Why so long?

Abstract

The new report “Why So Few?” by the American Association of University Women makes me feel old. I am really not that old, but I am old enough that my first career aspirations were to marry someone I would meet in graduate school and work in his lab, as did the few women scientists I knew as an undergraduate. Instead, I met my eventual husband when already an assistant professor, so circumstances and a changing world altered my career trajectory.I started graduate school in 1969, so I have been dealing with issues of gender in science for more than 40 years. I entered the Ph.D. program in Biology at UCSD as 1 of 13 women in a class of 30. This was an unprecedented number; changes in the draft laws made it difficult for men to attend Ph.D. programs, so most graduate programs in the life sciences became 50% female by the early '70s (the same did not happen in math, chemistry, physics and engineering, and why not is an interesting question). I started as an assistant professor in the biology department at Brandeis University in 1978. Unlike most of my female peers who were the first woman to be hired in their departments, I was the 5th woman in a department of 19. Today, my department has 13 women and 16 men, with many female tenured full professors.That is why I have no patience when I visit other universities around the world and discover that the number of female faculty is still low in many departments of biomedical science. I find it unfathomable that a department could hire 10 or 12 people in the past 10 years and fail to hire women among them.I give my male colleagues endless grief when they organize symposia and forget to invite women speakers. Most women are as well-respected as their male colleagues, but still forgotten when invitations are extended and awards, and other honors, are decided. Ironically, today's bias usually results from lack of attention, rather than from malicious intent. But the rejoinder of, “Oh, I didn't notice that I had invited 20 men and no women” infuriates me (even more so when the guilty party is female), because I know that all of the young women in the field do notice. Almost invariably for every award or honor or speaker slot there are many, many more deserving candidates (including many women) than can be chosen, so a little care can ensure that young women students and researchers do not receive the message that female success is exceptional, rather than the norm.With 40 years of a gender-neutral pool entering graduate school in the biomedical sciences (at least in the United States), why then has it taken so long to reach parity in the professoriate in the biological and biomedical sciences? Many men claim to be perplexed by this. Most women understand the myriad and complex forces that result in the proverbial leaking pipeline. The answers are not simple. For example, many young male scientists with small children also spend a lot of time taking care of their children, so family duties today take a toll on the careers of both our young women and men with young children. If we cannot simply lay the onus on the added burden of raising children, what then?“Why So Few?” argues that women still have to be more accomplished than their male peers to be viewed equivalently. That is probably somewhat true. I dare say that on average women are more careful to avoid mistakes, and therefore may produce science more slowly. I dare say that young women still must fight harder to establish their voices on the national and international scenes than their male colleagues. To this day, a strong opinion assertively delivered in a deep male voice may still carry more weight than the same opinion in a female voice. And although there are many men today who are comfortable and proud of their female partner's success, even if it eclipses their own, one wonders if some women still opt out of competition to protect their personal relationships.But, I think the crux of the matter is that doing research in the biological sciences has become increasingly plagued by long training periods with little positive reinforcement. Therefore, many of our most smart and creative young scientists find it difficult to understand that they are making a difference. While women are as stubborn and smart as men, they may be preferentially discouraged by a field that denies them, for long periods of time, the validation of a “job well done”. Therefore, they, and many able men, leave science to find that sense of satisfaction elsewhere. We can't make the discovery of new knowledge any easier or faster, but we should do our best to make it easier for our young scientists to see that their work matters.Our postdocs increasingly believe that high-profile publications are necessary for their future. This belief drives many decisions that make little sense. I have seen graduate students and postdocs jump through scientifically ridiculous hoops in attempts (often futile) to satisfy reviewers who have “upped the ante” on what is needed for publication. While students and postdocs benefit enormously from revising manuscripts in response to thoughtful reviews intended to ensure that the published work is of the highest quality, they do not benefit from requests for gratuitous additional experiments. Moreover, decisions made as a consequence of perceived novelty and future impact of the work are often capricious, and can be dispiriting to all of us, but especially damaging to scientists at the beginning of their careers. The inevitable delays in publication associated with the seemingly arbitrary review process at the most prestigious journals can easily provoke disillusionment in a young scientist who might find herself waiting for many years for her work to be published. We must remember that science properly done is the creation and dissemination of new knowledge, not the pursuit of glory. Honest work deserves respect, and hard-working young scientists should not be tormented by the publication process if we expect them to stick with lives in academic science.