August 4, 2005
UW center aims to fix system, ‘advance’ women scientists
Women are vastly underrepresented in the academic sciences — that unfortunate fact is widely known.
What might be less known, however, is that there’s an entity at the UW called the Center for Institutional Change (CIC) that’s working to improve that unequal climate. The center efforts are meeting with some success, and changing a few lives along the way.
The CIC was funded by a five-year, $3.75 million National Science Foundation grant to the UW in 2001, called an ADVANCE Institutional Transformation award. The UW was one of nine universities participating in the grant when it started, but that total has since grown to 19 institutions in all.
The aim of the grant, and the center it paid to create, is clear: “to increase the participation and advancement of women faculty in academic science, engineering and mathematics careers.” In the language of the ADVANCE program, these are called “SEM” departments — meaning science, engineering and math — the ones most representing career paths in which women are underrepresented.
The CIC, which operates under the auspices of UW ADVANCE, is in the business of creating cultural change, which does not come about quickly or easily. The center is run by Eve Riskin, a professor of electrical engineering, with Joyce Yen, program/research manager. Denice Denton, former dean of the College of Engineering, was the original principal investigator on the grant. Since her departure to become chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz, the project’s P.I. has been Ana Mari Cauce, professor and chair of the Psychology Department.
The center has six major areas of focus:
- offering leadership development for department chairs and college deans,
- bringing about cultural change in SEM departments,
- creating a visiting scholars program,
- providing leadership mentoring for women faculty in science,
- examining existing UW policies for equity and needed change, and
- giving transitional support to faculty whose careers have been challenged by personal problems that threaten to limit or suspend their research work.
That help at the personal level comes in the form of Transitional Support Program grants, which the CIC provides to certain faculty researchers — most but not all women — to help them overcome life challenges that might otherwise limit or suspend their work. These grants range in size from about $5,000 to $38,000, including overhead and administrative costs. Since its inception, the CIC has given out 39 such grants to 37 faculty (two researchers received two grants each), totaling about $750,000.
All but two of the grant recipients have been women, but the definitions of the grant program do not specify gender, stating more generally, “the TSP is available for outstanding science, engineering and mathematics faculty, regardless of gender, who are in the midst of major life transitions.”
There also is a Universitywide TSP program which offers similar help to faculty — men and women both — whose careers are under severe stress from personal issues. While the ADVANCE TSP program will end with the grant’s completion in 2006, the institutionwide program will continue.
Martha Bosma, an assistant professor of biology, was one of the first ADVANCE TSP grant recipients, and in fact was featured in a July 22 article on the topic in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Bosma was awarded a grant of $20,000 — each grant total includes overhead and administrative costs — which helped her through a difficult period when her son, then 4 years old, suffered from a severe and undiagnosed neurological problem. She also was given an additional two years to pursue tenure.
Confessing her high stress level was a difficult first step, Bosma said. “It was very hard for me to be a woman walking into — any department, really — and realizing I have a major problem to face and that’s my kid.” Given the competitive world of scientific research, Bosma said she worried at the time, “I’m a woman in science, and I don’t want my colleagues to think that I’m whining. I just felt I could not discuss this problem with anyone.”
The money and tenure extension enabled Bosma to avoid having to consider quitting her research, or even her job. Plus, she said, she thinks of how the University and the government have supported her work over the years. “If I just stop, what happens to all the resources invested in this lab so far, and the knowledge that it has produced?”
When her son’s condition leveled out, Bosma was ready to resume her research and even steer it in a direction related to her son’s condition. Results of her research — about isolating the brain neurons that affect facial development, and featuring her discovery of a sort of pacemaker in the brain regulating this activity — will be published in September, and has already attracted attention from the scientific community, she said with pride.
Julianne Dalcanton, an associate professor of astronomy, received an ADVANCE TSP grant for $32,457 to help her continue her research when her second child suffered from an extreme digestive disorder. “I had a baby who just screamed all the time,” she said. “You don’t sleep and you really can’t leave them with a sitter — it’s stressful enough for a parent. My life just came to a standstill.”
