response like "Gee, I haven't been so embarrassed since"....or "I haven't seen him since"....or "I haven't been at that hotel since".... or "I haven't been anyplace the air conditioner was turned on so high since the Chamber of Commerce had that special banquet to honor me."

Keep a log or a notebook filled with all your work successes. Whenever you get a rave letter, close an important deal, have stellar results in your quarterly report, pass along the quote or statement to your company newsletter, email updates to associates, professional publications and weave the positives into regular press releases for your company.

Make yourself visible and develop your skills at the same time by attending industry functions. Volunteer to be a speaker on your area of expertise. Hand out and collect as many business cards as you can. Develop what deal makers call your "elevator pitch", something you can say which summarizes your value and achievements in the 30 to 60 seconds it takes for an elevator to move between floors.

Weave into your conversation your participation in professional and community organizations and women's networks. Leverage your credibility in the community to increase your credibility in your organization and industry and visa versa.

It may help you to start promoting yourself to remember that,in the context of business, women are often devalued."A man's success is more likely to be attributed to ability, a woman's success to hard work, good luck, or an easy task. A woman's failure will be attributed to lack of ability, a man's failure to bad luck, a hard task, or lack of effort". Women's achievements are not automatically recognized and rewarded. It is only right and fair that we bring attention to our successes. Just as it is said "Power is never given, it is always taken", in the context of business, your achievements will rarely,if ever, be touted by men who may feel threatened and most certainly will feel competitive. If you want recognition, you must broadcast your achievements and press for appropriate rewards and advancement. No one else will do it for you. And if you start promoting yourself, you will soon feel comfortable doing it, and equally important, you will begin to realize you deserve it.

Molecular Biologist Becomes First Woman to Lead Princeton (5/16/01)

By KATE ZERNIKE

PRINCETON, N.J., May 5 — Shirley M. Tilghman, a molecular biologist
who was among the architects of the national effort to map the
human genome and an early advocate for women in a field still
dominated by men, was named the 19th president of Princeton
University today.

 Dr. Tilghman, a popular Princeton professor and a prominent
researcher, has become widely sought-after for national commissions
and panels dealing with some of the thorniest ethical dilemmas in
science, including embryonic stem-cell research and human cloning.

 When she takes office on June 15, she will become the second woman
to lead an Ivy League institution, by just two weeks; Judith Rodin,
the president of the University of Pennsylvania, was the first, and
on July 1, Ruth J. Simmons will become president of Brown
University.

 "She has something of the Tiger spirit in her, that spirit that
only those of us close to the place can really understand," Robert
H. Rawson Jr., a trustee who led the search committee, said after
the announcement beneath portraits of George Washington and King
George in Nassau Hall. "She epitomizes the strengths, the values,
that those of us who care about this place think are distinctive
about Princeton."

 Dr. Tilghman, 54, broke into a smile of relief after the
announcement today, she said, "It is time for a woman president,"
she said. Noting that Princeton, with 6,300 total students, started
admitting women in 1969, she said "I am just excited to have the
incredible privilege to be that person.

 "I feel I have this institution in my blood," she added.

 Harold
T. Shapiro, an economist, announced last fall that he would retire
after more than 13 years as president of Princeton.

 Dr. Tilghman (pronounced TILL-man), was originally one of five
faculty members on the search committee. But about six weeks ago,
after she excused herself early from a meeting to teach a class,
Mr. Rawson said, the rest of the committee members decided to ask
her to become a candidate. She agreed to resign from the committee
and go through formal candidate screening.
 She joined Princeton as a professor in 1986, and became head of
the university's Institute for Integrative Genomics in 1998, a job
that has given her some training in the fundraising that will be
demanded of her as president.

 She is also the parent of a Princeton junior, and she said today
that she had learned about campus life from "some rather
fascinating conversations with my daughter, Rebecca."

 Her research has focused on the imprinting of genes — the way some
genes function differently depending on whether they are inherited
from the mother or the father. At the National Institutes of Health
in the 1970's, she was among the researchers to isolate one of the
first mammalian genes. She has been equally devoted to teaching,
and was awarded Princeton's President's Award for Distinguished
Teaching in 1996. This morning, when trustees came out of their
meeting to tell her she had been unanimously chosen as president,
she was busy reading senior theses.

 She was an unexpected and unconventional choice for this
tradition- bound, ivy-decked campus, where students today were
preparing for the swirl of spring house parties at the eating clubs
along Prospect Avenue.

 She has argued to abolish tenure, calling it "no friend to women"
because the trial period leading up to the tenure decision usually
coincides with childbearing years, pressuring many women to choose
between a family and career. She herself raised two children as a
single mother while continuing her research. Dr. Tilghman has also
said that the federal government should deny funding to scientific
meetings that do not include women on their panels of presenters.

 She headed the National Institutes of Health committee that
established guidelines for the use of embryonic stem cells in
biomedical research. The cells, taken from an embryo a few days
after conception, give rise to all the tissues of the adult body.
She recently argued to the Bush administration to continue funding
for stem-cell research despite the protests of abortion rights
opponents.

 Dr. Tilghman has also tried to infect amateurs with her own
enthusiasm for her field. She has taught science courses to
undergraduates not planning to major in science and special courses
on behavioral genetics to alumni.

 She has long sought to encourage young scientists, and women in
particular. She pointed out that while women were entering science
in numbers comparable to men, they were not breaking into senior
faculty ranks in the same proportion.

 Like her predecessor, Dr. Shapiro, Dr. Tilghman was born and
raised in Canada. She graduated from Queen's University in
Kingston, Ontario, and taught in Sierra Leone for two years before
earning her doctorate at Temple University in Philadelphia.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/06/nyregion/06PRIN.html?ex=990196247&ei=1&en=
1ef96c9bbf24bf52

Balancing act is tough for women (5/7/01)

Carrie Kirby, Chronicle Staff Writer

A new study shows that juggling work with family responsibilities is the biggest challenge facing women in Silicon Valley. Just ask Monika Henzinger, research director at Mountain View search engine company Google. Henzinger stayed in an "easy" job at Digital Equipment Corp. for two years while she sat on a waiting list for the high-quality day care she wanted for her daughter, now 3. Only after her daughter was in the right care did Henzinger feel comfortable pursuing an opportunity at startup Google, where as director of research she works 10-hour days. "Before, I didn't feel like I could do it," said Henzinger, who is expecting a second child in July. Tonight, Henzinger will be honored as one of the top 25 women in the Internet industry by professional organization San Francisco Women on the Web. The study, called "Unfinished Business: Women in the Silicon Valley Economy, " was released yesterday by the nonprofit groups Community Foundation Silicon Valley and Collaborative Economics. The study found that while most women (57 percent) in the region feel that job opportunities for them are getting better, there are still major obstacles holding them back. Women cited child care as a barrier to career advancement more than any other obstacle. Two-thirds of women surveyed said that the Silicon Valley region has failed to provide adequate child care options. Although Silicon Valley women now contribute substantially to family income, they still bear the brunt of household duties. The study found that half of Silicon Valley women overall -- and 33 percent of women in marriages and partnerships -- provide the majority of their household incomes. But 47 percent also do most of the errand running, cleaning and child care, while 46 percent share those tasks. Only 7 percent of women said that someone else had the main responsibility for running the household. Louise Kirkbride, founder and chief executive officer of Santa Clara online customer service company Broad Daylight, said that another reason women aren't leading more companies is that they aren't pursuing the right career paths. She advises that women with executive ambitions join corporations' sales teams and become vice president of sales. "Sales is the heartbeat of the company. Carly Fiorina came up through sales at AT&T. Carol Bartz at Autodesk, she came up through sales at Sun," Kirkbride said. Or, women can do what Kirkbride herself did -- start their own company. Broad Daylight is the third firm Kirkbride has founded. Where does she find the time? She doesn't do that whole family/work balance thing. "I don't have a life outside of work," said Kirkbride, who is married but has no children and is also being honored tonight. "I don't know that I could have done both." Other findings from yesterday's survey: -- Women are more likely to hold low-paying jobs than men. In the 12 fastest-growing occupations in the region, women hold only 29 percent of high- pay jobs, averaging $72,000 a year, but 61 percent of low-end jobs, averaging $22,000 a year. -- Nearly half of women (48 percent) say that child care at or near their workplace is "very important" to them; but only 19 percent have access to child care with their current employment. -- Of college-educated women surveyed, 60 percent believe that men have better advancement opportunities than women. E-mail Carrie Kirby at ckirby@sfchronicle.com. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2001 SF Chronicle

Molecular Biologist Is Still in Love With the Lab (5/7/01)

SCIENTIST AT WORK / Marguerite Vogt By NATALIE ANGIER

At the age of 88, when any sensible woman might feel entitled to indulge in a second childhood, Dr. Marguerite Vogt is still contentedly working on her first one — a childhood spent in that grand, intimate, luxuriously rigorous toy store otherwise known as a scientific laboratory.

After all, she began publishing research papers while she was practically still a child — when, as a 14-year-old girl in Germany, she described a series of fruit fly mutations that cast whisker-thin rays of light on the darkness of embryo development.

And for the past three-quarters of a century, Dr. Vogt, now a molecular biologist at the Salk Institute in San Diego, has not strayed from her youthful calling and the bliss that only a bench cluttered with beakers, tubes and petri dishes can bring.

She did research as a university and medical school student, skipping classes to putter around in the lab and making up for missed lectures by memorizing her textbooks. She did her bench work right through the Nazi era, when, for political reasons, her scientist-parents were thrown out of the Kaiser Wilhelm/Max Planck Institute in Berlin, where her father had been director, and they were forced to open their own research center in the Black Forest.

She did her work through the ruins of postwar Germany, and, after immigrating to the United States, she continued her research wherever bench space could be had, first at the California Institute of Technology, and then at the Salk. Before Louis Kahn's renowned Stonehenge- like structure was completed in 1963, Dr. Vogt worked for the nascent institute in a suffocating windowless woodshed, under hoods that barely protected her from the dangerous microbes she studies.

Over the decades, Dr. Vogt has won the respect of legions of her peers and protégés. She worked for years with Dr. Renato Dulbecco of the Salk Institute on groundbreaking studies of how the polio virus forms distinctive plaques in tissue culture, work that has proved essential to the development of a polio vaccine.

Later, the two researchers explored how a type of mammalian tumor virus called the polyoma virus transforms ordinary cells into cancer cells, research that lifted the study of cancer biology from a mere cataloging of the gross anatomy of a tumor cell to an exploration of the genetic mutations that underlie the disease.

But while Dr. Dulbecco eventually won a Nobel Prize for his research, Dr. Vogt has yet to be awarded a single significant prize, or even to gain membership in the prestigious National Academy of Sciences. Not that you would hear a grumble of bitterness or complaint from Dr. Vogt. "I'm happy not to have been bothered," she said. "When you get too famous, you stop being able to work."

Dr. Vogt is a small, weathered, unfailingly gracious woman, with foam-white hair and old-world manners, who insists on serving her guest Swiss chocolates and coffee, followed by a slice of rum-soaked cake. She is still reasonably spry, although she says that she no longer can run and do push-ups and calisthenics, as she did every day of her life until a year or two ago. She is hard of hearing, and she speaks in a soft, quavering voice that one must bend close to hear.

She also has become absent-minded, and has difficulty sometimes remembering to do things like split a dish of cultured cells before they have used up all their nutrients. Then again, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows a quarter of her age have been known to commit similar sins, and worse.

And few of them have her enormous dedication. Dr. Vogt is in the laboratory 10 hours a day, seven days a week. "I like it here," she explains. "If I were to stay at home, I'd be bored."

Over the years, she has mastered a wide variety of research topics, including oncogenes — the genes that, when mutated, result in cancer; immunology; and the behavior of telomeres, the distinctive chromosome tips that serve as molecular timepieces in healthy cells but that play a nefarious role in cancer by refusing to shorten as they should.

"Marguerite recognized early on that telomeres were interesting and important," said Dr. Martin Haas, Dr. Vogt's good friend and collaborator for the last 30-odd years. "She kept bringing them up and bringing them up, until finally I agreed that we should study them."

Dr. Haas, 54, treats Dr. Vogt with something approaching a son's devotion and affection, arranging her transportation to and from the lab, making sure that she regularly changes the batteries in her hearing aid, writing about her life and work for the journal Cancer Research. Dr. Haas said that nothing would make his great friend happier than to follow her father's example and work up to the very last, with her final glimpse of life being the view through a microscope.

Dr. Vogt is the oldest working scientist at the Salk Institute, although Dr. Dulbecco, the institute's director, is only a year younger. Well-known, deeply respected and frankly beloved, as few scientists are, Dr. Vogt nevertheless presents a complicated sort of role model, particularly for the young women in science who meet her, or know of her reputation.

On one hand, Dr. Vogt's life has been nothing short of heroic, as she has devoted herself to her work at a time when women rarely did, and often under political and economic conditions that might crush the confidence of even the smuggest young male Turks.

On the other hand, by some reckonings Dr. Vogt has sacrificed too much to the greedy gods of science. She not only never married or had children, she says she never dated anybody, never fell in love. "During the Hitler era, when I was young, I avoided every man," she explained. "I didn't want to end up dating a Nazi, and in Germany at that time, you could never be sure of somebody's politics."

Dr. Haas said, "She was a competitive athlete, and her friends say one of the reasons she took up running was so that she could outrun any man who tried to catch her."

Dr. Vogt also felt that she had to choose between being a scientist and being a wife and mother, and, she said, "Science was my milk."

Dr. Vogt's older sister and only sibling, Marthe, also became a scientist, studying the biochemistry of the brain, and she, too, opted against marriage and children.

When asked why the daughters thought they couldn't pull off their mother's trick of emulsifying accomplishments and intimacy, Dr. Vogt replied: "Ah, my mother. She was an exception to the rule."

Beyond the totality of her sacrifice of the personal for the professional, there is also the question of Dr. Vogt's apparent willingness to remain in the background, to hammer away at the bench without demanding any reward beyond the science itself. "When she did the work with Renato, women, with few exceptions, were not treated as equal to men in carrying on research," said Dr. Edward B. Lewis, a fruit fly geneticist at the California Institute of Technology and a good friend of Dr. Vogt's. "Marguerite should have received much more recognition than she did, that's for sure. She's certainly one of best and most intelligent scientists I know."

Dr. David Baltimore, the president of Caltech, said: "Marguerite is just a deeply devoted scientist who worked very hard, loved what she did and was uninterested in the professional side of the business, or in being recognized for what she did. She didn't try to establish herself in that way, or to get out there and tell her story. She let the stories tell themselves. Or, in the case of the work she did with Renato, he was the spokesman for the pair of them."

But Dr. Vogt is not indifferent to the trappings of fame and recognition. She is extremely proud of the fact that her sister, who immigrated to Great Britain in the 1930's, became quite prominent in neuroscience, and was elected to the prestigious Royal Society of London. Dr. Vogt also takes deep pride in her friendship with Dr. Barbara McClintock, the corn geneticist who won a Nobel Prize but who was considered something of a misanthrope.

Yet whether out of personal disinclination or insecurity, Dr. Vogt has never expected laurels for herself. Dr. Vogt also had little regard for her personal safety. When, in the 1950's, she and Dr. Dulbecco were developing the plaque assay for studying the polio virus, she again did much of the work, laboring under a hood in a basement with a pathogen that other biochemists wouldn't touch.

"I didn't tell my parents that I was working with polio virus," said Dr. Vogt.

Dr. Haas added, "They found out about it inadvertently, and they were very angry."

But despite her parents' disapproval of her polio research, Dr. Vogt absorbed her altruistic derring-do from them. Eminent in neurology and psychiatry, the Vogts met and mingled with scientists from around the world, who flocked to the Kaiser Wilhelm/Max Planck Institute, the epicenter of brain research. In the 1920's, officials in the Soviet Union invited Oskar Vogt to Moscow to study Lenin's brain.

"They wanted to show that Lenin was a great communist, and that communism was heritable," said Dr. Haas.

Oskar Vogt also helped the Russians establish a string of brain research institutes of their own. Because of their Moscow connection, though, the Vogts came under suspicion when the Nazis rose to power in Germany. Nor did it help that many of the Vogts' friends and fellow scientists were Jewish. Eventually, the Nazis forced the Vogts to resign from their posts, and they might have put the couple in jail, or even to death, were it not for the intercession of the powerful Krups family, several of whom had been patients of the Vogts. The Krupses donated money to build them a new research center, in the back woods of Neustadt, where they continued their scientific research, while offering refuge to a number of Jewish scientists and their family members.

"Nowadays, one cannot imagine such a crazy world," said Marguerite Vogt. "I'm glad that I've managed to forget most of it."

Dr. Vogt had been so repelled by her wartime experience that when, in 1950, she was offered a research position in the United States, at Caltech, she jumped at the chance, even though it meant abandoning fruit fly genetics. "There was no interest in Drosophila research," she said. "So I had to take up something new" — the study of viruses and tumor biology.

On moving to America, Dr. Vogt brought along only one possession: her grand piano. She still plays the piano regularly, and on Sundays holds recitals with fellow musician- scientists. Otherwise, she left Germany wholly behind. She has traveled to many countries, but she has never been back to Germany. And when young German scientists come to the lab, eager to meet the famous Doktor Vogt and to chat with her in their native tongue, she replies, sternly, in English.

By contrast, she would gladly greet a visiting Sorbonne student in French, which, because her mother was French, was the first language she learned. "I have no moral hesitations about that," she said.

Dr. Vogt's moral sense and generosity never waver. "When young people came to the lab, if they didn't have money, I've seen her lend it to them out of her own pocket," Dr. Baltimore said.

