The "Macho Culture" of Science and Engineering

Earlier this month the Harvard Business Review released a research report titled "The Athena Factor: Reversing the Brain Drain in Science, Engineering, and Technology". Their stats that for the basis for the report:

* 41% Science, Engineering, and Technology (SET) professionals are female at career lower-rungs
* 52% quit SET jobs, peaking at 10 year career mark
* 5 major factors contribute to mid-career SET female attrition
* 13 companies share initiatives designed to keep women on track with SET careers
* 25% reduction in female attrition adds 220,000 to qualified SET labor pool

I haven't read the actual report ($295 is a bit beyond my budget, even with a money-back guarantee), but the contents have been widely reported in the mainstream media. So what did the they find? Tara Weiss summarized the issues for Forbes:

So why are women leaving? Many said they're often the only women on a project team or on a work site, amid a pervasive macho culture that's hostile and excludes them. Since so few are in the upper ranks, there aren't female mentors to shepherd women through challenges and support them for promotions.

In many cases they said they didn't even know how to get to the next level--it seems like a hidden code. And since these are jobs that require long hours--some experiments require scientists to take samples at regimented times 24 hours a day, seven days a week--it's nearly impossible to manage raising a family or caring for elderly parents.

Of course men have children and elderly parents too. What she didn't say - what's just assumed - is that the burden of raising a family and taken care of elderly parents falls to women. And it's not just not having a second job at home that's the problem, it's lack of respect from their male colleagues, as the New York Times reported*:

The 147-page report (which was sponsored by Alcoa, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Pfizer and Cisco) is filled with tales of sexual harassment (63 percent of women say they experienced harassment on the job); and dismissive attitudes of male colleagues (53 percent said in order to succeed in their careers they had to “act like a man”); and a lack of mentors (51 percent of engineers say they lack one); and hours that suit men with wives at home but not working mothers (41 percent of technology workers says they need to be available “24/7”).

Be sure to read the article for the story of Josephine/Finn. Women who didn't participate in "locker room stuff" were also excluded from important information shared by their male colleagues - and networking and inside information are important for advancing your career.

Despite those problems, women don't seem to have a problem with the actual work performance:

They also do well at the start, with 75 percent of women age 25 to 29 being described as “superb,” “excellent” or “outstanding” on their performance reviews, words used for 61 percent of men in the same age group.

So it doesn't seem likely that the reason why women leave is that they are unable to perform their duties.

And biotech companies are better at keeping their female scientists, which is not that surprising, considering that women receive a much higher percentage of graduate degrees in the biological sciences than in the physical sciences or engineering. As the Chicago Tribune reported:

Of note is Cambridge, Mass.-based Genzyme, where 51 percent of scientists are women, as are 42 percent of senior managers. The publicly traded company has about 10,000 employees worldwide. The company's list of core values provides a clue. It includes principles common to many entrepreneurial companies—innovation, collaboration, drive—but topping Genzyme's list is compassion.

I'm not sure it's necessarily "compassion" that is their secret, unless that refers to an atmosphere where "macho" behavior is discouraged.

The bottom line is that it's an issue of economics. Companies are concerned about the brain drain of their experienced female employees, so Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Cisco (among others) have begun to institute programs that they hope will help retain women scientists and engineers. The Genzyme example demonstrates that it certainly is possible for a successful technology-based company to include women at all levels of its work force. Only time will tell if other companies can replicate their success.

Sean at Cosmic Variance has some thoughts about the article (and a story about Richard Feynman's sexist behavior). See also Jake's post at Pure Pedantry.

* Apparently this article ran in the "Fashion & Style" section of the Times, rather than business section, which only really makes sense if you assume that anything having to do with women is a "fashion" issue.

Tags: gender gap, women in science, women in engineering

Women in Science in India

Readers of this blog probably realize that it's heavily USA and English-speaking-world-centric. That might obscure the fact that women scientists in Asia are struggling with many of the same issues as women here in the US. For example, in March there was a conference on "Showcasing Cutting-Edge Sciene by Indian Women Scientists" held in Delhi that was attended by 1,000 delegates. The attendees came up with a number of suggestions that could improve the number of women scientists in India:

Interestingly, the questionnaire distributed among conference participants elicited diverse and strong views on major pitfalls in the system, and remedial measures for improving career opportunities and working conditions. Observing there is a “leaky pipeline” in women’s careers in science, with the major leak at post-PhD levels when the roles of wives and mothers take centre-stage, participants felt that an active support system was required to prevent such leakage. Facilities for housing, crèches, day-care centres for the elderly, women’s cells at workplaces, flexi-timings, part-time jobs, and opportunities for re-entry should be provided, said the delegates.

It was also suggested that there be additional bureaucratic remedies as well, such as "gender audits". You can read a more detailed report on the recommendations from the conference at IndianWomenScientists.in .

Apparently some changes are already being made:

The minister also announced a package of concessions. These included flexible working hours for women with small children, funding for crèche facilities, construction of women’s residential blocks, and annual research grants up to Rs 20 lakh for five years for young women scientists. In addition, the DST also recently launched a special fellowship scheme for women scientists to enable them to continue after a break in career. It has also set up a Women Scientist Cell, which holds gender sensitisation workshops and is preparing a manual on gender issues in technology transfer.

Several women scientists were also honored at the conference:

• Women Bioscientists' Awards to Dr Sangita Mukhopadhyay (Centre of DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics, Hyderabad), Dr Mitali Mukherji (Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, Delhi) and Dr Sujatha Sharma (All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi).
• award for women's development through application of science and technology went to Dr Vijaylakshmi of the Delhi-based NGO Development Alternatives, "for developing low-cost water-testing kits and water filters for rural areas."
• Dr Rani Bang, founder of Maharashtrabased NGO Society for Education, Action and Research in Community Health, received the award for providing community-based healthcare in a tribal area.

