The WiSE Women of Science

By Diane Krieger on August 21, 2009 9:15 AM

For the past decade, USC’s Women in Science and Engineering program has been working to make academic research and scholarship more hospitable to women scientists. The reason is simple: In today’s global economic competition, American research universities need all the brainpower they can get.

A Very WiSE Gift
What Women Want

ALICE PARKER CAN RECALL scanning crowds at national meetings in search of another female face.

When she spotted one (there was rarely more than one) among the hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of fellow computer scientists, she would give a little wave. The other woman would discreetly wave back.

Parker remembers leaving breakout sessions engrossed in conversation with a knot of colleagues, only to come up short at the men’s room door. No one else seemed to sense anything unusual in the situation, but she found it highly amusing. She could hear the discussion continue uninterrupted on the other side.

If they did notice her gender, more amusement was in store. When she arrived at Carnegie Mellon University - for her first tenure-track job - the women’s restroom down the hall still possessed a functioning urinal. (One of the department secretaries eventually filled the porcelain hole with a potted plant.)

These scenes aren’t from ancient history. Parker got her Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1975. Three years later, female students first outnumbered males at American colleges. Yet 34 years later, Parker, a professor of electrical engineering systems in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, remains an anomaly: a woman, a computer scientist and a professor at a major research university. Nationally, for reasons both obvious and mysterious, more than 90 percent of Alice Parker’s peers are still men.

But at USC, thanks to a remarkable program now entering its 10th year, change is afoot. A decade ago, USC trailed national faculty gender-diversity averages in every discipline. In 2000, only three tenured or tenure-track women could be found across the vast landscape of eight academic departments of the USC Viterbi School. Starting this fall, there will be 16. That’s a five-fold increase, though it’s still less than 10 percent of the 186-person USC engineering faculty.

Across the six science and math departments of the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, the number of women professors has doubled since 2000 - up from 12 to 24. (Women now make up 14 percent of the 168-person math and science faculties.)

The program responsible for many of these changes is called Women in Science and Engineering (nicknamed WiSE), and it is unique. While there are other university-based efforts promoting the advancement of women in the sciences - generally supported by five-year grants from the National Science Foundation’s ADVANCE Program - nothing comes close to WiSE in comprehensiveness or independent permanent resources.

Funded by a $20 million endowment, WiSE supports women scholars at every stage of their careers - from freshmen to senior professors. “That’s one of our strengths, that we permeate almost all levels of education,” says Hanna Reisler, professor of chemistry in USC College and an original member of the faculty task force that designed the WiSE framework.

The program has attracted national attention, including a 2006 feature in The Chronicle of Higher Education. That article spotlighted the personal history of WiSE founding director Jean Morrison, professor of earth sciences and mother of two. A dozen years earlier, when Morrison was pregnant with her first child, the dearth of peer women able to offer career advice made the task of balancing motherhood and professional obligations, in Morrison’s words, “frustrating and isolating.”

In stark contrast, the Chronicle pointed to Maria C. Yang, then a newly hired USC assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering who, after consulting with numerous female colleagues through WiSE, was able to work out a sensible balancing plan when she became USC Viterbi’s first non-tenured expectant mother.

By what Morrison calls “the sledgehammer metric”of total tenured and tenure-track women on the faculty in targeted USC departments, WiSE is a success.

“We’ve made some real strides,” says Morrison, who is now USC’s vice provost for academic affairs and graduate programs as well as a professor of earth sciences in USC College. However, she notes: “We’re not where we should be. We still have departments that are below the national average.”

Gender imbalance also remains striking among graduate students. According to the latest USC Graduate School data, women make up just under 20 percent of all students enrolled in science and engineering master’s programs and 29 percent of all Ph.D. students.

THE PROBLEM OF GENDER imbalance in academic engineering and sciences is complicated. “It hinges on a variety of issues,” says Morrison. “It’s family, it’s work climate, it’s a laundry list of 40 things.” (For what those things are, check out Virginia Valian’s 1999 book, Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women.)

It should come as no surprise that women and academia aren’t a natural fit. After all, the roots of the modern university - the departmental hierarchy, the tenure system, the ritual vestments - trace back to the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. It was an environment originally designed exclusively for men, usually celibates (priests, monks and other “bachelors”) who had renounced the material world to retreat into lives of study. Is it any wonder then that the vestiges of this system don’t work very well for women?

