Faculty science positions continue to elude women of color: Oklahoma professor's study finds hiring, tenure remain stumbling blocks

Black Issues in Higher Education, March 25, 2004 by Kendra Hamilton

Women and underrepresented minorities are receiving the doctorate in record numbers these days. For example, women got 45 percent and minorities 19 percent of the 39,955 doctoral degrees awarded in 2000, and both figures were all-time highs.

So it comes as something of a surprise to learn that senior academic women in science and engineering are almost uniformly gloomy about what's happening in their fields.

Asked what's changed the most and what's changed the least in the 54 years that have passed since she first earned her degree, Dr. Jewell Plummer Cobb, the renowned cancer researcher and former president of University of California-Fullerton, takes a long pause.

"Honestly," the emerita professor says from her home in New Jersey, "I think things are about the same. I haven't done a study, of course, but as I've moved around over the years, as I've traveled to conferences and talked to people and worked in this field, I've seen exceptional women who have moved to high levels, like Shirley Jackson at Rensselaer (where she's president) and a few other people. But I haven't seen what I would call a big change in the number of minority faculty women."Halfway across the country, though, Dr. Donna Nelson, an associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Oklahoma, has done a study. It's an exhaustive look at the status of women and minorities in 14 science and engineering disciplines at the nation's top 50 departments. Her findings put flesh on the bones of Cobb's intuitive sense of the landscape in her field.

Nelson says she was aghast to see that her data indicated that "when it comes to hiring, the numbers of underrepresented minority males and females of all races actually appear to he decreasing in spite of the fact that their percentage of Ph.D. attainment is increasing.'"

Nelson's findings also included the following:

Women have few opportunities to be taught or mentored by women. While the number of undergraduate women receiving science and engineering degrees continues to grow--women are now 48 percent of the nation's math majors, for example--the composition of the faculty is stagnant. The faculty ranks in math, chemistry and chemical engineering are 91.7, 87.9 and 89.5 male. Meanwhile, women comprise 48.2, 47.3 and 35.7 of the students in those fields.

When it comes to hiring, the pool of qualified women is not in fact, limited. Indeed, the number of Ph.D. recipients has grown dramatically from 1983-2002, even in the hard sciences. Women, for example, were nearly a third of Ph.D. recipients in chemistry from 1993-2002. The numbers are smaller in computer sciences, astronomy, physics and the engineering disciplines--yet still substantially above those in the decade 1983-1992.

But hiring remains the stumbling block. The gender disparities in the hiring of recent Ph.D. recipients are startling in certain fields. In biological sciences for example, women were 44.7 percent of the doctoral recipients between 1993 and 2002, but only 30.2 percent of the assistant professor hires. White males, meanwhile, got 43.2 percent of the doctorates and 55.4 percent of the jobs.

The picture looks no better when it comes to tenure. Female full professors comprise only 1.8 percent of the faculty in electrical engineering, 2.7 percent of the faculty in chemical engineering, and 3.1 percent of the faculty in math. Psychology, sociology and astronomy were the fields with the best female representation; women were 15.4, 12.1 and 6.5 percent of the full professors in those fields.

Women tend to be clustered at the lowest academic rank, that of assistant professor They're 21.5 percent of those who hold the rank of assistant professor in chemistry, even though they're only 12.1 percent of the chemistry faculty. Even in the field in which women faculty are best represented--sociology, where they're 35.8 percent of all faculty--they're 52.3 percent of the assistant professors.

Underrepresented minority females suffer the worst disparities of all. With the exception of one Black full professor in astronomy, there were no Black or American Indian full professors in the sciences and engineering disciplines surveyed. Indeed, the faculty surveys turned up a grand total of 19 African American women 33 Hispanic women and one American Indian woman.

WHAT SHOULD BE EXPECTED

The findings don't come as a surprise to Dr. Jong-on Hahm, director of the Committee on Women in Science and Engineering at the National Academies of Science.

Hahm, a neuroscientist, notes that "especially in the '90s with the worker shortage, a lot of things happened to make workplaces more attractive to women scientists. Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies knew that they had to work hard to keep good people--they became very good about making their workplaces more attractive.

"But academia doesn't have those incentives," she adds. "Overall, full-time, permanent slots are dwindling due to budget constraints. There are fewer jobs and a huge boom of foreign applicants for jobs, so the competition is much more acute. Also in academia, it's very hard to get anything to change very quickly People keep on doing things because they've always been done a certain way."