A number of other women scientists gave presentations as well (pdf). However, as one of the participants pointed out, one successful conference won't necessarily result in long term changes. Only time will tell.

Image: The Hindu Business Line. "President Pratibha Patil and Union Minister Kapil Sibal seen felicitating Dr Vijaylakshmi."

Tags: women in science, India

Canadians: There's still time to appy for the L'Oreal For Women in Science Fellowships

I received the following announcement for the L'Oreal-UNESCO "For Women in Science" program in Canada:

We would like to offer the program's financing to the largest possible number of female researchers. We would like to increase his notoriety in Canada and the number of subscriptions. The deadline is June 15th 2008. These Fellowships of $20 000 and $40 000 allow scientists to develop and pursue a research project in the field of Life Sciences.

If you are interested, you should check out the eligibility guidelines. (The application form can be found at that link as well).

And what if you aren't Canadian or a resident of Canada?

Unfortunately the deadline for the US fellowships was May 9 and the deadline for the UK was May 31. However, It appears that the general application deadline for the 2009 international award is June 30th. Download the application.

And here's a video about the program.

Tags: L'Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science Fellowships, Canada

Girl Geek Dinners

A story in last week's Guardian told the story of programmer Sarah Blow's experience as one of the few women attending a "Geek Dinner":

. . .the other guests "either assumed I was in marketing or completely incompetent and that I didn't have a clue about any of the stuff they were talking about," she says. "I was stood next to one of my male friends, and was cut out of the conversation to the point where it was like: 'You don't know this stuff, this is absolutely nothing to do with you - you just sit there and look pretty.'"The men's conversation turned to Blow's area of expertise, the programming language C#.net. When they finished talking, Blow seized the moment. She showed them the binary watch she was wearing: "I lit it up, and they didn't say a word; absolute silence. Then they went completely white and apologised profusely for what they'd done. I said, 'don't make assumptions about people, because you never know who they are, or what they know - so whether I look like a techie or not shouldn't matter.' At that point they changed their attitude to all the females in the room."

Blow took that experience and decided to create an event of her own for women*: the London Girl Geek Dinners. Since she started the dinners almost three years ago, the idea has rapidly spread.

The international extent of the problem, and the eagerness to address it, became clear when Blow set up a website to advertise the dinners - she soon had women across the world contacting her, asking if they could set up their own branches. There are now groups in Australia, America, New Zealand and across the UK and Europe. Blow recently attended the Milanese Girl Geek Dinner, and found to her delight that geeks are the height of fashion in Italy. "They had Glamour magazine down there, and that was just hilarious. In Italy the stars of the technology industry are also the stars in the local magazines." In London, the dinners have become so popular that participants have begun meeting once a fortnight for Girl Geek Coffee mornings. The next dinner is in June, and the biggest date on the horizon is their three-year anniversary event, to be held at Google headquarters in August.

Check out the Girl Geek Dinners website for more information about upcoming meetings around the world. Currently there are groups in the UK (London, Brighton, Nottingham, Manchester), Ireland, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Canada (Toronto, Montreal, Saskatoon), New Zealand, Australia (Sydney), Malaysia, and the USA (Bay Area, Seattle, Northern Virginia).

* men can attend if invited by a woman
Tags: Girl Geek Dinners, women in computer science, networking

Where is she now? Jane Richardson

As part of Scientific American's ongoing series of articles on Westinghouse (now Intel) Science Fair finalists, they profile Jane Richardson, who was a finalist in 1958. Richardson was fascinated by astronomy, and she and her friends recorded the position of Sputnik, which allowed her to calculate the orbit of the Soviet satellite.

Despite the success of her science fair project project, she didn't take a direct path to becoming a scientist. She started out studying mathematics, physics and astronomy at Swarthmore College, but switched her major to philosophy with a physics minor. She then went to graduate school in philosophy at Harvard, but found that their emphasis was modern philosophy, rather than the classical philosophy she was interested in. That brought her back to science.

Meanwhile, Richardson explains, she had enrolled in "several excellent courses in plant taxonomy and evolution in the Harvard botany department, [which was] very gracious to an interested outsider. I then tried high school teaching, which didn't work because when I concentrated on something I became completely oblivious to anything else. Then I joined, as a technician, the chemistry lab at MIT where my husband, David, was working on a PhD."

Her husband was working on the 3-dimensional crystal structures of proteins. She also became fascinated with the 3D molecular structures, and was inspired to develop a way of depicting them as "ribbon drawings". But it wasn't easy. She spent two years developing her "taxonomy of protein structure". The resulting diagrams were not only were visually appealing, but also made the structures more understandable.

In fact, aside from appearing on the covers of numerous journals, the "Richardson diagrams" broke open the study of these complex molecules. "Jane and David's work allowed us to reveal the form of proteins, and from there it was easier to understand their function," 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry co-winner Peter Agre recently told Duke Research, a university publication.

Her careful observations of protein structure allowed her to formulate general rules for protein structure and lead to proposed mechanisms of protein folding.

Jane and her husband David moved to Duke university in 1970, where both are currently professors in the Department of Biochemistry. In 1985 she received a MacArthur Fellowship, was made a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1991 and in 2006 was elected to the National Institute of Medicine, despite never having earned a Ph.D or M.D..

She told the Biological Physicist:

"I think," she says, "that you can be intensely ambitious in science on very non-establishment terms that have nothing at all to do with running your own lab, with getting tenure and lots of grant money, or even with getting explicit recognition for your ideas. The first big reward is the excitement of attaining a new insight, independent of whether it is shared with anyone else. But if later work proves you right and if everyone else eventually ends up adopting and using your ideas, then that is success, and it can in some ways add to the fun if they don't always realize who started it. I want immortality from both my biological and my intellectual children, but I don't think they would be as much worth procreating and nurturing if they were always busy thinking of me as their source."