When her older sister's health began failing, Dr. Vogt moved her to San Diego and helped care for her, and Marthe is still alive, at 98. A longtime liberal, Dr. Vogt marched in protests against the Vietnam War, and her filing cabinets are decorated with photographs of Democratic presidents from John F. Kennedy through Bill Clinton. She thinks that times are better now for women in science than they were when she was getting started, but she also sees considerable room for improvement.

"There have to be many more of us around," she said. "Maybe then it will be hard to ignore us."

Still a Man's World? (5/7/01)
By Laura Carr
Dec 25 2000 12:00 AM PST

The wage gap between men and women still persists, even among Internet Economy employees.

Trailblazing: One Woman's Trek in Science (5/7/01)

Dr. Rita Colwell

Director, NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION

at the Association for Women in Science-Alaska Chapter Luncheon

Thank you for welcoming me back to Alaska. It's a pleasure to be back in this beautiful state, to be invited to reflect with you on my own "trek" in science.

We have, each of us, lived the rigor of a frontier life and have developed special strengths to live with daily challenges, both in today's society and from the natural environment.

Indeed, my visits to Alaska -- I've traveled as far north as Deadhorse to the Arctic Ocean's edge -- have evoked for me how human life thrives and how the human spirit is enriched in a harsh and demanding environment.

Living in the Arctic has parallels to the challenges we face as women in science.

What has struck me on my visits to Alaska is how the rigorous climate, the physical landscape, the winters, the darkness, are merely part of daily life.

This kind of "blending" of people with the environment has a long legacy in Alaska and the Arctic.

What springs to mind, of course as a biologist, is the remarkable adaptation of native peoples, how they survive and persevere in the harshest environment on Earth. They survive because they understand their environment.

It has been said that "We all stand on the shoulders of our ancestors," but that "in the Arctic the debt seems more obvious."

How I got into science

Let me first look back on my personal and professional journey, ramble a bit down some pathways in science and education.

Some of the barriers for women on those pathways are still all too familiar, but we can celebrate the fact that other roadblocks have disappeared.

Keep in mind that mental toughness, or perseverance in the face of obstacles, is fundamental. In fact, I could say that I got my start in science out of sheer stubbornness.

When I went to high school, girls simply were not allowed to take physics. What's more, my high school chemistry teacher told me I'd never make it in chemistry -- because women couldn't.

That angered me but also galvanized me. I had begun to see science as a way to understand the world and a way to make my way in the world.

University

I was offered a scholarship to Radcliffe, but I couldn't afford the other half of the tuition. Instead, the full scholarship and the opportunity to live on a campus lured me to Purdue.

I started out in chemistry, but the way it was taught was so uninspiring -- beginning chemistry taught in a classroom full of a thousand students. If you were way back in the auditorium, you could barely see the lecturer.

It was actually not until my senior year that I discovered bacteriology -- the term microbiology hadn't surfaced yet. It was great --interesting and fun.

Professor Dorothy Powelson was an inspiration. That was it. All six of us women in her class went on to get MDs or PhDs.

Family life/Jack

It was about this time that I met a handsome, 6-foot-2-graduate student. First date, proposal -- married 40 years. He's still a nice guy. About that time -- there was a grad school fellowship possibility -- but the department chair said he wouldn't waste it on a woman.

Instead, I got a stipend toward a Masters in genetics. My research: I counted 186,000 fruitflies. It was tremendous fundamental preparation for microbiology.

Eventually we both applied for post-docs and we both got them at the NRC in Canada.. Then I got a letter expressing concerns about nepotism. They would give me lab space but no money.

We have two daughters, and my husband Jack played a major role in their lives and their successes from the beginning.

In 1963 -- we're talking 35 years ago -- I went off to a scientific meeting for three days to give an invited paper and left my husband with our three-month-old daughter, Alison.

That kind of behavior was unheard of at the time. People asked Jack, how could you possibly let your wife go off and leave you with a new baby? Of course, now we know that's a good way for fathers and daughters to bond. We know what an important role fathers play in their daughters' expectations of themselves.

We made a deal with our daughters: they could major in whatever they wished, but they had to take math and calculus and two years of chemistry, that is, through to organic chemistry.

Oldest -- got Ph.D. in population biology -- works on "whirling disease" parasite in fish. She and some fellow graduate students gave papers at an evolutionary biology conference I organized.

Youngest -- med school, and a Ph.D. in Women's Studies and African history -- has worked on Mount Kilamanjaro.

This past May was a red-letter month for us -- Ph.D.s, NIH grants, graduation, baby, etc.

My personal trek has taken me to this new and wonderful threshold: the beginning of my term as NSF director, and it's great...extremely exciting place to be...

My research/broader trends in science

My own research on climate and health -- particularly the correlation of cholera with climatic factors -- illustrates some of the forces or trends I see as shaping the world of research and education in the coming years.

I'll be speaking tonight at a public lecture in much more detail about my own research. Here I'd like to briefly touch on three broad trends that carry much import for our community.

• One is the revolution in information technology. We could not have developed models to predict conditions conducive to cholera without advanced computing.

  We use data from remote sensing -- would have been impossible without high-speed computing. Sustained support for information science, through NSF and other agencies, is absolutely vital to these advances.

• Second trend: My own research experience has also taught me the importance of crossing disciplines in research and education. Understanding our planet's systems -- and the interactions that shape them -- is an enormously complex task.

  It will take the combined efforts of biologists, ecologists, physical scientists, computer scientists, engineers, and social scientists. Much of the research excitement today is at the boundaries of disciplines.

• The third trend is the need for all of us to communicate with those outside of science about our work. It's our responsibility to explain to the broader public how science contributes to society.

Conclusion

I would like to end with a bit of poetry that embodies this scientific and personal trek for me. I have been a sailor for many years as well as a scientist, and both have taken me on treks of discovery and adventure. Here is the poem:

"As sailors know
At the edge of the world
Knowledge is invisible
But changes lives.
Discovery is a shout against the dark.
And reason is an act
of the imagination
in a world in process."

The tough challenges facing us as women in our treks through science and education are far from over.

But as scientists, we know the value of both reason and imagination. And through appreciation of Alaska and the Arctic, we know perseverance can carry us on great journeys.

Thank you.

Colleen Crangle Update (4/13/01)

Students can learn more about Colleen Crangle and her lawsuit (as well as others who have pending lawsuits) at http://www.gender-equity.org

U.S. Women Near Par With Men In Education/But income disparity lingers, census shows (4/8/01)

Robert A. Rosenblatt, Los Angeles Times

Washington -- The college education gap between men and women is the narrowest in the generation since Americans started pouring into universities in huge numbers, but there is still a major income disparity between the sexes, the government reported yesterday. Despite the virtual parity in higher education, women continue to be concentrated in comparatively lesser-paid jobs and earn about 70 cents for every dollar earned by men, the Census Bureau said in its annual report on the status of women. Overall, 27.8 percent of American men have completed a college education, compared with 23.6 percent of women, the report said. The figures are compiled from a survey sample of households, and offer an early glimpse of the kind of detailed information expected to emerge from the decennial census, conducted in 2000. "There has been an important growth in educational attainment for women," said Renee E. Spraggins, the author of the Census Bureau report. In 1970, for example, just 8.2 percent of all women had received college degrees, compared with 14.1 percent of men. With many women workers concentrated in comparatively lower-paid jobs, the pay gap remains significant. Among all workers, women who worked full time in 1999 had median earnings of $26,300, equal to 72 percent of the median earnings of $36,500 for men. (Median is the midpoint; half earn more and half less.) Women with a high school degree had a median income of $21,563, about 70 percent of men's earnings of $30,868. The overall educational gap for men and women in the nation's labor force will disappear relatively soon, because women and men now graduate from high school in equal percentages, and women are slightly more likely to attend college. While having a higher education delivers more cash for both men and women, it does not offer a parity of earnings. Women with college degrees make about 69 cents on the dollar compared with men with the same education. The median income for women in this group was $34, 408, compared with with $49,982 for men. "When people have additional education, their wages go up, which is terrific, but women do not get the same bang for a buck as men" in getting the financial benefits from going to college, said Jocelyn Frye, director of legal and public policy at the National Partnership for Women and Families, a group that deals with policies on balancing work and family. The gaps are unexplained, with theories pointing to a variety of possible causes. "Our concern has always been, what part can be explained by differences of experience and what part is due to discrimination or other unexplained factors," Frye said. The majority of women, about 58 percent, work in support and service professions, including clerical and sales jobs, many of which offer comparatively low pay. About 30 percent of men work in these fields. Women's labor force participation has been rising steadily. Some 74 percent of men and 61 percent of women were in the labor market last year, either working or actively seeking a job. The trends show a dramatic rise in the number of women who are balancing the challenges of work and home. A record 59 percent of women with children under the age of 1 were working in 1998, compared with 31 percent in 1976.
---------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2001 SF Chronicle

Speaking Circles (2/5/01)

I wanted to let you know about the Speaking Circles (R) I am now offering. We incorporated these into the Women's Natural Leadership Institute, and found them to be so powerful in developing one's authenticity and presence, that I'm now offering them independently of the institute.

Whether you're a professional trainer, speaker, or leader who wants to feel more comfortable and at ease in front of groups, or whether you're gripped by terror at the thought of speaking publically, these circles change the way you experience yourself and your audience. Below is the information. Let me know if you have any quesitons, and please feel free to share this information with others whom you feel might benefit.

Here's to being in our full presence, and living and working with our highest purpose in 2001. Happy New Year.

"Speaking of Presence" Experiencing the magic of being yourself--in a group.

Imagine standing in front of any group, and feeling absolutely at ease, experiencing natural rapport with members of the group, and winning the rapt attention of your listeners. The delightful surprise is that being seen and heard by a support, attentive audience is a powerful tool for personal development.

Speaking Circles will help you to: * Speak with more ease, authenticity and clarity * Listen to yourself and others in a powerful new way * Move past performance anxiety to confident, natural self-statement * Express yourself from the heart to inspire and motivate others * Enjoy the natural, gentle humor of our shared human experience * Relax into the wisdom that comes from the heart

A Speaking Circle is a safe, small group where we offer an innovative, natural, and absolutely supportive approach to personal transformation: being genuinely yourself, and receiving positive, appreciate and empowering acceptance for doing so.

Speaking Circles are for individuals terrified of being in front of a group to professional speakers who want to be authentic. Business people, trainers, speakers, teachers, salespeople, leaders and other human beings choosing expressiveness and connection over dread or fear will benefit from participation.

Dates: Alternate Thursdays, starting January 11, 6:30-9:00 p.m. (Jan. 11, 25; Feb. 8, 22; March 8, 22) $30/session, limited to 8 participants

Saturday, Feb. 3, 10 a.m.- 5 p.m. $150, limited to 10 participants

By reservation only.

Contact me at: 650.726.3353 Rhowemurph@aol.com **************************************************** "Our Speaking Circle has become a place to lay down my heart and never be judged, not matter what. it is spiritual food. Participants have gone from good speakers to dynamic presences in a brief time, able to touch levels and depths they never knew they had." Pat Vivo, CSPS, CPAE ********************************************* I can also bring Speaking Circles and coaching into your organization or group. Contact me if you'd like to discuss this option.

Note: Speaking Circles were founded by Lee Glickstein. For more information on his work, read Lee's book, Be Heard Now from Broadway Books, or check out the website, www.speakingcircles.com.

Roxanne Howe-Murphy, Ed.D., Principal Life and Leadership Coach Certified Speaking Circle Facilitator

"What are you doing with this one, precious life? Mary Oliver

LifeWise Learning Institute P.O. Box 656 El Granada, CA. 94018 PH: 650.726.3353

Offering:

Leadership Coaching:

Offering a collaborative relationship that supports leaders in bringing to life the best within them, and in being a catalyst for positive change.

Life Coaching:

Offering a collaborative relationship that supports individuals in bringing to life their purpose, voice, strengths and wisdom.

Speaking of Presence: Speaking and Listening Circles: Offering a safe and supportive environment to practice expressing yourself naturally and effectively with one person or with a group. Dissolve your fears of public speaking while discovering your own compelling presence as a speaker. Strengthen your ability to create a listening space. * Alternate Thursday Evening Circles, 6:30-9:00 p.m. January 11, 25, Feb. 8, 22 * Saturday, February 3, 10:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m. By advance reservation only.

These circles are based on Speaking Circles(R), originated by Lee Glickstein, author of Be Heard Now: Tap into Your Inner Speaker and Communicate with Ease .

The Women's Natural LeadershipTM Institute: Powerful programs for weaving your inner leadership into the work you bring into the world. Contact Roxanne for more information on teleclasses and upcoming programs.

Learning Materials:

Distributor for the Personal Profile using DiSC language, the Dimensions of Leadership Profile, Transition: The Personal Path through Change by Wm. Bridges and other outstanding learning materials for building emotional intelligence published by Inscape Publishers (formerly Carlson Learning Company).

West Coast US recognizes academic gender bias (2/5/01)

I think you will be interested in the article in Nature Medicine January 2001 entitled "West Coast US recognizes academic gender bias" - for those of you who dont subscribe to this journal I have posted this on my web page. If you want to read it go to my web page at: www.biomath.medsch.ucla.edu/faculty/sblower then click on the related links button then click on the Sally in the News button. best wishes Sally Blower Professor of Biomathematics, UCLA

Thrive at the Speed of Change: Faster! Smarter! Newer! (yes) More trustworthy! (huh?) (2/5/01)

by Beata C. Lewis, J.D., Principal of Bridging Lives

As a leader in the New Economy, you surely recognize the imperative of being faster, smarter and newer. The entire business agenda, including the quality of our decisions and relationships, is increasingly defined by how fast we act. It is widely accepted as true that to survive in a market demanding increased speed, quality and lower costs to compete, business leaders must be able to make and effectively implement fast and accurate decisions that are in the best interests of their customers, stakeholders and shareholders. Especially in virtual business relationships these decisions are increasingly being made across huge geographic distances. They directly and indirectly impact the lives of ever increasing numbers of people. In our business culture we are experiencing extraordinary rates of innovation, growth and change-especially from a technological perspective-which place extraordinary demands on people in their efforts to work together towards a common purpose to achieve superior performance and a sustainable competitive advantage. People are pushing themselves and each other ever harder to be and do faster, smarter and newer.

But what about the fourth item: "more trustworthy"? Where does trust fit in your vision, conversations, and practices for effective leadership, collaboration and business success?

Is your answer something like this?Š Trust is an interesting topic and it would be great to have the luxury of time and bandwidth to cultivate it in our organization's business practices, but there are more pressing and critical issues which I/we need to address instead. If that sounds like you or someone you know, then my questions are: What issues take priority over trust? Why? What is it costing you?

Is your answer something like this?Š The leadership in our organization knows the value of trust in all our business relationships; they have made a real commitment to generate and sustain high-performance, creative collaboration and to cultivate a workplace environment that attracts and retains the best talent, but our efforts at identifying and shifting trust dynamics have been less than fully successful. If that sounds like you or someone you know, then take heart: help has arrived!

Although trust-and an absence of betrayal-can be critical to the accomplishment of strategic goals, today's business leaders are often faced with the task of (re)building trust in organizations without the support, tools or understanding necessary to work with the consequences of betrayal and complex dynamics of trust. Saying "we have got to build trust here" in a business context more often than not gets about the same response as saying "all we need is love." Get real. It may well be true, but how do we do it? And how do we do it within the boundaries of our business mandate and available resources? Trust is an emotionally loaded and highly subjective concept. Very rarely do people in business know specifically what behaviors build the capacity for and perception of trust. The challenge is to translate ideas about trust into effective and meaningful action-give it a pull-down menu, so to speak.

There is a new model to help business leaders build inter-relational trust in a highly pragmatic, effective and potentially fun way. This model meets businesspeople where they are, helps them shift their awareness about what is possible, and enables them to do it in such a way that is accessible even to those who otherwise "won't go there." The model, based on ten years of research in over 65 organizations, differentiates between types of trust and identifies behaviors that develop trust-or may result in betrayal-in the workplace. This model, published in the book Trust and Betrayal in the Workplace: Building Effective Relationships in Your Organization by Dennis S. Reina and Michelle L. Reina, is the only such model that also offers corresponding research-based and statistically valid measurement instruments that can be used within an organization to give people an opportunity to generate quantitative as well as qualitative data about trust dynamics they observe and experience within the collective. Using the model within organizations, people learn a common, objective language for talking about trust dynamics. Using the corresponding instruments they can identify areas of strength and opportunity for improvement as a collective problem to be solved. With a framework for inquiry and understanding and accessible data, people are better equipped to make informed choices and targeted decisions for action. The model and instruments invite a process of discovery about one's own capacity for trust and learning what to ask and look for so trust-based relationships and leadership characterize a group's collaborative experience.

From a behavioral perspective, the Reina Trust and Betrayal Model identifies two main types of trust: transactional and transformative. Since people in most business environments are struggling with transactional trust, that is the most extensively developed area of the model. By their definition, transactional trust is reciprocal in nature; namely, you have to give it to get it. Note that this is different from "you have to get it to give it." It is also build incrementally. The Reinas have identified three types of transactional trust: competence trust, contractual trust, and communication trust. The behaviors associated with these three types of trust are also those tracked in the survey instruments. A behavior that tends to build competence trust is, for example, involving others and seeking their input for decisions that affect their work and lives. Examples of behavior that builds contractual trust are managing expectations and delegating appropriately (with the necessary resources and authority, etc.). Examples of behavior that build communication trust include telling the truth, sharing information, and speaking with good purpose. Can you imagine the value of experiencing more of these behaviors in your business relationships?

