Gender equity and Caltech’s academic climate

David Baltimore

In January 2001, I signed on behalf of Caltech a Statement on Gender Equity in Academic Science and Engineering, along with the presidents of eight of our peer institutions: MIT, the University of Michigan, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, UC Berkeley, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania. The pledge calls for all our institutions to meet the challenge of increasing the proportion of women in science and engineering in the United States, and to remove the barriers that still exist to the full participation of women in these fields. The focus is on faculty issues because everyone agreed that dealing with gender discrepancies at the faculty level will help the situation at all levels.

The statement outlines three goals. The first is a faculty whose gender diversity reflects that of the students we educate, the second is to give female faculty a larger role in university life, and the third is to better support individuals with family responsibilities. We all agreed to meet periodically and review our progress. For Caltech, the gender-equity pledge was followed by more comprehensive findings and recommendations issued in December 2001 by the Committee on the Status of Women Faculty at Caltech. This month, the Task Force on Gender and Academic Climate, which focused on gender issues at the graduate level, presented its set of findings and recommendations to me and to the Faculty Board.

What progress has Caltech made? What are our central challenges?

Caltech has made progress in a number of areas. In 2001–02, women constituted 10.7 percent of the faculty. This academic year, women constitute 12.3 percent of the faculty, an increase of five women (from 30 to 35). In this last year, two of eight new faculty recruits were women. In the specific fields of science and engineering, women constitute 11 percent of Caltech faculty. Across the nine institutions that signed the gender-equity pledge, the proportion of women in these fields today ranges from 11 percent to a high of 14 percent at the University of Michigan. In contrast, a decade ago, women constituted 6 to 8 percent of the science and engineering faculties in these same institutions. Therefore our progress is in line with the experiences at our peer institutions.

In the past three years, the Institute has doubled the number of named chairs held by female faculty from three to six, increased the number of women appointed as executive officers in their divisions, and appointed the first women in the positions of division chair, vice president for student affairs, and director of the Beckman Institute. The academic divisions have pursued new recruitment efforts to increase the pool of female candidates and have implemented mentoring and tracking programs for junior faculty. We have established a Child-Care Assistance Fund for faculty, staff, and students to aid in child-care costs. And, in May, the Faculty Board approved a maternity leave policy for graduate students.

Yet the rate of progress is still slow, and serious challenges lie ahead. Attending the most recent meeting of the nine institutions this spring, I was very disturbed to hear that at the current rate of progress in hiring and tenure, it could take 60 years or more for women to reach parity with men in the faculty ranks in science, math, and engineering. A key factor is the departure of women from the pipeline at every stage of the scientific career: in the transitions from undergraduate to graduate school, graduate school to postdoctoral fellowship, and postdoctoral positions to the professoriate, and within the professoriate as well. At all of these nodes, it seems that women are leaving science, engineering, and mathematics careers at a higher rate than their male counterparts.

It is clear that some of the fault lies with the difficulties and biases that female students and scholars face in our academic environments. Unfortunately, these difficulties and biases are as present at Caltech as elsewhere. In response to the Graduate Student Council and Women in Engineering, Science, and Technology survey on quality-of-life issues, the Task Force on Gender and Academic Climate, cochaired by Professor John Bercaw and Vice President Margo Marshak, found that “a collection of underlying behavior and attitudes concerning gender has made productive life on campus difficult for many graduate students.” The task force “concluded that primary responsibility for correcting this situation belongs to the professorial faculty, who must take an active and ongoing role in educating their students and research group members” about inappropriate gender-related behavior and gender bias.

Academic careers are demanding of everyone, but such behavior creates added stresses and obstacles to women’s full participation in science and engineering, directly contributing to the “leaky pipeline” problem.

In its recommendations, the task force urges faculty to take a leading role “in improving the gender climate” on campus; suggests that “a comprehensive education program about gender issues and bias” be established with input from the graduate students; and proposes that “future assessments should address the concerns not only of the graduate students but of all members of the Caltech community.” I wholeheartedly support these recommendations.

Gender balance is not the only challenge we face in the area of diversity. Achieving proportional participation by underrepre-sented minorities in science and engineering is an equally important goal. Here, we have little success to report; this is clearly a more difficult and demanding disparity to correct than gender imbalance.

On all fronts we must dedicate ourselves to the essential task of realizing greater diversity of participation than we have been able to achieve thus far.

For the text of any of the reports and statements cited in this essay, see http://diversity.caltech.edu.
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