How to boost their numbers
at UCLA
Women scientists
BY CYnthia Lee
UCLA Today Staff
Harvard University’s natural science departments have 149
tenured male faculty compared to just 13 women. The dismal statistics,
reported April 15 by The New York Times, was hardly big news to
many of the 70 UCLA women scientists and others who gathered that
same day at the Faculty Center to discuss the pace of recruitment
and retention of women in their own departments.
The lack of women faculty in science departments of academia has
been in the headlines ever since Harvard President Lawrence Summers
caused a seismic tremor across the nation after he commented at
a conference in January that women’s “intrinsic aptitude”
might be one of the reasons for their relatively small numbers in
science and engineering.
“In a perverse way, we are grateful to Professor Lawrence
Summers,” said Christine Littleton, director of the UCLA Center
for the Study of Women and a law professor, who moderated the Estrin
Conference. “This is one area where we [at UCLA] are ahead
of Harvard, but let’s not rest on our laurels.” The
conference was one of a series of events funded by Computer Science
Professor Emerita Thelma Estrin to focus on the issues and concerns
of women in science on campus.
UCLA’s own progress has been mixed, noted Robin Garrell, professor
of chemistry and biochemistry and a panelist at the conference.
While women in the life sciences division at UCLA now make up 33%
of all ladder faculty, their numbers total only 11% in the physical
sciences at a time when women Ph.D.s make up 22% of those available
nationally in those fields. In the basic science departments in
the David Geffen School of Medicine, women comprise 17% of ladder
faculty. The data were published December 2004 in a report by UCLA’s
Office of Faculty Diversity.
Garrell pointed to the slow rise of women overall in ladder-rank
faculty at UCLA: from 22% in 1992 to just 24% in 2005. “That’s
2% in 13 years,” she said.
If UCLA wants to become the leading university for women in science,
it needs to build on its strengths, identify the hidden biases that
trip up women’s careers, and adopt the tools needed to pick
up the pace, Garrell said.
Many of these tools have already been created by other institutions.
UC Irvine, for instance, has developed successful models for recruiting,
retaining and promoting women faculty under a five-year, $3.5-million
grant from the NSF Program for Institutional Transformation. Priscilla
Kehoe, a neuroscientist who directs the UCI ADVANCE Program, told
participants that the university has been successful at attracting
women faculty to tenure-track positions across the campus, including
science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
In each of the 10 schools at UCI, senior faculty serve as equity
advisers and earn $15,000 a year in addition to their faculty salaries.
As assistants to the deans, they help to recruit and mentor faculty
as well as investigate inequities.
UCLA has one advantage in recruiting women faculty: its exceptional
strength in interdisciplinary areas, in which women are strongly
represented, Garrell said. Another plus, she added, is a new systemwide
initiative, the UC Faculty Family Friendly Edge, which aims to resolve
many work-family issues that face women faculty.
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