WHEN SONIA KOVALEVSKY was appointed math professor at the University of Stockholm during the 19th century, she did not receive the warm and hearty welcome that a new faculty member might expect. "As decidedly as two and two makes four, what a monstrosity is a woman who is a professor of mathematics, and how unnecessary, injurious, and out of place she is," was one of the comments heralding Kovalevsky's appointment, according to H.J. Mozans' Women in Science.
Dr. Mary Frank Fox (right) and her students Kathryn Michaelis (left) and Mahtab Mahmoodzadeb review surveys that, along with site visits, provide information on inclusion and exclusion, job assignments and training, and evaluation schemes and systems from faculty members and doctoral students in five science and engineering fields nationwide.
Female colleagues in science and engineering are hardly considered "monstrosities" in the 1990s. Women do, however, remain under-represented in academia, particularly at higher ranks -- despite increasing numbers of women earning doctoral degrees from prestigious universities, says Dr. Mary Frank Fox of the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of History, Technology, and Society. She has studied women and men in scientific and academic organizations for 20 years.
"Despite growing pools of women with doctoral degrees in the 1970s and 1980s and the passage of 15 to 25 years during which those pools have matured in professional time, the proportion of women who are full professors has changed little over the past two decades," says Fox.
Organizational factors play a role in these discrepancies, Fox maintains. She is exploring those factors, and how they may be linked to gender differences in science and engineering achievement, with a $459,539 grant (1991-95, with H. Etzkowitz, State University of New York at Purchase), from the National Science Foundation. With a national survey of 5,400 science and engineering faculty and students, and site visits to more than 30 different science and engineering departments and programs for women in science and engineering, Fox is collecting data on inclusion and exclusion, job assignments and training, and evaluation schemes and systems.
Respondents to the survey are faculty members or doctoral students in chemistry, computer science, electrical engineering, microbiology and physics nationwide.
Among the topics Fox explores is the role of the faculty adviser: How does the adviser help students, and does the type of guidance or amount of time spent with students vary? Fox also seeks information about interactions among smaller research groups within departments, and how graduate student performance is evaluated. Experimental data indicates that when criteria for evaluation are loosely specified, minorities and women are affected.
"When there is a known standard, they do better," Fox explains. "I want to go further and assess that in science and engineering fields."
She also wants to determine whether men and women have different experiences in and perceptions of their organizations or departments. The basic question is -- which types of departmental and research group conditions tend to foster higher participation and performance of women in doctoral education in science and engineering?
Organizational factors are particularly important to science and engineering because these fields are social by nature -- more so than the humanities.
"Compared to the humanities, the sciences are more likely to be performed in teamwork rather than solo, to be carried out with costly equipment, to require funding, and to be more interdependent enterprises," says Fox. "From an organizational perspective, achievements of women and men are a consequence also of the characteristics and practices of educational and work settings."
An organizational approach is even more compelling in light of other differentiating factors that can be ruled out. Past research by Fox and others shows that in most science and engineering fields, men and women are as likely to have graduated from universities rated as "strong" or "distinguished." The few exceptions include mathematics, where 45 percent of men, compared to 37 percent of women, earned doctoral degrees in top departments. In physics, women also were somewhat less likely to have attended a top university -- but women were more likely than men to have graduated from top universities if they studied psychology or microbiology.
Gender differences also are small in the percentage of women compared to men who held research or teaching assistantships during graduate school. In addition, research shows that marriage and motherhood do not govern women's performance in science -- at least among those who have remained in scientific careers. Despite these similarities, women publish less than men in science and engineering fields and are often under-represented as organizers and prestigious invited speakers at professional meetings. However, their abilities as measured by IQ are higher as a group than their male colleagues'.
"The attainments of women in science and engineering are not a simple function of their individual characteristics," Fox explains. "Rather, they are a consequence also of the characteristics and practices of the environments in which they are educated, and in which they work. Personal factors may play a role, but one does not exist in a social vacuum. People connect with and reflect the elements of their settings."