If the intention is to build trust, then why open the proverbial Pandora's box of betrayal? In conducting the research for this model, the Reina's consistently noticed that conversations about trust evolved into conversations about trust betrayed. Indeed, research and experience independent of this model indicate that people in American workplaces increasingly suffer profound, chronic and systemic instances of betrayal and have come to expect situations and relationships characterized more by betrayal than trust. The Reina model is the first to offer a framework for differentiating between types and degrees of betrayal. And, perhaps most importantly, it outlines steps necessary for individual and collective healing from betrayal. The first step in that healing process is to observe and acknowledge what has happened. The last step is to let go and move on. The intervening steps are to allow feelings to surface, get support, reframe the experience for the learning, take responsibility for one's own role in what happened, forgive oneself and others. To go directly from the first to the last step and skip the intervening steps-a practice commonly experienced in fast-paced business environments-consistently results in the perception of yet another betrayal.

In an environment where people are more likely to trust and be trusted they are creative, dynamic, think critically and have a greater collaborative capacity. Betrayal makes for very unhappy, uncooperative, guarded people who give their leaders and peers only limited access to their knowledge, initiative and commitment. By contrast, relationships characterized by trust allow people to breathe freely again, collaborate and explore possibilities with a sparkle of life. Making trust a priority means making success a priority because trust is vital to individual, team and overall organizational performance. A growing number of experts assert that the only viable way to achieve superior performance and a sustainable competitive advantage is by cultivating trust- and relationship-based leadership and management practices and organizational systems. If that is a high priority for you and your organization, then here, finally, is a roadmap for leaders and organizations to embark on a journey of evolving from the inside out to thrive at the speed of change.

Let your work be a joyful expression of who you are.

********** Beata C. Lewis, J.D., Principal of Bridging Lives, provides leadership coaching and collaboration consulting services to a diverse range of high-performance business clients, inspiring leaders to build trust and collaboration in the workplace. Working with individuals and groups, she offers particular expertise in regenerating collaboration where it breaks down, due to lapses in communication, negotiation, conflict resolution, collaborative process, and agreement structuring. She is one of a select group of coaches and consultants certified to work with the Reina Trust and Betrayal Model and to administer its instruments to benchmark, measure, and monitor levels of trust within organizational systems. For more information and to contact Bridging Lives, visit http://www.mediate.com/bridging

Beata C. Lewis, J.D. Bridging Lives P.O. Box 3146 Sausalito, CA 94966

Tel: 415-332-8338 Fax: 415-332-8332 Email: beata@igc.org Inspiring Leaders to Build Trust and Collaboration in the Workplace

We Undervalue Women in Science at Our Peril
By JALEH DAIE
   You do not have to live in Silicon Valley or be a genius to understand the close link between the expansion of our economy and advances in science and technology. To keep pace, we must reach out to all segments of our population--particularly women and minorities--who are essential to keeping our competitive edge. While a case can be made for all underrepresented groups, for the moment, let's take the case of women, many of whom are on the sidelines in their fields. After more than 30 years of positive intervention, a few good policies and some truly tangible results, the science and technology work force remains, unmistakably, male-dominated.

   According to a recent National Science and Technology Council report, white males in 1997 received less than half of all science and technology degrees, yet they held 65% of the jobs in those fields. While women earned nearly half of the undergraduate degrees and a third of the doctoral degrees, they held only 18% of the science and technology jobs. To make matters worse, in fields such as computer science, where the great demand for skilled workers is going unabated, women are earning fewer degrees today than they did a decade or more ago (28% in 1999 versus 37% in 1985). The conventional wisdom emphasizes a numbers problem--not enough women are in the pipeline. This is a myth. In the life sciences, there is now parity in numbers, but equity remains elusive. Take molecular biology. Today, about half of the PhDs in molecular biology are awarded to women. But in the field's upper levels and in tracks with potential for significant and timely career advancement, women are still grossly underrepresented.

   The chilly climate for women in academia, outlined in a 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology report on the status of its women faculty in science, is replicated in the corporate world and government agencies. In the nascent field of biotechnology, for example, where women have busted the numbers myth, only 1% of top positions in biotech corporations (CEO, chief operating officer, chief scientific or technology officer, research director) are held by women, sending a powerfully discouraging signal. These data suggest the absence of a direct relationship between science and technology education and careers. In other words, many men enter and succeed in the science and technology work force without earning degrees in those fields, and many women who have earned such degrees drop out of the science and technology work force. Why? A reasonable interpretation is that the climate and culture of science and technology workplaces are unwelcoming to women.

        While the causes for the situation are complex, we must recognize the evidence for differences in biological and cognitive wiring and learning styles between women and men, as well as social conditioning. We need to learn to not only respect these differences, but to exploit them, both in educational settings as well as in the workplace. This issue is about more than the ideal of social justice. The imbalance has serious implications for our national competitiveness. Only about one-third of our population is white male. We can't continue to rely on this small a part of our population to fill the growing number of high-tech jobs. Nor can we rely forever on importing skilled work force. Our economic success will be compromised unless we figure out how to attract and retain women in these jobs and increase the number of women at the top of their fields. - - -

Jaleh Daie Is Founder of Women in Science and Technology Alliance.
She Is Senior Advisor at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
Copyright 2000 Los Angeles Times

More Relaxed Boomers, Fewer Workplace Frills And Other Job Trends

THE SOFTENING ECONOMY promises to change the work-life landscape in the coming year. It will speed restructurings and mergers, and shake workers' already-fragile bonds with bosses. Balancing work and personal life -- already difficult for four out of 10 workers, according to a poll by Radcliffe Public Policy Center and FleetBoston Financial -- will get tougher.

Here are five trends to watch: Demographics will drive a growing focus on family, personal and spiritual matters.

Women, more outspoken about family, will be a growing share of the work force. And men's priorities will continue to shift. Unlike their grandfathers, a whopping 82% of men ages 21 through 39 now give family top priority, Radcliffe says.

Also, aging baby boomers will see fewer reasons to overwork. For years, "I pushed the envelope constantly in work hours and stress, trying to do and be all to my family and career," says Beth Kuntzleman, who at 57 years old is a little ahead of the boomer wave.

After raising five kids while working and running a business with her husband, Ms. Kuntzleman says she is tired and burned out. "Had I to do it over," she adds, "I'd have played tons more." She's cutting her hours to focus more on relationships, vacations and volunteerism.

EMPLOYEES WILL demand that employers make alternative schedules that work.

Weary of window-dressing corporate flexibility policies that force users to commit career suicide, employees will take a more activist stance on part-time, work-at-home and other nontraditional setups. A study by the Women's Bar Association of Massachusetts says outdated policies and attitudes concerning part-time work are driving women lawyers to quit. Nearly 40% of women attorneys who left their firms over a two-year period cited such obstacles and prejudices.

Though Tina Traficanti, a partner at a law firm, had support from her senior partner for working part-time, others criticized her setup. She was passed over when important cases were handed out, even though she was willing to up her hours. She soon quit and moved on to another firm.

"People will be demanding more flexibility" in the future, she predicts. Noting the complex demands on parents, she adds, "I don't know how we're going to get along without it."

Internet-age values will take deeper root in the workplace.

Dot-coms may be in the tank, but the values they've inspired in young workers live on. Reared in a culture fixated on the fluid work styles of Web entrepreneurs, many will expect short-term rewards to mirror performance, and they'll switch jobs with hair-trigger readiness.

"Attitudes have changed considerably with the younger work force, and corporate America needs to deal with it," writes a Berkeley, Calif., reader, age 30, who quit a big company for a small software concern. "The prevailing attitude is, `Why should I kill myself when I'm only going to be laid off, or given poor raises, anyway?' "

These days, girls just wanna have their own businesses. In a survey, Arthur Andersen found only 50% of teen girls wanted a career in a big corporation. Instead, they were drawn to what they saw as the independence and happiness of small business. The study suggests "large corporations need to brush up their image," an Andersen partner says.

THE growth in New Age employee benefits will slow in a back-to-basics trend.

Frills such as dog-walking and massage will be the first to go. Cost-benefit analysis is also leading employers to cut perks such as subsidized cafeterias and health-and-wellness programs, according to the Society for Human Resource Management.

What really motivates workers? Beyond competitive pay, benefits and opportunities to improve skills, employees want a fair deal in the sense that the company keeps its promises, a feeling that they're valued, and decent relationships at work -- especially with immediate bosses.

One Midwestern manufacturer was puzzled that its elaborate medical and retirement plans weren't satisfying workers. It polled employees and discovered a fundamental reason: It needed to improve communication with workers, who were resentful of the fact that rising profits weren't leading to higher pay, says Dawn Di Leo, a William M. Mercer senior consultant. After the company explained that it was spending to expand overseas to stay competitive, employee satisfaction rose, Ms. Di Leo says.

It will get harder to tell work and home lifestyles apart.

Working at home, relaxing at work: Nearly half of leisure travelers bring laptops, cell phones or pagers from work, and two-thirds work while they're home, says Hilton Hotels. It works both ways: 60% of employees said they spend 25% of each workday on personal matters such as doctor appointments. Ford Motor has put a corporate seal of approval on this blending of work, family and personal lives, making integration a workplace strategy and training managers on the topic.

Even traditional parental roles look more like jobs. A new book, "And What Do You Do?," shows stay-at-home moms playing joblike roles, setting up preschool pension plans and raising funds for community centers. Maybe, the book suggests, we need a new label for these multitasking parents.

---

Send e-mail to sue.shellenbarger@wsj.com. To see other recent Work & Family columns, please go to CareerJournal.com.

Enhancing the Postdoctoral Experience for Scientists and Engineers: A Guide for Postdoctoral Scholars, Advisers, Institutions, Funding Organizations, and Disciplinary Societies

On September 11, 2000, the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine released, "Enhancing the Postdoctoral Experience for Scientists and Engineers: A Guide for Postdoctoral Scholars, Advisers, Institutions, Funding Organizations, and Disciplinary Societies."

The full report can be found at www.nationalacademies.org/postdocs. Below is an excerpt from the opening statement summarizing the guiding principles and the 10 "action point' recommendations of the report.

My thanks to Dr. Deborah D, Stine, Director, Office of Special Projects Associate Director, Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy at the above organization for calling this important report to our attention.

Regards,

Rick Reis Reis@stanford.edu

Tomorrow's Graduate Students and Postdocs

------------------- 843 words -----------------

ENHANCING THE POSTDOCTORAL EXPERIENCE

Enhancing the Postdoctoral Experience for Scientists and Engineers: A Guide for Postdoctoral Scholars, Advisers, Institutions, Funding Organizations, and Disciplinary Societies.

National Academy of Sciences National Academy of Engineering Institute of Medicine

Public Briefing September 11, 2000

Excerpt from opening statement by Maxine Singer, President, Carnegie Institution of Washington and Chair, Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

In response to these findings, COSEPUP (Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy) began by setting out several guiding principles for the postdoctoral experience.

First, the postdoctoral experience is first and foremost an apprenticeship. By that we mean its purpose is to gain scientific, technical, and professional skills that advance the professional career.

Second, postdocs should receive appropriate compensation, benefits, and professional recognition for their contributions to research.

Third, to ensure that postdoctoral appointments are beneficial to all concerned, all parties to an appointment should have a clear and mutually understood concept of its nature and purpose. No single organization or group can enhance the experience by itself. Rather, it will take the combined effort of the postdocs themselves, their advisers, their host institutions, the funding organizations, and disciplinary societies.

In this guide, COSEPUP has divided its more explicit recommendations by category in order to address each participant in the postdoctoral experience. For the sake of brevity I'll summarize these recommendations in the form of 10 "action points":

* One: Award institutional recognition and status commensurate with the contributions of postdocs to the research enterprise.

* Two: Develop distinct policies and standards for postdocs in the institutions where they work - most especially in universities. These policies can be modeled on those already available to students and faculty.

* Three: Develop mechanisms for frequent and regular communication between postdocs, their advisers, institutions, and funding organizations. This communication should include clear initial expectations on the part of both postdoc and adviser.

* Four: Submit formal evaluations, at least once a year, of each postdoc's performance. Without evaluations, some postdocs may be uncertain about their standing or progress.

* Five: Ensure that postdocs have access to health insurance and institutional services.

* Six: Set limits for total time as a postdoc. This should be approximately five years, including time at all institutions, and exceptions should be clearly described.

* Seven: Invite the participation of postdocs when creating standards, definitions, and conditions for appointments.

* Eight: Provide substantive career guidance to improve postdocs' ability to prepare for regular employment.

* Nine: Improve the quality of data both on postdoctoral working conditions and on employment of postdocs.

* Ten: Take steps to improve the transition of postdocs to regular career positions.

To be effective, the reforms will need to be collaborative endeavors. The postdocs themselves must play a role in promoting good communication with their advisers and making the best use of their opportunities. Advisers must invest the time and effort to help make each postdoctoral experience an educational one. Host institutions must provide these scholars with full membership in the institutional community, help to ensure adequate stipends, and provide logistical and career planning support. Funding organizations must take more responsibility to provide adequate stipend levels and create incentives for good mentoring. Disciplinary societies also can play an important role in catalyzing and supporting reform, particularly because the needed changes vary from one scientific field to another.

Providing excellent postdoctoral experiences for junior researchers is critical to the health and productivity of the U.S. system of research. Among other considerations, high school, undergraduate, and graduate students need positive messages about advanced education and research careers if they are to pursue their own scientific and engineering interests.

To make this guide as effective as possible, we have planned a three-part dissemination and follow-up program. The first part is the distribution of the guide itself to all parties to the postdoctoral experience. This will be through institutions and presentations at major meetings throughout the country. The second is to post the full text of the guide is posted on our Web site (at national-academies.org/postdocs). Beginning today, anyone can access it at no cost. We shall also post a Web guide containing resources and examples of "best practices" for all parties who wish to improve the postdoctoral experience. And the third part will be a day-long convocation at the National Academies on March 2, 2001 to discuss the postdoctoral experience.

To conclude, today's postdoctoral experience has many marvelous aspects, and these must continue. But it also has elements that are not working well and these should be improved. COSEPUP hopes that this new guide will help to maintain the vigor, excitement, and leadership of the U.S. research community while ensuring maximum opportunity for all.

My colleagues and I would now be glad to take your questions. Those of you listening to our Webcast can send in questions by e-mail, using a link on the National Academies home page. We ask those of you in the room to step to the microphone in the aisle and identify yourself and your organization when you speak. We'll begin with a question in the room.

U.S. Nobel Winner Gives Prize to Women Researchers

NEW YORK (Reuters) - American scientist Paul Greengard said on Monday he was ``thrilled'' to win the Nobel Prize for Medicine and would give his share of the prize to a fund that helps women researchers in biomedicine.

Greengard, 74, of New York's Rockefeller University, one of three scientists to share the nearly $1 million prize, said he would donate his part of it to the university for a fund it set up a couple of years ago to provide an award to outstanding women in the biomedical research field.

His remark was greeted with rousing applause at a news conference at the university, where he had earlier been greeted with a two-minute standing ovation by faculty, family and friends. ``I am naturally thrilled and particularly moved by the very warm ovation ... it's just a wonderful feeling,'' he said.

Greengard, Eric Kandel of New York's Columbia University and Swede Arvid Carlsson, formerly of the University of Gothenburg, shared the prestigious award for studies on how messages move around the nervous system. The scientists said their work was important in developing drugs to treat diseases such as schizophrenia, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and drug abuse.

Kandel, 70, who was not available for comment, joined the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1974 as the founding director of the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior.

UC System and Gender Discrimination (12/3/00)

I thought you may be interested to hear that California State Senator Jackie Speier has asked for an audit in response to the declining number of women faculty being hired by UC. Her request is for a careful audit of hiring practices for ladder-rank faculty throughout the entire UC system which will give the Legislature important information and will encourage the University to come into compliance with both federal and state laws prohibiting sex discrimination in employment. The request also specifies particulars of the audit: the gender of those in the pool from which UC can hire, the gender of those in the applicant pool, how searches are made, the gender ratio of the short list of potential hires, the process of making and accepting offers, the number of final hires by gender, and finally, the salaries of hires by gender. On August 24th Senator Speier's office announced that the audit request had been approved by the Joint Legislative Audit Coimmitte. The state auditor lists it as 2000-131 UC Faculty Hiring Practices. The report will be available as a pdf file from the California Bureau of State Audits Reports web site http://www.bsa.ca.gov/bsa/since93.html. It is anticipated that the audit will be done by February 2001. Apparently Senator Speier has described UC's response as supportive of the audit and noted that they acknowledge that a problem exists.

best wishes Dr. Sally Blower

As Leaders, Women Rule (12/3/00)

New studies find that female managers outshine their male counterparts in almost every measure.

Twenty-five years after women first started pouring into the labor force--and trying to be more like men in every way, from wearing power suits to picking up golf clubs--new research is showing that men ought to be the ones doing more of the imitating. In fact, after years of analyzing what makes leaders most effective and figuring out who's got the Right Stuff, management gurus now know how to boost the odds of getting a great executive: Hire a female.

That's the essential finding of a growing number of comprehensive management studies conducted by consultants across the country for companies ranging from high-tech to manufacturing to consumer services. By and large, the studies show that women executives, when rated by their peers, underlings, and bosses, score higher than their male counterparts on a wide variety of measures--from producing high-quality work to goal-setting to mentoring employees. Using elaborate performance evaluations of execs, researchers found that women got higher ratings than men on almost every skill measured. Ironically, the researchers weren't looking to ferret out gender differences. They accidentally stumbled on the findings when they were compiling hundreds of routine performance evaluations and then analyzing the results.

The gender differences were often small, and men sometimes earned higher marks in some critical areas, such as strategic ability and technical analysis. But overall, female executives were judged more effective than their male counterparts. ''Women are scoring higher on almost everything we look at,'' says Shirley Ross, an industrial psychologist who helped oversee a study performed by Hagberg Consulting Group in Foster City, Calif. Hagberg conducts in-depth performance evaluations of senior managers for its diverse clients, including technology, health care, financial-service, and consumer-goods companies. Of the 425 high-level executives evaluated, each by about 25 people, women execs won higher ratings on 42 of the 52 skills measured.