Interestingly, today’s priorities in engineering, as well as many other sciences, are better suited to women’s self-conception than were those of previous decades, according to USC’s executive vice president and provost, C. L. Max Nikias. An engineer and former dean of the USC Viterbi School, he offers a brief historical review of the profession: In the 1930s, he says, civil engineering dominated the scene, and the hero was a guy in a hard-hat straddling a skyscraper or highway.

The 1940s and ’50s belonged to the chemical engineer, whose natural habitat seemed to be huge factories, aluminum smelting pots and warehouses. Then, in the 1960s, aerospace engineering was front and center.

None of these were environments where women could easily imagine themselves. It’s no coincidence, says Nikias, that the first uptick in women’s engineering enrollment came in the 1980s, with the rise of the personal computer and the information technology revolution. The nature of the work was being transformed. Women could relate.

“Now we’re into the biotech revolution - medicine, biochemical engineering and green technology will attract even more women into the profession,” he predicts, because women can readily imagine themselves as the heroines of this drama.

As dean of the USC Viterbi School from 2001 to 2005, Nikias was determined to increase women’s representation on the faculty. When he became dean, there were just three tenure-track women on the 150-person faculty - a situation he found completely unacceptable. He called together his eight department chairs and informed them that from that point forward, no new job search would be authorized until and unless the department could demonstrate that it had made a serious, good-faith effort to identify women candidates.

And he stuck to that policy. Nikias’ willingness to go out on a limb with his faculty, say many female (and male) academics, was indicative of a real commitment to change. (The fact that he had teenage daughters of his own, Nikias admits, may have had something to do with his sensitivity to the issue.)

“For our school, big things happened because of the right leadership,” says Maja Mataric´, professor of computer science and neuroscience and senior associate dean for research at USC Viterbi. “At USC,” she adds, “the most influential advocates for women have been men - former provost Lloyd Armstrong, university president Steven Sample, Max Nikias and Viterbi School dean Yannis Yortsos - scientists all.”

This championing of women in science by male mentors is a recurring theme. Intentional sexism isn’t really the problem, though everyone has her favorite anecdote. But the occasional ogre notwithstanding, women scientists invariably describe a plethora of Prince Charmings.

Morrison, who received her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, has nothing but praise for her male mentors:

“I had wonderful professors, all of whom were men, all of whom I’ve kept in close touch with.” She doesn’t remember ever being told by a man that she couldn’t be a scientist. “And I was naïve enough and oblivious enough not to recognize that there were likely to be real problems ahead,” she adds with a knowing grin.

Parker also speaks glowingly of male mentors from high school on up.

It was a male physics teacher who recommended her for the engineering scholarship that got her a free ride at North Carolina State, and she reveres the man who supported her every step of the way at USC, George Bekey, professor emeritus of computer science, electrical engineering and biomedical engineering.

“Words can’t describe what he did for all the women whose careers he touched,” she says.

IN MANY WAYS, Jean Morrison embodies the challenges women face in academic science. A metamorphic petrologist whose research has focused on stable isotopes and the role fluids play in fault systems, she has spent her whole career at USC, hired right out of graduate school in 1988 as an assistant professor.

Morrison, who is married to earth scientist J. Lawford Anderson, also a USC professor, waited until she was 37 to have her first child. By postponing motherhood, she dodged the biggest bullet that kills women scientists’ careers: the collision course between tenure and the biological clock.

Having soldiered through graduate school and postdoctoral fellowships and landed a plum job at a research university, the average woman scientist will spend the next seven years in a Darwinian publish-or-perish struggle. On the march to tenure, she will devote every waking hour to grant-writing, lab-building, data-crunching, symposium-presenting and, of course, teaching and mentoring bright young minds. Throw a screaming baby into the mix and the challenges are amplified.

Women graduate students look around at the small number of faculty women who are successfully performing this perilous balancing act and draw their own conclusions. Most opt out of academe without even dipping a toe in the water. Many others trickle off in the early stages of their careers, casualties of what is called the “leaky pipeline.” Even disenchanted tenured women scientists occasionally jump ship.