I think it's pretty amazing that Richardson took such a non-traditional path to scientific success. However, I can't help but think that she had a luxury that most scientists do not: a husband who is a successful scientist himself, and who was willing to share his research results - and later space and grant money - with his wife.

Related links:

• Ribbon Diagrams: They Turned Messy Data Into Beautiful Pictures
• Ribbon Diagrams and Protein Taxonomy: A Profile of Jane S. Richardon, The Biological Physicist 4(3):5 (2004) (pdf)
• Women in Chemistry: Jane Richardson
  

Earlier in the series:
• Mary-Dell Chilton

Image - bottom: Duke Research
Image - top: Scientific American
Tags: Jane Richardson, biochemistry, Westinghouse Science Talent Search

Women on the Big Bang Theory

The Big Bang Theory is a sitcom that features a couple of socially awkward yet brilliant male physics postdocs who live across the hall from a sociable "blond bombshell" actress/waitress of "average intellect." And of course one of the geeky geniuses finds love with his hot non-genius neighbor. I've never seen it, so I don't really know what it's like. The description makes it sounds like nerdy male fantasy fulfillment, which isn't really my cup of tea.

The season finale was on May 19, but it was apparently popular enough that they are talking about next season. Science recently ran an article about the show's science advisor, UCLA physicist David Saltzberg, who apparently keeps the physics fairly accurate. So does The Big Bang Theory include any female physicists?

Leonard, plyaed by Johnny Galecki, is the experimentalist who longs for [actress/waitress] Penny and has a disastrous fling with Leslie, a brilliant labmate, who spends part of their tryst correcting an equation. In the episode in which Leonard firs asks Leslie for a date – "a biosocial exploration with a neurochemical overlay," he calls it – the two test how long it takes a powerful lab laser to heat up soup.

You can watch the clip on YouTube. If you enjoy scientist stereotypes - thick glasses, uncombed hair, poor social skills - you'll probably get a laugh out of it.

Leslie is the only female research on the show, a complaint [creator] Prady and Saltzberg hear often from women, whether scientists or journalists. Prady promises that more female scientists will appear. "The [female-male] ratio is actually higher on the show that it is in my part of the field, which is pretty bad, Saltzberger unhappily adds.

There are fewer than one? I guess he's talking about the ratio of the single female physicist character to the 3 or 4 male physicist characters. But hey, it's a fantasy, so why not have two female physicists - and have one of them date a sexy actor/waiter.

The show's production team actually visited the UCLA physics department and apparently received a depressing picture of what it's like to be a woman in physics - which, of course, they'll include in the show:

Prady met a physicist who lies about what she does in social situations, because she feels her career intimidates men. "We're going to have Leslie do that," Prady says. "Whenever anybody says they lie about who they are, there's a rich story to tell there."

At least I find it depressing. The article goes on to talk about how much physicists - male and female - love the series, so maybe it's just me. I doubt I'll bother to give it a go when I can watch the socially inept but brilliant Gregory House instead.

• Watch the video clips that accompany the Science article.
• Watch some recent full episodes of the Big Bang Theory at CBS.com.

Image: Guess which character in this The Big Bang Theory group photo is not a physicist.
Tags: The Big Bang Theory, physics, women in science

Frequency Hopping

I got the following notice about an upcoming show in New York City, Frequency Hopping:

It is a dark comedy based on the remarkable collaboration in 1940 between glamour girl Hedy Lamarr and “bad boy” composer George Antheil on a secret communication system now recognized as a model for wireless technology.

Featuring a 25-piece robotic orchestra and 3D multimedia and written & directed by Elyse Singer, Frequency Hopping is winner of the 2007 STAGE Script Competition for new plays about science and technology. Multimedia design by Elaine J. McCarthy (Wicked, Spamalot). Produced by the OBIE-winning Hourglass Group (Beebo Brinker, Trouble in Paradise).

Performances May 29 – June 29, 2008 at 3LD Art & Technology Center.

The show features a 25-piece robotic orchestra, video and Eyeliner 3-D holographic projections (the same system used to create the Gorillaz when they play "live"). Oh right, and a Hedy Lamarr look-alike.

The robotic orchestra was designed by the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (check out their work on YouTube).

You can find out more about the work of co-inventors Lamarr and Antheil:

• Hedy Lamarr at inventions.org
• "Advanced Weaponry of the Stars" by Hans-Joachim Braun in American Heritage Magazine (Spring 1997)
• US Patent 2,292,387 "Secret Communication System" issued August 11, 1942 (note that Markey was the last name of Lamarr's second husband)
  

Tags: Frequency Hopping, Hedy Lamarr, plays

Welcome Fellow Blogger Users!

I was surprised when I logged into Blogger that Women in Science had been listed as a "Blog of Note". No wonder there have been so many new comments today. Welcome everyone (except the spammers)!

I hope you find the blog interesting and chose to stick around. And if you are interested in science and scientists, be sure to check out some of the blogs in the sidebar.

Carolyn Porco: Leader of the Cassini Imaging Team

Carolyn Porco received her PhD from CalTech in 1983 from the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, then joined the faculty of the University of Arizona and was made a member of the Voyager Imaging Team. In 1990 she was selected as the Imaging Team leader for the Cassini-Huygens mission, which is ongoing, and Director of the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS (CICLOPS). She is also currently a Senior Research Scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

In 1991 Porco talked to Natalie Angier at the New York Times for an article about the lack of women in scientific leadership positions:

"Scientists can be like schoolyard toughs," said Dr. Caroline Porco, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson who has been appointed head of NASA's Cassini spacecraft mission, scheduled to fly past Saturn in the early 21st century. "I grew up as the only girl with four brothers, but still I wasn't prepared for what I encountered at Stanford when I went there in 1974, as a graduate student. You'd present your results, and somebody would say, 'How did you get here? Why are you wasting my time? If you had half a brain you could have done that calculation.' "

What is more, said Dr. Porco, if she had had the inclination to respond in kind, "the guys would probably say, 'She's a pushy bitch.' "

And Porco does apparently have a reputation for aggressiveness (at least according to this 2004 article).

