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Economic Security Initiative
Corporate Women's Initiative
Leadership & Diversity and HigherEducation Initiative
Reframing Security Project:· Rockefeller
· Beijing + 5 Symposia
· 2002 Conference
· 2003 Conference
· 2005 Conference
MisInformation Project
Research for Action Clearinghouse
World's Women Project
Science and Technology Project
Girls Project
Balancing the Equation
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
As the economy in the United States and the world grows more and more reliant on a technologically literate work force, the nation cannot afford to overlook the talent and potential contributions of half the population. Women and girls and others underrepresented in the sciences offer valuable new perspectives that will affect both the goals and practices of technological work and research.
Much work has been done, particularly in the last two decades, to pinpoint the needs of women and girls in science, engineering and technology and to develop programs and interventions to encourage their progress. However, changes need to reach deeply into the culture to permanently alter the institutions where science is taught and practiced. Balancing the Equation: Where Women and Girls Are in Science, Engineering and Technology reports far-reaching strategies that women, and men, have developed to turn programmatic progress into lasting change.
Introduction: A Critical Moment
The 20th century has seen women struggle for recognition as scientists and engineers, some with notable success. Programs beginning in the 1970s, with increasing momentum in the 1990s, recognize an uneven playing field and attempt to improve women's chances for success. Several events and conditions make this a particularly good moment to evaluate these endeavors and look to the future:
K-12: Training the Nation's Girls and Young Women
In the overall effort of recent decades to better educate young people in science, technology and mathematics, girls made rapid progress; the gender gap in science and math achievement has narrowed significantly. However, studies still reveal weaknesses in the training of girls. Young women, for example, exhibit less confidence in their math skills than young men. At higher levels of math achievement, high school boys still outperform girls.
Inclusive, engaging teaching methods developed in programs to encourage girls to perform well in science and technology studies have been found to be very effective for teaching boys as well. Tested programs improve the competence and confidence of elementary school science teachers, and new programs exist to train instructors in information technology and other expanding fields of knowledge. However, innovative teaching methods may not make their way into the mainstream when programs are terminated, for example, because of limited funding. While programs have successfully transformed the educational environment in a particular classroom or a particular school, the challenge of system-wide reform has proved significantly more daunting.
Young women are alarmingly absent from computer science advanced placement classes. According to an American Association of University Women report, girls do not feel computer-phobic; they demonstrate reticence about a technology that seems to them largely devoted to the interests of boys. In such a situation, girls-only computer labs boost girls' enthusiasm. In addition, young women are drawn into computer technology when it is presented not as a set-aside activity but integrated into a subject area that interests them, whether it is history or language, ecology or economics.
Innovative programs for girls and young women provide opportunities for them to interact with women in science and technical fields. Summer residential weekend and weeklong programs allow young women to work with up-to-date equipment. Programs seek to meet the needs of young African-American women and Latinas who are in danger of being left behind. But more research is needed to assess what factors in such programs contribute to a girl's long-range interest and success in scientific and technical fields.
Undergraduate Education
With some exceptions, girls and young women hold their own through high school in math and science, but retention of potential female scientists and engineers becomes more complex at the undergraduate level. Young women tend to begin college study of science and technology with career goals that are less well defined than those of young men. A Wellesley study identified the first undergraduate year as a significant time when women disproportionately abandon plans to major in science. Women's retention rates grow as they become more comfortable and confident in their technical skills.
Recruitment of women into undergraduate science and engineering programs is the goal of new efforts that focus on community colleges as a source of talent for the technological workforce. Other programs blend liberal arts and science and engineering curricula to attract young women to technical careers.
Educators work to retain women science, mathematics and engineering majors through a variety of interventions. Researchers found that women in science study tend to feel rewarded by praise from professors, while such things as competition among peers reward men. Mentoring by professors and upper-class students, the opportunity for undergraduates to perform hands-on research and curricula designed to emphasize the problem-solving applications of science and technology are strategies developed to appeal to women in undergraduate science courses.
Within science departments, the educational environment for undergraduate students, both women and men, can be a disincentive. Programs encourage faculties to value undergraduate students and train teaching associates to nurture rather than discourage potential science majors. Advocates advise replacing gatekeeping courses designed to weed students out with curricula that invite students into disciplines that are male dominated, such as computer science and physics.