Taken collectively, about half of all undergraduate degree recipients in science and engineering are women. And according to the latest NSF data (from 2006), women earn 35 percent of all science and engineering Ph.D.s - up from 8 percent in 1966 - although the figures vary widely by field.

Life sciences, including health sciences and agriculture, awarded the highest percentage of Ph.D.s to women (51 percent); but only 28 percent of degrees in physical sciences and 20 percent of degrees in engineering went to women.

Yet somehow, by the time they should be going on the academic job market, this group of female candidates mysteriously evaporates from the pipeline. Chemist Hanna Reisler laments that of the many doctoral students she has advised over the course of a long career at USC, “I do not have a single woman who had followed in my footsteps. They either went to industry or teaching, but not one went on to a research university.”

Those who do make it through the leaky pipeline face the decision of when to start a family. Many opt to wait.

“I had my daughter right as I got tenure,” says Morrison, whose children are now 14 and 11. Even with that job security, she found managing two young children along with the demands of her career without guidance from anyone with experience to be hard. “I was rather overwhelmed,” she says.

Alice Parker took a similar path. She was 39 and tenured when her son was born. But tenure didn’t solve all her problems.

Realizing she couldn’t do everything her male colleagues were doing, Parker attempted what few scientists have ever successfully accomplished: She took a hiatus from research. Putting on hold her work in applied software design for CAD databases, she threw herself wholeheartedly into teaching. She threw herself into administration, too, serving as USC’s dean of graduate studies and vice provost for research.

Then, four years ago, Parker did the near-impossible: She rebooted her research, but with a twist. Instead of integrated circuits, she is now designing carbon nanotube neural nanocircuits - a completely different field. Her goal is to create synthetic neurons that can emulate human brain function. WiSE was instrumental in making the switch possible. The $17,600 faculty research grant it awarded to Parker was the springboard to the three-year NSF grant she landed in 2007.

Hanna Reisler took the opposite route. Anticipating that the tenure track and parenting wouldn’t mix well, she started her family early and pursued pure research. The Israeli-born scientist had come to USC in 1977 as a young postdoctoral student with a husband and baby in tow. When her fellowship ended, she stayed at USC but moved on to a soft-money (non-tenure track) job as research assistant professor. Ten years later, she went on the market for a tenure-track position.

“That is very unusual,” she says. “The career track is very conservative. I was very lucky.”

Reisler had made a name for herself using laser and molecular-beam techniques in the study of the detailed mechanisms of chemical reactions in gas and condensed phases. USC College hired her as a tenured associate professor in 1987 - “which was great because it meant we didn’t need to relocate,” she adds, explaining that her husband is a chemist at UCLA.

This brings us to another career-buster for women engineers and scientists: marriage. If only they remained single, many of the problems women face in academe would fade away. But they have a habit of marrying, and particularly of marrying other academics.

“It’s just a matter of circumstance,” says Reisler. “Most of us are married to other scientists and engineers, because we are in fields where we meet a lot of scientists and engineers already as undergraduates.” She adds with a smile, “There are a lot of guys.”

Of course men scientists marry, too. But they marry women from all walks of life.

Here’s the challenge: Suppose a woman scientist is tough enough to navigate the leaky pipeline. She publishes. Makes tenure. Despite marrying and raising a family, her academic career is humming along nicely. And now, she’s looking to make a smart move. She’s interviewing for university jobs all over the country. She receives several attractive offers, all requiring that she relocate. Now she faces the dilemma of the trailing spouse.

It’s simple, really. For an academic couple, it’s nearly impossible to find a location with two job opportunities. And, like it or not, 40 years after the women’s movement began, society is still configured in such a way that when the demands of family call for compromise, it’s usually the woman’s career that will yield - be she a kindergarten teacher or a high-powered research professor.

In the effort to recruit or retain a woman scientist, the existence of an academic spouse can be a deal-breaker. One way to beat the cycle is mounting a proactive effort to find employment for the spouse.

Sometimes it’s as easy as finding a neighboring institution to hire the spouse. Sometimes it’s a question of locating a short-term soft-money job to tide the family over during the transition to a new city. Or it can be as complicated as cobbling together a double hire involving two academic departments.

