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Suggested Citation:"Reports from the Breakout Sessions." National Research Council. 2000. Women in the Chemical Workforce: A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10047.
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8

Reports from the Breakout Sessions

Following the presentations described in Chapter 5, Chapter 6 and Chapter 7, breakout sessions were organized to enable more extensive discussions among the workshop participants. The following questions and statements were suggested to the breakout groups as possible topics for discussion:

  • What are the negatives and positives of formal diversity programs?

  • Compare employment practices in industry and academia.

  • Are the best practices of industry transferable to academia?

Discussion leaders from the breakout sessions then reported in plenary session what they believed to be important ideas and topics that had emerged in the discussions.

Frankie K. Wood-Black, Phillips Petroleum: Our group began by talking about formal and informal diversity programs, and we discussed problem solving for some recruiting issues that had been observed by the participants.

We started with mentoring programs, both formal and informal, trying to identify some of the pros and cons—what worked and what didn't work. One of the characteristics of the programs that didn't seem to work was a high degree of structuring, with a sense that the mentor-protégé relationship was assigned rather than chosen. There was no flexibility for participants, no room for volunteering; it was, “You will be so-and-so's mentor,” and that approach didn't seem to work very well.

An example of a program that seemed to work very, very well was GE 's mentoring program, in which the company had 600 executives who were told that they each needed to find a younger mentor to teach them about the Internet. So it was highly focused from the standpoint of being an assignment, but there was flexibility in how the relationship was developed. It actually worked quite well.

We have a program at Phillips, for folks who come into the plant, yard men included—folks who dig the holes and turn the wrenches. It has a focus on safety, and it is a peer mentoring program, but it is voluntary and seems to work fairly well. The structured formal programs with mentor assignments were not so successful; some programs worked and some didn't.

Suggested Citation:"Reports from the Breakout Sessions." National Research Council. 2000. Women in the Chemical Workforce: A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10047.
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We talked about recruiting these employees from the perspectives of a selection committee and an industry recruiting committee. One of the common patterns that emerged is that the successful recruiting committees were proactive, they weren't reactive. That proactiveness seemed to help make those recruiting committees work.

We also noticed that there were champions: successful candidates who came out of the recruiting committee process had a champion who said, “Did you see this one?” They had somebody to speak up for them. So champions were very important.

Finally, we talked about some of the diversity programs—seminars, talks, and the like. One of the programs that was mentioned was Pat Heim's “She Said/He Said” program,1 which talked about communication styles.

This is where we started bringing into our discussions the question of problem solving for employment procedures. We talked about hiring strategies and, particularly, the differences between academia and industry. Industry's hiring practices are more formalized—there are procedures and people know how they work. There are some trends that ebb and flow—they may be cyclic—such as going from a central corporate environment to a business-unit-type environment.

What is happening in hiring practices is very similar. Some industries are focusing on recruiting from a core group of universities, while others are branching out once again to get more diversity in their hiring pools. One thing that did come out for the academic institutions was the existence of human resources (HR) departments. The fact that corporations used HR department structures did seem to help the recruiting process, whereas academic institutions frequently must develop these structures every time they hire a professor. While HR departments aren't the solution, they provide a structure. They are going out and doing the same things every time, so search committees do not have to recreate procedures every time. Academic institutions are at a disadvantage there.

What are the problems in recruiting, and what are the effects of locations—where the candidate visits during recruiting—and culture perception? Once a candidate submits a job application, what happens next? “First perceptions are killers,” was a recurring theme. There is something about the first perception, when a candidate is out in the organization or in the department for the first time, that can be a killer. Even though everybody is trying to be proactive, something frequently happens to cause a negative perception during these visits. The question came up, Is it a hostile environment? How do you define a hostile environment, and how do you address a hostile environment? These are significant questions.

We also talked about flexibility in hiring. If you go looking for the person you think you need, sometimes you may be defining that person too narrowly. You may be saying, “I need a biochemist in XYZ area, and the candidate needs to be a female, needs to be a minority. ” You have actually defined that person so narrowly that you may not be able to find that person.

