APPENDIX B
Relevant Findings and Recommendations from National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Reports
Numerous National Academies reports and workshops have addressed the topic of the underrepresentation of women in STEMM over the last 20 years. The findings, recommendations, and suggestions raised in many of these consensus reports and workshop summaries align closely with findings and recommendations in this report. Although the primary audience for most of the recommendations is academia, a good number are also directed to federal agencies, Congress, and foundations.
From Scarcity to Visibility: Gender Differences in the Careers of Doctoral Scientists and Engineers (NRC, 2001)
Issue | Select Relevant Finding or Recommendation |
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Family-Friendly Policies | Finding: Marriage and family are the most important factors differentiating the labor force participation of male and female scientists and engineers. Single men and single women participate equally in the workforce. Marriage and children are associated with increased rates of full-time employment for men, but declining rates for women. |
Hiring, Promotion, and Tenure | Finding: Career interruptions matter to the chance that a person will achieve tenure track status. Women with interruptions before receiving the Ph.D. are more likely to become faculty, while this variable has the opposite effect for men |
Gaps in Resources | Finding: Differences remain in the ways that men and women fund their education making it more likely that men are launched into research careers. Men are more likely to receive funding through research assistantships. Women are more likely than men to fund their graduate work by holding teaching assistantships in the physical sciences, mathematical sciences, and engineering—fields in which they are least well represented. |
To Recruit and Advance: Women Students and Faculty in Science and Engineering (NRC, 2006)
Issue | Select Relevant Finding or Recommendation |
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Changing Culture | Recommendation: Create and institutionalize a pervasive inclusiveness mandate on campus, with buy-in from the highest levels of the administration, and then dedicate resources to that mandate. |
Data Needs | Recommendation: Conduct periodic university studies of various issues affecting women, such as tenure process, salary equity, or climate. |
Family-Friendly Policies | Recommendation: Improve institutional policies and practices such as the tenure clock, child care, leave, spousal hiring, and training to combat harassment. |
Hiring, Promotion, and Tenure | Recommendation: Modify and expand faculty recruiting programs by creating special faculty lines, diversifying search committees, encouraging intervention by deans, and assessing past hiring efforts |
Mentoring | Recommendation: Create mentoring programs for students and female faculty |
Education | Recommendation: Extend outreach to potential students at both the K-12 and undergraduate levels. Such outreach might take the form of summer science and engineering camps, lecture series, career days, collaborative research projects, and support for K-12 teachers. |
Biological, Social, and Organizational Components of Success for Women in Academic Science and Engineering: Report of a Workshop (NAS, NAE, and IOM, 2006)
Issue | Comments or Suggestions from Workshop Participants |
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Addressing Bias | Participant Suggestion: Using new metaphors and descriptions to discuss bias, in particular calling bias or stereotyping unexamined places the responsibility on the person who holds or acts on the bias or stereotype. |
Family-Friendly Policies | Participant Suggestion: Establishing flexible-time policies such as family leave, flex time, part-time tenure, and temporary stoppage of the tenure-clock; and, just as importantly, an atmosphere that allows faculty members to take advantage of these policies without fearing damage to their careers. |
Hiring, Promotion, and Tenure | Participant Suggestion: Restructuring hiring and promotion procedures to reduce bias and encourage diversity, particularly the training of search committees, deans, and department chairs to recognize and reduce bias in hiring, evaluation and promotion. |
Mentoring | Participant Suggestion: Establishing programs to provide mentoring and support to women and other underrepresented groups. |
Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering (NAS, NAE, and IOM, 2007)
Issue | Select Relevant Finding or Recommendation |
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Addressing Bias | Finding: A substantial body of evidence establishes that most people—men and women—hold implicit biases. |
Recommendation: University leaders should incorporate into campus strategic plans goals of counteracting bias against women in hiring, promotion, and treatment. | |
Recommendation: University leaders should as part of their mandatory overall management efforts hold leadership workshops for deans, department heads, search committee chairs, and other faculty with personnel management responsibilities that include an integrated component on diversity and strategies to overcome bias and gender schemas and strategies for encouraging fair treatment of all people. | |
Recommendation: Deans, department chairs, and their tenured faculty should develop and implement programs that educate all faculty members and students in their departments on unexamined bias and effective evaluation. | |
Recommendation: Federal funding agencies and foundations should ensure that their practices—including rules and regulations—support the full participation of women and do not reinforce a culture that fundamentally discriminates against women. All research funding agencies should provide workshops to minimize gender bias. |
Issue | Select Relevant Finding or Recommendation |