Peter Goldreich, who directed Porco's doctoral studies at Caltech, said she always had a "nose for discovery" and learned early on that, in a large enterprise such as the Voyager missions "men would tend to be much more aggressive than women" in speaking up at meetings. "She became much more determined to succeed and assert herself," he said.

Goldreich said Porco is not a good politician. "She tends to have a rocky relationship with quite a few people, even on the team," he said. "On the other hand, she gets things done. ... She's quite a presence."

"Carolyn defends the imaging team," said Andrew Ingersoll, a planetary scientist at Caltech. "She defends her instrument. You have to be a little abrasive."

Jonathan Lunine, a University of Arizona planetary scientist who was at Caltech as a graduate student with Porco, recalled that she managed to get access to Voyager data at a time when it was not widely available. "She was in a very intense and stressful position," he said, with "people who were more senior than her who really wanted their chance" at the data first. "Many grad students would fold up and go away," Lunine said.

I don't know if Porco is really "abrasive" or whether her assertiveness is interpreted negatively because she is woman*. In any case, she appears to be quite successful in her career, and does a lot of public presentations about her work. This is a talk she gave at TED in 2007 about landing on Titan and the ice jets of Enceladus:


And her work is her life**. As she told Wired News:

WN: What do you do in your free time that has least to do with astrophysics?

Porco: (Laughs) What free time? My work is my life. If I had more free time I would have learned to play the piano by now.

I did play the guitar and sing; I was in a band called The Estrogens: three females and one very brave guy. But really, Cassini has been so inspiring, I get so much fulfillment from that. I do wish I could go on vacation, though.

At least when she goes to work she knows the scenery will be gorgeous.

More Carolyn Porco Links:

• Exclusive Interview With Carolyn Porco - Star Trek's New Science Adviser (Feb. 2008)
• Beyond Belief: Carolyn Porco on Science & Religion: part 1, part 2, part 3 (YouTube Video)
• Edge: The Third Culture: Carolyn Porco
  

* see, for example, Science Daily on "People Accept Anger in Men, But Women Seen As Less Competent" and Female Science Professor's Post about "Aggressive Women"

** It seems like many of the scientists I've profiled are single-mindedly focused on their science. I don't know if it's really true that the most high profile scientists don't have lives outside of their work, if it's partially a cultural issue - scientists feel like they are expected to say that they have few other significant interests, or it's a reporting issue - profiles of scientists are written with the assumption that stereotype is true. All of those factors may come into play.

Tags: Carolyn Porco, women in science, planetary science

The Phoenix Has Landed, or What to Wear to Mission Control

This post is a bit rambling, but what the hey, it's my blog.

I love space exploration, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that I watched the touchdown of the Phoenix lander on Mars this afternoon. Although, obviously, it wasn't the landing itself that was on TV - it was Mission Control watching the data come in. And as I was watching, I was really struck by their outfits.

Phoenix team members celebrate the Phoenix landing

Sure there's nothing original about blue polos with khaki slacks, and it does unfortunately make them look a bit like Best Buy employees, but it struck me that it's one of the few really gender-neutral outfits they could have chosen. Compare that to what I think of as the "traditional" Mission Control look:

View of Mission Control Center during the Apollo 13 oxygen cell failure.

While there are women's clothing options that are the equivalent of the suit and tie, they women would still appear different than the men in the room. I think there is something to be said for being able to blend in with the rest of your team.

Anyway, here's one of first images from the Arctic pole of Mars! (More images)
Tags: Phoenix, Mission Control

Studying Science at Community Colleges

There was an interesting article in yesterday's Los Angeles Times about a group of faculty members at Santa Ana College who have started a scholarship fund for students who cannot afford the $600 it costs to attend full time. It is a public community college in Orange County which serves "the densely populated, impoverished core of Santa Ana". Half the student body is Latino/Latina, and 60% receive financial aid. Many are the first in their families to attend college. The scholarship fund is particularly helpful to non-citizens and non-California residents, who are not eligible for financial aid.

Maximina Guzman, student government president and a former student of [chemistry professor Jeff] McMillan, plans to apply for the scholarship.

Because she is not a citizen -- she and her parents came to the United States illegally when she was 3 -- she is not eligible for financial aid. The biology student has paid her own way, working full time at a hotel gift shop and moonlighting as a telemarketer.

Guzman said her grades have suffered because she had to balance homework, two jobs and family obligations. She usually finds time to study only between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m.

If she is awarded a scholarship, she could cut down on weekend work hours, she said.

"It's frustrating to know that I could get better grades if I didn't have to work all the time," she said.

I think that Associate's degree-awarding community colleges are often neglected in the discussion of science education. They serve a student population that is more likely to to have dependents and be working full time than their counterparts at 4-year institutions. It allows students who are not academically or financially prepared to enter a 4-year degree program to earn a degree that will prepare them to work as a technician or, if they are so inclined, to transfer an institution that grants Bachelor's degrees.