Finally, one difference between industry and academia emerged—and this shows why human relations departments may be good things. A lot of industry hiring practices are structured in response to federal grants and take into account that they will be audited against a particular regulation. For example, you may generate a candidate pool, but the auditor comes in and asks what you specifically did to ensure that a woman, a minority, a Vietnam veteran, or any one of a whole host of other candidates was listed. What did you do that would let you say you went that extra step in recruiting for the position?

We talked about different approaches to the equal opportunity philosophy. In industry, a lot of these approaches have been driven by knowledge of what the auditor is going to look for. When you are in an academic environment, you don't necessarily have that structure.

1  

Pat Heim, “She Said/He Said: Gender Differences in the Work Setting,” audiocassette, The Heim Group, 1995.

Suggested Citation:"Reports from the Breakout Sessions." National Research Council. 2000. Women in the Chemical Workforce: A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10047.
×

Industry uses benchmarking for everything: costs, supply chain, all those kinds of things. Maybe that is where people need to go in hiring: to benchmark departments in terms of what is or is not a good environment and to look for the blind spots. We heard from folks who have a proactive department; they have a critical mass of women, yet it is still perceived to be a hostile environment. Where are the blind spots? Benchmarking should be able to help.

We talked a lot about goals. What is realistic? What is a stretch? Are goals good? Markets measure all those kinds of things. A running theme was, You've got to keep pushing, you can't just stay unchanged.

Lou Ann Heimbrook, Lucent Technologies, Bell Labs: Let me share with you a little bit of what came up in our group discussion of formal diversity programs. We discussed the positives and negatives for formal diversity programs, whether those programs described were in industry or in academics.

The first positive is financial incentives. These may be financial incentives for the diverse candidate or for the person bringing in the candidate. Often it is the formal programs that force that. You have to watch out for the flip (or negative) side of that as well.

Formal diversity programs can broaden the notion of what the “best” is. What we are trying to do is entertain the thought that the best and how we define it can change and become much broader. Diversity programs bring that to the forefront for individuals.

Diversity programs also can provide formal training. Where formal diversity programs are in place, all aspects of managing diversity typically can be handled. We discussed some courses that have been organized, such as “Men and Women in the Work Environment.” Programs at the graduate student level appear to be working well in the academic arena. That seems to be quite positive.

Formal diversity programs also can expand comfort zones, to make the work environment more sensitive to cultural differences. At the very least, they can raise the consciousness level. These are some of the positive aspects that we thought the programs would bring.

What about the negatives? As you can imagine, if you are using financial incentives to change the workforce, there is already a workforce in place. The incentives can aggravate the financial differentials between the haves and have-nots. So you need to be quite sensitive, because diversity programs can drive differentials.

In addition, diversity programs may cause major institutional change or disruption. Formal diversity programs often drive change, whether it is in a university or in an industry. That might be viewed as either a positive or a negative, but remember, any workforce will have both components.

One thing that I want to emphasize, which was mentioned quite often, is the feeling that there is little leverage to require formal training for faculty. One perception was that this might be seen as infringing on the academic freedom of faculty. However, this clearly is not the case in industry, where formal training already exists. So this is an issue that academics would have to address in their formal programs.

Now, how would that kind of training influence employment practices? Let's start by taking a look at employment practices from an academic perspective, and then we'll look at industry and other sectors. One of the employment practices is the old-boy network. What happens typically in the hiring practice is, “We have a chemistry position, let me call so-and-so, so-and-so, and so-and-so.” This is an employment practice now in use. In this audience, I am now looking at what I hope will become the old-or young-girl network or the women's network. The other employment practice we discussed is the manila envelope, as often used by formal search committees in academia. They get the envelopes in and then they sort them into “desirable” and “undesirable.”

Advertising job openings is a common requirement. There is variation in the length of time the

Suggested Citation:"Reports from the Breakout Sessions." National Research Council. 2000. Women in the Chemical Workforce: A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10047.
×

opening must be advertised, but as long as you advertise, you can say you have followed the employment practice. Employment practices may vary by institution, just as they would in industry. Advertised positions require letters of recommendation or information on the candidate, so a portfolio can be made for the candidate; this provides the maximum amount of information.

Employment practices may include some discussion of employee needs, but typically there is minimal consideration of spousal accommodation. We have alluded to the question of dual careers, and this is often discussed. There can be a lot of spousal professional support. Typically in industry, when someone is being interviewed, everything possible will be done to make sure the portfolio includes the spouse by, for example, helping them find employment.