Urbashi Mitra, a professor of electrical engineering and chair of the USC Viterbi WiSE committee for three years, knows firsthand how hard it can be to recruit an academic couple. When Ohio State hired her directly out of her doctoral program at Princeton University, it took some cajoling to get her trailing spouse, a physicist, a job of his own at the university. The physics department hired him as a post-doc in 1996. The following year he secured a tenure track position. By the time he resigned six years later, they were begging him to stay. But in 2000, he had decided to leave academe to go into industry. Mitra recalls her excitement at hearing the news: “Does this mean we can move to California?” she remembers asking. Yes, it did.

Even after Mitra had formally accepted a job offer from USC Viterbi, “they didn’t believe we were really coming,” she says. Because her husband did not have a position at USC, there were a number of contacts to ask: ‘Are you really coming?’ ”

More recently, in 2005, WiSE helped orchestrate twin offers to civil/environmental engineer Amy Rechenmacher and her husband, aerospace and mechanical engineer Roger Ghanem. Both came to USC from Johns Hopkins. It took a little over a year to put the deal together.

WiSE program manager Nicole Hawkes makes it clear that WiSE does not involve itself in departmental hiring decisions. “We get involved to assist academic departments in recruiting,” she says. “We participate simply by meeting with candidates to let them know about the existence of the WiSE program at USC and the programs we have to offer, which are very attractive to women faculty.”

PROBABLY THE MOST intractable of all the barriers facing women scientists is motherhood - what independent toxicologist Emily Monosson mischievously calls The Elephant in the Laboratory. Last year, she published under that title a collection of revealing first-person essays penned by 36 mother-scientists. It’s not a pretty picture.

In recent years, UC Berkeley legal scholar and former dean of graduate studies Mary Ann Mason has documented some surprising facts about parenting and tenure. Using data from the national Survey of Doctorate Recipients, she zeroed in on scientists a dozen years out of graduate school and still working in academe. Mason found 55 percent of those with “early babies” (born before or within five years of the mother’s doctorate) were tenured, compared to 65 percent of the same cohort with no babies or “late babies.”

By comparison, 77 percent of the men with “early babies” were tenured. Indeed, Mason discovered, young fathers do better than everyone else in job security, including single men and women. Where babies hold back mom, they seem to advance dad’s career.

In another study, Mason calculated that women with babies are 29 percent less likely than women without babies to ever enter the tenure track. Women who achieve tenure are also twice as likely as men to be single a dozen years after receiving their Ph.D.

Where do the women who “leak” from the pipeline flow? A high percentage, says Mason, spill into the second tier of higher education - the part-time, adjunct and lecturer corps. “More than 50 percent of all undergraduate courses [nationwide] are now taught by part-time or temporary instructors, and this work force is disproportionately composed of mothers,” she says.

“The advice commonly given to wait until tenure before having a child proved wise. Since the average age at tenure is almost 40, this advice has obvious biological drawbacks.”
At USC, under the watchful eye of WiSE, family-minded scholars are not likely to receive such advice. “As we tell young women, there is no good time, no right time,” Morrison says. “The time is the time and you have to run with it.”

“I was 39 when I had my son,” adds Parker. “It was delayed, significantly, because of my career. That is always a dilemma. Early or late? Until you’re tenured, you feel you’re on thin ice. But then the younger you are, the easier other things are. So what I tell students is that there is never one answer that fits everyone. There is actually no solution to the situation for working mothers, but we have choices, and we can choose what to emphasize and what to sacrifice.”

In recent years, USC has taken steps to make itself more family-friendly. Lactation rooms are a common feature in new campus construction. Campus-based child care, job flexibility and family-leave policies make it far easier for young women to imagine themselves pursuing academic careers. A stop-the-tenure-clock option lets junior faculty take a guilt-free year’s detour from the professorial fast track.

And WiSE has helped. A couple of years ago, when cosmologist Elena Pierpaoli was hiring a postdoc from among 240 resumes, she happened to choose a woman. When that woman turned out to be pregnant and accompanied by a trailing partner, Pierpaoli didn’t go back to her short list. She called WiSE.

“Elena pulled it together to find positions for both of them in her lab,” says Hawkes. The candidate was chosen to be a WiSE Postdoctoral Fellow, which comes with $50,000 in salary support over two years; and her baby is now in USC day care, also partially supported by WiSE.