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Family Friendly Policies | Recommendation: University leaders should develop and implement hiring, tenure, and promotion policies that take into account the flexibility that faculty need across the life course, allowing integration of family, work, and community responsibilities. |
Recommendation: Establish policies for extending grant support for researchers who take a leave of absence due to caregiving responsibilities. | |
Institutional Barriers | Finding: Academic organizational structures and rules contribute significantly to the underuse of women in academic science and engineering. |
Data Needs | Recommendation: Expand support for research on the efficacy of organizational programs designed to reduce gender bias, and for research on bias, prejudice, and stereotype threat, and the role of leadership in achieving gender equity. |
Oversight | Recommendation: Congress should take steps necessary to encourage adequate enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, including regular oversight hearings to investigate the enforcement activities of the Department of Education, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Department of Labor, and the science granting agencies—including the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Energy, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. |
Recommendation: Federal enforcement efforts should evaluate whether universities have engaged in any of the types of discrimination banned under the anti-discrimination laws, including: intentional discrimination, sexual harassment, retaliation, disparate impact discrimination, and failure to maintain required policies and procedures. | |
Hiring, Promotion, and Tenure | Recommendation: University leaders should take action immediately to remedy inequities in hiring, promotion, and treatment. |
Recommendation: University leaders should require evidence of a fair, broad, and aggressive search before approving appointments and hold departments accountable for the equity of their search process and outcomes even if it means canceling a search or withholding a faculty position | |
Recommendation: Deans, department chairs and their tenured faculty should expand their faculty recruitment efforts to ensure that they reach adequately and proactively into the existing and ever-increasing pool of women candidates |
Gender Differences at Critical Transitions in the Careers of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Faculty (NRC, 2010)
Issue | Select Relevant Finding or Recommendation |
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Data Needs | Recommendation: Investigate why female faculty, compared to their male counterparts, appear to continue to experience some sense of isolation in subtle and intangible ways |
Family-Friendly Policies | Recommendation: Explore gender differences in the obligations outside of professional responsibilities (particularly family-related obligations) and how these differences may affect the professional outcomes of their faculty |
Recommendation: Monitor and evaluate stop-the-tenure-clock policies and their impact on faculty retention and advancement. Where such policies are not already in place, adopt them and ensure effective dissemination to faculty members. | |
Mentoring | Recommendation: Initiate mentoring programs for all newly hired faculty, especially at the assistant professor level. |
Hiring, Promotion, and Tenure | Finding: In every field, women were underrepresented among candidates for tenure relative to the number of female assistant professors. Most strikingly, women were most likely to be underrepresented in the fields in which they accounted for the largest share of the faculty—biology and chemistry |
Finding: Most institutional and departmental strategies for increasing the percentage of women in the applicant pool were not effective as they were not strong predictors of the percentage of women applying. The percentage of women on the search committee and whether a woman chaired the search, however, did have a significant effect on recruiting women. | |
Recommendation: Make tenure and promotion procedures as transparent as possible and ensure that policies are routinely and effectively communicated to all faculty | |
Recommendation: Design and implement new programs and policies to increase the number of women applying for tenure-track or tenured positions and evaluate existing programs for effectiveness |
Seeking Solutions: Maximizing American Talent by Advancing Women of Color in Academia: Summary of a Conference (NRC, 2013)
Issue | Comments or Suggestions from Workshop Participants |
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Addressing Bias | Participant Suggestion: One of the most striking realizations was the recognition that a major issue is the innate biases that all humans carry (see, for example, Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman). This innate bias leads us all—men, women, people of color—to make snap judgments that, unrecognized and unchecked, will contribute to perpetuating the status quo. In many ways, this recognition frees institutions and individuals from blame and may make it easier for all to join forces in an attempt to fully marshal the talent of the nation in STEM endeavors. |
Participant Suggestion: Include bias awareness training at key points in university processes. Important points at which to provide bias awareness training include: searches for new faculty and postdocs (for search committees), regular occasions for faculty evaluation—annual reviews, third year reviews, tenure and promotion reviews (for all faculty), reviews of research grants (for reviewers), the hiring of a “solo” —the department’s only [anything], a woman, woman of color, etc. (for departmental chairs, faculty members, staff) | |
Participant Suggestion: Incorporate bias awareness training in universities into training programs that already exist | |
Changing Workplace Culture | Participant Suggestion: When a department hires a “solo” (and thus comes to include a sole individual of any group), it must deliberately work to ensure that its climate and policies do not inadvertently discriminate against the new faculty member or hinder her or his ability to thrive in that community. It is beneficial if university leadership is available to provide this guidance. |