But the grant enabled her to hire a student research assistant for three quarters who helped keep her work on track. (Dalcanton had previously received a smaller TSP grant for a different health-related issue.)
Both of these respected researchers stress, however, that they feel the grants were more an investment in them and their work than a rescue, or worse, a handout. And that’s in keeping with the theory behind ADVANCE and CIC office’s approach to gender inequities: “Fix the system, not the woman.”
“This is not just welfare,” Bosma said. “This is a way to keep a functioning person functioning. I wasn’t just sitting around waiting for someone to hand me cash.”
Dalcanton expressed a similar view: “I think the larger story is the overall success of the ADVANCE program” she said. “ADVANCE has helped me professionally in a wide range of avenues. It’s just been tremendously educational.”
The cluster of programs offered by ADVANCE, Dalcanton said, also helps reduce the isolation that can be felt by women in science, or indeed any underrepresented group in academia. “Knowledge is power. The more you know, the more you can help each other out and ADVANCE is one way that women who are fairly isolated in their departments can forge those ties.”
Dalcanton said, too, that the program is improving the UW’s reputation among researchers. We’re hearing through the grapevine that ADVANCE is a draw for women to both apply to and accept offers from the UW. “What’s happening out there is our reputation is getting stronger and stronger. And even after this ends, it will show the UW to be a reasonable place to be a woman in an underrepresented field.”
At about the midpoint in the ADVANCE program’s five-year grant, its administrators — Riskin, Yen, research assistant Kate Quinn and internal evaluators Suzanne Brainard and Sheila Edwards Lange — already can point to a number of small improvements in the job climate, especially for women faculty. These include:
- A 20 percent increase in women tenured or tenure-track faculty in science, engineering and math departments.
- Between 2002 and 2004, five of eight proposals submitted to the NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development Program by UW women faculty and reviewed by ADVANCE staff were awarded.
- An increase in the proportion of women assistant professors in science, engineering and math departments
- Strong attendance at quarterly leadership workshops, with 69 people attending at least one, 28 being women and 17 faculty of color.
- Tool kits for faculty recruitment and retention and assistance with faculty searches, to better bring in and support women faculty and others in traditionally underrepresented populations.
Riskin, the CIC’s director, cited the leadership workshops for chairs, deans and “emerging leaders” as key among the program’s accomplishments. “I’m very proud of the community we’ve built, both of the women faculty and the chairs — we have a strong chair community, and the chairs are doing their jobs differently than nearly four years ago,” Riskin said. “It’s been wonderful to see how supportive they are of our agenda and how they view candidates and faculty differently.”
Dalcanton echoed this praise, saying, “I have a much better understanding of what’s involved down the road in my career and can take steps now to prepare myself for that. It’s been extremely helpful.”
Tom Daniel, chairman of the Biology Department, said he took over as chair about when the ADVANCE program started, and has gained much from the leadership workshops. “There was an incredible wisdom downloaded in an effective manner, and I really valued the leadership of Denice Denton, and also Eve Riskin and Joyce Yen, all of them,” he said. “They were there to say, ‘How can we help you promote a culture in your department that is supportive of everyone?’”
Daniel added that the consciousness-raising work of the CIC and the ADVANCE program should not be seen as a cure-all or an end in itself — more of a beginning, in fact.
Riskin agrees. “I feel we’ve made significant progress but I also feel like there’s a long way to go, not just for women but for all faculty — to somehow make faculty life more compatible with having a life, but also more attractive to the next generation, so young women and men will be interested in academic careers.”
Perhaps the last word should go to former dean Denice Denton herself, who began this work as principal investigator four years back. Denton said in an e-mail she’s proud of the contributions the program has made toward “enhancing the environment for women students, science and faculty in science, math and engineering on campus.
“The ADVANCE team at the UW, including the staff, department chairs and faculty, have done a wonderful job of creating programs and models that are being adopted nationally and internationally.”
More information is available at http://www.engr.washington.edu/advance/.