Without the will and the resources that WiSE provides, this story could have gone very differently.

IN THE BEST OF all possible worlds, women would be as equally engaged in academic science as men. But they aren’t. No one expects gender parity among firefighters, longshoremen or oil platform workers. Do we, as a society, really need women in science and engineering?

“It’s a critically important question,” says Morrison. “Why do we care?”

Her answer is a straightforward one: We care because American success over the past century has depended on “our unique capabilities at scientific and technological innovations.” As we go forward in the next 50 years, she says, with increasing economic pressure from China and India, the United States must harness all of its intellectual talent.

“Particularly where the commodity that is so essential is uniquely American - entrepreneurial, creative, intuitive intellectual drive - we can’t afford to have our universities be uninviting to some members of our population.”

Provost Nikias points to the critical role that math, science and technology will play in the new century. “We have three great technological frontiers currently calling American research universities,” he says. “The first - in my opinion, the most important - is medicine and biology; the second is the search for new energy sources; and the third is the ongoing digital media and communications revolution.”

Engineering, he believes, will be a major player in all three of these revolutions. “It will shape the 21st century, which will shape the world our daughters and sons will live in. That makes it all the more essential that we draw our daughters into the making of this new world.”

Morrison throws out the classic hypothetical: “How do you know that the next Bill Gates isn’t Suzy in fourth grade right now?”

Even if Suzy isn’t the next great innovator, there currently aren’t enough science-minded boys in her class to fill the yawning void created by our technology-starved culture.

Bill Gates himself is worried. Last year, the founder of Microsoft testified before the House Committee on Science and Technology to urge Congress to permit more H-1B visas, which allow foreign nationals to work in the United States.

Why? Because, according to an August 2008 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Microsoft can’t find enough top-quality computer scientists who are U.S. citizens or already have the right visas. America’s first-rate graduate schools have a wealth of brilliant scientists and engineers in the pipeline, but somewhere between a third and a half of them aren’t Americans. They’re foreign nationals on student visas and, upon graduation, will return to their native lands.

The need goes beyond computer scientists. So starved is industry for engineers that aerospace corporations, for example, have taken to recruiting their future workforce from community colleges - agreeing to foot the tuition bill while students finish their education at a four-year college or university. In effect, industry is privately funding a G.I. Bill for scientists and engineers.

At the same time, we know that the female talent pool in science, engineering and technology is surprisingly deep and rich. In 2008, Harvard Business Review released “The Athena Factor,” a report on what corporations are doing to reverse the costly female brain drain that afflicts American industry. The report found that 41 percent of highly qualified scientists, engineers and technologists on the lower rungs of corporate career ladders are female.

The female professional dropout rate, however, is huge. Fully 52 percent of highly qualified women working for science, engineering or technology companies quit their jobs, driven out by hostile work environments and extreme job pressures. Reducing female attrition by just one-quarter, the study found, would add 220,000 qualified people to the labor pool - far more than would be gained through a more generous visa allocation program.

ONE AFTERNOON IN early April, a small group of women met for an hour over brown- bag lunches and chocolate Easter eggs. Members of the WiSE Postdoctoral Network, they come together every month to share ideas. On this day, they are discussing the qualities that make a good “elevator talk.” This is the two-minute spiel that every scientist must be prepared to deliver on demand should she be asked, “What do you study?”

WiSE program manager Nicole Hawkes has made it her business to encourage women scientists at all levels of USC to bond in this way. In addition to the Postdoctoral Network and the WiSE Faculty Network, which meet informally once a month, there are groups calling themselves Graduate Women in Biology, Women in Chemistry, Women in Physics and Women in Math. There’s even a nascent network called FUELS, an acronym for “female undergraduates educating and leading in the sciences.”

Hawkes, who came to USC three years ago from Chicago after working in the fellows program of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, puts a lot of effort into nursing along these networking groups. Though she insists WiSE is not initiating or running them, she is clearly their No. 1 cheerleader. Some might wonder if it’s worth the trouble but, like Hamlet, Hawkes believes the readiness is all.