It is perhaps not surprising that women receive a higher proportion of Associate's degrees than Bachelor's degrees in scientific fields. Some statistics from the National Center for Education Statistics:

• Women were awarded a higher proportion of the science degrees at 2-year institutions than at 4-year institutions (Tables 18, 19 and M2):
  
  

  Field	% Associates Degrees awarded to women	% Bachelors Degrees awarded to women
  all degrees	60%	57%
  biological or life sciences	66%	58%
  computer and information sciences	43%	28%
  physical sciences	52%	40%



• Students at 2-year institutions are more likely to have dependents and be a single parent (tab 35):
  
  

  Institution type	1 dependent	2 or more dependents	single parents
  public 2-year	13.8%	20.7%	16.4%
  public 4-year nondoctorate-granting	10.4%	12.1%	11.1%
  public 4-year doctorate-granting	7.3%	7.4%	8.1%

  
  
  
• Students are more likely to work full time while attending a 2-year institution (tab 44):
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Institution type	Did not work	Work full time	Hours Worked (for those who worked) average/median
  Public 2-year	15.8%	53.8%	36.0/39.3
  Public 4-year nondoctorate-granting	20.3%	32.1%	29.5/29.6
  Public 4-year doctorate-granting	24.4%	21.7%	26.0/24.3

I don't know how it works in other states, but both the University of California and the California State University systems encourage transfers from California community colleges. The system provides science education to students who wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity to pursue a degree, whether they chose to transfer to a 4-year college or not. And it's excellent that the professors at Santa Ana College are willing to financially help students pursue their education.

(Oh, BTW, if you happen to be in California, please buy lots and lots of lottery tickets, because that's what's funding our education system.)

Tags: California community college, science education

Pardis Sabeti, Cool Super Scientist

Sometimes you read about someone who has so many accomplishments it's hard to figure when they have time to sleep. Pardis Sabeti is one of those people. The profile of the 32-year old biological anthropologist in the April 25 issue of Science was pretty amazing:

• one of the first recipients of a L'Oreal Women in Science fellowship award
  
• developed a "novel test for natural selection in the human genome" which is being used in research on the evolution of resistance to malaria and Lassa fever
• as a postdoc had more than $600,000 of her own grant money, and is currently a co-investigator on a $2 million Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant
• named a Trailblazer by Science Spectrum magazine as one of the "top minorities in science" (read the interview)
  
• named by the London Daily Telegraph as one of the "top 100 living geniuses"
• panelist at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland
• received a Burroughs Wellcome Career Award in Biomedical Sciences
• recently hired as an assistant professor at the Harvard FAS Center for Systems Biology
  

In some ways she is the stereotypical driven genius scientist. She attended top schools: undergrad at MIT, Rhodes scholarship at Oxford University, graduation from Harvard Medical School with summa cum laude honors (presented to the "single most deserving student among a graduating class and is not automatically awarded every year"). Her research on the evolution of resistance to tropical diseases in affected human populations may eventually result in better vaccines and therapies. She is a nerd at heart. As she told Science:

"Even though I am gregarious, I interact more with [scientific] papers than with people. Deep down, I am just a math geek."

Sabeti, who moved to Florida with her family from Iran in 1979, attributes her academic success to her mother:

"My mother crated a summer camp in our house, where she would teach the children and make us do book reports. And my sister, who is 2 years older than me, would teach me and my cousin what she had learned in school."

But she also has a creative side. When she has time she writes music and performs with her band, Thousand Days. And she is making videos:

With support from the MIT Council for the Arts and a women-in-science program sponsored by L’Oreal, Dr. Sabeti is planning a series of music videos featuring Boston-based science luminaries such as Dr. Lander and artificial intelligence expert Marvin Minsky.
[. . .]
The videos, which Dr. Sabeti would like to distribute online, will use pop culture to show that science is cool. Her hope is that young viewers will want to learn more about the people in the videos.

You can see one of them when she is profiled on NOVA, scheduled to air in July.

For more about her research and her thoughts on women in science, check out the video below of her talk at Seed Magazine's Inspiration Festival in 2006:


She starts talking about women in science - particularly the L'Oreal Women in Science program - at about 14:44.

And the sleep thing? When Science spoke to Sabeti she was managing "only 2 hours of sleep each night, most of them inside a crumpled blue sleeping bag she keeps under a desk . . ."

Tags: Pardis Sabeti, biology, human genetics, women in science

June Scientiae Carnival: Taking Up Space

The June Scientiae Carnival will be hosted by Zuska, and she has just announced the theme: "Taking Up Space":

How did you let the world know "I am HERE!" Or, if you feel the past year has not been so fruitful in your quest to take up positive space in the world - what added weight would you like to take on in the coming year? How do you want to take up space? How do you want to let yourself sprawl, in your professional or personal life? What, if anything, holds you back from a full-on sprawl? If you are a guy - what's something you've done or want to do that supports women who've taken on added weight, that supports women's right to sprawl in the world? How do you fight the nefarious Nutrisystem universe that tells women they should be small, small creatures of little physical or mental substance? Interpret liberally as seems fit to you.

E-mail your entries to scientiaecarnival [at] gmail [dot] com by midnight on June 6.

Tags: scientiae carnival

Girls Winning the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair Awards

ScienceWoman broke the news from the Intel Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) that the three winners of the Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award went to girls. As ScienceWoman rounded it up:

• Efficient Hydrogen Production Using Cu-Zn-Al Catalysts Prepared by Homogeneous Precipitation Method by Yi-Han Su, 17 from Taipei Municipal First Girls' Senior High School in Taipei. (A girl! From Taiwan! And I happened to pick up her abstract and take a picture of her board! (I'll have the pic and highlights from the abstract later this afternoon)


• Development of Biosensors for Detecting Hazardous Chemicals by Natalie Saranga Omattage, 17, from The Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science in Columbus. (Another girl!)


• Computation of the Alexander-Conway Polynomial on the Chord Diagrams of Singular Knots by Sana Raoof, 17 of Jericho High School in Jericho, New York. (Another girl! It's a sweep!)

They will each receive a $50,000 college scholarship. A number of other awards were also presented. ScienceWoman has more about Su's work (and the excellent photo above). Scientific American has more photos of the fair and its participants.