Bias of Experience: "I know I'm going to get a certain quality of work," says Shukla, who recently sold her Web software company for $390 million The growing body of new research comes at a time when talent-hungry recruiters are scrambling to find execs who can retain workers and who can excel in the smaller bureaucracies of New Economy companies. Women think through decisions better than men, are more collaborative, and seek less personal glory, says the head of IBM's Global Services Div., Douglas Elix, who hired two managers within this year--both women. Instead of being motivated by self-interest, women are more driven by ''what they can do for the company,'' Elix says. Adds Harvard Business School Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter, author of the 20-year-old management classic, Men and Women of the Corporation: ''Women get high ratings on exactly those skills needed to succeed in the global Information Age, where teamwork and partnering are so important.''

It's no surprise, then, that some executives say they're beginning to develop a new hiring bias. If forced to choose between equally qualified male and female candidates for a top-level job, they say they often pick the woman--not because of affirmative action or any particular desire to give the female a chance but because they believe she will do a better job. ''I would rather hire a woman,'' says Anu Shukla, who sold her Internet marketing-software company Rubric Inc. earlier this year for $390 million. ''I know I'm going to get a certain quality of work, I know I'm going to get a certain dedication,'' she says, quickly adding that she's fully aware that not all women execs excel. Similarly, Brent Clark, CEO of Grand Rapids-based Pell Inc., the nation's largest foot-care chain, says he would choose a woman over a man, too. Women are more stable, he says, less turf-conscious, and better at ''all sorts of intangibles that can help an organization.''

But if women are so great, why aren't more of them running the big companies? Thousands of talented women now graduate from business schools and hold substantive middle-management jobs at major corporations--45% of all managerial posts are held by females, according to the Labor Dept. Yet only two of the nation's 500 biggest companies have female CEOs: Hewlett-Packard Co.'s (HWP <http://www.bigcharts.com/custom/businessweek-com/bw-cobrand.asp?symb=HWP>) Carly Fiorina and Avon Products' (AVP <http://www.bigcharts.com/custom/businessweek-com/bw-cobrand.asp?symb=AVP>) Andrea Jung. And of the 1,000 largest corporations, only six are run by women.

UNREWARDED. For one thing, there's still a pipeline problem: Most women get stuck in jobs that involve human resources or public relations--posts that rarely lead to the top. At the same time, female managers' strengths have long been undervalued, and their contributions in the workplace have gone largely unnoticed and unrewarded. Companies are now saying they want the skills women typically bring to the job, but such rhetoric doesn't always translate into reality. Some businesses view women only as workhorses, well-suited for demanding careers in middle management but not for prime jobs. These undercurrents of bias in Corporate America infuriate many women, who then bail out rather than navigate unsupportive terrain. ''They're doing the work, but they don't make it to the top,'' says Lyn Andrews, president of WebMD Health, a consumer unit of WebMD Corp. (HLTH <http://www.bigcharts.com/custom/businessweek-com/bw-cobrand.asp?symb=HLTH>) in New York. Many start their own companies, while others seek a different work/family balance than many corporations offer. There are now more than 9 million women-owned businesses in the U.S., double the number 12 years ago.

Old-School Advice: One of managing director Kiely's ex-bosses told her: "You should be looking out for yourself, not your people" The new studies offer some clues about why the cultural mismatch between women and large companies persists and why it's so critical to keep women on board. What makes the new research more compelling than other such data is that it is based on results culled from executives' actual performance evaluations rather than on opinion surveys or experiments that simulate business situations.

Because the participants had no idea that their evaluations would end up as part of a study on gender, the data are untainted, says Janet Irwin, a California management consultant who conducted one of the studies. ''We were startled by the results,'' she says.

Irwin and her colleagues discovered that women ranked higher than men on 28 of 31 measures. Irwin was stunned by women's consistently high ratings and how the scores defied conventional wisdom. Contrary to stereotypes, women outperformed men in all kinds of intellectual areas, such as producing high-quality work, recognizing trends, and generating new ideas and acting on them. ''Women's strengths are stronger than men's,'' says Irwin, ''and their weaknesses are not as pronounced.''

Several other studies showed similar patterns. Personnel Decisions International, a consulting firm in Minneapolis, looked at a huge sample--58,000 managers--and found that women outranked men in 20 of 23 areas. Larry Pfaff, a Michigan management consultant, examined evaluations from 2,482 executives from a variety of companies and found that women outperformed men on 17 of 20 measures.

Some of the researchers draw different conclusions, though, arguing that the research shows that women executives are equally effective as their male counterparts but not necessarily superior. While women score better, and the scores are statistically significant, says Susan Gebelein, executive vice-president of Personnel Decisions, those differences don't mean much in the real world. Why? Because the consulting firm has tested so many thousands of people, which can make minor differences appear more important than they really are. Women have always outscored men in such evaluations, says Gebelein, whose company began looking at gender differences in 1984. And they score highest at the most male-dominated companies because, she surmises, of the type of woman who succeeds in such environments--someone who must be superior in every way.

Robert Kabacoff, a vice-president at Management Research Group in Portland, Me., also wondered if women were getting higher test scores in these studies for reasons other than gender. They might have rated higher because they weren't being compared with men holding similar jobs, he suggests. Managers of human-resources departments often get rated higher on people skills than other supervisors, for instance. If the majority of female managers in a study work in human resources, vs. only a minority of males, the results may have more to do with job than gender.

MISUNDERSTOOD. To eliminate such potential distortions, Kabacoff conducted a differently designed study in 1998. He compared male and female managers who worked at the same companies, held similar jobs, were at the same management level, and had the same amount of supervisory experience. When he examined 1,800 supervisors in 22 management skills, he found that women outranked men on about half of the measures. Female managers were graded more effective by peers and subordinates, but bosses still judged men and women equally competent as leaders. ''Men and women seem to be doing roughly equally effective jobs, but they approach their jobs differently,'' says Kabacoff.

Certainly, many women managers are keenly aware that they inhabit a different reality at the office than men. Nancy Hawthorne, former chief financial officer at Continental Cablevision Inc., who is now a consultant, says she often felt her bosses ''wondered what the heck I was doing.'' At meetings, she often allowed subordinates to explain the details of ongoing projects. She felt her role was to delegate tasks to people around her to help them be more effective. ''I was being traffic cop and coach and facilitator,'' she said. ''I was always into building a department that hummed.''

And sometimes, women say, they were badgered about using the very skills the research found so valuable. Sandra Kiely, managing director and chief administrative officer at National City Investment Management Co. in Cleveland, recalls that one of her bosses at National City Bank warned that her management style would hurt her career. ''You should be looking out for yourself, not your people,'' he advised her.

Everyone knows that women have long excelled at teamwork, but getting results was one of the categories in which women earned their highest marks in these studies. Jackie Streeter, Apple Computer Inc.'s (AAPL <http://www.bigcharts.com/custom/businessweek-com/bw-cobrand.asp?symb=AAPL>) vice-president for engineering, says she has repeatedly volunteered to shift dozens of employees out of her division because she felt they would better fit into a different department--a move that she says ''startled'' her male colleagues. ''It's not the size of your organization that counts but the size of the results you get,'' says Streeter, who has 350 people working for her.

New Business Model: Companies assume people skills aren't business skills, says management professor Fletcher, when in fact, they're inextrictable Women are also more likely to disregard as a useless power trip another long-held management bugaboo: keeping information tightly controlled. ''It's better to overcommunicate,'' says Shukla, whose Web startup, Rubric, made 65 of her 85 employees millionaires. Rather than dispensing information on a need-to-know basis, she made sure information was shared with all of her employees. She also created the CEO lunch, inviting six to eight employees at a time to discuss the business with her.

CARING WORKS. Companies can also undercut women's strengths in another, often inadvertent way: by assuming that people skills are not business skills. In fact, they are inextricable, argues Joyce Fletcher, a professor at Simmons Graduate School of Management in Boston and author of Disappearing Acts: Gender, Power, and Relational Practice at Work. Employees who feel cared about by their bosses or are inspired by them often produce higher-quality work, consultants say. And supervisors who know how to deal with conflict get better results.

Women have been doing this kind of work for years, but their behavior is often devalued because their intentions are misunderstood, says Fletcher. A woman who takes the time to talk to an employee about a meeting he has missed, for instance, might simply be considered a nice person--not someone trying to make sure that the staff has enough information to make an important decision. Her business actions become invisible, since the staff attributes her behavior to just being kind.

Similarly, duties such as coaching and keeping people informed are often taken as a given. But these tasks can actually be the invisible glue that holds a company together, which, until the 360-degree feedback evaluation came along, rarely got examined. ''It's like somebody doing your laundry,'' says Hawthorne, the former Continental Cablevision exec. ''You rely on them to have clean clothes,'' but the work is ''invisible when it's done well.'' Because ''the guys are into glamour,'' says National City's Kiely, women often end up in charge of difficult and unglamorous tasks such as performance reviews.

Kiely bristles at some research that concluded that women aren't perceived as strategic or vision-oriented. Her strategy, she says, is to make people think something is their idea so she can get them to buy into a plan.

Another potential trap: Women's biggest strengths can also become their biggest weaknesses, says Vivian Eyre, a New York management consultant. By working so hard to get great results, they often take away time from building critical business alliances. ''Given the opportunity to stay in their offices and make sure their report is perfect or going out of their office and talking to Joe about his business, women are more likely to do their own work,'' says Eyre.

What's more, she adds, women still suffer from a lack of mentoring and being kept outside informal networks of communication. Many women admit that because they spend so much time focusing on getting results, they don't think enough about strategy and vision--qualities that Harvard's Kanter says are still the most important in a top executive. ''If women are seen as only glorified office facilitators but not as tough-minded risk-takers,'' says Kanter, ''they will be held back from the CEO jobs.''

In the end, it takes a lot more than competence to make it to the top. Getting the best performance evaluations in the company's history may not be nearly enough. ''When you actually sit down in a selection committee to choose the CEO, lots of subtle assumptions come into play,'' said Deborah Merrill Sands, co-director of Simmons' Center on Gender & Organization. Companies may say they want collaborative leaders, but they still hold deep-seated beliefs that top managers need to be heroic figures. Interpersonal skills may be recognized as important, she said, but they aren't explicitly seen as corner-office skills. ''We are in the process of changing our concepts of leadership,'' she says. ''But organizations haven't evolved that much yet.''

In fact, Kabacoff has just finished a new study showing how CEOs and corporate boards view upper management, and he found a clear double standard. Male CEOs and senior vice-presidents got high marks from their bosses when they were forceful and assertive and lower scores if they were cooperative and empathic. The opposite was true for women: Female CEOs got downgraded for being assertive and got better scores when they were cooperative. Kabacoff's conclusion? ''At the highest levels, bosses are still evaluating people in the most stereotypical ways.'' That means that even though women have proven their readiness to lead companies into the future, they're not likely to get a shot until their bosses are ready to stop living in the past.

By Rochelle Sharpe in Boston

A Woman’s Job? Women Are CEOs, But Still Deemed to Be Men’s Caretakers (11/18/00)

By Sue Masterman

V I E N N A, Austria, Aug. 18 — It’s all the fault of hard-working women that the men in their lives are in poor health. That’s the conclusion drawn from a survey of 3,000 U.S. couples by the University of Michigan. “This survey shows how much more dependent husbands are on their wives on health issues,” says Ross Stolzenberg, professor of sociology and author of a paper on the survey. Stolzenberg spoke earlier this week at the American Sociology Meeting in Washington, D.C. Women Still Caretakers Wives and girlfriends, he says, are generally the guardians of their men’s health and social secretary for the couple. Problems arise, the survey shows, if the women in the partnership work more than 40 hours a week. The women are not around to remind their partners to look after their health, take their medication, see a doctor, or exercise. When women work more than 40 hours a week outside the home, men see their health decline by more than 25 percent over a three year period, the survey reveals. “Husbands tend to be socialized to not perform health and social-emotional monitoring and management for anyone at all, not even themselves,” Stolzenberg concludes. “The truth is that boys spend a lot of time being treated to ignore relatively obvious information about their health.”

Men Dangerous to Their Own Health In plain language, that means that when the little woman is absent, men tend to go out with the guys, hit the booze and become couch potatoes watching sports on television. No, Stolzenberg says, it’s not that women threaten their masculinity or make men feel inferior by either working harder or bringing home more money. And the reverse — when the man works more hours out of the home than the woman — has no marked effect on the health of the female of the species. The only exception is if the male is out of work. Then both members of the partnership suffer, Stolzenberg says, because of those old traditional gender expectations about the man as the bread winner. In other words, women take the hit — again.

Advancement of Women and Minorities in Science, Engineering, and Technology Development Report (11/18/00)

The Commission on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in Science, Engineering, and Technology Development recently release an executive summary of its forthcoming report. It can be found at: http://www.nsf.gov/od/cawmset/start.htm#about
The Technology Subcommittee of the House Committee on Science held a hearing following the press conference on the report. Testimony from that hearing can be found at http://www.house.gov/science/106_hearing.htm#Technology.

Wage Gap Widens in 1999 Women Make 72% of Men's Earnings (11/6/00)

Despite the booming economy, low unemployment, and declining poverty rates, the wage gap between the earnings of men and women is widening. According to statistics released September 26, 2000 by the Census Bureau, year-round, full-time working women earned only 72% of the earnings of year-round, full-time working men. The Census Bureau reports that "the female-to-male earnings ratio dropped to 0.72 in 1999, significantly lower than the 1998 ratio of 0.73 and the all-time high of 0.74 in 1996." The Census Bureau attributes the drop in the ratio to the larger growth in the earnings of men (6.9% compared to 4.6%) between 1996 and 1999. Below is the breakdown by sex and race:

1999 Median Annual Earnings of Year-Round, Full-Time Workers Age 15 and Over:
All Men: $36,476 (100%)
All Women: $26,324 (72%)
Difference: $10,152 (28%)

Breakdown by Race/Ethnicity:
                    Men         Women
White        $37,248    $26,663
Black        $30,026    $24,229
Hispanic    $22,957    $19,411

Since 1963, when the Equal Pay Act was signed into law, the gap has narrowed 13 points (from 59%). However, as the Census Bureau pointed out, some of that narrowing is due to the decline in men's earnings.  For more detailed information on the Census Bureau report, contact the National Committee on Pay Equity at 202-331-7343.

How Change Happens: Thoughts on the Report of the Commission on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in Science, Engineering, and Technology Development.  Commentary from the APS (10/10/00) 

Female Scientists Turn Their Backs on Jobs at Research Universities (8/29/00)

By ALISON SCHNEIDER

Deborah S. Gross doesn't have a fancy lab, a $1-million grant, or a bevy of graduate students to do her bidding. But she doesn't consider herself an also-ran as a scientist, even if a lot of big-time researchers might disagree.

As an assistant professor of chemistry at Carleton College, Ms. Gross knows exactly who she is -- a small-time scientist at a small-size college. And she has news for all those researchers holed up at Harvard, Berkeley, and Caltech: This is a life she wanted, not a life she settled for.

That might sound like bravado. After all, everybody knows you can't do science -- not real science, anyway -- without a fat budget and plenty of postdoctoral students to check your petri dishes. The only scientists who pull the born-again-teacher routine, the critics in lab coats say, are the ones who couldn't land a research gig to begin with.

Actually, says Ms. Gross, she wasn't seeking the big time -- and she's not alone. A growing number of female scientists are turning their backs on the research institutions where they trained, and are signing up for jobs at places where so-called "serious" scientists, like their mentors, would never set foot.

The trend doesn't surprise Geri Richmond, a chaired professor of chemistry at the University of Oregon. "Twenty years ago, the question was, 'Can I do it?'" Today, she says, there's a history of women in elite science departments, albeit a short one. Now, "the question is, 'Do I want to?'"

Apparently, a lot of women don't. Take chemistry. In 1995, according to the American Chemical Society, 23 percent of the female assistant professors in the field worked at Ph.D.-granting institutions. By 2000, that proportion had eked its way up to just 25 percent. But at bachelor's colleges, in 1995, 37 percent of the assistant professors in chemistry were women; by 2000, 42 percent were.

Then there's physics. In 1994, says the American Institute of Physics, 7 percent of the female assistant professors in the field worked at liberal-arts colleges, and 5 percent at research universities. Four years later, the proportion had climbed to 11 percent at bachelor's institutions. At research institutions, the figure had only crept up to 6 percent.

Biology doesn't have one overarching society that tracks the numbers, but there's lots of anecdotal evidence in the discipline, and it all indicates the same thing: The liberal-arts hiring trend is happening there, too.

Lingering sex discrimination may be one reason that big institutions aren't hiring more women. But it's not the only reason, experts say. Self-selection is involved, too.

Ms. Gross certainly selected a different kind of life from what she'd known. She earned her doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley and did a postdoc at U.C. Riverside. But when it came time to go on the job market, she says, she didn't even bother mailing her resume to Ph.D. institutions. "I wasn't interested in that kind of rat race."

She has other interests, though -- teaching, advising, even research, as long as it helps her students. "In my mind, the research is a way to learn the chemistry," she says.

Female scientists are going to small colleges by design, not default, for precisely those kinds of reasons, says Mary Frank Fox, a sociologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Six years ago, she surveyed 3,800 doctoral students in chemistry, computer science, electrical engineering, microbiology, and physics, and asked them what kind of career they preferred -- research universities, teaching colleges, or industry. Industry was the top choice, appealing to 40 percent of both men and women. But when it came to academe, nearly 25 percent of the women said they preferred to work at a teaching college rather than a research university, compared with 16 percent of the men. Nearly 30 percent of women expressed a preference for research institutions, versus 40 percent of men.

Of course, Ms. Fox points out, "people prefer things in the context of what's possible," and some women seem to think that the odds are more in their favor at a teaching institution. It's hardly a secret that many female scientists at research institutions are discontent and disaffected. Only last year, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology issued a report acknowledging that women there were the victims of widespread discrimination, getting shortchanged on everything from salaries to laboratory space.