She explains: “At some point in your career, there may come a moment when you say, ‘Hmm? Did that happen because I’m a woman?’ You go to a professional meeting where there are no other women. Or a department with no ladies’ room. All sorts of subtle experiences that make you wonder: ‘Am I welcome here?’ ”

One of the goals Hawkes sets for herself - and for WiSE - is to anticipate that moment, which may come at any time, any place. And when it does arrive, to have networks in place that can provide sympathetic ears and serve as sounding boards at all levels of scholarly life.

In the basic sciences, “postdocs” are the bellwether of what future faculties will look like. Women account for a rising share of these apprentice researchers in all fields except computer sciences.

As with graduate programs, there remains wide variation among disciplines in terms of gender diversity, but collectively, in 2006, women accounted for one-third of all postdocs, up from 29 percent in 1996. This is a propitious sign.

Other signs aren’t so propitious. According to the National Center for Women and Information Technology, women earned only 18 percent of all computer science degrees in 2008. That represents a large step backwards from 1985, when women earned 37 percent of computer science degrees.

And this is a field that’s exploding - the nerve center of the ongoing information and multimedia revolutions.

SINCE THE INCEPTION of WiSE, USC has made strides in hiring women. Certainly, the momentum for hiring women is strong at USC Viterbi, where in recent years 16 women have joined the incoming junior faculty ranks.

Among senior faculty hires, however, men remain dominant. That has a lot to do with the supply. The pool of senior women is small to begin with, and competition is stiff. USC is not alone in the desire to make a demographic dent in the areas where gender imbalance is most glaring. Cherry-picking senior women scientists and engineers is no easy task.

Despite several attractive offers being made, USC science and engineering departments have recruited only two new senior women in recent years: Susan Forsburg in biology and Susan Friedlander in math.

But the efforts continue. In 2005, WiSE renamed its chair the Lloyd Armstrong Jr. Chair for Science and Engineering to honor the former provost’s leadership in creating WiSE. The chair’s primary purpose - it comes with a five-year, $50,000-a-year endowment - is to attract outstanding senior women scientists to USC. Currently it’s filled by Hanna Reisler, though she would gladly vacate it.

Two engineering hires from 2008 - Andrea Armani and Michelle Povinelli - have “rising star” written all over them. Between the two, they had competing job offers from 10 universities. Plus USC, of course.

Povinelli, an assistant professor in electrical engineering with a specialty in nanophotonics, earned her bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Chicago. Before her Ph.D. studies at MIT and four years of postdoctoral work at Stanford University, she went to Cambridge University as an elite Churchill Scholar, picking up a master’s degree along the way.

Armani, an assistant professor in chemical engineering and materials science specializing in biophotonics, also got her bachelor’s degree in physics from Chicago, while her Ph.D. (in applied physics) and two-year postdoctoral fellowship (in biology and chemical engineering) were at Caltech. In the one year she’s been at USC Viterbi, Armani already has reeled in three federal grants.

Both say WiSE influenced their decision to come here.

In Armani’s case, the program sweetened her start-up package, but more important, it rolled out the welcome mat. “I met with WiSE when I first interviewed here, and they were extremely welcoming,” Armani says. “That was something unique, unlike all the other schools I interviewed at.”

E-mails flowed from the WiSE faculty before she arrived. “It made it feel like I already had friends here, a network, which is very, very nice.”

WILL CURRENT EFFORTS be enough to significantly increase the ranks of female scientists in America? Hanna Reisler doesn’t think so. “I won’t see it during my time at USC,” she predicts.

Why not? “Because it is so ingrained in the nature of the scientific enterprise, this competitiveness, the fact that the harder you work, the more you are rewarded. The culture is dictated by men who are very driven and very career-oriented. That’s who they are. You can’t tell somebody: Work a little less.

“I just don’t see that it is going to change. That’s how it is.”

Maybe not for the current generation of women scientists, but what about the next?
At the end of her USC presentation last spring, Phoebe Leboy of the Association for Women in Science told of a junior professor at a major university who had been informed by the head of her mentoring committee that the research talks she had been giving all over town would not count when it came time for her tenure review. Only out-of-town presentations would be considered.

“Isn’t that wonderful?” Leboy grimaces. “This is an assistant professor with two small children.