One thing that stands out about the winners' research is that its apparent complexity makes it pretty unlikely that this is research they did in their garage with parts from Radio Shack. Podblack did a bit of digging into the background of ISEF participants, and found that most indeed have greater than average access to mentoring and lab or workshop space (also, see Barn Owl's comment regarding this year's winners). As Podblack points out:

Looking over the winners that are being lauded as examples of how “any society that relegates women to an underclass is, at the very least, throwing away half their brain trust” - yes, but what may be thrown away if such women are already in an ‘underclass’ NOT based on their gender but based on socio-economic, location and educational factors? Just how many brains are being thrown away regardless of ‘girls kicking arse, doing science’?

So while it's a fantastic achievement, the real "have nots" science-education-wise aren't really going to be affected one way or the other by the awards. Of course I'd think that the more girls that win such awards, the more "normal" it will seem for women to pursue science and mathematics - except that the public doesn't even seem to know that the awards exist. In fact, girls have been winning the science fair awards since their inception by Westinghouse (see, for example, Marina Prajmovsky, who won the first Westinghouse Science Talent Search award in 1951).

My impression has always been that the top science fairs participants have access to tools that most students - even those who are interested in science - don't have access to. In my own experience, I was a nerdy kid who was interested in science, knew I wanted to study science in college, and yet no one suggested that a science fair project might be something I wanted to do. And it wasn't because I wasn't educationally privileged, since I attended a private college-prep high school. It just wasn't very science-oriented. It wasn't until I was in grad school that I met someone who had participated in the Westinghouse science fairs. He had attended a high school in New York (possibly Stuyvesant, but I don't remember specifically) where there were counselors who specifically worked with kids who wanted to do science-fair projects. They were teamed with mentors, assisted in choosing projects and were sometimes given help getting the space in someone's lab to do experiments. Any independent student from a less helpful high school who was interested in doing a project on her own from scratch would be at a great disadvantage.

So while winning an award at ISEF is a great achievement in and of itself, I'm not sure how much it does towards encouraging girls and women pursuing careers in science and engineering, or the general perception that those are "masculine" fields. I think it would be great if more kids from all backgrounds got to do hands-on science projects, but I don't think the solution isn't to provide more options at the high school level. By that point many students are already behind in their math and science education. Maybe elementary school is where kids would be most receptive to trying something new - and might just get hooked on science permanently (or at least learn something).

Tags: ISEF awards, women in science

Where is she now? Mary-Dell Chilton

Scientific American is running a series profiling past Westinghouse (now Intel) Science talent Search finalists and winners. This week their focus is on Mary-Dell Chilton, who was a finalist in 1956 for "building a long telescope in a short tube." She was interested in pursuing astronomy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but was discouraged from enrolling in astronomy courses.

"As a young female student, I had a hard time being taken seriously in those days," she says. Rebuffed by astronomy, she said, "The hell with that," and "never went back." She majored in physics but fell asleep in lectures and so switched to chemistry to finish her undergraduate degree.

In graduate school she found an interest in the fledgling field of molecular biology, writing her dissertation on bacterial transformation, followed by postdoctoral research at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Indeed, after her postdoc, because she was married to a professor in the chemistry department, she took a temporary job in U.W.'s microbiology department rather than trying to rise through the ranks somewhere else. "I thought to myself, at least I have the advantage of being a woman," she says. "My husband is the breadwinner, so I can just do what is interesting. I don't have to have a high-paying job."

Her research interests lead to a study of Agrobacterium - bacteria that infect plants. She and her colleagues found that Agrobacterium transfers DNA between itself and the genome of the infected plant. '' They further found that the disease-causing genes could be removed and the DNA transfer would still occur, leading to methods that produced the first transgenic plants.

Today [. . .] it's clear that Chilton's work revolutionized plant science. Although genetic modification is sometimes controversial, "the fact that it's possible scientifically and technically is amazing," says Philip Hammer, vice president of Philadelphia's Franklin Institute, which awarded Chilton the Franklin Institute Award in Life Science in 2002. "What she did is incredibly important in our understanding of genetics and relationships between bacteria and plants and bacteria and other organisms."

In 1979 she took a faculty position at Washington University in St. Louis, and four years later left academia to work for what is now Syngenta Corporation in North Carolina. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1985.

Chilton no longer works on company projects, and once again has the freedom to tinker in the lab.

"I work on what amuses me." Currently, this is gene targeting—telling the DNA where to go in the plant genome. No one knows if any useful technology will be developed from this idea, but Chilton is still having such fun that she has no plans to retire. "Not as long as I can get up and go to the lab," she says.

That sounds like a great way to do science.

More:

• Watch the video about Chilton's reseach, made upon her induction into the WITI Hall of Fame in 2004.
• Listen to this 2006 AgWired interview with Chilton about her research and directorship of the Mary-Dell Chilton Center at Syngenta.

Image: SBI Distinguished Scientist: Mary-Dell Chilton
Tags: Mary Dell Chilton, Westinghouse Science Talent Search, genetic engineering

Jennifer Hooper McCarty on the Colbert Report

One of the topics I find particularly interesting is science that intersects with history: engineering the pyramids, medical practices of medieval Europeans, ancient astronomy, and the like. Jennifer Hooper McCarty is a materials scientist who does exactly that kind of research. Her Ph.D. thesis was "based on her studies of recovered material from the RMS Titanic", which have now been turned into a book: What Really Sank the Titanic. (co-authored with NIST materials scientist Timothy Foecke). Here she is talking about it on last night's Colbert Report:

After completing her PhD, she was a post-doc in the Department of Materials at Oxford University, where she studied 18th through 20th century railroad materials and roman coins - and continued her Titanic research. After returning to the United States, she worked in the licensing and technology transfer office at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) in Portland, Oregon. She currently is a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Biomaterials and Biomechanics in the OHSU School of Dentistry. Her next research project will focus on the Eiffel Tower (which hopefully was put together using quality rivets).