"Large universities are not carefully examining their own cultures to see what might be going on that's making women say, 'Boy, I wouldn't want to do that,'" says Tricia Ferrett, an associate professor of chemistry at Carleton.

Is it really a surprise, Ms. Ferrett asks, that 10 out of the 12 top job applicants in a recent chemistry search at Carleton were women, while research universities have to scramble to get female scientists into their applicant pools? Sure, she observes, there are drawbacks to small-college science: self-doubt, snide comments from big-time researchers, a sense of marginalization in the profession at large. And small-college jobs have pressures, too -- the constant need to juggle courses, committees, advising, and research. It's a fragmented existence, not a focused one.

That said, Ms. Ferrett still thinks it's a better life. At liberal-arts institutions, she says, women can actually win tenure, enjoy teaching, do research, and start a family before needing amniocentesis.

And the glass ceiling? "I think it might be softer -- a gelatinous ceiling rather than a glass ceiling," says Jan Serie, a biologist at Macalester College and dean of the natural-sciences division.

Numbers have a lot to do with it, she explains. There may not be a crowd of female scientists anywhere in academe, but at least at small colleges there's a community. In the Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Pathology Program on the University of Minnesota's Twin Cities campus, one out of the 21 professors in the immunology track, where Ms. Serie earned her Ph.D., are women. In her own department, the body count is almost evenly split between the sexes, with four women and five men. Before a spate of recent faculty moves, women were in the majority.

Those role models make a difference, on both a personal and a professional front. Sandra L. Burkett, an assistant professor of chemistry, ditched a tenure-track post at M.I.T. a year ago in favor of a job at Amherst College. People still can't come to terms with her leap, she says. If they could, why would they keep forwarding her mail to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst?

But Amherst -- the college, not the university -- had one very big draw for Ms. Burkett: Patricia B. O'Hara, a female full professor in the same department.

"She was the first person I had met who I could look at and say, 'This is who I want to be down the road.' She's gotten tenure. She has a good research reputation. She has a family. And she's a nice person. I hadn't met any women at M.I.T. who I could say, 'This is who I want to be in 20 years.' I found that very discouraging."

Many of the scientists Ms. Burkett knew at M.I.T., she adds, were on at least their second marriage. Ms. Burkett is on her first and would like it to be her last.

Anne J. Cox, a physicist at Eckerd College, is on her first child and doesn't think it will doom her tenure bid this year. "Women say you need to wait until you have tenure to have a family." She refused. "I didn't want an institution to determine my personal choices to that extent."

So far, Ms. Cox has no qualms. She's had "wonderful support" from Eckerd: maternity leave, a reduced teaching load for a semester, encouragement to bring her daughter to campus. "She went everywhere with me." And she means everywhere -- office hours, job-candidate interviews, appointments with the dean. Ms. Cox even nursed her baby during faculty meetings.

That's encouraging to Beth Forys, an assistant professor of environmental science at Eckerd who has published 10 papers and won 10 grants. She had a baby in July. As a result, she's teaching one course in the fall, and her committee assignments are nil. "I'm working on a really reduced load," she says.

So is Elizabeth A. Howell, an associate professor of biology at Calvin College. In 1998, she took a month off from work, flew to China, and adopted a daughter. Ms. Howell has been working on a reduced load -- it's now at 70 percent -- for the past two years.

"When I was at Harvard and Northwestern" as a graduate student and postdoc, "people were there all day," she recalls. "A family can be held hostage to a lab."

No one is holding a gun to her head at Calvin. The pressures are entirely different from those at Harvard, for example. She's not expected to secure big grants or publish a pile of papers. A couple of articles should suffice, and small grants will do. But her teaching had better be topnotch and her service record stellar, or she can kiss tenure good-bye.

At small colleges, more than one consideration comes into play when you come up for tenure. Research is just one ingredient, although it is part of the recipe.

"It's not like we're just allowed to do research," says Ms. Gross, the Carleton chemist. "We're able to." She has 13 articles to her credit and just spent two weeks in a tunnel in Berkeley collecting data on aerosol particles for No. 14.

At a small school, "you're in the lab doing the work," says Ann T.S. Taylor a biochemist at Wabash College. "You're not relegated to a desk writing grants and papers and dealing with the bureaucracy of running a big lab." She worked in one of those big labs during her graduate-school days. In five years, she saw her professor conduct only one experiment. "The graduate students set everything up," she recalls. And the professor? "He watched."

Is it tougher to get some of that research done at a liberal-arts college? Certainly. Nine months of the year are chewed up with classes and committees. Your research assistants -- all two or three of them -- are green undergraduates.

"I could be scooped in a month by someone with a graduate student and a couple of postdocs," says Donna M. Bozzone, chairwoman of the biology department at Saint Michael's College.

Back at Princeton, where she earned her Ph.D., Ms. Bozzone studied gene progression in social amoebas -- a "hot topic." Now she works on something a little cooler: biological problems in the same organism. "It's a neat little problem, but the world isn't waiting on the answer."

And that's OK. "At a small school, you can do -- and this isn't a pejorative -- small science," she explains. "Big science is the human-genome project. Hundreds of people are engaged in it. But there are a lot of questions that can be answered in a single-person shop."

Does anyone listen to the answers that come out of a small-college shop, or that are produced by graduate students planning on working in one? Years ago, when Ms. Bozzone was a postdoc, she applied for a grant. The reviewer complimented her proposal but questioned why someone who wanted to teach needed to do a postdoc at all. She didn't get the money. When Ms. Bozzone resubmitted the proposal, she left out any mention of her career plans. The funds came through. "I'm a scientist, so I can't make a conclusion from one experiment," she says. But she has her suspicions.

So does Ms. Serie, the Macalaster biologist. Years ago, when she told her Ph.D. adviser that she wanted to work at a small college, he replied that she "'might as well retire.' There was no acknowledgment that this was a valid thing to do."

Affirmation hasn't been fast in coming. In the late 80's, Ms. Serie attended an immunology conference. She was the only small-college scientist there. No one talked to her -- "It was like I was invisible." Finally, someone spied her nametag. "'You're from Macalester," the professor said. "'Don't they do a lot of drugs there?'"

"It was hard," she says.

It still is. Two years ago, Ms. Serie began studying the immune response to viral infections. To learn more about viruses, she spent a month working in the lab of a major research scientist -- who suggested that Ms. Serie do a basic search of the literature to learn more about immune responses. Ms. Serie already had a cabinet full of papers in her office.

"She would never mention to a research colleague that they should do a literature review," Ms. Serie says. That would have been a given. "But she never really took me seriously as a scientist. I still don't think she undestands that I have a research program and publish in the same journals that she does."

It can be hard to get published from a small college, though. In the late 80's, one of Ms. Serie's articles was rejected by a journal. She made some changes, including adding to the title page the name of a co-author from a research institution. "It's a strategy," she says. And it worked.

A small college has its advantages. But it might not be as warm and fuzzy a place as some women think, says Ms. Richmond, the Oregon chemist. She left a tenure-track job at Bryn Mawr College for Oregon years ago because she got tired of shutting down her lab every time she went out of town. Now she has an endowed chair and a family as well.

She nursed her babies in the office, traveled with them, even set up a nursery down the hall from her department office. "There's a perspective that if you go to a small college, you have more freedom," she says. "But I could decide tomorrow that I'm going to take off a month," and her lab would keep running without her. That's a luxury most small-college scientists don't have.

The stakes are higher for Ms. Richmond. Her missteps are more public; the expectations for grants and publishing are higher. But scientists at small colleges have to publish, too, she says, and come tenure time, their records are sometimes compared with those of their colleagues at research universities. Ms. Richmond can attest to that. "It's not a fair comparison," the professor says, but she's been asked to make it.

Some women say they have paid the price. There was a notoriously ugly tenure dispute in biology at Vassar College, and one in chemistry at Smith College. Both involved women who had tried to slow down the tenure clock because of children. Vassar won the case, and the lawsuit against Smith was dropped.

"In statistics of small numbers, these isolated cases take on a lot of importance," Ms. Richmond says.

But other things are important, too. Eight years ago, Lori Bettison-Varga passed up a job at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington to work at the College of Wooster, where she is now a tenured associate professor of geology and the mother of three children, two of them born before she got tenure.

Sometimes Ms. Bettison-Varga suffers from self-doubt, but most if it is self-imposed. "Face it, we were trained at research places," she says. "We have that monkey on our backs. If you think you should produce at the same rate as people at research institutions, you end up playing head games on yourself."

Ms. Bettison-Varga has played a few herself. Not long ago, she won a five-year "Young Investigator" grant from the National Science Foundation, an award typically given to people doing "cutting-edge research." She won it because of the interplay between her teaching and her research, but some days she still holds her work against a "cutting edge" measuring stick.

"I carry around with me, 'Gee, you really let N.S.F. down because you didn't get 10 papers out of this grant.'" She published four and is working on the fifth. Chances are she'll finish. She has been given the next year off to focus on research.

AAUW Investigates Unfair Labor Practices (6/14/00)

The AAUW Legal Advocacy Fund & the Dept. of Labor investigation of Stanford for unfair labor practices (including the Colleen Crangle case) at www.gender-equity.org The AAUW website at www.aauw.org (American Association of University Women)

Rebuttal to Sally Blower Comments (4/21/00)
I am writing to respond to the allegations of Dr. Sally Blower regarding my actions as Interim Chair of the Department of Microbiology & Immunology contained in a recent email sent to this group of recipients. The facts related to the incident referred to by Dr. Blower (excerpted below) are as follows:

1) Dr. Blower (then and now a member of the Department of Medicine) was loaned space in the Dept. of Microbiology & Immunology (4th floor of HSE). The written loan of space gave the term as 12-18 months and this elapsed around May of 1999. In other words Dr. Blower was in loaned space beyond what had been committed.

2) I was recruiting a new faculty member to a position in the Department of Microbiology & Immunology and had promised him lab space including that occupied at that time by Dr. Blower and her lab members. Negotiations related to the recruitment continued during the summer of 1999. Others had arranged for renovations of other space for Dr. Blower on the 3rd floor of HSE (belonging to the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and to the Department of Pediatrics) and I had been assured that Dr. Blower would be able to move into that space in the near future.

3) In August of 1999, I became very concerned that Dr. Blower was still in the lab space that had been promised to someone else. Checking into the situation, I found that the renovations to the new space for Dr. Blower were stalled by financial problems (the cost estimate was $150,000 to $200,000 and only $40,000 had been identified for the renovations). I wrote a letter to Dr. Blower (dated August 16, 1999) stating that the space she was occupying had been promised to a new recruit who might come at some time in September (he ended up coming in early October) and that the Department would have to move her and her lab to alternative temporary space. The plan was always to provide departmental space for her office and for her lab members in the interim until her new space could be renovated. At no time was "eviction" mentioned.

4) Shortly after the letter was sent, Dr. Blower failed to show up at a scheduled meeting with me to discuss the situation and what her space requirements would be. She adamantly refused to move out of the loaned space or to consider alternative space. In short, she did not contribute to constructive efforts at solving the problem at hand.

5) Thanks to the generosity of other departmental faculty members, fully adequate space on the same floor was identified for Dr. Blower to occupy and, after her high pressure tactics failed to get me to change my decision, she agreed to move. We paid for movers to move her office furniture, computers, etc. and her lab computers. To characterize this as an eviction or her actions as "begging for space" is totally misleading. In short, the space was not assigned to Dr. Blower, it was loaned to her temporarily and that promise had ended. The space had been promised to a new recruit as part of the recruitment. Thus, I was obligated to make the space available to the new recruit and I had no such obligation to Dr. Blower. Moreover, practical reasons dictated the same approach, the space Dr. Blower's lab was occupying has 7 lab benches and she had 4 postdocs. The new recruit was expected to need 6 lab benches within a month or two. In no way did Dr. Blower's gender figure into the decisions on my part. I fully discussed this decision with many people, including the Chair of Dr. Freimer's department, who was very concerned with retaining Drs. Freimer and Blower, and none of the people I consulted told me I should do the opposite. We provided excellent space for Dr. Blower (you are welcome to view it) and provided assistance with her move. Again we did not "evict" her. Whether Dr. Blower's other allegations have any greater basis in fact than those described above remains to be seen. I certainly hope that the Chancellor's office and WILS will be able to get to the truth regarding these serious charges.
Sincerely,

Anthony L. DeFranco
Interim Chair, Department of Microbiology & Immunology

UCSF Researchers Leave, Charging Bias (4/17/00)

Science, Volume 288, Number 5463 Issue of 7 Apr 2000, pp. 26 - 27 
Marcia Barinaga
   A prominent research couple has decided to leave the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), for tenured jobs at another UC school after accusing the university of sex discrimination. UCSF officials deny any bias or wrongdoing, and some scientists say the real problem is the vulnerability of adjunct faculty members--a problem that isn't confined to UCSF. The departure this summer of Nelson Freimer, a key member of UCSF's human genetics program, and his wife, biomathematician Sally Blower, for UC Los Angeles will mark the end of a stormy 5-year relationship between Blower, an adjunct professor, and UCSF. Blower says that powerful male faculty members have humiliated her in a variety of ways, for example by forcing her to beg for permanent work space and shuttling her among departments and temporary space assignments.

"If they think this is the correct way to treat women," says Blower, "I find it offensive. I don't want to be at this kind of institution." Freimer, who joined the UCSF faculty in 1990 and whose work on isolating human disease genes has been integral to UCSF's new human genetics program, supports her claims. "My faith in the values of the institution has been repeatedly shaken by my witnessing Sally's treatment here over the past several years and has been utterly destroyed by her experiences over the past several months," he wrote in a letter to UCSF Chancellor J. Michael Bishop in early February. Blower has received a position as a full professor in the department of biomathematics at UCLA, and Freimer will direct a new center for neurobehavioral genetics. UCSF officials dispute Blower's allegations. In a statement on 23 March, Bishop said that a 1-month inquiry by a UCSF associate dean into Blower's allegations found "no evidence of institutional sexism, gender discrimination, sexual harassment or professional misconduct directed against Dr. Blower." But at least one administrator agrees that the status of women in medical schools in general needs improvement. "The quality of academic environment for women ... is not ideal in academic medical centers anywhere in this country," says Diane Wara, associate dean for minority and women's affairs at UCSF.

   Blower, 42, completed a postdoc 10 years ago with Robert May at Oxford University, then worked at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health before taking a position as adjunct professor at UCSF in 1995. Over the past decade she has published a steady stream of articles in high- profile journals, including Nature Medicine and Science, modeling the transmission dynamics of infectious diseases. As a theoretician, Blower's space needs upon arriving at UCSF were modest: an office for herself and one for her postdocs. She had her own grant to pay salaries and research expenses, and she says she was not "looking for red-carpet treatment," but just wanted to be left "alone with a few postdocs [to] do some excellent research." Instead, in an e-mail circulated in February to colleagues, she complains of mistreatment by a group of faculty members, whom she calls "the Senior Boys." The experience, she writes, left her feeling "powerless and voiceless" against "a vicious brutal sexist system, run by a bunch of bullies."

   In a written response to questions from Science, the university said that Blower "was not repeatedly evicted from space. On the contrary, extraordinary efforts were made to accommodate her requests," including the offer of premium space at the Parnassus Heights campus and salary support when she was between grants. "Sally was not picked on uniquely," says Wara. "Space is precious here, and all of us have to be flexible." Blower is neither suing UCSF nor filing a grievance. Her intention, she says, is to "shine the light ... on the status and treatment of women at UCSF." She says many female UCSF faculty members support her but have remained silent "based on a fear of retaliation." But others vigorously deny that UCSF is a notably sexist place. "In the basic science departments at UCSF, I firmly believe there is about as little sex discrimination as anywhere in the world," says geneticist Cornelia Bargmann. "One of the reasons I came to UCSF was because I knew that was true. It was clear you could do well here." Some attribute Blower's dissatisfaction to the fact that she has been a highly accomplished scientist serving in an adjunct position. And Bargmann notes that although her female tenure-track colleagues are thriving in the basic science departments at UCSF, the situation is very different for adjunct professors at most U.S. medical schools. "You look around and you see they are not treated well," she says about this group, often women, whose soft-money, non-tenure track positions give them little clout. "People feel that they are doing them a favor by giving them a position at all." Wara acknowledges that assisting women in a historically male-dominated system and protecting the rights of adjunct faculty are more difficult than achieving such numerical goals as increasing the ranks of women faculty and providing pay equity. "We have tried for over a decade to put in place strategies to at least diminish the power differential" that female faculty members experience, she says, but "we still have a long way to go." The university began an inquiry into the status of women before Blower made her charges. It is designed, according to a statement, to "research the issues and get beyond the numbers." A good place to start, say some researchers, may be the concerns of women in adjunct faculty positions.

UCSF whistle-Blower alleges gender discrimination (4/12/00)

Karen Birmingham
Nature Medicine, April 2000 Volume 6 Number 4 p 359

London

Sally Blower, an internationally respected biomathematician, renowned for her work on computer models of infectious disease transmission dynamics, is to leave the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) amid a storm of controversy involving allegations she has made of gender discrimination within the medical school.

An email sent by Blower to a select group of colleagues on 5 February, detailing her complaints, has been circulated throughout the mathematics and academic medicine communities and has triggered the UCSF Chancellor, J. Michael Bishop, to open an investigation into the charges.

Blower's research, which has been published in this journal and more recently in Science (287, 650; 2000;MEDLINE), is aimed at developing the study of infectious diseases (particularly tuberculosis, HIV and genital herpes) into a predictive science to facilitate health policy strategies, such as vaccination programs and potential patterns of antiviral drug resistance. However, Blower told Nature Medicine that her experiences during five years at USCF have adversely affected her career, health and home life and she now wants to go public with her allegations to "expose institutional sexism" within UCSF School of Medicine in the hope of changing the system for others.