“How do we change the culture?” she asks, and answers her own question: “We change the culture,” waving her arms inclusively at the USC audience. “Things like WiSE change the culture.”

But, she adds, there’s much more to be done. “Institutions like WiSE - which have worked on the easier problems for 10 years now - please,” she implores, “work on the harder ones, discipline by discipline.”

A VERY WISE GIFT

A gift from an anonymous donor jump-started the WiSE program and put USC on the map.

When USC announced in 2000 that an anonymous donor had made a $20 million gift to support women in science and engineering, the question on everyone’s mind was: Who’s the WiSE guy?

First of all, he is a she.

Though her identity remains a secret, here’s what program director Jean Morrison can reveal about the donor: “She’s absolutely delightful. She’s elderly, in her 90s. She is an alumna of the university; however, she is neither a scientist nor an engineer.”

And the impetus for her exceptional gift? “She wanted to do something for women in the fields where they were making the slowest progress, to help the university redress that lack of progress.”

Working with then-provost Lloyd Armstrong, himself a physicist and well aware of the problems of underrepresentation of women in science, the donor created a sort of mini-foundation within USC that could award grants to individuals in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the six science and math departments of USC College. (For organizational reasons, departments based at the Health Sciences campus were not included.)

The WiSE endowment pool generates about $1 million a year in investment income. This money fuels an array of activities: sweetened hiring packages for faculty candidates, major and minor research support, travel grants, help with pricey scientific equipment purchases, child care assistance, beefed-up stipends for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, undergraduate research grants, salary replacement funds to departments faced with a teaching gap caused by maternity leaves, logistics for an array of women’s networking groups, even help in finding soft-money jobs for a “trailing spouse.” Perhaps most crucially, WiSE creates a space for women to ask questions they might feel awkward raising with a male colleague, department chair or dean - anything from “How do I get heard in male-dominated meetings?” to “When do I tell my colleagues I’m pregnant?”

In 2008-2009, WiSE awarded 140 grants, worth about $760,000. The balance covers program and administrative expenses and salaries for a staff of two, led by Morrison. To stretch the dollars to the limit, “virtually everything we do involves matching commitments from USC College and USC Viterbi,” says Morrison, who came on as the program’s founding director in 2002 and, like a careful gardener, has pruned and grafted as circumstances demand. “We tend to be entrepreneurial in nature,” she says. “Rather than offering up penalties, we offer up incentives.”

With enough money - and $20 million is a tidy nest egg - it’s tempting to imagine you can spend away your problems. But it was clear from the outset, says Morrison, that in the quest for gender equity in academic science, there are no silver bullets. A whole suite of programs would be tried, to sink or swim based on their merits. Much of the work would be pioneering. With no tried-and-true model to build on, WiSE was blazing a trail in the wilderness.

The first push was intense faculty hiring: USC’s gender imbalance figures were poor even
by the dismal national standard. In many departments, percentages languished in the low single digits; a few scraped rock bottom, with zero women in sight.

In recent years, as the numbers soared, WiSE increasingly has focused on support for women graduate students and postdocs. Another important thrust has been visibility and atmospherics - engendering a more woman-friendly climate at USC.

WiSE introduced a distinguished lecture series that brings to campus some of the leading advocates for gender equity in American science and technology. In 2009, it hosted a presentation by biochemist Phoebe Leboy, president of the Association for Women in Science, the movement’s leading organization. The year before, former Princeton engineering dean and current Harvey Mudd College president Maria Klawe gave a talk dispelling popular myths about women’s alleged lack of interest in computers. Other guest speakers have included UC Berkeley dean of graduate studies Mary Ann Mason, whose national study “Do Babies Matter?” documented how motherhood stunts careers in academic science. (Many of these presentations are viewable as streamed video at www.usc.edu/programs/wise/events)

WiSE didn’t spring fully formed from the head of Zeus: Rather, it was the brainchild of a USC task force that deliberated for more than one year before spending a dime.

A small, grassroots group of senior women scientists took the lead on the task force, among them chemist Hanna Reisler. “There were only four of us in the whole College,” she recalls: Sarah Bottjer in neuroscience, Susan Montgomery in math, Chiara Nappi in physics (who has since left USC) and Reisler.