(For more about the book and the Titanic rivet issue, see this April 15 article in the New York Times.)

Tags: Jennifer Hooper McCarty, materials science, Titanic

Sixteen Women Elected to National Academy of Sciences - Chronicle.com

On April 29, the National Academy of Science announced their newly elected members, and 16 of the 72 inductees were women. The Chronicle of Higher Education points out that this is a significant increase over last year, when only nine women were elected, but still lower than the 2005, when 19 women were elected. The women who were honored:

• Frances H. Arnold: Dick and Barbara Dickinson Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biochemistry, department of chemistry and chemical engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.
• Emily A. Carter: Arthur W. Marks '19 Professor, department of mechanical and aerospace engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.
• Maureen L. Cropper: professor of economics, University of Maryland, College Park
• Margaret T. Fuller:Reed-Hodgson Professor in Human Biology and professor of genetics, department of developmental biology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, Calif.

• Jane I. Guyer: professor of anthropology, department of anthropology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore
• Evelyn L. Hu: professor, electrical and computer engineering department, University of California, Santa Barbara
• Nancy A. Jenkins: deputy director and principal investigator, cell cycle control, Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, Proteos, Singapore
• Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz: chief, section on organelle biology, cell biology and metabolism branch, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md.

• Gail Mandel: investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and senior scientist, Vollum Institute, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland
• Claire E. Max: professor, astronomer, and director, center for adaptive optics, University of California, Santa Cruz
• Carol L. Prives: DaCosta Professor of Biology, department of biological sciences, Columbia University, New York City
• Lisa J. Randall: professor of theoretical physics, department of physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

• Anjana Rao: professor of pathology and senior investigator, Immune Disease Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston
• Johanna Schmitt: Stephen T. Olney Professor of Natural History, department of ecology and evolutionary biology, Brown University, Providence, R.I.
• Theda Skocpol: Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
• Elizabeth A. Thompson: professor, department of statistics, University of Washington, Seattle
  

Five of the 18 elected foreign associates were women:

• Anny Cazenave: senior scientist, Laboratoire d'Etudes en Géophysique et Océanographie Spatiales, Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES), Toulouse, France (France)
• Anne E. Cutler: professor, Institute for Cognition and Information, University of Nijmegen, and director, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Heilig Landstichting, Netherlands (Australia)
• Caroline Dean: associate research director, John Innes Centre, Norwich, United Kingdom (United Kingdom)
• B. Rosemary Grant: research scholar, department of ecology and evolutionary biology, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J. (United Kingdom)
• Janet Rossant: chief of research and senior scientist, Hospital for Sick Children, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario (Canada and United Kingdom)

While it's great to see talented female scientists gaining recognition, it's still appears that women are underrepresented. As Zuska points out, there are a number of arguments that keep getting trotted out in support of the status quo.

One of the favorite arguments seems to be that the percentage of women elected to the Academy is commensurate with the percentage of female science faculty members, so there must not be any discrimination. While it might seem reasonable, my biggest problem with that argument is that it assumes that if the percentage of women scientists elected to the Academy are representative this year, the numbers elected have always been representative. That simply hasn't been the case. According to the Membership Directory, in 1980 only a single women was elected, in 1985 there were only four, and in 1990 and 1995 only five*. In fact less than 10 years ago, in 2000, only 6% of the National Academy's members were women. Some of the recently elected women almost certainly were overlooked for membership in previous years. At the rate they are adding new members, they may never catch up.

* 1980: Eloise Giblett; 1985: Mary-Dell Chilton, Mildred Dresselhaus, Sandra Faber, Martha Vaughan; 1990: Gertrude Elion, Esther Conwell, Nina Federoff, Sarah Hrdy, Cathleen Morawetz, 1995: Clara Franzini-Armstrong, Lily Jan, Judith Kimble, Anne Krueger, Carla Shatz

Tags: women in science, National Academy of Sciences

New Scientiae Carnival @ A Cat Nap

The May Scientiae Carnival is up on Flicka Mawa's Blog, A Cat Nap. This month's theme is career paths, perspective, and changing self-image.


The June Scientiae carnival will be at Thus Spake Zuska. If you'd like to contribute, see the instructions here.

Tags: scientiae carnival

Gender Bias at Fermilabs

Sherry Towers has posted a paper preprint to arXiv which look at gender bias in particle physics at Fermilab: A Case Study of Gender Bias at the Postdoctoral Level in Physics, and its Resulting Impact on the Academic Career Advancement of Females. She focused on the 9 female and 48 male post docs who worked on on the Run II Dzero project from 1998 to 2006. Using information in public databases regarding internal publications and presentations, she compared scientific productivity to the number of conference presentations given. As the paper explains:

Conference presentations are important to the career advancement prospects of postdoctoral particle physicists primarily because they give a young physicist much needed positive exposure to future employers (important because postdoctoral positions are inherently temporary). Conference presentations are also important to career advancement because the names of all of the several hundred collaborators are included on the author list of refereed publications. The names appear in alphabetical order only, and there are no first authors. This is because particle physics in theory strives to be an egalitarian field where the contributions of all physicists in the collaboration are given equal merit.

Significantly, while every participant was expected to present publications describing the progress of their work, the selection of who would present the project's data at conferences was determined by a committee behind closed doors.

The results of Tower's analysis is striking:

• The females in the study were more productive (as measured by internal publications), on average, than the males. Half of the males produced fewer internal papers per year than the least productive female in the sample. There was a much broader distribution for the male post docs: "nearly all the females are highly productive, whereas 1/2 the males produce almost nothing, somewhat half are moderately productive, and a select few are extremely productive." Note that internal publications were used to measure productivity because peer-reviewed journal publications always list all of the project's participants in alphabetical order as authors.
  