The preliminary, 30-day internal investigation is being lead by Associate Dean of Nursing Zina Mirsky, who will report to the vice chancellor on whether inquiries should proceed to a second stage. To their credit, UCSF initiated the investigation 10 days after Blower's email was sent. And, unrelated to the Blower investigation, UCSF has been conducting an inquiry into the status of women faculty for several months, focusing on pay and promotion structure.

Like so many academic staff in medical schools across the US, Blower has been in a 'soft-money' position since she joined USCF, meaning that she pays her own salary through grants she raises. She has a remaining 18 months of grants to run from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Despite her financial stability and her undeniably strong publication record, she has never had permanent space assigned to her and her team of postdocs which presently number four within USCF.

The issue of workspace is the first of Blower's two main accusations. She complains that she has "been moved from temporary space to temporary space 4 times in the past 5 years at UCSF," and on two of these occasions she alleges she was "evicted" from the laboratory space. She insists that the University failed to relocate her and that she was forced to work from her home for a six-month period between July and December of 1996. As her research is computer-based, rather than laboratory-driven, Blower is able to work entirely within an office environment. She adds, "NIH provides funding to UCSF in terms of research grants and part of the commitment for receiving this funding is for UCSF to provide space to perform this research."

In a letter to Nature Medicine, Stephen Hulley, Blower`s department chair at that time, responds that most employees in his department work in off-campus locations due to the limited space available. Moreover, he says that Blower understood from the start that the space she had been given was on loan from the Department of Medicine. Because of a similar lack of space at the Parnassus campus, he offered her accommodation at a new building called 74 Montgomery Street which, he says, she initially refused but later accepted.

The second accusation is that UCSF is controlled by a small group of powerful men, whom Blower refers to as the "Senior Boys" in her email, who control access to the positions and resources necessary for success at the school. She says that this system has permitted very few women to succeed at UCSF?24 of 25 department chairs in the School of Medicine are men.

In his letter to Nature Medicine Hulley says that UCSF has a strong and appropriate stance on equal opportunity regardless of gender, race or sexual preference. University figures show that over the past five years, and from a total of 405 female faculty in the School of Medicine, there has been only one investigation into allegations of gender discrimination and three investigations from 294 female postdoctoral fellows. UCSF faculty members question why she has taken so long to come forward and why she still has not initiated legal proceedings or brought formal charges against the school choosing instead to circulate her complaints by email. For example, although she sent an email to her division head, Coates on 4 March 1998 asking for a formal investigation into her treatment nine months earlier, she did not follow this through.

Blower told Nature Medicine that she would "not stay at UCSF under any circumstances because the problems are not caused by a single person the problems are institutional," and that she is coming forward now because she is now able to leave USCF. Blower's husband, Nelson Freimer, a human geneticist on the USCF faculty for nine years says, "As someone who had always been treated fairly at UCSF I encouraged Sally to focus on continuing her great work and that things would get better for her as people became aware of her work...I regret now that I encouraged her in such a ridiculously naïve belief...It was very hard to find an appropriate opportunity to leave."

The February email was distributed the day after Blower received an offer of a hard money position at the full professor level in the Department of Biomathematics of the University of California, Los Angeles. She has a start date of 1 July.

Gender bias dispute flares at UCSF  (4/6/00)

Ulysses Torassa EXAMINER MEDICAL WRITER San Francisco Examiner, Sunday, March 26, 2000

Some see research center as conciliatory, but embittered female epidemiologist jumps ship for UCLA.

Amid concern nationally about the scarcity of women in the high ranks of major research centers, a UC-San Francisco scientist is charging that the male power structure on campus has made it impossible for her to work there.

Epidemiologist Sally Blower, an associate adjunct professor who has published in leading scientific journals, is leaving UCSF to become a full tenured professor at UCLA in July. Early last month, she sent a scathing e-mail to a British medical journal and several colleagues, accusing two leading UCSF scientists of misconduct and bullying.

But some who have dealt with Blower during her five years on campus say she has been demanding and impossible to please.

Blower's accusations have been the talk of the campus since Nature Medicine, a top scientific journal published monthly, followed up on her charges by sending a "straw poll" to female faculty at UCSF asking if they had experienced gender discrimination or harassment.

The survey irritated some recipients, who objected to a scientific journal conducting what amounted to an unscientific poll.

As the controversy became public, Chancellor J. Michael Bishop asked Zina Mirsky, associate dean of the school of nursing, to investigate Blower's e-mail allegations. Late Thursday, Bishop announced in an e-mail sent to the faculty that Mirsky found no wrongdoing nor any evidence of sexism against Blower.

Blower, 42, a native of Britain who attended the University of Edinburgh and received her Ph.D. from Stanford, has not brought formal charges or filed a lawsuit. She called the internal investigation "a complete and utter sham."

Accusations of gender bias have dogged UCSF and other big research institutions for several years. The highly competitive environment of academic medicine, full of big egos and powerful department chairs, is known to be especially hard on women.

While women make up almost half of all U.S. medical students, they are barely visible in the upper reaches. UCSF has two women among its 26 chairs, which is higher than the national average, according to UCSF officials.

Still, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found evidence of widespread sex bias at UCSF in 1993 when it reinstated and awarded $200,000 in back pay to a psychiatrist who was laid off and whose job was given to a less qualified man.

And in 1997, UCSF paid $1.5 million to a former medical professor who filed a wrongful termination and sex discrimination suit, charging she was made a scapegoat for financial practices put in place by higher-ranking men.

But UCSF is far from alone among high-powered academic institutions in struggling with charges of sexism.

Just down the Peninsula, a respected Stanford brain surgeon two years ago published a book about her experiences with sexual harassment and discrimination there. A Stanford research scientist is now suing the university, claiming she was reduced to a "girl Friday," and then fired for complaining about sex discrimination at the medical school.

In the early 1990s, women throughout the UC system formed an organization called WAGE (We Advocate Gender Equity) to combat what they saw as widespread discrimination.

WAGE board member Marjorie Mosier, who worked at UC-Irvine, said Blower's story rings true.

"It's exactly what the rest of us have experienced in spades," she said.

But the men accused say they are baffled by Blower's charges, which they strongly deny.

Moreover, the dean of the School of Medicine, Haile Debas, said he did more on her behalf than he has done for any other faculty member.

Even the head of the school's affirmative action office, who has been sympathetic to Blower, called her portrayal of events "overblown and out of perspective."

In the lengthy e-mail, Blower complained that she and her postgraduate assistants had been relocated four times in five years. In one case, Blower said she was evicted because she refused to give honorary authorship to a male scientist who had not worked on nor funded any of her research.

"He told me he 'owned me,' " Blower wrote.

Andrew Moss, the researcher accused, called the charges "disturbing and baseless." He said she was asked to move from his space because their collaboration had ended, and she was planning to expand her research group.

Like many faculty, Blower has had problems getting space. The Parnassus campus is so crowded that about half the epidemiology and biostatistics department is housed in a building downtown.

Department Chairman Stephen B. Hulley said after Blower and Moss dissolved their collaboration, he offered her space downtown, but she refused. Blower says no such offer was made, and she was forced to work out of her Noe Valley home, where she lives with her husband and two sons, for several months.

In her e-mail, Blower said she asked Hulley to intervene but that he refused "and said Andrew could do what he liked."

Hulley doesn't recall her telling him that Moss had sought to be named as an author on research he had nothing to do with.

"If she had brought a complaint to me, I would have had to investigate it," Hulley said.

In an interview, Blower claims that when her complaints reached Dean Debas, he apologized on behalf of the university and offered to set her up with a better position within the Department of Medicine. He also granted her $30,000 from his discretionary fund for her research, she said.

Debas said he has repeatedly tried to satisfy Blower, whose husband, Nelson Freimer, has been a key part of UCSF's human genetics program. He, too, is leaving for UCLA.

"Most of what we did, we did to retain her husband," Debas said.

While Blower is unquestionably an accomplished scientist, Debas said her work in the mathematical modeling of disease epidemics did not coincide with other areas of research at UCSF - complicating efforts to find her a permanent home, he said.

Debas said he prevailed upon Department of Medicine Chair Lee Goldman to find a place for her. Blower says her first interview with Goldman was humiliating and offensive.

She said Goldman told her that she would be on probation for a year while they "dated," during which he would evaluate whether she could stay on. During that time she needed to make him ''happy, " but when she asked what criteria he would use to judge, she said it became clear that it was not based on scholarly achievement - though he would not say.

She said she left the office and turned him down via e-mail. She said Goldman later summoned her to his office and yelled at her for defying him.

Tom Coates, head of the UCSF AIDS Research Institute, was also there at Goldman's request, Blower wrote.

The reason, she said, "was for Dr. Goldman to make very clear to me that a) he is a very powerful man, b) he can do exactly what he wants, and c)even when I have a witness they will not speak out."

Goldman could not be reached for comment. But in an e-mail response also widely circulated, he denied her accusations and has demanded a retraction.

Meanwhile, Coates has an entirely different recollection of events. He was there because Blower was to be assigned to his division within the department.

"It's like other meetings I've attended of that nature, in which things are explained (about an offer of employment)," Coates said. "I think Dr. Goldman explained things in a very businesslike, professional manner."

Coates added that after the meeting, Blower burst into tears, which he found baffling. Like others, he said he worked hard to accommodate her.

"She was offered much more than any other faculty in my unit," Coates said.

Blower said that since Coates works under Goldman, he is afraid to speak out against his powerful chair. She claims she took her complaints to many throughout the UCSF hierarchy to no avail.

"I have been told repeatedly by many Senior Boys including by officials in the Deans office (in the School of Medicine) that the Chairs can do anything that they like with me & that the Deans office will back them up - the grievance procedure at UCSF is a sham . . .," she wrote.

She said she contemplated filing suit, but believed it would be costly and drag on for years. She also wrote that the school's associate dean for minority and women's affairs, Diane Wara, was sympathetic, but "she admitted to me there is nothing she can do (if she actually tried to do something she would be replaced) - so she spends her time arranging lunches for women faculty to get together and making sure that there are tampon machines in every women's restroom."

Wara, a professor of pediatrics, was quick to take issue with that.

"I believe passionately that there is still a long road to walk" for women at UCSF, she said. "I also believe passionately that UCSF has come a long way, and that the leadership is firmly committed. If I weren't, I would step down from my position."

She called Blower's e-mail "overblown and out of perspective."

"Everything is not always fair," she said. "But in this particular case I truly believe the institution has gone further to try and accommodate an individual, almost more than I can remember."

While the merits of Blower's complaints remain far from clear, there is one thing both sides agree on: women are still underrepresented in academic medicine, and UCSF is no exception.

Before Blower's e-mail, Bishop had already convened a panel to look into the status of women on campus.

"I expect that group will come forward with some very pointed recommendations and concerns about what has gone on in the past," Coates said.

Wara said she believes UCSF has made significant strides, and now ranks better than most schools of medicine not only in percentage of women faculty, but also for how many have tenure.

Blower and Freimer, meanwhile, are leaving UCSF bitter and angry.

"If people want to think I've made up a bunch of crazy stories about people at the university, they can think that. I know what's happened, and I have a great job" to go to, she said. "I'm not trying to extract any money out of the university. I'm trying to point out the terrible way women are treated here."

Sally Blower UCSF Controversy (4/6/00)

Dear UCSF Faculty Women,  I have heard from quite a few of you asking for more details as to what is happening. I am happy to tell anybody anything. Here is a brief summary.

 1) The Nature Medicine "straw poll" was not my idea & I agree it was not a good idea.

 2) I am leaving UCSF - I have just signed an offer from UCLA - and I am

(from July 1st) a full professor in the Department of Biomathematics in the School of Medicine at UCLA - it is a "hard money" position.

 3) In early February 2000 I sent some email to Sir Robert May - Bob is the Chief Scientific Advisor in the UK & a professor at Oxford University -this summer he will become President of the Royal Society. Bob will be at UCSF in 2 weeks - he is giving the Annual Gordon Tomkins Lecture. I sent email to Bob - as I know him well - I did my post-doc with him. In this email I described exactly why I was leaving UCSF - because of my "career experiences" at UCSF over the past 5 years. I also sent this email to a handful of senior male colleagues at Yale, MIT, Harvard, NIH, Stanford, Berkeley & Cornell. I also sent a copy of the email to the publisher of Nature Medicine (Dr. Adrian Ivinson). Apparently, this email has been now widely circulated around the US  & has also been sent to the Examiner.

I sent this email to Nature Medicine & to a few of my senior male colleagues- not only to tell them about my specific experiences - but to explain (at least partially) the bigger picture. I am so tired of reports that are published in Science & Nature & NEJM that keep asking the question but with such a puzzled tone - "So many women have been trained - why are there still so few senior women in science & medicine". Obviously - the problem is complex - and there are many factors - but my main point is (& was) that the problems are not solely determined by "subtle biases" &/or women "choosing" to opt out.

 4) In a nutshell - here are some of my UCSF career "experiences". Four years ago I was in the Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics - I had office space for myself & 2 postdocs at SFGH - Dr. Andrew Moss demanded honorary authorship on all my publications - I refused (I had a faculty position - I was an adjunct associate professor - I was funding myself & my postdocs & Moss was not contributing intellectual, data or financial support to my research). Moss responded by evicting me & my postdocs - I & my 2 postdocs had to work at home for 6 months - (luckily as I am a theoretician - check out my web site for my research - my career was not totally destroyed). Steve Hulley Chair of Epidemiology did nothing about the situation  - & incidently - even though I asked him - neither did Phil Hopewell (who was one of my closest collaborators during that time).
Because: a) UCSF was worried about a lawsuit &
b) also didn't want to lose my husband (Nelson Freimer - who is on the faculty here & leaving with me to move to UCLA)the Senior Boys tried to resolve the situation. Obviously I had to leave the epidemiology department - Dean Debas told me I had to move into the Department of Medicine.
I had 2 interviews with Dr. Lee Goldman (Chairman of Medicine). The first was my job interview - where he told me that I had to date him & make him "happy" for a year & that if he was "happy" he would then start a search for an In-Residence position for me - he also explained that making him "happy" did not involve any academic criteria. I left his office & I turned down his "offer" via email. I complained about Goldman’s behavior. I was summoned to see Goldman again for a second interview - this time Tom Coates was present - Goldman handed me a written job offer & read it to me - then he told me he was going to tell me what he thought of me "off the record" - he then proceeded to shout & yell at me - he told me that "I had broken every rule in the Department of Medicine" and that "I had defied him once - but that was the last time that it would ever happen" - it was quite a performance - Tom Coates said nothing. When we had left Goldman’s office - I asked Tom what he thought of that "interview" – he responded, "Well - you got your job offer didn’t you?".

I was reduced to tears. It was obvious that my career was not going to "flourish" in Goldmans department & I wanted to leave UCSF - I started looking for jobs elsewhere - the Senior Boys wanted Nelson to stay – so it was decided that I could move to Microbiology & Immunology - I did. In September 1999 - I was evicted - this time - by Tony DeFranco - I (&Nelson) spent the entire month of September begging for space for me & my 4 postdocs - many Senior Boys were involved at this point including Don Ganem & Ira H who tried to help - but the bottom line was that Tony could do whatever he liked & the Deans Office would back him up. At this time - UCLA was actively recruiting both Nelson & I to hard money senior faculty positions - we made UCSF very aware of this - it was very strange - the Senior Boys were all talking to Nelson about what they could do to retain him & at the same time they were all well aware that I was dealing with being evicted - Nelson explained to many of the Senior Boys that he was leaving because of the way that I had been & was currently being treated - but most of them didnt quite seem to understand. Duh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 5) So what is happenning? Nature Medicine decided to investigate my

"career experiences" & began to interview Moss, Hulley, Goldman et al. - thenChancellor Bishop decided to launch an investigation. Goldman sent me email demanding a retraction - I was advised to hire a lawyer to protect myself against Goldman & so I have done - Goldman (who is still my Chair) hired a private attorney & is trying to silence me - such a place. I am leaving - I have a wonderful job to go to - I have not filed a lawsuit against UCSF & I am not trying to extract any money from UCSF - I just want people to be aware of how the system works here - the abuse - the "cover-ups" - and hopefully the system will then have to change. Over the past few months I have heard from quite a few women who have also been driven out of UCSF - & a few who are still here & have terrible experiences such as mine.

There are many problems here - most women are too frightened to speak up about them - I understand this - I am doing it as I am leaving & I am so deeply disgusted by the system here. I am not sure what the purpose of the Chancellors investigation is -  is it just to cover-up things or does Mike Bishop really want to change the system - we will all see.

 6) The 2 major problems that I have seen at UCSF are these:

 a) Chairs (incidently all are male in the Medical School) are given

"absolute power" - they get to do what they like & the Deans Office will then back them up - this leads to abuse - there should be checks & balances.

b) There is no powerful & independent office or person with which to lodge a complaint. I have dealt with Dr. Diane Wara in her capacity as the associate Dean of Women & Minority Affairs for years - she has no power & is just there as a "token" to placate & reassure women who "complain".

 I would suggest that if Chancellor Bishop is concerned about the treatment of female faculty at UCSF that he deals with these two major problems as quickly as possible - many/some of the other problems will then disappear.

He could also post an electronic chat group - so that he could receive input from the female faculty as to what they perceive the problems to be & what should be investigated or improved at UCSF - email is a wonderful way for everyone to be heard. The problems at UCSF are very different from the problems at MIT - & an "MIT-type" investigation - which is underway at UCSF - is unlikely to reveal any big problems.