The university wasn’t even tracking the number of women faculty it employed in 2000, Reisler discovered. So she took to the department Web sites and painstakingly hunted down names that sounded feminine, verified them and brought these women together as a network for the first time.

It was a sobering task. The grand total population came to 15. That included all tenured and tenure-track women in what are now known as WiSE-eligible departments - all of engineering and a half-dozen departments in USC College (biology, chemistry, math, physics and astronomy, earth sciences and kinesiology). Fifteen women out of a pool of more than 300 permanent faculty in those fields.

Five percent.

The goal WiSE set for its first five years: Double the number. “And we did go from 15 to 32 in that time period,” says Morrison, an earth scientist and one of the original 15.

It was Reisler who initially gathered together these women in what would become the WiSE Faculty Networking Group - a lively sisterhood that meets monthly over sack lunches to compare notes, hash out problems and cheer each other on. (As of spring 2009, membership stood at 38.)

The group is remarkably loyal. The April gathering brought out 15 of them. On the top of everyone’s agenda: the names and specialities of three new women faculty hires, set to join USC in fall 2009.

WHAT WOMEN WANT

The increasing concern about the role and status of women in research positions at high-powered universities surfaced publicly in the early 1990s.

The problem of gender imbalance in science, technology, engineering and medical disciplines gained wide attention relatively recently, as successful women at top institutions began coming forward with harrowing tales and startling statistics.

The first flare was fired in 1991, with the very public resignation of Stanford faculty physician Frances Conley - a star surgeon, the first woman ever appointed to a full professorship of neurosurgery at an American medical school. When a colleague she detested was promoted to department chair, Conley, then age 50, took to the pages of Time magazine to air her frustration with the status quo, describing casual fondling of her legs under the O.R. table and a steady stream of demeaning comments and sexual innuendo directed at women, both junior and senior. Though she eventually mended fences with Stanford and returned to her department, Conley elaborated on her experiences in an eye-opening 1998 book, Walking Out on the Boys.

By then, “The Status of Women Faculty in the Sciences at MIT” was stirring controversy. A groundbreaking study prepared by a small group of distinguished faculty women, it exposed a striking pattern at the nation’s premier technology institute. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, despite surges in the number of women earning Ph.D.s in math, science and engineering, the level of female research faculty members at MIT held steady at 9 percent.

There were no smoking guns. No secret handshakes or scandalous memoranda. But such clear stasis in a time of demographic upheaval hinted at subtle bias woven into the very fabric of academe. The MIT report, released in 1995 and updated in 1998, noted: “In no case was this discrimination conscious or deliberate. Indeed, it was usually totally unconscious and unknowing. Nevertheless, the effects are real.”

Interestingly, MIT junior faculty women reported feeling “included and supported in their departments.” However, when the committee interviewed senior women, it got a different picture. These women - and we’re talking about MIT here, scientists at the apex of their professions - described feeling “invisible,” excluded from having a voice in their departments, blackballed from positions of real power. (Molecular biologist Susan Forsburg confirms this feeling. A senior scientist who joined USC in 2004, she has participated in departmental meetings - happily, not at USC - where she felt her voice was not being heard: “I mean literally not heard! Where you say something, and it’s just ignored until one of your male colleagues says the same thing 10 minutes later!”)

Given the scarcity of senior women faculty in the sciences and the fact that they are essentially irreplaceable, one would expect tenured women to be treated exceptionally well - pampered, overpaid, indulged. Instead, the MIT study showed, “they are underpaid, have unequal access to department resources and are excluded from substantive power within the university.”

Importantly, the MIT committee found, this pattern repeats over generations: The same senior-ranked women who complain of invisibility and exclusion from power say that as junior faculty, they had felt gender discrimination was a thing of the past.

The gender gap isn’t uniform across disciplines. In the biological sciences, women nationally make up 35 to 40 percent of faculties at research universities (the pattern holds at USC). At the other end of the spectrum is physics, with female representation in the single digits nationally (also true at USC). The toughest nuts to crack, besides physics, are computer science and engineering. With physics, the total numbers of students and faculty are small, so a dearth of women in the pipeline, while unfortunate, isn’t catastrophic. But in computer science and electrical engineering, the demand for graduates is huge. Here, the prevailing five-to-one gender imbalance carries ramifications for the entire economy.

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