But practices sometimes lead to legal violations in interviews. Some of the questions asked during the interview process are illegal, but this does occur. Those involved in the process need to recognize the importance of absolute adherence to the letter of the law—knowing that you can be sued if you fail in this. Discussions need to be limited to what is relevant to the job. They should not extend to anything outside the job, the job description, and the skill set necessary for that job.

The positive practices being developed in industry include early recruiting or outreach to preprofessionals. The goal is to contact potential workers before they are ready to enter into your industry. There is active attention to diversity; it makes economic sense, so there is active attention to it in most cases. We cannot assume that the candidate wants to join the company, so we must sell the company. One of the things that we are looking at is an in-your-face type of selling, a selling attitude toward employment. But I like this quote from one of the individuals in our group: “I just want to make sure they are not too close to your face.”

In other institutions such as the national labs, our group noted the excellent employment practice of screening postdocs for their suitability as future staff. I know this is difficult in academia, because you typically have one slot, and you may not want to hire someone from an academic postdoctoral position to do the same organic chemistry as the mentor. But screening is something that might be useful.

What aspects of best practices can be moved from industry to academics? One of the overarching things is positive reinforcement for enhancing diversity. However you choose to measure, or whatever your metric is—whether it is monetary or perhaps lab space—positive reinforcement for that tends to be something industry does well. Finding mechanisms to transfer this to academics would be useful.

There is also the redirection of emphasis from individual achievements to team-oriented or departmental accomplishments. With that redirection, you automatically increase the likelihood of diversity because your team has just become larger. A move from individual to team is one way to do this. I also believe the idea of selling can be transferred from industry. Sell your institution to the candidate. If you want to bring a top candidate into your institution, make sure you sell it. Don't just assume the candidate will want to come. And finally, there is the need for more explicit mentoring and guidance. This exists as both a defined and an undefined process in industry.

I would like to leave you with a couple of key points that I took from our discussions. The first one applies to academics: you seem to get it for students, but not for faculty. What we consistently heard is that the approach and principles used for graduate students —for both recruiting and diversity—seem to be excellent across the board, if you look at the graduate student profiles. How do we apply the same approach and principles to recruiting faculty? When you take a look at that, it becomes apparent that diversity isn't a given. In both industry and academia it is used when it makes good business sense. The reason that we achieve such diversity on the graduate student level is that we have cheap labor. That is why you want them in there to carry out whatever programs you have.

On the business side, we have quite a diverse set of customer portfolios, so it tends to be a money-driven activity. How do we address that? Overall, we need to be quite proactive in addressing any sort

Suggested Citation:"Reports from the Breakout Sessions." National Research Council. 2000. Women in the Chemical Workforce: A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10047.
×

of workforce issue, because that lets us get a jump on the competition, whether it is another institution or an industry.

Geraldine L. Richmond, University of Oregon: Ours is the soul-searching group. After Debra Rolison's talk, we spent a lot of time discussing academic institutions as a hostile environment.

We talked about differences between industry and academia, particularly the value systems. In industry, there are clearly metrics for success and a better idea of what success means. The success of employees is more closely tied to the success of the company. In academia, the metrics for success are not as clear. For example, an academic institution may be considered successful if it keeps the student body numbers up. This provides the right number of undergraduates, who pay tuition to keep the institution going. But faculty salary increases and faculty promotions are not tied to that, except for institutions where the faculty spend most of their time doing undergraduate recruiting.

The metrics for success are not as clear in academia, and the reward structure for faculty members varies from one institution to another. The reward system is changing all the time. Academia could learn from industry on a number of issues. It is not necessarily true that all industry is more progressive in the area of child care, but there are good examples of companies that have progressive policies toward child care and family—more so than many academic institutions. There are also in industry examples of healthier workplace policies, particularly on the issue of pregnancy in the workplace. We have graduate students, undergraduates, and faculty in academic institutions who are in their childbearing years and have children. Yet the issue in most departments is largely ignored, and little effort is expended on setting policy for pregnancy in the workplace. Academic institutions could learn a lot from industry on this issue. Management training is also more prevalent in industry—in fact, it is almost nonexistent in academia. I said almost, because management training in academia usually consists of watching somebody else.

