Having children poses problems for female scientists

Having children poses problems for female scientists

By Shannon Brownlee and Monika Guttman

In a year of difficult weeks, the seven days just before Christmas were particularly trying for Valarie Miller-Bertoglio, a biologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Miller-Bertoglio, 28, regularly puts in 50-hour weeks in the lab and still feels she isn't doing enough. But she had to cut back when her 1-year-old son and two dogs all fell ill at the same time. "My son went on an eating strike, and he's already thin to begin with," she says. Her husband, a Web designer and musician, couldn't step into the breach because he was having an unusually hectic week. "One of the things I have to keep in mind," she says, "is not to quit when things get hard."

Miller-Bertoglio is not alone in often feeling on the brink. Young female scientists are evaporating from the scientific pool at such rapid rates that some experts are calling it a national crisis. According to the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Va., women make up a healthy 48 percent of college graduates who majored in science or engineering. But by the time young scientists reach the doctorate level, the percent of degrees going to women drops to just 33 percent. In the physical sciences and engineering, fields in which women are especially underrepresented, they account for 23 and 12 percent of doctorates, respectively. At some of the nation's most prestigious universities, the relative numbers of science Ph.D.'s earned by women are even lower.

"This is not just a social issue," says Elaine Mendoza, chairperson of a federal commission convened last year to report on women and minorities in science, engineering, and technology. "We have huge labor shortages. The nation's economy depends on getting more women and minorities into the sciences."

Series of slights. So why aren't women making it through graduate programs in biology or chemistry the way they are in, say, medicine, where 40 percent of all newly minted M.D.'s are women? "Thirty years ago, you would not need a sociologist to answer the question," because back then discrimination against women in science was blatant, says Gerhard Sonnert, a sociologist in Harvard's physics department and coauthor of a large study of men and women in science. Now women drop out as a result of "an accumulation of small disappointments and disadvantages."

Among these disadvantages is the dearth of role models for young female scientists-in-training at many universities. Women represent less than 10 percent of faculty in fields surveyed by the National Science Foundation. For the handful of female professors who achieve tenure, there are other hazards: Recent internal au***s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found patterns of subtle discrimination against both tenured and junior female science faculty members. The MIT report found "differences in salary . . . access to space, resources, and . . . positions of power." The discrimination, concluded the report, took a toll on female faculty's "professional and personal lives."

These kinds of inequalities helped alienate Sara Gaucher, 26, who is doing a postdoctoral fellowship at the private Buck Institute for Age Research in Novato, Calif. During her undergraduate stint at MIT, and while getting a Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of California-Berkeley, she felt that her ideas and theories-the currency of the scientific trade-were not taken seriously in these mostly male departments. "I had the sense that, as a woman, I was an outsider," she says.

Still, the main reason that many young women leave the academy is they don't think they'll be able *****ccessfully combine career and family. That's in large part because securing a tenured job at a university demands a flat-out effort for most of a woman's childbearing years. Those who want to ease up for a few years to focus on their families are presumed to be "not serious" about their careers, says Robert Drago, an economist at Penn State University-University Park, who is conducting a study of women and families in academia. "Most women in departments which are predominately male will not ask for leave when they have a child," he says.

Madeleine Jacobs, e***or in chief of the journal Chemical & Engineering News, goes even further: "Outstanding young women graduate students at major research universities with whom I talk tell me candidly they don't want a career in such institutions because they are 'hostile to families.' "

Indeed, many female scientists say they've been given the message that test tubes and fallopian tubes don't mix. When Jhumku Kohtz, now an assistant professor in pediatrics at Northwestern University's Children's Hospital in Chicago, announced after a successful postdoctoral fellowship plans to extend her two-month maternity leave, a colleague told her, she says, "to kiss my career goodbye."

The antifamily sentiment that pervades many labs is not surprising given the schedules of young researchers, say sociologists Linda Grant of the University of Georgia in Athens and Kathryn Ward at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. Young scientists typically spend between 45 and 60 hours a week in the lab, frequently returning to complete experiments at night and on weekends. Researchers are highly competitive, often racing to publish results before scientists in other labs, so even longer hours are not unusual. Labs typically are organized into teams composed of a dozen or more graduate students, postdoctoral fellows-or postdocs-and a senior scientist, who heads up the research and is responsible for bringing in money that supports the entire group. In such small, dedicated teams, the senior scientist's complicated pregnancy or lengthy maternity leave could put everybody else's careers at risk should a grant not materialize or a major experiment go awry, says Grant.