• Males were much more likely to be alloted conference presentations. The ratio of physics conference presentations to internal physics papers produced for males was double that of females (triple if all presentations and papers were considered).
  

Since conference presentations are important for career advancement, the relative lack of presentations at conferences puts the female physicists at a disadvantage relative to their male colleagues. While roughly similar percentages of the male and female postdocs moved on to faculty positions, Towers points out that ". . . the females in our cohort have worked significantly harder than their male peers to achieve this “equity” in academic career advancement, and yet some highly competent female physicists nevertheless appear to be prevented from moving on to faculty positions because of the conference allocation gate-keeping mechanism."

In an interview with the journal Nature she explained that she believes this bias selection of conference presenters is likely unconscious:

"I don't think for a second that there is a conscious bias going on," she says. But the committees "are in danger of being prone to patronage and cronyism". Male committee members are more likely to nominate male protégés to receive presentations time, she claims.

University of Washington astronomy professor Julianne Dalcanton has her own take at Cosmic Variance:

. . . I doubt that anyone participated in conscious “Girls can’t do math” types of sexism. I think you get a net effect from a series of small decisions that seem defensible when taken individually, but that add up to a real net bias. We have a natural tendency to recognize talent that looks like our own (ie. people whose strengths lie in careful detailed analyses often find fast-moving creative types to be shallow and showy, and fast-moving creative types are more likely to find careful deliberate scientists to be plodding and dull). Thus, when passing out conference presentations, you naturally want to give them to someone that you think will do a good job, where “a good job” frequently means “do the job the way I would have done it”. This leads to a tendency to give breaks to people who fit into a mold that you already know and respect, and require extra proof of merit from people who lie outside that norm. The net result can be gender biased, even if the decisions that produce the result aren’t intrinsically gendered.

I would think that such biases are especially difficult to counter, since the committee members are likely to feel that they are actually allocating conference slots based on "fair" criteria.

Not surprisingly, the paper has stimulated a lot of discussion. The female physicists that Nature spoke with weren't surprised by the analysis:

"You often see a young guy with an older guy gossiping an dhaving coffee, but never a woman," says Freya Blekman, a physicist on the CMS experiment at CERN. "Im convinced," agrees [CERN physicist Pauline] Gagnon. "There is absolutely no shodow of a doubt in my mind."

Fermilab, on the other hand, appears to be dismissive of Tower's analysis. An internal investigation at Fermilab determined that the project had "followed its policies correctly", and the leaders of the DZero project claim that if there ever was discrimination, there isn't now, because from 2006 to 2007 women "gave 17% of all talks despite making up just 12% of the collaboration." That seems to miss the point of the analysis: Towers isn't suggesting that women be given conference presentation slots on a quota basis relative to their population withing the project. Instead female postdocs should be allotted presentations based on their productivity. If her analysis holds true that the current female postdocs on the project are substantially more productive than many of their male colleagues, I would have expected their percentage of conference slots to be even higher than 17% if they were strictly merit based.

Not surprisingly, this has stimulated a lot of discussion online. It's interesting to read people's own experiences within physics. And yes, there are criticisms of the study, both thoughtful and not so much. Check out:

• Thus Spake Zuska (Towers participates in the discussion)
• Julianne Dalcanton at Cosmic Variance
• Nature News
• Chronicle of Higher Education

Tower's own experience as a postdoc in particle physics at Fermilab who found her career derailed because she took maternity leave was covered by the Chronicle of Higher Education. That article is behind a pay wall, but Zuska covered it in her old blog. Towers is currently in the Department of Statistics at Purdue University.

Tags: gender bias, physics

Blackburn and Steitz win the Albany Medical Center Prize

On May 2, the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research was awarded to Joan Steitz and and Elizabeth Blackburn. It is the first time that the award has gone to a woman since its inception in 2001. Even though the prize is fairly new, it's the largest monetary award - $500,000 - given for biomedical research in the United States.

Elizabeth Blackburn is the Morris Herzstein Professor of Biology and Physiology at the University of California San Francisco. She was given the award for her discovery and characterization of the enzyme telomerase. From the press release:

Before Dr. Blackburn’s research, the “clock” that determines cellular life was a mystery. Shortening of chromosomes, which carry key genetic information, continually occurs naturally over time until the telomeres become too short and the cell dies. She demonstrated that telomerase can “turn back the hands of the clock” by replenishing the chromosomes by “adding DNA back into their ends.”

In more recent experiments with a UCSF psychologist, Dr. Blackburn’s team has shown a direct link between low levels of telomerase and chronic stress that can promote early onset of age-related diseases such as cardiovascular disease and neurodegenerative disorders. Dr. Blackburn and her team are now exploring the potential role that the enzyme could eventually play in neurodegenerative and other age-related disorders. The goal of some current trials is to see whether telomerase can be inhibited in order to slow and perhaps halt the progression of cancer.

Joan Steitz is the Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale, where she is best known for "discovering and defining the function of small ribonucleoprotteins (snRNPs) in pre-messenger RNA". From the press release:

Dr. Steitz’ uncovering of the previously mysterious splicing process elucidates the science behind the formation of proteins, essential components of all of our biological processes including the intricate metamorphoses that occur as the immune system and brain develop. Understanding just how splicing occurs is important because it may someday enable scientists to prevent a variety of human genetic diseases. In, fact, many scientists believe that Dr. Steitz’ research will ultimately lead to breakthroughs in diagnosing and treating patients with lupus and other serious autoimmune disorders.

They are both clearly well-deserving of the prize.

ETA: Check out GrrlScientist's post for more about Blackburn and Steitz's research.

Tags: Joan Steitz, Elizabeth Blackburn, Albany Medical Center Prize