As of 1991, 95 percent of women in science and engineering with doctoral degrees worked in academia. However, across science and engineering fields, the higher the rank, the lower the proportion of women at that rank. In 1991, women were 29 percent of the assistant professors, 21 percent of the associate professors, and 9 percent of the full professors in science and engineering within four-year colleges and universities.
"In every field but psychology, the number of women at the rank of full professor is meager," Fox explains. "In half the categories -- physics, math, environmental science and engineering -- women are 6 percent or fewer of full professors."
Chemistry provides a good example of the dissonance between the number of women in full professorships and the growing percentage of women with doctoral degrees. Among doctoral granting institutions, women were 3 percent of full professors in 1985 and 4 percent in 1990, according to American Chemical Society (ACS) figures. However, 7.7 percent of chemistry doctoral graduates were female in 1970; 11 percent in 1975; 17 percent in 1980; 20 percent in 1985; and 25 percent in 1990, according to ACS and National Center for Educational Statistics.
"Even allowing for up to 15 years between the doctorate and rank of full professor, women's educational attainments are not translating into expected rank over time," Fox concludes.
Fox uses a combination of research methods -- survey and site visits. She spent a year developing her survey questionnaire in two forms, one for faculty members and one for students. She pre-tested them among students and faculty in each of the fields surveyed. Male and female respondents were selected using true systematic sampling, such that each individual had a known probability of being selected. The respondents come from a range of departments, from those with relatively low proportions of women earning doctoral degrees over time, to those with relatively high proportions and those showing marked increases in proportion of female doctoral recipients.
Preparing the survey distribution roster such that she and her student research team will be able to consider differences among respondents by field was quite important, Fox notes. Generally, more female scientists and engineers at four-year colleges and universities work in life sciences, psychology, and social science. Women made up 41, 20 and 26 percent of doctoral employees in those areas, respectively, during 1991. In contrast, men were twice as likely as women to work in physical, mathematical and environmental sciences. Understanding why these differences exist, and whether they are due to organizational factors, is vital.
Fox explicitly followed guidelines of survey research developed at the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she worked earlier. That, along with questionnaire design, resulted in a 67 percent faculty response rate and a 60 percent student response rate. The expected response rates for such groups are under 50 percent for faculty and no better than 30 for students.
"We use administrative controls on everything we do, and used every variable established in survey research as producing both quality and quantity in response rate," Fox explains. The only aspect of the survey research not being done by Fox and her student research team is the keypunching of the results.
The site visits have been conducted among 20 science and engineering departments that are also in the survey sample, and at 11 program sites designed to increase the participation and performance of women in science and engineering. In these visits, Fox interviews administrators, faculty and students, with an aim to answering the question: What constitutes a favorable organizational environment for women in doctoral education in science and engineering?
Women are making inroads and are becoming represented in fields across science and engineering, albeit slowly. So why explore gender differences in science and engineering?
"Training in science and engineering is an investment the public makes. Science and engineering are funded through tax subsidies or profits of corporations," Fox notes. "It is a public investment. We can't afford to squander that type of investment. We need a collective response to deal with these issues. We need informed policy for making experiences and outcomes optimal."
When she completes analysis of her survey data, Fox will report her findings in a series of journal articles, because of the scope and range of methods employed. Fox also is developing a curriculum minor at Georgia Tech in the study of women, science and technology with colleagues Carol Colatrella and Anne Balsamo of Georgia Tech's School of Literature, Communication, and Culture, and Steve Vallas of the School of History, Technology, and Society. The curriculum will integrate research, research training programs, curriculum and teaching. Ultimately, Fox hopes her research helps provide insight into removing gender-related barriers that may exist in graduate education and work in academia.
"Until we know what works and does not work, solutions will be ill informed, ad hoc, and frequently misplaced and wasteful, even though people are of good intent," Fox noted. " I see this research leading to recommendations for ways departments and research groups can better organize for positive and productive outcomes."
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