Since I'm a woman and my career goal is to be on the engineering faculty at a prestigious university, I've been following that
Larry Summers thing the way other people watch a train wreck. Recently, I was idly clicking links and I found out that MIT had noticed a similar lack in the ranks of their science professors. Rather than having their president give an insulting speech, though, MIT did a
study.
The study comes to some interesting conclusions, and has great things to say about the nature of discrimination in the "post-Civil-Rights era."
I was convinced to read the whole thing when I saw this graph, which tracks the percentage of the School of Science's faculty that were women from 1985 to 1994.
When the proportion stays that low while the number of women undergraduates in the sciences has been going up, there's got to be something going on.
Surprisingly, the study found that junior women faculty didn't think there was any discrimination that would affect their careers, but that most women changed their minds as they progressed:
An important finding to emerge from the interviews was that the difference in the perception of junior and senior women faculty about the impact of gender on their careers is a difference that repeats itself over generations. Each generation of young women, including those who are currently senior faculty, began by believing that gender discrimination was "solved" in the previous generation and would not touch them. Gradually however, their eyes were opened to the realization that the playing field is not level after all, and that they had paid a high price both personally and professionally as a result.
And this is the most powerful argument I've ever seen for why affirmative action still needs to exist:
How else might we explain what happened to the senior women faculty in Science? While the reasons for discrimination are complex, a critical part of the explanation lies in our collective ignorance. We must accept that what happened to the tenured women faculty in the School of Science is what discrimination is. It defines discrimination in the period from the 1970s up till today. But we, including for a long time the women faculty themselves, were slow to recognize and understand this for several reasons. First, it did not look like what we thought discrimination looked like. Most of us thought that the Civil Rights laws and Affirmative Action had solved gender "discrimination". But gender discrimination turns out to take many forms and many of these are not simple to recognize. Women faculty who lived the experience came to see the pattern of difference in how their male and female colleagues were treated and gradually they realized that this was discrimination. But when they spoke up, no one heard them, believing that each problem could be explained alternatively by its "special circumstances". Only when the women came together and shared their knowledge, only when the data were looked at through this knowledge and across departments, were the patterns irrefutable.
The tenured women faculty, acting as a group through the Committee, together with the Dean, made a discovery. They identified the forms that gender "discrimination" takes in this post-Civil-Rights era. They found that discrimination consists of a pattern of powerful but unrecognized assumptions and attitudes that work systematically against women faculty even in the light of obvious good will.
I'm impressed that they did the study, and doubly impressed that they took its results seriously and made actual policy changes in response. And the changes have made a difference - in 1999 the School of Science's faculty was more than 10% women for the first time ever. But even that is depressing: 10% is an improvement? Their projection for how long it'll take to remedy the situation is similarly bleak:
This is an important initiative since, even with continued effort of this magnitude, the inclusion of substantial numbers of women on the Science and Engineering faculties of MIT will probably not occur during the professional lives of our current undergraduate students.
