Women in Science

Thanks to Larry Summers (for those of you who don't know, ex-Harvard president who said the enlightening comment: "with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions...is what I would call different availability of aptitude" For a full transcript of his speech go here), I get asked the question all the time now, "Is it hard for you being a women in your field?" This is actually an issue that has been on my mind a lot these days. The maelstrom that ensued after Summer's comments which eventually led to his resignation (really more of a straw on the camel's back for him though as far as Arts and Science faculty at Harvard was concerned) made everyone in the field acutely aware of the disparity between the sexes in the life and hard sciences. In September, came Newsweek's cover story titled "Science and the Gender Gap". This was the article that really got me a little frightened. It presented the entire academic tenure system as being discriminatory against women. It became clear that many of the barriers women face in the sciences are of a systemic nature due to this arcane system setup when there were very few or no women in academia and is something that really needs to be reconsidered if we want to provide women with equal opportunities in academia. This article got me worried enough to push me to action. I started organizing a Graduate Women in Biology Group for our department. The response has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic. By every woman we talk to. You see even in our department (Molecular and Computational Biology), there are 32 faculty members, only five of which are women, only one senior female faculty, one emeritus, and three junior. At the post-doctoral and graduate student level, the numbers are different. There are about as many female graduate students in our department as male. It's when you travel further on the career track that the numbers start trickling down. A junior faculty member pointed out to me that it's great that we're doing this, but right now we should be more focused on our science and our research because this is really when everything is equal for both sexes. She's right of course. I may have jumped the gun and I will certainly always give my all for my research, but I still think its important to start fostering an encouraging social network for women early. Certainly the response we've gotten is a sign of how necessary and welcome a group like this is in our department.