Industry appears to be more family friendly, so the question became, Why? One issue that was raised had to do with retention. Retention is very important in industry. In academia, if a faculty member leaves, you soon have a pile of 200 applications sitting next to you to fill that one job slot. So retention takes on a different character in academia. You want to retain someone if they bring in a lot of money and have national recognition or if they bring something important to the institution—but that may not come until later in their career. In industry, there is a greater push to retain people once they walk in the door. This leads to policies that are more supportive of the community on issues—child care is one—that have been on the back burner for many academic institutions.

Let me now go to what we spent the majority of our time discussing: the hostile environment in academia and other issues. There are mixed feelings about how hostile the environment is in academia. There are some very positive situations in academia, but many others are negative.

One situation in academic institutions that is perceived to be particularly negative is that of the very large research groups that depersonalize a graduate student's experience. These are research groups where students just turn the crank and spew out results but have very little contact with the other students in the group. That can be a negative experience, particularly for women. We see funding being directed more and more toward large group activities, which causes us much concern, not just because this means that one PI must support a huge group, but also because in mega groups, the student becomes a cog in a big machine.

I think it is important to point out my own perspective on NSF's tendency to treat training and the training experience as a valued commodity in the review process for grants. I believe this will actually help to maintain the strong incentive to have faculty members stay tied to their students, and that is a valuable result.

Suggested Citation:"Reports from the Breakout Sessions." National Research Council. 2000. Women in the Chemical Workforce: A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10047.
×

There was a discussion on small colleges versus universities: Which is better, which is worse? Which is more family friendly or unfriendly? The perception is that small college environments offer a more flexible and supportive environment, but that is not always true. There is insufficient time to discuss this in detail, but students need to get a realistic picture of what life is like at a small college compared with a larger institution. There are tremendous demands on women at small colleges, demands that often are much more time-consuming than at a larger university.

Finally, the expectations for academic faculty are rising everywhere, contributing to what might be perceived to be a hostile environment. Technology, travel, and information overload are all contributors. That is not just in academia, but also in industry.

At small colleges, we see increased pressure on faculty to have a research program, to publish, and to get research money. The metrics are changing all the time, and that just places larger demands on faculty at small colleges. At larger institutions, faculty are required to obtain multiple grants, whereas their predecessor or their mentor might have been able to survive with just one. Collaborations are now called for in addition to individual programs, and many faculty are asked to be involved in entrepreneurial activities and start their own small businesses. All of this means that there is a tremendous amount of pressure in the academic community, contributing to a hostile environment.

So what is my overall message from this discussion? There is clearly a lot of hand-wringing and heart-wrenching and soul-searching going on about academia and the hostile environment, at least the perceived hostile environment in academia. I think the message that needs to be given to women who are going into academic positions, and frequently industrial positions as well, is the need to set priorities—the need to set one's own personal priorities.

We are hearing that women want everything and want it all and want it now, and we are hearing that from the younger women coming up the career ladder. Unless women learn how to set priorities and reevaluate these priorities as they go through their careers, I'm afraid that we're asking them to follow everybody else's priorities, which may be overwhelming. The demands placed on us in the workplace are large, and they are growing. These demands encompass family issues, teaching, and research, as well as entrepreneurial pressures. If we don't set priorities, we'll just wind up feeling that the environment is even more hostile than it actually is.

W. Sue Shafer, University of California, San Francisco: We began our discussion with some legalistic questions about what formal diversity programs are. Obviously, they take a couple of different forms, including those that are designed to improve the diversity of the workforce and those that are designed to improve the sensitivity of others in the organization to diversity issues.

Someone in our group asked if you can you have quotas these days. The circumstances in which it is legal to have quotas are those in which you can document that you are addressing previous discrimination. Often quotas are unspoken but visible. Then we turned to small companies and discussed what size businesses must be concerned with diversity programs. Some of the new small start-up companies may be below the threshold size for which the programs are required. But we can all think of other reasons that may drive people to have such programs, even if they are not legally required to have them.