 Finally I would suggest that instead of sending a barrage of email to

Nature Medicine that you may want to use your limited time to deal with some real problems & to send your concerns or comments regarding the treatment of female faculty at UCSF to Chancellor Bishop. Some may argue - as Diane Wara does - that conditions have improved for women & very slow & steady is the way to improve things. Women have been in academics & medicine for a long time - (my grandmother recieved her MD in 1923 & worked her entire life as a doctor in the slums of Glasgow in Scotland) - but the rate of progress is way too slow & the current conditions at UCSF are completely unacceptable - so I am leaving. I am glad to beleaving - and I wish the rest of you the very best of luck.

  Best wishes,

Dr. Sally Blower

Nelson Freimer's comments on UCSF Controversy (4/6/00)

Dear colleagues:

I know that you have already received email from Sally Blower indicating that she and I are leaving UCSF. Although we are both leaving for excellent jobs elsewhere, as Sally has already stated the reason that we are leaving is because of her treatment here, and more generally, the appalling status of women at UCSF. I am sending this email to let you know that I am in complete agreement with Sally on these points and am very proud that she has so openly brought attention to this situation which brings shame on the institution. Certainly the abuse of and discrimination against women faculty occurs at other institutions. However this is the one in which you have chosen to work. Sally has already been public about her experiences; demands for honorary authorship from more senior faculty, eviction from research space, intimidation from department chairs. Since she has gone public with her story she has received a flood of supportive email from women faculty members here who have also been treated terribly but who have been afraid to speak out. This is also a situation that does not depend on anecdote. Looking at the administration of the institution gives a clear picture; for example, of 25 department chairs in the school of medicine, 24 are male. There are large departments here with virtually no tenured women faculty. This is not just a problem of the clinical departments; I recall that at meetings of the large Mission Bay planning committee almost all of the attendees were male. I regret that I have not been more outspoken about this issue. The terrible status of women on this campus and at other institutions will not change if only women are concerned about it. There are too few women in influential positions to effect, on their own, real change here. As many of you know I have worked very hard since I have been here to improve UCSF (and this graduate program in particular); my effort was because I was proud to be associated with this institution. Over the past few years however, this pride has turned to shame and then to disgust, as I have observed how Sally (and a great many other women are treated). This is why I am leaving. I wish to say that I have had many friends here and colleagues with whom I have enjoyed working, and whom I will miss. I would be happy to discuss further the above points with any colleagues who wish to.

Yours,

Nelson Freimer

Response of UCSF Chancellor to Gender Bias (4/6/00)

Dear Colleagues:

Many of you by now know that Dr. Sally Blower, Associate Adjunct Professor in the School of Medicine, has made allegations of misconduct and discrimination against UCSF and several of our faculty. Dr. Blower chose not to file these allegations as a formal grievance with the campus, but instead has publicized them by means of several widely distributed emails to colleagues, scientific journals and the press. The allegations are not entirely explicit . But they have been interpreted to include institutional sexism, gender discrimination, sexual harassment and professional misconduct. Despite the absence of a formal grievance, I felt obliged to initiate an inquiry into these charges, according to the campus Procedures for Investigation of Faculty Misconduct. I appointed Professor and Associate Dean Zina Mirsky from the School of Nursing to perform the requisite preliminary investigation. Over the past month, Associate Dean Mirsky interviewed Dr. Blower, all of the faculty named in Dr. Blower's emails, as well as a number of other faculty and staff with first hand knowledge of the matters about which Dr. Blower had complained. Dr. Mirsky has now completed her investigation and has shared her findings and conclusions with me.

Although investigations of this nature are normally conducted in aconfidential manner and the results are not disseminated, in this case Dr. Blower has chosen to share in detail with the faculty and others both the nature of her allegations, and in her most recent March 17, 2000 email, the fact that I had initiated an investigation. I therefore felt it appropriate under these circumstances to share with you the results of Dr. Mirsky's investigation. In examining each and every one of Dr. Blower's charges, Dr. Mirsky found no misconduct or inappropriate behavior on the part of any of the faculty named by Dr. Blower. Specifically, Dr. Mirsky found no evidence of institutional sexism, gender discrimination, sexual harassment or professional misconduct directed against Dr. Blower. I have accepted these findings and plan no further action on this matter. I do want to note, however, that some months ago I initiated a general inquiry into the status of women on the UCSF faculty. That inquiry will continue.

Sincerely,

J. Michael Bishop, M.D. Chancellor

Networking on the Network (3/21/00)

      	As a student preparing for a career in research, you have two

       jobs: (1) do some good research, and (2) build a community around

       your research topic.  This community is called your professional

       network.  Unfortunately, many students neglect their networking;

       either they feel overwhelmed by short-term demands, or they

       associate networking with politics and manipulation, or they are

       working in a hierarchical environment that does not encourage

       individuals to act on their own.  Yet building your professional

       network is the best way to ensure that your dissertation and

       other research publications will be read.  It is also the best

       way to get a job once you graduate.  The skills are easy enough

       with practice, but they are not at all obvious to beginners.

       "Networking on the Network" is a guide to professional networking

       for PhD students.  Originally written for the students of the

       Department of Communication at the University of California,

       San Diego, it has been continuously expanded and revised for

       six years, incorporating comments from dozens of researchers in

       many fields.  It includes detailed instructions for identifying

       individuals who should be part of your professional network,

       contacting and corresponding with those people, building your

       network at professional conferences, organizing events of your

       own, and citing others' work in your dissertation.  It also

       includes a lengthy section on interviewing for academic jobs.

       "Networking on the Network" is free and available on the Web

       at <http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/network.html  .

       Please send any comments that might improve it, and pass it 

	along to others who can use it.

WWW.Women.com Marleen McDaniel

Marleen McDaniel, 50, CEO, president and chair of Women.com Networks, who helped lauch 3Com Corp., Sun Microsystems and Crescendo (now Cisco Systems), has logged 28 years in the high tech industry-18 of that in Internet ventures. She founded the first Unix users group in the early 80’s. She joined Women.com in 1994 because “I thought if we could bring women on-line we could turn the Internet into a consumer vehicle.” Women.com is ranked by Media Metrix as the Web site most visited by women; its staff of 300 produces 20 content channels and Internet editions of 13 women’s magazines, 11 of which belong to Women.Com’s partner, the Hearst Corporation

QUESTION: When you were a kid, what did you imagine you’d do as a grown-up?

ANSWER: I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. Probably because I watched “Perry Mason”. I liked the parading around the courtroom and giving speeches. And maybe I liked the idea of helping people.

QUESTION: I don’t see a channel for graying babyboomers on Women.com. Are they not an attractive market? Why no menopause channel?

ANSWER: We started with a younger skewing, probably because our founders and editors were in this age bracket. Our readership is a classic bell curve centered around age 35. You will find those aging issues addressed- as content on our channels but not as a separate channel. We are-what shall I say?- going after channel strategies one at a time. We intend to keep adding channels. But, in short, we’re just busy. Swamped. We are inundated with offers from firms wanting to partner with us. We get maybe 100 a week. More than half of these businesses are start-ups. They all want our audience. We are adding staff just to figure out who they are, to sort through them. We are dealing with massive, explosive growth. We just culminated a new partnership with Harlequin Books, to create a romance channel for them. (Laughs) I’m sorry, but there is just infinite to do.

QUESTION: How does content for women on the Internet differ from your basic grocery store check-out line kind of women’s magazine?

ANSWER: We at Women.com are in the interactive media. We have a live audience. We are able to deal with daily changing content, much the way a newspaper does, which is very, very different than a magazine. We have interactive columnists who answer questions right off the Web site. We have video and audio. We do original reporting on current events, on women making the news.

QUESTION: Are there content areas that you avoid because they are unprofitable?

ANSWER: I’m not aware of any, although we are very careful about how racy we get. No, I have not found things that are not marketable.

QUESTION: You do your own polling. What have you learned?

ANSWER: Psychographic studies show us that the upwardly mobile people are ver, very active on the Internet. This is changing, which I think is very good. From two years ago we have seen the average family income come down $20,000, from about $70,000 to a little over $50,000. That’s still high, relative to television, which is more like $35,000. But you are seeing a broadening, from first users to a more mainstream audience.

            We are really very balanced, in all geographic areas. We rank equally high at home and at work. We think the magazines have helped us in the home sample  because we do have all this great home oriented content. About 30% of our traffic is overseas; Germany, U.K., Canada, Japan, Australia- those are your big Internet countries. Internationally, we see big opportunities, by localizing our content in different countries, that will represent huge growth for us in the future as these countries come up.

            And Media Metrix says our audience is 25% male. I don’t know exactly why. I wonder if sometimes they just want to know what [women] think.

Reported by Marilyn Lewis

mlewis@sjmercury.com

In the San Jose Mercury News 9/19/99

Denying Tenure: Who Said Anything About Fairness? (11/1/99)
By KAREN SAWISLAK
The Chronicle of Higher Education
from the issue dated September 17, 1999

"Now let me see if I have this straight," said my  old friend, a lawyer who works in the area of  discrimination.  
"Your department at Stanford approved your tenure bid by a vote of 26-0, with one abstention, and a tenure evaluation Stanford committee voted 5-1 in  your favor? And then the dean of humanities after reviewing, denied  your promotion?"   "That's right," I said.
"Then," my friend continued, "in  a letter from Gerhard Casper,   President of Stanford University, rejected the complaint you filed, and the provost upheld his decision? But after that, the majority report of the highest panel of faculty review at the university found that the deans had not had compelling reasons to reject the department's  recommendation, and had not given adequate weight to a book you were working on or to letters from outside scholars who had reviewed your work?"
"Yes," I said.
"The board found that your grievance, in which you asked for tenure, should be granted?"
"Yes." 
"Then the president set aside that faculty panel's determination, but offered to reinstate you as an assistant professor -- on the condition that you undergo the entire tenure-review process again?"
"Right," I said.
"And you refused?"
"Right."
My friend sighed and put down her pencil. "I'm sorry to keep asking you to go over the details," she said. "It's just that I find this very odd."

That is the true account of my effort, starting in October 1996, to be promoted and tenured in the history department at Stanford University. I loved my work, and I know that I excelled at my job. I am convinced that I was treated unfairly -- that's  why I fought for almost two years to overturn the negative decision. And that's why -- despite the  fact that I beat very long odds by "winning" an appeals process that is not designed to favor the grievant -- I have started law school this year.
Stanford's president, Gerhard Casper, concluded that my grievance had merit on very limited grounds: that my department had given me "exceedingly incautious counseling" about my progress in meeting the standards for tenure. I believe much more was at issue. My mentors in the history department had honestly communicated to me their understanding of what it took to be tenured, and they -- and I -- believed I had met those standards. I had published one book, Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871-1874, with the University of Chicago Press in 1995. An outside reviewer of my case had been on the committee for the Bancroft Prize -- one of the top awards in my field -- and told Stanford that my book had been a finalist in the competition. I had written two articles based on the book, five book reviews, had two more articles under consideration for publication when I came up for tenure, and was at work on a second book. But the humanities and sciences dean, John Shoven, wrote me that he and his associate deans had concerns about the quality and quantity of my scholarship, and that while my teaching was "excellent," it was "not sufficiently exceptional" to override other concerns.

What the dean didn't talk about was a pattern I found as I prepared the first grievance I filed with Stanford. As I alleged in that document, during Dean Shoven's term of office, he had approved all six of the men put forward for tenure by my department. Of the four cases that involved women, he approved one, approved another with a demotion in rank, and denied two. At present, there are 34 tenured members of the Stanford history department: 29 are men, and 5 are women. I believe that the worst thing that even my harshest critics ever said about my tenure case was that it was "borderline," and that it just as easily might have been decided in my favor. But at the same time, I also believe that, in the years since I was first hired, top administrators at Stanford have backed away from the idea that consideration of a candidate's race or gender might properly figure in the promotions process, even as a minimal check meant to guard against unconscious bias.

The provost at the time I came up for tenure, Condoleeza Rice, has publicly stated that the university has had a long-standing policy of considering affirmative-action issues in faculty hiring, but not in tenure or promotion decisions. The advisory board that reviewed my case "found no evidence that affirmative action policy or practice changed" while I was employed, but it did express "concern about the lack of a clearly articulated, widely disseminated, University-wide policy on some aspects of faculty affirmative action." At best, I would say, Stanford's policy in this area is mired in confusion.

That's why I have filed a sex-discrimination complaint against Stanford with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission -- and why I will not accept the terms that Mr. Casper has set forth for my reinstatement. Even if I were to  submit again to a complete tenure review, I do not think it is possible for such an evaluation to   proceed with any sort of real fairness or objectivity. I do not think it was fair the first time around, long before my tenure bid became a cause celebre. And it is difficult for me to trust in the good faith of all who would conduct a new review, since I have been told that, after my  grievance was under way, some of my former history-department colleagues wrote to the dean to qualify their prior support for my promotion.

Then there is the matter of my mental health. I value it, and I cannot even begin to imagine the emotional toll of allowing Stanford to decide my professional fate again. I have a long list of academic achievements. I earned my Ph.D. at a top program (Yale) in impressive time (five years), and worked for eight years in a first-rank department. I have broad experience as a teacher of graduate and undergraduate students, excellent student evaluations, and a highly regarded first book. My second book is well under way, and that project has already been awarded three nationally competitive humanities fellowships. I have won many other honors. Last year, I found a temporary haven in a research appointment at the Charles Warren Center at Harvard and staved off unemployment. But all I have to show for two years of a fairly extensive search for another teaching position is a stack of more than 20 rejection letters. I will soon be 37 years old, I need to earn my own living, and I am unwilling to continue to face the uncertainty of the history job market. So this year, I am sitting in entirely new classrooms, as a first-year student at Boalt Hall, the law school at theUniversity of California at Berkeley. I plan to study labor and employment law.

I have spent a long time trying to understand why  I was denied tenure. This was my first serious encounter with professional failure. It was a shock, and it took some time for me not to feel that I had done something wrong, that I just wasn't good enough. As anyone who has been denied tenure can attest, the institution and its defenders do their best to reinforce such a sense of personal inadequacy and shame. In my case, colleagues expressed their dismay and surprise at the dean's decision, but they also warned that an appeal would be painful. Was the implication that I had shortcomings that I might want to hide? But I did not go quietly, as expected. As soon as I saw the contents of my tenure file, even in the redacted form allowed me by the university, it was clear to me that something was very wrong. So I publicized my situation, gathered information, retained outstanding lawyers, wrote endless appeals, and found my way to other women who had suffered similar injuries. Perhaps, as I had been warned, an open fight with Stanford killed my chances of moving to another academic job. But I felt that my best choice was to search for answers that I could believe. The most meaningful result of refusing to accept Stanford's judgment is that I now know that I did not fail. Quite the reverse: There is no doubt in my mind that Stanford failed to treat me with fairness or with equity. My experience, while perhaps extreme, in many ways reflects the larger reality of what are hard times for virtually all young Ph.D.'s. There is a labor glut, and many institutions see little utility in granting lifetime positions to faculty members who can easily be replaced with entry-level newcomers. The minority of applicants who do make it to the tenure track often face mysteriously shifting standards of review, and a tenure bar often raised to levels far beyond the achievements that had been required of the same senior colleagues who decide our fates. In an era of diminished respect for scholarly and disciplinary expertise, administrators regularly overturn the recommendations of their faculties. At top research universities like Stanford, junior faculty members face the double trouble of managers who are cost- and status-conscious. With eyes only for the "best of the best," those managers increasingly reserve the prize of tenure for a handful of proven, often high-priced "stars."

There is also the double bind that confronts female and minority faculty members at elite institutions. We are poorly represented; we often shoulder extensive teaching, advising, and service loads. As a consequence, it is harder for us to do the research and gain the reputations that truly "count." But when it's time for our tenure reviews, we still face the hurdle of supposedly neutral evaluations meant to determine our future promise. And our employers increasingly prefer not  to spell out the standards by which we will be judged. Stanford's president was stunningly blunt in  making that point to me, when he wrote that "the tenure decision is a prediction; it is not a matter of 'equity,' as you argue. One does not 'earn' tenure. Instead, the University makes complex decisions on the basis of which lifetime appointments are granted or withheld."  The president approvingly quoted from the minority opinion of the committee that heard my grievance:  "Because the larger context in which the predictive decision is made is constantly changing and is, to some extent, outside the control of the candidate, there are no hard and fast criteria for tenure. The latter is an unsettling thought to untenured faculty." Unsettling indeed. Such a stance is a recipe for favoritism and discrimination. It is significant that men in the humanities at Stanford are far more likely to be successful in their tenure bids than are women. I was hired in 1990 and came up for tenure in 1997. For example,  in my cohort, people hired from 1986 through 1991, 8 women were denied tenure in the humanities and 6 were granted it; 6 men were denied tenure, and 12 granted it. In 1997-98, according to the American Association of University Professors, only 11.4  per cent of Stanford full professors were women; 28.8 per cent of associate professors were women;  and 26.7 per cent of assistant professors were women. In 1998-99, 12.4 per cent of full professors were women; 26.2 per cent of associate professors were women; and 28.8 per cent of   assistant professors were women. Gender and racial biases can and do affect decision making at colleges and universities around the country, especially in the complex and inherently subjective calculations such as those involved in tenure reviews. But if it is policy that individuals rise or fall according to shifting  notions of "merit," there is little way to identify discrimination. As Mr. Casper wrote me, equity is not a goal of  the Stanford tenure process. But Stanford has a  real problem with gender equity. Some highly publicized gender-equity cases have given the medical school the reputation of a notorious boys' club. Stanford's overall percentage of female faculty members has long been below the average percentage for both public and private research universities. Indeed, the percentages of female  faculty members on the science, engineering, and humanities faculties at Stanford appear to be lower than the percentages for similarly titled units at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- which recently acknowledged that it was guilty of systemic bias against the women on its science faculty. But when then-provost Rice was asked about M.I.T.'s admission at a meeting of the faculty senate last spring, she said the situations were different. She further stated that she had reservations about the methodology that M.I.T. investigators had employed (although she also noted in the meeting that "we could all do   better").

