$4.2 million, five-year UM program aims for more women scientists

UM seeks equity in sciences
By BETSY COHEN of the Missoulian

University sees lack of females on faculty

Currently, there are 145 tenured and tenure-track faculty in the University of Montana’s science departments. Of that number, only 16 are women.

To help balance the scale, the university is dedicating $4.2 million to promote women faculty in the sciences with a newly launched program called UM Partnership for Comprehensive Equity.

Funding for the five-year effort – officially called UM PACE – comes from a $3.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation and $700,000 from UM.

The goal is to implement institutional change that allows UM to attract and retain more women faculty to create a campus that better serves its female students, said Penny Kukuk, a UM researcher and PACE program director.

The program grew out of an alliance between UM administrators, deans, department leaders and faculty who desired to bring about lasting change, she said.

One of the program’s highlights is that it will fund three new tenure-line faculty positions for women scientists.

With a team of UM faculty, administrators and staff, a series of initiatives will be launched. A mentoring program for female graduate students and tenure-track faculty will be developed.

Each science department will be asked to create a diversity enhancement plan, which will help faculty take a hard look at why women don’t apply for positions in their departments, and if they do, why they don’t stay.

Although UM PACE doesn’t have a comprehensive understanding about what issues prevent the campus from attracting and retaining women science faculty, it is aware of some barriers.

At present there is no child-care system on campus for faculty, making the campus not very family friendly for young tenure-track parents, Kukuk said. "Balancing family versus career demands is often a big issue for young women faculty," she said.

A feeling of isolation, a lack of acceptance, and a lack of feedback from peers and department chairs during the years women faculty are working toward tenure are also some barriers, said Diana Six, a tenured professor of forestry, and PACE collaborator.

"What I will be doing through the mentoring program will be to build a support system to help women faculty find each other and talk about their experiences," Six said. "We have seen mentoring programs work at other larger institutions like Stanford and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and they have shown to be effective in helping with job satisfaction and retention.

"In fact, the mentoring program has shown to be effective for men as well as women."

Studies on women in the sciences conducted by grant coordinators at the National Science Foundation and others have shown that women faculty often get burdened with higher teaching loads than their male counterparts, said Bill Noxon, NSF spokesman.

Not only is the workload unevenly distributed, it has an even more insidious affect, Six said. "It is difficult to develop research and that tends to slow the process towards tenure, even though the person is more productive than many of her colleagues," she said. "This is a problem seen at universities across the country."

Another trend is that women scientists are generally associated with a spouse or partner and have a difficult time finding a campus that will hire them both. Because women tend to earn less than men, they tend to follow their partners, said Diana Lurie, a UM associate professor of neuropharmacology and PACE collaborator.

It is one of the reasons that women scientists can be found in greater numbers in the adjunct professor ranks, where universities hire staff on a semester-by-semester basis.

Lurie’s role with PACE will be focused on recruiting top women junior and senior tenure-track candidates and help department search committees create a diverse pool of applicants.

"It’s a big challenge," Lurie said. "There aren’t that many of us who make it to the faculty level, and we aren’t entirely sure why."

That there aren’t more role models for female students is one of the great weaknesses of higher education, said Don Christian, associate dean of UM’s Division of Biological Sciences.

"On the most fundamental level, there is a great unbalance," Christian said. "Look at the makeup of the biology and other science classes – half or more of those students are women and they are seeing and working with a faculty that has a startling under-representation of women."

Now is the perfect time to launch the grant program, given that UM’s overall undergraduate enrollment is 47 percent male students and 53 percent female students, Kukuk said. In UM’s chemistry department, of the nine members of the freshman class of graduate students, five are women.

"We have to work harder to even out the scale, and I know that generally faculty want UM to hire more women scientists," Christian said. "I think this new program will help us achieve that, or at least point us in the right direction."

No one in the sciences is surprised by the unbalance, said Ed Rosenberg, chairman of UM’s chemistry department.

"This is a problem nationwide," he said. "But one of the biggest problems is that there aren’t that many women who apply for faculty positions."

For every 100 applicants for a position, five are women. Pointing to a study conducted by "Chemical & Engineering News," women make up 11 percent of faculty members in the nation’s top 50 chemistry departments, and other studies show roughly the same statistics in other science departments nationwide, Rosenberg said.

"In the last 10 years we have made four offers to women, and we have been turned down because they get more lucrative offers elsewhere – from campuses with better infrastructure."

Although child care is an important part of some women’s decision-making, there are perhaps even more compelling criteria, Rosenberg said.

"Expectations on this campus are high, but start-up packages for research aren’t that adequate," he said. "The people who have done well here – and we are talking all new hires, and particularly new hires in chemistry – are people who have come in with grant funding and can hit the ground running."

Although there is a clear need for diversity in the sciences, he said, it becomes a sticky business when gender issues become part of the hiring process, because in the end, a new faculty hire should be awarded to the person best suited for the job, man or woman.

"We are not hiring women for the sake of having a woman in the department; we are hiring the best person, period," Rosenberg said.

Before PACE can go into full swing, an administrative assistant, a Webmaster and a statistician must be hired, Kukuk said.

"We have an office provided by the Division of Biological Sciences, have it furnished and are advertising for staff," Kukuk said. "We’re making progress."

Once staff is hired, Kukuk will direct the new program and be assisted by Diana Six, who will be developing campus mentoring programs and statewide support networks; Diana Lurie, who will focus her efforts on developing recruitment strategies and creating a "best practices guidelines" for recruiting junior and senior women faculty; and Jim Hirstein, UM math department chairman, who will coordinate assessment of the program and fine-tune it.

"Getting this program to be truly functional will take an evolutionary process, since no one has done it before and we have so much to learn," Six said. "Our job at hand is to get the skeleton in place, and then improve it over time."

Despite the challenges ahead and the work that needs to be done, Kukuk and company said they are confident the program will instigate positive changes.

PACE has the full backing of UM Provost Lois Muir, who insists that diversity remain a top priority for the university, and is providing matching funding for the three faculty posts that will be created.

"When it comes to attracting qualified, talented women candidates, we are competing with universities that are larger and are viewed as more prestigious and have more money," Muir said. "Those institutions beat us out for the top people when we have so much to offer at this campus and in this community.

"I know we can attract those candidates," she said. "We just have to increase our understanding of how to be more supportive of women and minority faculty so that they want to work here and stay here."

Because the program is a partnership of campus leaders and faculty, PACE collaborators and National Science Foundation grant coordinators are optimistic the program will succeed and become a national model for universities in small communities like Missoula.

"UM is one of only a handful of institutions that has been able to convince us that what they will do is instigate institutional change," Noxon said. "Programs like this are very important, and with each one, they set a standard."

Reporter Betsy Cohen can be reached at 523-5253 or at [email protected]

http://missoulian.com/articles/2003/09/30/news/local/znews03.txt