Our group included people from academia, government—both administrative and laboratory environments—and industry, so we were trying to synthesize across all of these groups. One of the people from one of the government labs reported that they were doing quite a bit of diversity training. Some people in these programs are worried that if they don't accept everything taught in the diversity programs, it may somehow come back to haunt them, and they will be fired. I don't know that we have had any cases of that happening, but at least the concern was expressed. We talked about the consequences

Suggested Citation:"Reports from the Breakout Sessions." National Research Council. 2000. Women in the Chemical Workforce: A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10047.
×

of some of the diversity training that goes on. In one industry setting, the goal was to have zero so-called “personnel incidents.” Now that is obviously not attainable, but it is certainly an interesting goal.

We discussed the fact that one young woman decided to hold some diversity training for the technicians and graduate students in her group, and some of her faculty colleagues agreed to participate as well. That was both positive and negative. One of the topics was sexual harassment, and she ran into a couple of faculty members repeating one or another version of the tired old banality, “Well, if they would come to me I could tell them how to harass somebody sexually. ” The training had missed its mark for those faculty.

We had a long discussion on how to get faculty to take mandated training. If this is to be successful, the faculty has to impose that on themselves. Even then, you probably will miss the 5 percent who don't want to deal with things like that. We then went on to talk about what kind of teeth can be employed to reinforce diversity training. One individual reported that somebody brought some pornographic tapes or CDs to work and left them on their desk. The employee was told by a supervisor to put them out of sightæthey were inappropriate in the workplace. That didn't happen, and the employee was fired on the spot. That was in an industrial setting. I think many of us worry that one morning we could be fired, so a clearly stated policy and consequences might be helpful in conjunction with both the training and actions. But most people feel that some behaviors—like carrying firearms into the workplace—merit being dismissed on the spot no matter what (unless you happen to work for a police department).

We talked about the difference it makes when managers absolutely believe that the diversity training they are giving should have real consequences for their organization. If top management is convinced that this is in the best interests of the organization, you will have a much better effect than if management is only going through the motions, or is doing it for some legalistic reason.

NIH has been a positive influence in stimulating training in the responsible conduct of science. A question was raised whether NIH has any requirements for training in diversity, and it was reported that it does not have such training requirements. However, NIH requires institutions to have programs to ensure equal opportunity and to have sexual harassment policies, and so on. Unfortunately, we do not have mandates for how to do it; it just has to be effective.

We talked a little bit about programs to provide incentives to hire minorities. If you recommend a minority candidate for an opening in that institution, you might get a reward if that person is hired. But there are undesirable consequences if you perceive that you were hired only because you are a woman or only because you are a minority. Finally, being the first woman or minority candidate to join a group might have significant consequences for retention. A person working in an already diverse workforce is probably better off than someone who is the first addition to a previously monolithic workforce.

We did talk about transfer of good practices from one sector to another, and we talked about the incentive programs for hiring minorities. I believe that the federal Department of Energy laboratories have used that pretty successfully, but I don't know that academia has used that at the professorial level. In our group, we didn't hear of any reports that this had been done in the industries they represented. We talked about giving departments an additional faculty position if they hired a minority candidate, and the pros and cons of that approach. Certainly NIH has been known to reward institutions that do well in recruiting underrepresented minorities. In some technical fields other than chemistry—for example, biochemisty—this has been less of a problem for women. There are examples of departments that have been rewarded with an extra position if they have a good prior record of minority recruitment.

We also discussed the dual career problem and what companies do about it. In some reports from the academic sector, the whole family was recruited to make sure that the spouse—as well as the candidate—was actually on board. You are not going to convince the candidate you want unless you convince the spouse. Industry seems to have done a 180-degree turn. They used to think that employing

Suggested Citation:"Reports from the Breakout Sessions." National Research Council. 2000. Women in the Chemical Workforce: A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10047.
×

two people in the same company was a problem. I think they now see it in many cases as a plus. And we heard some reports of academic experiments in which positions that were initially shared became two full-time, tenured slots. That could be a way of retaining individuals in parts of the country where it may be hard to keep faculty.

I'm going to return to a theme that I have spoken about before in this meeting. I think that any institution that wants to keep and attract good faculty needs to view faculty or scientists as an investment and to treat them as a resource whose success is going to make the company or the institution better. To help that happen, I think we need the kind of diversity training that allows us to “walk in the other guy's shoes,” and we can get professional help in doing that. To the degree that we can give power and control to our employees who are actually doing the work—but still be a supervisor, a consultant, and a sister—I think we are going to ensure better investments in the people that we hire.