Some of the same data that Stanford officials seem unconcerned about have now captured the attention of the federal government. Last year, I helped to organize a charge of systemic gender discrimination at the university that has been filed with the U.S. Department of Labor's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. More than 30 present and former Stanford female faculty members and researchers have now joined the complaint. The university's compliance with federal equal-employment law -- and whether it maintains an adequate plan for hiring and promoting female and minority faculty members -- is at issue; its ability to receive over $500-million per year in federal funds is at stake. We complainants, and many others on the campus, eagerly await the results of the continuing investigation. I am a historian. I know that people often differ  in their understanding of facts, and that there are many ways to tell a story or make an argument. But I have been trained to seek out all the evidence, and to be aware of my own biases as I puzzle out meanings. As a scholar and teacher, I  am deeply committed to such methods and to their underlying values. It is a source of sadness to me that my tenure struggle has made me wonder if evidence actually matters much in academic administration. In his offer to reinstate me, Mr. Casper made a point of rejecting a key finding of the majority of the faculty board that had reviewed my case: "I particularly disagree with the Advisory Board majority's suggestion that, if the Dean decides to reject the recommendation of the Department and  the School's Appointments and Promotions Committee, the burden of proof somehow shifts to the Dean to demonstrate that he has 'compelling' reasons to do so," he wrote.Months later, I still stare at that sentence with disbelief. How can a great university, a place supposedly devoted to truth-seeking and analytic rigor, decide the question of who warrants promotion in a way that seems like so much hocus-pocus? Tenure, as the president wrote me, is based on a "prediction." There are no set criteria for judgment, and proudly so. One does not earn tenure; equity is not a concern; and a decision maker need not have compelling reasons for an action.Stanford administrators swear up and down, to me and to everyone else, that their tenure process is fair. I think they sincerely believe that. But how can the rest of us be sure? Because those who run the system say it is so? So I am continuing my battle. I hold in reserve the prospect of mounting a lawsuit as an individual, and currently wait for the two LaborDepartment agencies with which I have filed claims   to move forward. I want the E.E.O.C. to closely  compare my qualifications to those of the men who were promoted to tenure in my department by the same dean who denied my bid. Like me, Stanford shows no sign of giving up. University officials appear to be arguing that my rejection of their  offer to return and face the tenure review again is irrational, and that my sex-discrimination claim is frivolous. We shall see whose arguments ultimately prevail.  "You're not going to like this," my good friend warned, as she started to tell me about a lunch conversation at the Stanford Humanities Center, where a young assistant professor voiced his opinion that the fact that I had declined reappointment in favor of law school merely confirmed that I was "not a true scholar."  My friend was right. I hate to hear things like that, to be reminded that I remain the object of profound misjudgments. I also hate that Stanford officials accuse me of demanding that they lower their proverbial standards for a woman. I hate the fact that it is so hard to open the eyes of most people who themselves have not experienced discrimination to the unfairness and inequities that structure the academy. And it disturbs me to know that some of the readers of this piece are likely to dismiss me as an unqualified, angry, whining woman.

WITI Hall of Fame Inductee Donna Shirley talks about generating creativity and accomplishing goals in the workplace. (10/29/99)

http://www.witi.com/wire/feature/dshirley.shtml.

Columbia University historian Ann Douglas says that contrary to popular belief, female academics are actually losing ground (10/19/99)
SALON October 11, 1999
From Salon.com 10/11/99 thanks to another list for this pointer

Crashing the top
Women at elite universities may have broken the ivory ceiling, but they're still battling old-fashioned discrimination. When MIT posted its "Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science" on the Internet in March 1999, it made the front page of the New York Times under the headline, "M.I.T. Acknowledges Bias Against Female Professors." Since then, Nancy Hopkins, the professor of biology who chaired the report, has received an outpouring of e-mails, faxes and phone calls from female academics, confirming her contention that gender discrimination is still commonplace in top-flight universities at every level of institutional life. As a long-term veteran of elite higher education myself, I needed no persuading. I, too, have spent years, as Hopkins put it, "chronically recovering from the battle of yesterday or preparing for the one tomorrow."

Like Hopkins, I was part of the first generation of women to teach in the top-level universities. Inevitably, since I began my professional life just as affirmative action went into effect in the early 1970s, my career has been a series of firsts -- I was the first woman to be offered an assistant professorship in my department at Harvard, the first woman to teach in Princeton's English department, the first to get tenure in the college division of Columbia's English department. I saw the elite universities before they had perfected their civil rights manners, before they learned how to correct, or camouflage, their gender assumptions.

I am divorced and contentedly childless. Although my work has been the most important thing in my life, I always found it difficult to think of myself as ambitious or competitive. Calculations of money and success played no conscious part in my decision to become a writer and a teacher -- I was embracing a higher, even a sacred calling. I did not yet understand that by choosing career over family I had exchanged the traditional feminine domestic plot for the quest story, a search for personal and even societal salvation usually reserved for men.

When I applied to college in 1959, women were marrying younger and having more babies than at any other time in American history. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, men were going to school in record numbers, but the percentage of female college and graduate students had dropped since the 1930s. This shortage of female scholars was evident in "Who's Who," which had fewer entries for women in the 1950s than in the 1890s. Betty Friedan was uncovering the horrors of the "The Feminine Mystique" by studying 1950s college women as well as housewives, and my undergraduate years at Harvard could have served as a case in point.

In the early 1960s, Harvard was a Cold War university awash with federal funds, dubious corporate investments and misogynistic assumptions. Radcliffe students took Harvard classes and received Harvard degrees, but they were prohibited from entering Lamont, one of Harvard's two main libraries, though male students could use Radcliffe's library. Nor were women eligible for Harvard's prestigious honor societies, traveling fellowships or, presumably, most of its professorships. There were only 12 tenured women at Harvard when I entered, a number that had shrunk to 11 when I left a decade later, Ph.D. in hand. I never had a female teacher.

President John F. Kennedy drew many of his cabinet members from his alma mater, and James Reston jestingly predicted in the New York Times that soon Cambridge would have nothing left but Radcliffe. Radcliffe, apparently, couldn't supply the nation with its cabinet nor, unaided, give distinction to Cambridge. Despite my ambitions, however, I didn't question the prevailing assumption that even the smartest women were less viable career bets than men. Back home in the New Jersey country-club set, I'd been advised that "every girl must have two social sports," for me a dreary and impossible goal. At Harvard, devouring the major works of Jonathan Edwards, as I did during my first week of classes, was a sign of virtue. Male endorsement was reward enough -- I was content to be an unrecognized heir, even the exception that proved the rule. 

Professorial enthusiasm: I got jumped at the grave of Henry James.
Some of my teachers, however, confused my enthusiasm for their subject with a passion for their person. One professor jumped me at Henry James' graveside, where he had presumably taken me to muse on the noble poignancy of literary achievement. Out of the blue, my philosophy instructor explained that he would run away with me soon but not just yet, becausehis wife was then eight months pregnant. A teaching fellow told me, as a compliment, that the only thing needed to make my beauty complete was a lobotomy. Dependent as I was on male regard, I always put my money on my mind: Intellect lasted, looks didn't. I regarded what today we call sexual harassment simply as another career obstacle, to be cleared without breaking my stride. My dedication served to make me oblivious to the obstacles that faced me. It was a double bind: If I fully assessed the forces arrayed against me, how could I continue? If I didn't assess them, how would I know where I was going or how to get there? As a woman in a male world, I needed armor. Inspiration afforded the strongest kind, but armor is nonetheless an anaesthetic, even a form of blindness.

In 1970, I turned down a tenure-track job at Harvard. My fascination with peak male intellect remained, but, thanks to the feminist movement just under way, I was now aware of the gender-restricted privileges that safeguard its preeminence, and the dangers of questioning them. The Harvard professors I loved who had praised me as a student might react differently once I was a colleague. After all, no one likes finding a critic where he expected a fan. I accepted a post at Princeton, which was then aggressively recruiting women scholars. There, I assumed it would be less risky to be my adult self, whoever that might turn out to be. In fact, Princeton proved to be my first experience with the out-in-the-open backlash against women scholars. Long an exceptionally well-to-do bastion of gentlemanly values, the university had admitted a handful of women undergraduates in 1969. When I became one of only 13 female professors on its faculty, and the first woman ever in its English department, many of my colleagues expressed their open displeasure. "Someof us wanted to be in an all-male school," one colleague pointedly told me, explaining why he'd rejected a Harvard offer. To make matters worse, despite my junior status, I was quickly given a series of coveted and prestigious committee appointments. While this seemed to be a privilege, it also fueled the resentment of my male colleagues.

Inevitably, token women are overexposed and overworked -- even today, the Ivy League looks like a cheap Hollywood production in which a dozen female extras run repeatedly past the camera to create the illusion of a mob scene. Meanwhile I was kept constantly aware of my status as an interloper. Colleagues warned students not to take my courses in women's literature and history. My chairman called me into his office to tell me my work was faddish, "a luxury, intellectually speaking, which Princeton simply can't afford." In 1974, I resigned to take a job at Columbia, where I have been ever since.

Today the attitudes and behavior I encountered in the early stages of my career should seem part of a prehistoric past. Women outnumber men in college. Roughly 30 percent of the students at the nation's leading business schools are women; the figure is over 40 percent in medical and law schools. In many fields in the social sciences and humanities, more women than men get Ph.D.s. The nation's female faculty has grown 114 percent since 1976, almost six times as fast as its male faculty.

Yet such figures are misleading. Despite the increase in their numbers, on several significant fronts, women are losing ground in the academy, and the more prestigious the institution, the greater the discrimination. There may be more female than male undergraduates nationwide, but most of the top private colleges, including Harvard, MIT, Chicago, Yale, Johns Hopkins and Princeton, maintain a slim male majority. Although over 50 percent of the faculty at junior colleges are women, the figure is only 36 percent at four-year institutions. Most disturbingly, the gap between available female Ph.D.s and women in tenure-track appointments has actually widened in the last 10 years. While more women are qualified for such jobs, a smaller percentage are getting them. This imbalance is evident in promotion patterns as well. More full-time male faculty (72 percent) have tenured jobs now than did in 1975 (64 percent), but the number of tenured full-time women remains the same (46 percent). Women are disproportionately represented in the proliferating part-time, non-tenure-track jobs that now make up about 40 percent of all academic posts. The multiplication of ill-paid and often benefits-free, part-time jobs, which enrich the institution at the expense of its most vulnerable members, coincided precisely with the moment when women began to earn Ph.D.s in record numbers. The gender gap in academic salaries, after narrowing in the early '90s, has increased in the last few years, and it is greatest at the top. Yet gender parity within the academy is no longer seen as a pressingissue. As Jean E. Howard, an English professor at Columbia and currently the president of the Shakespeare Association of America, told me, "Feminism is no longer foregrounded in progressive politics in the academy, especially in the elite institutions. The assumption is, we've done that." Howard is quick to add, "We haven't -- it's just not being talked about."

The feminization of the academy: more women, less preestige.
Some of the critics of the MIT report argue that what gender inequality,if any, remains in the academy merely reflects women's personal choices -- perhaps they wanted to be less career-driven, to take time off to raise children. But that doesn't explain why the women who have pursued full-time careers still meet discrimination. There are many factors at work in today's sometimes embattled, ever more profit- and prestige-conscious elite universities, factors that shape women's (and men's) careers in a variety of ways. Yet among them is surely the old gender pattern sociologists identify as "feminization," the shift from a largely male to a largely female work force, and its consequences. Greater numbers do not necessarily spell increased equality, especially when the group in question is female. When "feminization" has occurred in the past, notably in elementary school teaching, the result has been a loss for the occupation in pay and status. Women move into male territory only to find that its occupants abandon it rather than share it with women, and they take their privileges with them. In such situations, female failure becomes a consequence of female success. A feminist journal of the 1970s summed up this dynamic: "Women Get a Ticket to Ride After the Gravy Train Has Left the Station." The elite academy, however, presents a critical new variation in the feminization pattern. Gifted 19th century male elementary and high school teachers, unhappy with the growing number of women in their ranks, could aspire up to the all-male world of the richest private colleges and universities. But if the elite institutions are themselves overrun with women, where can the most distinguished men go? The backlash today against women in the top-level universities is intense, though unacknowledged, precisely because the stakes are so high. And if obvious discrimination is in theory prohibited, mistreatment less accessible to legal remedy can accomplish the same end. Nancy Hopkins' awakening didn't come when she discovered how much lower her salary was than those of her male peers ("it was my fault," she remembers thinking; "I'd never asked about salaries"), but when a male colleague in effect took over a course that she had been teaching. She sought redress, only to realize that the rules were one thing, the practice something else. As Anne McClintock, a pioneer in gender studies at the University of Wisconsin, told me, "The decisions that really matter are made outside the democratic process." The right of faculty women to be in the elite academy is no longer at issue. But their authority, their ability to lead in both the scholarly and administrative realms -- particularly in areas that have traditionally been all-male preserves -- is on occasion not only challenged but actively undermined. One female professor quit her tenured job at an Ivy League university after watching two female colleagues of unimpeachable intellectual and moral standing in important administrative positions be stripped of their power and accused of unethical conduct. Watching this "torture," as she put it, brought her to "a level of despondency about which I could do almost nothing." "I don't want to do bitter," she told me. "Not if I have a choice. So I ran away." She was fortunate enough to be offered a post at another top university. Another scholar was forced out of a departmental chairmanship by an all-male administration that sided with a hostile male colleague, who had campaigned to turn her colleagues and students against her. Despite the fact that the male scholar was widely recognized as unstable, she says, the administration treated her adversary like "a sick but brilliant brother they were going to take care of at all costs." According to another female scholar, "even when the man making the charges is less valuable than the woman he accuses, shoring up male camaraderie at the center takes precedence over the well-being of the institution." An Ivy League administrator, reminiscing about a moment when she horrified her male superiors by demanding "a penis salary, not a vagina salary" for a post she wanted to fill (the spot remained vacant), explained that women have to "stroke the fellas to get something done. Anything else, and you're a bitch. If you want to complain, you can't, because you're always going to be complaining to a man, since you wind up going to that level, and the man will side with the men." As Elaine Combs-Schilling, an anthropologist at Columbia, notes: "Power flows around the woman in a leadership position, never through her." In my own department at Columbia, though there are significantly more women than men at the graduate-student and junior-professor levels, tenured men still outnumber women by over 4-1. Behind the surface rhetoric of equality, old attitudes lie in wait, and sometimes manifest themselves in ugly and disturbing forms. A personal example: Last winter, I was asked to poll my department as part of the process of electing our next chair. The results, which favored a brilliant and feminist candidate, were unwelcome to a small group of senior men who had the (all-male) administration's ear in a way that the departmental majority (which in this instance included most of the department's women, minority group members and faculty under 40) did not. One of these male colleagues accused me of falsifying the polling; the poll was declared invalid, and, for various reasons, the female candidate withdrew. I was devastated. How could men who had worked with me for a quarter-century not know that I would never tamper with the democratic procedures on which all my hopes for progress depend? Success, it turns out, seldom shields women from injustice, though it sometimes protects their male colleagues from the consequences of unjust acts. There are, of course, women at Columbia and elsewhere who believe that gender is not a decisive factor in their careers, and certainly not a reliable basis of identification among complex and varied human beings. This a respect-worthy position, one that the academy -- like many workplaces -- often rewards highly.

Nancy Hopkins remembers avoiding one early feminist organizer lest she anger the men in her department or be distracted from her research. Yet ultimately, the burden of "living alone with discrimination" proved too heavy for Hopkins. After years of silence, she began to talk to other faculty women about how she felt. When they said, not, as she feared, "You're crazy!" but rather, "Me, too," her life changed, and she took the actions that led to the MIT study. The task force succeeded, Hopkins believes, because the women involved operated like "a school of fish, doing everything by consensus."Today, MIT's administrators are justly proud of the steps they have taken to end gender discrimination, which include equalizing salaries and hiring nine new faculty women in the School of Science. In fact, what these women asked for was good for their institution as well as themselves. As Susanna Cole, a senior at Brown, observes, when universities recruit female >students and faculty, they usually "promise them an environment in which women will be equal. If it's not there, they're lying," and sooner or later, lies have consequences. When I asked the faculty women I interviewed what motivated them today, they spoke of their work and their teaching. Research in biology remains "the most interesting thing in the world" to Nancy Hopkins. "The students make my heart sing," Elaine Combs-Schilling said. But they also spoke of the challenge of still feeling like pioneers in mostly male worlds. "These institutions are still a frontier for women," said Jean Howard. "Someone has to fight the battle in the Ivy League." For me, it's worth fighting. I still believe with all my heart in what my great Harvard teacher Perry Miller called "the life of the mind," the gold-rush kingdom of first strikes and second chances. Its sole prerequisite is freedom; its only law, democracy.

salon.com | Oct. 11, 1999
About the writer
Ann Douglas teaches cultural history at Columbia University and is author of "Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920's." She is currently at work on a book about the Cold War culture in the United States. 

Career Development Issues

Gail Schecter spoke on career development issues in a recent ebAWIS event, and the slides from her talk will be posted on the ebAWIS website. FYI for links or alerting interested members.  Visit www.ebawis.org.

Grants

Announcing the Amersham Pharmacia Biotech & Science Prize for Young Scientists
Here's a great opportunity for scientists who completed their Ph.D. in 1999 to receive recognition for their research in the field of molecular biology. The 2000 grand prize winner will receive a prize of U.S. $25,000, while runners-up will receive prize of U.S. $5,000 each.
Go to http://www.apbscienceprize.org for entry details.

Links

• AdvancingWomenNetwork. [http://www.advancingwomen.com/index.html]
• WWW.Women.com
• Webgrrls International (http://www.webgrrls.com)