Women are making strides in the bioscience and social science STEM disciplines, yet men still vastly outnumber women in computer science and engineering.
But the University of Illinois at Chicago has improved its gender balance of science and engineer professors through a $3.3 million National Science Foundation grant program it won in 2006.
Mitra Dutta, professor of electrical and computer engineering and vice chancellor for research at UIC, explains how.
Q. How did you narrow the gender gap among science and engineering professors, especially in your department?
A. When I started in the electrical and computer engineering department at UIC, I was recruited in as the department head and I was the only woman in the department. Now, after 14 years, there are eight women in the tenure system faculty of about 24, so it’s about 33 percent.
The National Science Foundation is concerned about this, especially in the hard disciplines, so they have set up grants called Advance institutional transformation grants, which are several million dollars over a period of five years.
More Top Picks Vupoint Solutions Magic Wand
They are given to institutions to change the climate so that female faculty members in science, math and engineering are promoted, and policies are changed in the university to help make it more attractive to female academics to enter and sustain their careers in academia. We competed for and we won one of these grants.
Q. What did you learn from the program?
A. We learned a lot about unconscious bias. One of the most successful things we did was in recruiting. When the pool comes in, we do a spreadsheet masking the names and looking at their qualifications; where did they get their Ph.D.s from, how many papers they published, and where they did their post-doc rather than look at their names.
Then women tend to rise to the top much more than if people did look at names. Generally, these search committees are mainly for faculty with the idea being if you have women as mentors and role models, it will be easier to recruit women as students.
Q. How did you address the problem of retention?
A. Tenure is something that faculty worry a lot about. They are in probationary status for six years. By the sixth year, the committees will vote whether you’re making adequate progress to meet the norms of what faculty do, how many papers you’ve published, research you’ve developed, students you’ve graduated and committees you’ve served on during that period.
If not, you’re given a year to catch up. If you don’t, you’re let go.
Unfortunately for women, that’s often in the childbearing ages. So a lot of the women faculty have children during this period and they worry about whether they will be as productive as their male counterparts. Let’s say you have a child, and during that period you didn’t get to work as much as you normally would have.
So as part of the grant, one of the policy changes that happens automatically for both men and women is the minute HR is informed that they have a new child in the family, and you can now have the clock stopped so the process is held. Even though you may be in year three in time, it looks like you’re in year two and you have time to fulfill your duties. It’s much less of a stigma attached to it.
Q. Were there any results?
A. This is one of the most effective policy changes that has happened. When the policy change went in, five people in the faculty that were coming up for tenure used it over a period of six years. Three were men and two were women.
Q. The recent #ILookLikeAnEngineer social media campaign sparked debate about how realistically the campaign portrayed the looks of female engineers. Is that part of the bias, even on the part of women?
A. I think that is part of what’s going on there. I remember my reaction when I went gray early in life and I thought, “People will take me seriously now.” Maybe it was my own bias there, but I did feel that I was taken a little more seriously. Especially if you’re in a management role and you’re a lot younger than the people that you’re supposed to be managing, it helps if you’re gray.
Q&As are edited for length and clarity.
Kate MacArthur is a freelance writer.