Maria K. Burka, National Science Foundation: Our group is the one that was primarily a chemical engineering group, although there were some chemists in the group. In our discussion of formal diversity programs, we looked at some of the pros and cons. Some of the pros that came up include the observation that students flock to places that have set programs, particularly when these programs are well run. That leads into the second item, which is that you can depend on these programs to bring in a pool of good candidates. So it helps the institution as well as the students. You have students who feel confident that they are going to a good place, and it helps the institution because you are going to attract some good students. In addition, it is the right thing to do. While that may sound hokey, it is still very important.

One of the negative aspects of any diversity program is that it is an entitlement program, and then people don't always perform. A more important problem is the feeling that “This is being dealt with over there,” so the rest of the people in either the company or the department don't feel that it is their responsibility. If there is a formal program elsewhere in the organization, individuals may conclude, “I don't need to get involved in this; it has already been handled.”

Diversity programs work only if they are properly supervised. For example, there is a formal program at Berkeley, where they actually see candidates through from the beginning to the end. This ensures the success of the people who come in under the formal programs. There is still concern over the possible attitude of others, that you have hired a person for the wrong reason—that the person is not necessarily qualified for the job. But that works both ways. Some in our group suggested that this is irrelevant. If you come in as a new hire—no matter what reason other people say you were hired for—if you perform, you really shouldn't care. That view suggests that such concern is not necessarily a negative; it is just one of those things that is often mentioned but really is not that important.

We then talked about the various practices in industry and academia. It was mentioned that big companies—those that have devoted substantial efforts to these issues—are often bastions of diversity. But smaller companies can be the exact opposite. Very often, students know that there are certain small companies that they would never want to go near, because the environment is much worse than what they have already experienced in some of these academic departments where there are problems. Other participants pointed out that while in industry the situation is good, it is still not a utopia. We still have a way to go.

We talked about some of the specific rotation programs or field programs that are very positive. These permit a person to be rotated to different parts of a company to get good training and the background needed to move up the corporate ladder. Also valuable are brown bag programs that bring together people who have similar problems and similar interests.

Then we talked about the important idea that “what gets measured gets done.” Companies are very

Suggested Citation:"Reports from the Breakout Sessions." National Research Council. 2000. Women in the Chemical Workforce: A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10047.
×

good at measuring things, so things get done. A very positive example is evaluation of the success of subordinates as a formal part of a supervisor's performance appraisal. This is very important, because it means that the supervisor will invest effort and time into developing the younger person.

We discussed the differences within companies, that is, in different parts of the company. The plant environment—which, of course, for chemical engineers is very important—is frankly a much more negative place for women than the office environment. Somehow, the plant environment, when you are dealing with operators and so on, is not as welcoming to women as, for example, the typical business environment.

What about the practices in academia? First of all, the programs are much less formal than they are in industry, but some of these things are changing. Certain departments now have what they call posttenure review. How far will these go? Some schools are talking about doing away with tenure, but we don't really think that will happen. I think what happens is that these post-tenure reviews basically affect a person's salary increase. We also touched on NIH training grants, which really can be used as a mechanism for change, and finally we noted that some schools now have ethics courses, which sensitize people to some of these problems.

Some practices are transferable from one environment to another. For example, mentoring needs to be recognized as a sanctioning role. One of the things that was mentioned—and this is a situation in both industry and academia—is that very often women, particularly senior women, become sources of comfort—people to whom others talk about issues. This becomes very time-consuming, and it affects the ability of these women to do their job. There is a need to understand that mentoring is something that is positive but that the time consumed should be credited in that person's performance appraisal. What is very good in industry is the recognition that the company is making an investment in the person. Maybe academic departments should look into that approach rather than bringing in young faculty and letting them sink or swim. Early feedback—particularly to young faculty members —would help. Employees in industry get annual or semiannual reviews; you don't necessarily get those very in-depth reviews in academic institutions. The issue of mandatory mentoring of young employees —which was mentioned by another group—has been instituted in some places, but this very often doesn't work, because you are forcing something that is just not there.

