There are times when numbers and percentages speak volumes. As reported
in the just released Profiles of Engineering and Engineering
Technology Colleges published by the American Society for Engineering
Education, the percentage of women who are full professors in engineering
stands at just over 5 percent. The highest percentage of female faculty
is at the assistant professor level. Assistant professors are typically
untenured and have little job security or ability to change the culture
of their departments.
So what is stopping women faculty from gaining higher positions,
such as tenure, full professor, chair, or even dean? The problem is
a complex mix of cultural and organizational barriers that some say
will take decades to dissolve. A lack of connections and professional
acknowledgment is one thing that can hold a woman back. A common complaint
is that when it comes to hiring and promoting, the men on the faculty
are the majority and they have their “old-boy network,” while the
women, whose numbers are considerably smaller, are isolated. As one
woman professor put it, “When there are only two of us [women] we
don’t sit around discussing who should get the promotion.”
One influential academic position held by few women is department
chair. Debbi Niemeier, professor and chair for the department of civil
and environmental engineering at the University of California-Davis,
says that—considering the chair’s crucial role in making committee,
teaching, and space assignments, deciding on salary and budgets, and
“setting the climate” within the department—the importance of having
women chairs cannot be overemphasized. Niemeier dubs chairs the “guild
masters elected by their peers, most of whom are men.” According to
Niemeier, the latest data from Research 1 universities shows that
there are nine women chairs out of 150 engineering departments.
“Women,” she says, “will bring new energy and a personal investment
in issues of parity to the role of department chair. In addition,
they can serve as significant role models to both younger faculty
and students aspiring to achieve leadership positions both within
and outside the university.”
Women faculty members are ready to take an active leadership role
in their departments. “Women want to have a positive impact,” says
Maria Klawe, dean of Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied
Science. “They’ve been trained to care about their community, to have
a broader perspective than just their personal success. Often they
spend a lot of time doing this kind of thing without getting the reward.
If you spend a lot of time working on departmental problems and wishing
you had a higher position to get it taken care of, well that’s a clue.”
Another thing hindering women’s ascent to higher positions is their
reluctance to tout their accomplishments. “We are, as young women
and as girls, given a strong message that it’s not appropriate to
promote yourself,” Klawe says. “I’ve seen younger women who have to
sit on themselves to avoid antagonizing people because they are so
outspoken. By graduate school they have already learned that being
outspoken is not going to get you anywhere. This is not a male versus
female thing; it’s culture.”
When Tresa Pollock, professor in the materials science and engineering
department at the University of Michigan, was asked by her dean to assess
the status of women faculty in the college of engineering, she was surprised
at the strong message that came from the women who were tenured and
were looking forward to what’s next. “We heard at the associate, mid-career
level that the women were interested in leadership positions, but they
felt that nobody was thinking of them in that way.
“We’ve had a woman provost, and now a president,” Pollock continues,
“but the reality of the situation is that leadership is not necessarily
being developed within.”
As a result of the assessment at Michigan, in October 2003 Pollock
organized a University of Michigan Women in Science & Engineering Leadership
Retreat, in which women deans and chairs from several universities talked
about the benefits and barriers of career moves. Since then there have
been several smaller workshops that focus on communication skills and
negotiating, and different styles of management among people with Ph.D.’s
in science.
Even with all that attention, the imbalance between men and women faculty
members still holds in many schools. When Pollock headed the last search
committee for the chair of her department, she says they were unsuccessful
at finding women candidates to even interview. “We tried. But those
that we thought would be good at it just weren’t movable. That’s not
completely surprising because it’s pretty well known that women are
more likely to have ‘two-body’ problems—family and job.”
Indeed, it’s commonly said that a woman in leadership, whether she’s
a dean or a chair, either has to have a husband who’s a saint, or a
stay-at-home spouse, or she has to be paid well enough to afford good
childcare. It’s not surprising, then, that a good percentage of the
women in leadership positions have children who are older, and/or husbands
who are retired. Leadership positions for women not only take a lot
of time away from family but from research as well, unless they are
highly disciplined. According to Klawe, if a woman moves into a leadership
position too early in her career, it’s hard to go back to research.
She advises women to hang onto their research as long as they can.
In 2000, when Judy Vance, at that time an associate professor in mechanical
engineering at Iowa State, participated in a NSF-sponsored Women Engineering
Leadership Conference in Winter Park, Colo., it planted the seed to
change her career. Three years later, after promotion to full professor,
her department announced a chair search; Vance threw her hat in the
ring and won, thus becoming the first woman to be named a permanent
chair of an engineering department at Iowa State. “I was looking to
be full professor, and I never thought of being a chair. I don’t know
if I would have given it consideration if I hadn’t gone to the conference,”
Vance recalls. “It wasn’t reticence, it just hadn’t occurred to me,
and that’s the shocking thing—women don’t realize they are ready for
it.”
Another discouraging factor for women is the pressure of the job, Vance
notes. “A chair gets pushed from the bottom from the faculty, and pushed
from the top from the dean. So people think, ‘Why would I want to do
that?’ They need to know how being a chair helps the school, other women,
and the program or department. You don’t have as much opportunity as
a full professor.” Vance says that women are more likely to jump from
full professor to assistant or associate dean, without ever being a
chair, thus missing a crucial step and “knocking down” chances for further
job opportunities or promotion to dean. “Selection committees, and the
power at the university for hiring deans, is still very male dominated,
and these committees use their own metrics to select the nominees they
want to interview. My experience has shown that having chaired a department
is a key piece of background needed for qualifying to be a dean candidate.
And if you can’t even make the candidate set, you will never be dean.”
All this is not to underestimate the importance of women in associate
and full professorships. As one recent study conducted by Donna J. Nelson,
a chemistry professor at the University of Oklahoma, noted, a cycle
is perpetuated when there are not enough women professors to serve as
role models. “Female students,” Nelson says, “aren’t the only ones affected
by the lack of female faculty on campus. Male students are also harmed
because they are deprived of access to talented faculty who could be
their mentors. In addition, the absence of women sends a message to
men that women do not belong in these nontraditional environments and
it is acceptable for them to be marginalized, denied tenure, and given
unequal resources.”
Princeton’s Klawe fully agrees that when women are leaders in science
and engineering, things get better for everyone, including the men.
“We want to make sure faculty members get all the information, and everyone
is offered the same information.” With so many deeply seated problems
in our culture and in the way male-dominated faculties operate within,
is there any hope for the women who want to move ahead in academia?
Pollock believes it can happen, but insists that in addition to hiring
women, the focus has to be on retaining them; otherwise women will never
have enough in numbers to be heard. “Until you reach some critical mass,
these problems are always going to exist. If 30 percent of your faculty
were women, a lot of these things would become less problematic,” she
says. The future might be looking up. In 2003, the percentage of assistant
professors who were female had reached 18 percent. While still low,
it does signify that colleges of engineering are moving in the right
direction.
Barbara Mathias-Riegel is a freelance writer based
in Washington, D.C.