New curriculum initiatives, designed to draw talented women into technical careers and increase science literacy overall, offer cross-disciplinary approaches that may meld women's studies courses with science training. Other innovative degree programs combine liberal arts and engineering majors.
With leadership from the top and carefully designed research that accurately identifies factors that discourage women, institutions can successfully attract and retain women students even in computer science, where the proportion of bachelor degrees earned by women has been declining. At Carnegie Mellon University, women's share in first year computing classes rose from 8% to 40% over a five-year period. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has greatly improved its retention rate of women in engineering and technical majors. Women's institutions-such as Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and Spelman College in Atlanta-have been successful in recruiting women into engineering and other technological majors.
Academia-Graduate School and Beyond
In graduate and postgraduate science and technology training, pressures on women and men increase. The time it takes to earn science Ph.D.s-too often more than 15 years from entering college-discourages young academics with family demands, and women tend to drop out at nearly every transition point.
Programs address the need to support women at the assistant professor level so that they can procure tenure track appointments. For example, the Clare Booth Luce Professorships provide a useful spotlight on women early in their academic careers, gaining them seats on faculty committees and other policy-making opportunities. It recognizes the varied needs of women beginning their science careers by offering flexible stipends that can be used for childcare or for travel to professional conferences.
Despite progress made over the last decade in the proportion of women, men continue to dominate science and technology faculties at the highest levels. Leadership by major institutions can make a difference in keeping talented women in the pipeline so that more attain senior faculty positions and leadership roles in their fields. A survey at MIT that demonstrated how women faculty and researchers have been shortchanged over the years led to changes that increased the productivity of MIT women. Other leading research universities have pledged to make similar efforts to improve the status of women faculty. A new National Science Foundation initiative invites institutions to design programs that will lead to systemic change to improve the status of women in science and technical fields.
Business and Industry
Many women scientists and engineers leave academic life early in their careers having concluded that industry offers fewer barriers for their advancement. Corporate leaders agree that the bottom line has become a strong inducement to recruiting women and underrepresented minority men, given the continuing needs of a technological workforce.
Still, prior to their entry into the marketplace, undergraduate and graduate science majors need ways to educate themselves about diverse opportunities in the technology workforce, since students in academic settings report a lack of information about careers. For example, some four-year institutions offer new degree programs that meld business and management training with science and technology curricula.
Leading corporations in science and engineering concerned about advancing women encourage networking among their female employees to alleviate isolation in a male dominated workplace and to make women leaders more visible. With an eye to the future workforce, forward-looking employers also encourage female employees to be role models for girls and young women in their communities.
Many women scientists and engineering professionals cite the integration of family life and work as a primary concern, particularly since women scientists often marry other scientists so that both partners are affected by the demands of a technical career. Major companies have taken the lead to decrease turnover by offering sabbaticals and work-at-home options. Many women in high-tech jobs leave the corporate workforce to become self-employed contract workers, a strategy that gives them more control over their work schedules.
In the growing biotech industry, women are poised to make major inroads because of their numbers in biology undergraduate and graduate programs. Studies suggest that the scale of biotech work, with many products being developed in relatively small workplaces, provides many opportunities for women scientists and researchers. Still, these same studies show that women are scarce at top levels of research and administration.
Strategists cite information technology as a field that offers women opportunities to choose technical work with social content. In San Francisco, an innovative incubator project, the Women's Technology Cluster, invests in women entrepreneurs launching high-tech businesses and calls on successful graduates to contribute resources to women following in their footsteps.
Into the Future
National advocates for women in science and technology stress the importance of leadership at major educational, corporate and government facilities to achieve institutional change. In secondary education and undergraduate studies, a cross-disciplinary curriculum is a key to drawing young women into science and technical careers and improving science and literacy throughout the nation. The need for mentors and networking for girls and women in science begins at the primary school level and continues through graduate education and careers in business and industry.
Only a broad effort based on a wide consensus will transform the culture of science and technology in environments where women and minority men have been discouraged and excluded. To that end, strategists need to look at women's progress in science and engineering in the United States in the context of what women engineers, for example, have achieved in other countries. New research must accurately track the different experiences of women scientists and engineers depending on the community from which they come and the setting in which they work.
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