Bye, bye, baby. In fact, there may be no good time for a scientist to have a baby. Most grad students put in six or seven years earning a Ph.D. and then several more in postdocs before searching for a tenure-track position at a university. By the time the clock starts winding down on a bid for tenure, usually a six-year marathon in which a scientist must publish papers at a feverish pace, her biological clock may be winding down as well.

Trina Schroer, a cell biologist and one of only three female tenured faculty members in her department at Johns Hopkins University, says she "threw caution to the winds" and got pregnant midway through her tenure race. "It turned out I waited long enough that one was the number [of children] we were going to have," she says.

Such experiences may be common, according to a study of 560 Penn State faculty members released in January. Women on the tenure track at Penn State have, on average, only half a child, compared with one child per male faculty member. "It's our own China policy," says Drago, referring to the Chinese government's "one family, one child" plan.

Female scientists who want both a family and a successful career have to be tougher and more persistent than their male colleagues, says Marnie Halpern, a prominent developmental biologist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and the mother of two. In her case, she also cre***s a supportive husband who is willing to pick up the slack at home. "I don't think it enters a man's mind, 'Either I am going to become a scientist or I can become a father, but not both,' " she says. "Universities and research institutions have to accept the fact that pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing are perfectly normal parts of our civilization," says Halpern, who has been nominated to a Society for Neuroscience committee for the development of women's careers. "I don't think women should have to change; the system should."

Thanks, but no thanks. A handful of organizations have launched programs aimed at making academic careers more flexible. The Association for Women in Science, based in Washington, D.C., gives an annual grant to a woman graduate student who has taken off three or more years to raise a family. The National Institutes of Health offers "re-entry" grants, providing multiyear awards *****pport the research of men and women who are returning to the lab after taking time off. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is in the fourth year of providing up to $20,000 in matching grants to young faculty members at 11 universities and colleges who want to take family leave.

These well-intentioned programs have found few takers, however. The grants are not widely publicized and women often perceive they will be penalized if they take advantage of them. The NIH made only four awards last year, while the Sloan Foundation has funded just 13 fellows.

At some schools, women are meeting to talk about improving the climate for female scientists. At Stanford University, female graduate students in the mechanical engineering department created a for-cre*** seminar called "Women in Engineering: Perspectives" that brought in guest speakers to talk about issues like integrating marriage and family with jobs, and arranging time off. At the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, female graduate students in the sciences mentor undergraduates, and the campus women's center sponsors round tables on the issues faced by women in science.

A few institutions have already taken steps to boost the number of women in their labs. Some schools like the University of Southern California offer students and faculty on-site day care. Other institutions are experimenting with part-time tenure track positions and even job sharing (where two people split a single tenure-track position). At North Carolina State University-Raleigh, for example, both male and female faculty members can stop the tenure clock for up to a year in order to take time off or lighten their research and teaching load to attend to family.

Universities are finding that such accommodations make it easier for them to attract high-quality female job candidates. In the statistics department at North Carolina State, nearly 1 in 4 faculty members is a woman, an unprecedented percentage in a mathematics department. "We've been building for a long time, trying to diversify our faculty," says Tom Gerig, department chair. "We have found that once you reach a critical mass, you have a much easier time attracting female faculty and students."

Getting to that critical mass should be easier in the next decade. One third of the full-time doctoral faculty in physical sciences at four-year colleges and universities was over age 55 in 1997, according to the American Chemical Society. Says ACS President Daryle H. Busch, "The opportunity is now to actively recruit women and minorities."

In the meantime, young female scientists can seek out departments that will further their careers. When Deanna Gomochak graduated from St. Mary's College in Notre Dame, Ind., with top honors in chemistry in 1999, she had her pick of graduate programs. At first, she thought she would be heading for the University of Massachusetts, which has a top-ranked graduate program in polymer chemistry. Then she visited another highly ranked department at the University of Akron in Ohio, where she saw male and female graduate students collaborating equally on a number of significant research projects. Even more important, as she talked to students and faculty, she discovered that "all of the women here are doing really well." Gomochak headed for Akron two years ago and has no regrets. Once she saw the program and the people, she says, "I was sold."



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éu?c s?a ch?a b?i - Admin on 08/05/2001 05:47:09

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