Teaching management skills to department chairs and deans would help. Very often, the people who become department heads or deans are appointed because they are first-rate researchers. Often they don't have the people skills and they don't have the management skills. Management skills could make a big difference with some of these diversity programs. In academia, each faculty member is an individual little CEO. Each group is like a company, with the faculty member as head and their research students as workers. They have to bring in their own funds, they have to support their own group. Yet, they haven't been taught the skills to be these little individual CEOs. Maybe that is something that individual institutions could work on: How do you deal with your students? How do you help them? How do you promote them? How do you get them on their way? How do you bring in money? And so on. How do you manage the operation?

These mentoring and management issues are connected. It may not be possible to directly transfer practices from industry to academia, because these are different worlds. The reputation of a particular department—which may consist of anywhere from 10 to 40 people—is dependent on the people it brings in. A company with hundreds of thousands of personnel is operating with that same one-on-one personal situation. When you are interviewing someone for an industrial position, you are not evaluating how that person's performance will make your department's reputation. But academic departments are looking to raise their reputation.

At the same time, that person in a small group is going to live next door. You want a person with

Suggested Citation:"Reports from the Breakout Sessions." National Research Council. 2000. Women in the Chemical Workforce: A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10047.
×

whom you are going to talk, with whom you may play basketball, or whatever. You don't necessarily have that in a company setting, because you are hiring someone who could be moved to different parts of the company. So some of these practices are not necessarily transferable. When interviewing a potential new faculty member, people often want someone who looks just like themselves, because the new person is going to live next door.

If I have one summarizing statement, it is the word accountability. I think that is the bottom line in all of this. Universities basically are not held accountable for hiring, and they are not held accountable for the atmosphere; but very often industrial organizations are. Companies talk about the atmosphere; very seldom do people talk about atmosphere in an academic environment. They talk about the department 's reputation rather than the atmosphere in the department—but atmosphere should be taken more seriously.

Suggested Citation:"Reports from the Breakout Sessions." National Research Council. 2000. Women in the Chemical Workforce: A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10047.
×
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Suggested Citation:"Reports from the Breakout Sessions." National Research Council. 2000. Women in the Chemical Workforce: A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10047.
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Suggested Citation:"Reports from the Breakout Sessions." National Research Council. 2000. Women in the Chemical Workforce: A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10047.
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Suggested Citation:"Reports from the Breakout Sessions." National Research Council. 2000. Women in the Chemical Workforce: A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10047.
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Suggested Citation:"Reports from the Breakout Sessions." National Research Council. 2000. Women in the Chemical Workforce: A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10047.
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Suggested Citation:"Reports from the Breakout Sessions." National Research Council. 2000. Women in the Chemical Workforce: A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10047.
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Suggested Citation:"Reports from the Breakout Sessions." National Research Council. 2000. Women in the Chemical Workforce: A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10047.
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Suggested Citation:"Reports from the Breakout Sessions." National Research Council. 2000. Women in the Chemical Workforce: A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10047.
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Suggested Citation:"Reports from the Breakout Sessions." National Research Council. 2000. Women in the Chemical Workforce: A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10047.
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Suggested Citation:"Reports from the Breakout Sessions." National Research Council. 2000. Women in the Chemical Workforce: A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10047.
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For a period of history no women worked outside the home. Bust as years have gone by and society has changed, Women are working varying jobs every day. They are, however, underrepresented in some sectors of jobs. This includes women in the engineering and science fields. To matters worse, women do not ascend the career ladder as fast as or as far as men do.

The impact of this and related problems for science, the academic enterprise, the U.S. economy, and global economic competitiveness have been recently examined. The Chemical Sciences Roundtable evaluate that the demographics of the workforce and the implications for science and society vary, depending on the field of science or engineering. The roundtable has organized a workshop, "Women in the Chemical Workforce," to address issues pertinent to the chemical and chemical engineering workforce as a whole, with an emphasis on the advancement of women.

Women in the Chemical Workforce: A Workshop Report to the Chemical Sciences Roundtable includes reports regarding the workshop's three sessions—Context and Overview, Opportunities for Change, and Conditions for Success—as well as presentations by invited speakers, discussions within breakout groups, oral reports from each group.

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