A New Hothouse for Female Scientists

Small colleges, big results

Research universities have top-of-the-line laboratories, the most-accomplished researchers, and giant federal grants. But they don’t hold a monopoly on preparing future scientists.

In fact, some of the nation’s small liberal-arts colleges send on more women, proportionally, for Ph.D.'s in the sciences than do elite research universities. Higher-education leaders have been trying for years to get more women interested in careers in mathematics and science. The issue often boils down to the “pipeline” — universities cannot hire female physicists if women aren’t getting Ph.D.'s, and women cannot earn doctorates unless they’re prepared as undergraduates. The numbers show that liberal-arts colleges may hold some of the answers.

In 2005 the Survey of Earned Doctorates, which is sponsored by several federal agencies, released a report about where students who received Ph.D.'s between 2000 and 2004 had earned their bachelor’s degrees.

Across the board in all fields, liberal-arts colleges sent a higher percentage of women on to get Ph.D.'s than did doctoral institutions. Some of that gap can be accounted for by the slightly higher proportion of women enrolled at liberal-arts colleges, but that does not explain away the difference.

The gap was most pronounced in the sciences, especially the physical sciences. Of the 2,485 Ph.D.'s in the physical sciences earned during that period by liberal-arts college graduates, 36 percent went to women. In contrast, of the 8,388 Ph.D.'s earned in those fields by graduates of research universities, just 24 percent went to women.

And those overall numbers mask even bigger discrepancies at individual colleges. A few highlights from the study period:

• Almost half of the science Ph.D.'s awarded to Oberlin College graduates went to women.

• At the same time, 26 percent of the science Ph.D.'s earned by people who got bachelor’s degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign went to women. At Brigham Young University, the number was even lower: just 14 percent.

• Stanford University, with an undergraduate enrollment four times as large as Pomona College, produced six times as many male Ph.D.'s in the physical sciences, but just twice as many female ones.

Among the reasons for the gap, according to experts:

More attention: “At small four-year colleges, the attention is not shared between graduate programs and undergraduate programs,” says Gary D. White, assistant director of education for the American Institute of Physics. “Undergraduates are the full focus, and colleges don’t have to spread their resources and faculty energy among two very different groups.”

Role models: “Women who go to four-year schools are going to see a lot more female professors than if they go to a big university like Chicago or Stanford,” says Valerie J. Kuck, a visiting professor of biochemistry at Seton Hall University who studies women in science.

Atmosphere: Barbara L. Whitten, a professor of physics at Colorado College, has studied gender issues in the sciences. “There’s a disjunction often between what young women expect from college and what first-year science courses are like at big schools: the largeness, the impersonality, the pointless difficulty, the general meanness, the sense that we don’t need you,” she says. “Even very talented women coming in from high school, when they hit those things, suffer a huge loss of confidence and think: This is not what I want to do.”

FROM BACHELOR’S DEGREE TO PH.D. Liberal-arts colleges send a higher proportion of women on to get doctorates in the sciences than research universities do. Research-extensive universities Liberal-arts colleges Proportion of doctorates earned by women, 2000-4 All science and engineering fields: 41% 53% Physical sciences: 24% 37% Engineering: 19% 25% Life sciences: 47% 57% Social sciences: 58% 65% SOURCE: Survey of Earned Doctorates, 2000-2004

http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 52, Issue 35, Page A12