A new report indicates that in the case of the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), progress has in fact been made with respect to increasing the amount of women in academe. Inside Higher Education makes a review of the report and the earlier report from 1999 that received world wide attention, since it shed light on some of the obstacles women meet in academe.

However, according to the new report, the amount of female staff has almost doubled in science (from 30 to 52) and engineering (from 32 to 60), in addition there are more women in senior administrative positions. In fact, since 2004 the President of MIT is neuroscientist Susan Hockfield who has earlier worked at Yale Universityas the William Edward Gilbert Professor of Neurobiology and provost.

While the earlier reports  emphasized that the women in MIT felt professionally marginalized, the new report indicates progress. The MIT site cites Lorna Gibson, who is a professor of Materials Science and Engineering and chair of the School of Engineering study, who said that: “I chaired the study 10 years ago for engineering, and if you had asked me then how much better I thought it could get for women faculty, I never would have thought that we would get this far in 10 years“. (more…)

Image: stock:xchng

The fact that women still are underrepresented in the academia in tenured positions, is probably not a surprise to anyone. There are, of course, significant differences between disciplines, and there is variety between various countries and contexts, where fields related to natural sciences are often used as an example where the gap has been especially persistent.

Historically there was an assumption that provided that one gets more women into post-graduate education, the gap would disappear by itself over time as these women gradually enter the tenured positions. However, thirty and forty years later, the gap is still there. How can this be explained? The gap has been called many things – the glass ceiling and the boys-club being one example. In 1994, Louise Morley called it the “iron cage”, taking a starting point in the situation in the UK, and indicates that even in 1988-1989, only 3% of professors in the UK were women.

Arguably, the gap has remained especially strong in natural sciences and technology related fields. A recent Nature article reviews a study by Ceci and Williams from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York (US), and argues that the time has come to not call it a glass ceiling or a old-boys club: “the metaphor that best describes the challenge facing women in science today is the invisible web.” Indeed, the study also indicates that there has been a huge increase in the amount of PhDs awarded to women: for example, in life sciences the number rose from 13% in 1970 to 52% today. On the other hand – they also indicate that only 8.8–15.8% of the tenure track holders in math-intensive fields are women. So what happens underway? (more…)