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by Alexis Walker With the one year anniversary of the release of the National Academies report Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering, the issue of women and science is receiving much attention—in part due to the recent introduction of the Gender Bias Elimination Act of 2007 (H.R. 3514) by Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX). The 2006 NAS report asserted that the lack of scientific advancement by women is largely a result of the culture and structure of academic science and called for reform as an issue of national competitiveness. These ideas were echoed in an October hearing on Women in Academic Science and Engineering held by the House Committee on Science and Technology’s Subcommittee on Research and Science Education.
Chairman Baird (D-WA) and Ranking Member Ehlers (R-MI), along with several witnesses, argued that not only are scientific departments often unwelcoming environments for women, the criteria used for advancement in these fields do not reward work disproportionately provided by women, such as support and mentoring of younger scientists.
Amidst recommendations for reforming the scientific system, the NSF Advance program received praise at the hearing as a model for encouraging institutional transformation. The program aims to enable the full participation of women in academic science and engineering by providing grants for comprehensive programs to facilitate institution-wide change, as well as awards that support the analysis, adaptation, and dissemination of practices for increasing the representation of women in these fields. Dr. Freeman Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland Baltimore County, testified that the Advance program should be expanded and the lessons learned through its grants should be applied at other institutions. Dr. Donna Shalala, president of the University of Miami and Chair of the NAS report, called for similar programs to be put in place at the National Institutes of Health and other funding agencies.
Rep. Johnson’s Gender Bias Elimination Act of 2007 takes almost verbatim the recommendations of the NAS report, requiring federal granting agencies to provide mandatory workshops for department chairs, members of grant review boards, and agency program officers about methods to minimize gender bias. The bill also demands that agencies enforce non-discrimination laws and conduct compliance reviews at universities as well as collect and publish data on the demographics and funding outcomes for all grant applications. With provisions for the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Departments of Energy and Defense, the bill has now been referred to the Committee on Education and Labor as well as the Committees on Science and Technology, and Armed Services. One recommendation of the NAS report that was not included in the legislation was allowing grant money to be applicable to dependent care costs—an issue that Dr. Shalala continued to push in her testimony before the Subcommittee on Research and Science Education. At the hearing Shalala also took the recommendation for compliance reviews a step further in advocating the establishment of a regulatory body which would hold universities accountable for Title IX provisions in academics as the NCAA does in athletics. Even as congressional debates move toward addressing the issues raised by the NAS report, not all parties are in agreement as to the existence of biases against women in science. A conference held last month by the American Enterprise Institute analyzed the veracity of these biases, examining alternative explanations for the underrepresentation of women in the sciences, such as sex differences in aptitude or interest in the subjects. Even after debates on the merits of these arguments, panelists and speakers generally agreed that we must encourage the full capabilities of all. |
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