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The National Science Foundation (NSF) expects to announce several more awards
from its ADVANCE program this month, intended to increase the number and proportion
of women faculty in science and engineering. Numbers of women faculty in the
geosciences, though increasing, have remained a concern.
According to recent data collected by Mary Ann Holmes and co-workers (Geotimes,
September 2003), funded by ADVANCE, almost 60 percent of all tenure-track
academic positions in the geosciences are held by men, and very few women are
full professors. A recent survey of geoscientists conducted by the American
Geophysical Union and the American Geological Institute (which publishes this
magazine) found that women Ph.D. recipients were almost twice as likely as men
to have considered dropping out because of lack of confidence; nevertheless,
the study concluded that the numbers of women “in the pipeline” is
increasing proportionally.
The institutions receiving ADVANCE institutional transformation grants —
which can be up to $750,000 per year, for five years — are implementing
their programming in different ways to help retain those women geoscientists
at higher levels. At the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), for example,
some of the money will fund appointments for female candidates’ spouses
in different departments, as does the program at the University of California,
Irvine, says Elizabeth Anthony of UTEP, one of two ADVANCE co-principal investigators
who is a geoscientist. (The other is Ellen Druffel, an oceanographer at the
University of California, Irvine.) Some schools, such as the University of Michigan
at Ann Arbor, provide a type of gender-awareness counseling to departments during
the hiring process, and all have mentoring programs of some kind.
Women researchers at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) at Columbia University
in New York, which has applied for an ADVANCE grant, already benefit from onsite
childcare and other institutional efforts to support them. However, they have
also lost several women faculty members and candidates.
Also, Columbia University’s own studies show that only a small percentage
of their job applicants are female, fewer than might be expected. “They
need to look at that,” Anthony says, as do all ADVANCE institutional grant
receivers. “Is it a lack of mentoring? Of confidence? Or is it perceived
that it’s so difficult?” On the other hand, those few women who apply
“stand a decent chance,” she says, according to the data.
Robin Bell, a co-principal investigator on the grant proposal and senior research
scientist in the LDEO Marine Geology and Geophysics Division, notes that geology
has requirements such as fieldwork that make it different from other sciences.
If the ADVANCE grant comes through, LDEO will study whether funding for childcare
during fieldwork, or for women to do workshops, or similar ideas “actually
help.” The goal, she says, is then to institutionalize those activities
that work. “In the long run, it should make it a better place in general,
not just for women.”
Depending on budget constraints, the ADVANCE program will announce its third
round of competition soon. Bell says that LDEO should find out this month whether
or not they will receive the award, which would be the first devoted to earth
scientists.
Naomi Lubick
Links:
"The
Status of Women in the Geosciences," Geotimes, September 2003
NSF
ADVANCE home page and list
of institutional transformation grant awardees
"Earth & Space Science PhDs, Class of 2002," synopsis of American
Geophysical Union/American Geological Institute study
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