A new paper provides a glimpse of what administrators in the sciences think about increasing gender diversity among those who teach and do research in those fields. Most of the leaders see that goal as the responsibility of someone else—often, female professors.
The paper is based on interviews with department chairs and deans in science and other STEM fields at an unnamed large, public research university. It reveals that some administrators see building the ranks of women in science departments as largely their responsibility but that more leaders have a passive attitude toward achieving gender equity, often seeing it as something that would happen over time if women behaved differently. Nearly all of the 31 people whose interviews were detailed in the paper, “You, Me, or Her: Leaders’ Perceptions of Responsibility for Increasing Gender Diversity in STEM Departments,” were male.
“Through examining the leaders’ language, I think the study gets at the ways that people try to explain the absence of women in STEM and what they think they can do about it,” said Sara I. McClelland, an assistant professor of women’s studies and of psychology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the lead author of the paper, which was published online this month, ahead of its publication in a coming issue of Psychology of Women Quarterly. “It’s important to learn how we describe our own roles in university efforts.”
Efforts to increase the number of female professors in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics have been under way for decades. But recent research published in Science magazine revealed that the share of women who are being hired is so low that it would take nearly 100 years before half of all professors in those two fields are female.
Ms. McClelland didn’t set out to expose how leaders characterized their responsibilities toward gender equity. But when she was interviewing the administrators to see how much they knew about a federally financed program on their campus that is designed to help women excel in academic careers in science and engineering, she said, they “just wanted to talk about why there were so few women faculty even though I never asked any questions about that.”
Her subsequent analysis of the administrators’ unexpected responses involved separating them into two categories: responses that indicated the person felt a “high personal responsibility” for the gender imbalance and those that reflected “low personal responsibility” for it. The first label was applied to expressions of personal interest in doing something to improve gender diversity, while the second was applied to statements that reflected no such interest.
Sixty-one percent of the administrators were labeled as “low personal responsibility.” The rest, including all three women interviewed, fell into the “high personal responsibility” category. The women saw themselves as being even more personally responsible for increasing their ranks in the field than were the men in the same category.
High vs. Low Responsibility
What kinds of things did “high personal responsibility” participants say during interviews?
“I don’t think I had a good grip … on what the conditions were like for women in the sciences here … it’s pretty shocking to my mind,” said one male administrator quoted in the paper, which was written with Kathryn J. Holland, a Ph.D. student working with Ms. McClelland. “And so, I’ve been moved by it, and motivated by it, quite frankly.”
Some administrators explicitly said they considered it their job to set an example for others to follow in how female faculty members are treated.
“Leadership sets the standard, says, ‘We won’t tolerate this; we won’t tolerate that,’” one man said.
Among the sentiments expressed by low-responsibility participants was that change in the department’s makeup wasn’t necessary. In saying so, they often compared their department with others that had even fewer women in them. Some in that group also said gender discrimination is no longer frequent.
“Looking back on it now, you can see that that sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore,” said a male participant. “At least not that I’m aware of in our program, or I’d like to think it doesn’t in our program.”
The researchers also asked the administrators who they believed should help solve gender-equity issues in STEM fields—men or women. According to the paper, a common theme from administrators was that female faculty members “chose to have families, and as a result, their careers in STEM departments were often cut short.”
That sentiment, expressed by low-responsibility participants, characterized women as being responsible for their own low numbers in the sciences. A member of that same group of administrators also suggested that women can succeed in the sciences if they become “more aggressive” when seeking support as a way to fit into departmental culture.
That characterization of women isn’t new, Ms. McClelland said.
“For decades, women have been described as needing to change themselves in order to fit into STEM-workplace environments instead of the other way around,” she said. “Men are described as sensitive or becoming sensitive to gender issues, but they’re not described as needing to change their attitudes toward women.”
Administrators in the study spoke of male colleagues in a different light. Men were framed as not part of the problem but as being responsible for solving it by “learning more and by retiring.”
Over all, high-responsibility leaders most frequently held men more responsible for gender diversity, along with themselves, while low-responsibility leaders mostly said female faculty members were responsible for the gender-diversity problem in the sciences and for solving it.
