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Rutgers plan targets faculty gender gap

By Kirk Moore •
STAFF WRITER • November 28, 2008

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NEW BRUNSWICK — Laurie Rudman says she made the
professional jump from dance and theater into social psychology "because I
was tired of being a struggling artist."

But when she walked into
professor John Fleming's class at the University of Minnesota, Rudman
says, her first thought was: "That's like theater." Her art would prove a
valuable tool for constructing ways to test people's reactions to social
situations — and find how subtle factors of gender still affect women
decades after the sciences and other occupational fields were nominally
opened to them.

"Women are now 54 or 56 percent of college
enrollment . . . but only about 30 percent are in the
science-technical-engineering-math fields," said Rudman, a professor at
Rutgers University. "So there's still a big difference in the hard
sciences."

In this fall semester, Rutgers is using a $633,885 grant
from the National Science
Foundation to start a five-year program to
"promote the participation and advancement" of women in science,
engineering and mathematics at the Camden, Newark and New Brunswick
campuses.

"Rutgers has one of the finest women's studies programs
in the world," said Joan Bennett, a university associate vice president in
charge of the Office for the Promotion of Women in Science, Engineering
and Mathematics, and principal investigator for the NSF-funded
project.

On the other hand, she said, "the math department has 62
faculty members, and two are female. Half the students are female.
Something's wrong with that."

An abstract describing aims of the
project lists goals of increasing recruitment of female and minority
faculty, reducing the turnover of women leaving for other jobs and
institutions, and getting more women promoted to full professor and higher
professorial ranks.

Job satisfaction is another goal, through more
collaborative projects and involvement of science faculty with the
university's Institute for Women's Leadership and the Women's and Gender
Studies program.

Women's ranks in law and medicine have swelled,
but surveys show science faculties in much of academia remain around 10
percent female, and institutions have varied responses, Rudman said. Her
work on gender discrimination with Fleming in Minnesota figured in Lois
Jensen's landmark sexual harassment lawsuit against a taconite mine,
dramatized in the 2005 film "North Country."

"Columbia (University)
collected those numbers and sat on them for years. Rutgers took the
position that they were appalled," she said. That commitment from the
Rutgers administration helped the National Science Foundation conclude
that Rutgers is "a good seeding ground" for promoting women in science,
she added.

In 1992 the American Association of University Women
published a report, "How Schools Shortchange Girls," that postulated girls
do poorly and need special attention from educators. The past decade has
seen a push-back against that notion, with other researchers reporting
alarming findings that boys' academic performance is in sharp
decline.

But data still clearly show women encounter impediments in
science fields, said Patricia A. Roos, a professor of sociology and a
co-investigator for the project. A former social sciences dean, Roos and
other women took notice of a 1999 study at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology that documented decades-old imbalance in that faculty, and in
2000 she became involved in a similar gender-equity study of the Rutgers
faculty. Investigators found Rutgers "was not that much different from
other research universities" with its subtle factors that "limit women's
access and mobility within academia," she said.

"The pipeline
remains a pipeline" for female students, but "there are losses at every

step," Roos said. "They don't make that transition to graduate school
as much. And they don't make it into faculty as much, or senior
positions."

"The way social scientists look at it is, they
recognize the most overt kinds of
discrimination have waned," Roos
said. Impediments are mostly subtle, arising in "interactional and
personal relations," but those are still "discriminatory in outcome,"

she said.

There has been "a sea change in employment" for
women, Rudman said. "What people haven't changed is attitude at the
implicit levels," like an association of masculinity with "leader-like
qualities," and assumptions that "warm, communal" females lack the rigor
for scientific inquiry, she said.

It tilts toward "self-selection
out of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields," Rudman
said. When it comes to female students selecting those as their academic
tracks, "you even have negative reaction on the part of parents,
particularly moms," she said.

Rudman said she's been approached
about providing training to faculty selection committees, so they can
become aware of unconscious attitudes and prejudices. Social psychology
research shows that when it comes to self-reported attitudes, "people lie
like crazy," Rudman said. "I have a more charitable view: People don't
know the subtle messages that are rolling around in the backs of their
brains."

Common wisdom has it that discrimination is dying out, and
in fact "younger people are more ecumenical about everything," Rudman
said. "But at the implicit level you don't see much
difference."

"My sense is some of the younger women don't see this,
because they come out of high school feeling empowered," Roos said. But
"when we talk to women about this project, they get it," she added. "Our
hope is we help more people get it."

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According to Rutgers University Sociology Professor Patricia A. Roos,
'(female students) don't make that transition to graduate school as much.
And they don't make it into faculty as much." (STAFF PHOTO: KIRK
MOORE)
Buy
this photo

A $633,885 grant from the National Science Foundation is paying for
five related initiatives at Rutgers, according to an abstract issued when
the grant was released in August:

Increase the numbers of women on
Rutgers' science, engineering and math faculty through recruitment and
retention activities, such as an organized system of mentors for younger

women, training for search committees that help choose new hires, and
leadership
training for established professors.

Improve
communication among faculty on the different campuses, and establish
professorships open to competitive applicants.

Encourage
interdisciplinary research across Rutgers schools and campuses, and have
female faculty to work closely with the Rutgers Institute for Women's
Leadership on leadership training, research, and interdisciplinary
courses.

Make women faculty more visible, through lecture series,
nominations for awards, using
the university media office to generate
press coverage of research, and a bigger Internet presence.

Develop
family initiatives that help dual-career couples, families with children
and elders.

On the Web

Rutgers Girl Geeks

1999 MIT gender equity study

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