Representation | Participant Comment: The largest difference in academic promotion between women of color and White women occurs at the beginning of a faculty career, with the obtaining of a tenure-track job at a non-minority-serving, non-research-I institution. Therefore, although from that point forward women of color and White women are promoted at similar rates, their relative numbers have been distanced by the nonequivalent starting conditions, and the representation of women of color in faculty positions persists at low levels. |
Participant Comment: Women of color (in this case, not including Asian women) were more likely to be in nontenure-track positions and less likely to be in full professorships, meaning that women of color are disproportionately occupying positions that have the least power and authority in the academic context. |
Issue | Comments or Suggestions from Workshop Participants |
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Data Needs | Participant Suggestion: We should collect and publish data such as a diversity index. A diversity index would contain institutions’ and departments’ track records in training and supporting doctoral students as well as notes on students’ progress as they move forward in their careers. |
Participant Suggestion: In order for undergraduate students to make informed decisions about where to pursue graduate degrees, they need information about an institution’s commitment to creating and maintaining a culture of inclusion. Information needs to be available for all levels: faculty, department, college/school, and university overall. | |
Family-Friendly Policies | Participant Suggestion: An important factor in the slow integration of women of color into academia is the structural impediments built into current institutions, particularly in the United States. There cannot be full participation by women of color in academia until policies and expectations for work-family balance are addressed. |
Hiring, Promotion, and Tenure | Participant Suggestion: Institutions should increase the number of women and underrepresented minorities in candidate pools |
Participant Suggestion: Search committees, particularly for leadership positions, should include women and underrepresented minorities. | |
Participant Suggestion: Institutions should make the policies on promotion and tenure public and clear. | |
Participant Suggestion: To increase the diversity of the faculty at U.S. institutions of higher education, a top priority should be policies designed to increase college graduation rates among women of color. | |
Participant Suggestion: There is a great need to capture institutional and departmental contexts and climates, quantitatively and—the more acute need—qualitatively. It would be beneficial to put institutions’ successful strategies in context so that institutions and departments can judge which interventions are most likely to be successful in their particular contexts. | |
Mentoring | Participant Suggestion: Faculty, specifically graduate advisers, should maximize the types of projects and career paths that undergraduates and graduate students are exposed to, so that they can make optimal choices about where to invest their creativity with full information about where the opportunities are in the world of STEM careers. |
Participant Suggestion: Offer training to people whose actions have an impact on the careers of talented women of color in STEM, including people in leadership positions in federal agencies, academia, and the scientific community overall | |
Participant Suggestion: Since sponsorship does not lend itself to encouragement through policies, individuals must take the lead. Some participants encouraged senior women of color to continue to be or to become more aware of opportunities to sponsor talented junior faculty who are women of color as these faculty advance their careers. |
Sexual Harassment of Women: Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM, 2018)
Issue | Select Relevant Finding or Recommendation |
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Changing Workplace Climate | Finding: The two characteristics of environments most associated with higher rates of sexual harassment are (a) male-dominated gender ratios and leadership and (b) an organizational climate that communicates tolerance of sexual harassment |
Finding: A systemwide change to the culture and climate in higher education is required to prevent and effectively address all three forms of sexual harassment. | |
Finding: Organizational climate is, by far, the greatest predictor of the occurrence of sexual harassment, and ameliorating it can prevent people from sexually harassing others. | |
Recommendation: Move beyond legal compliance to address culture and climate. Academic institutions, research and training sites, and federal agencies should move beyond interventions of policies that represent basic legal compliance and that rely solely on formal reports made by targets. Sexual harassment needs to be addressed as a significant culutre and climate issue that requires institutional leaders to engage with and listen to students and other campus community members. | |
Data Needs | Recommendation: Academic institutions should work with researchers to evaluate and assess their efforts to create a more diverse, inclusive, and respectful environment, and to create effective policies, procedures, and training programs. |
Representation | Finding: For women of color, preliminary research shows that when the sexual harassment occurs simultaneously with other types of harassment (i.e., racial harassment), the experiences can have more severe consequences for them. |
The Science of Effective Mentorship in STEMM (NASEM, 2019)
Issue | Select Relevant Finding or Recommendation |
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Mentoring | Finding: Mentorship across a broad range of professional domains has an overall positive effect on academic achievement, retention, and degree attainment as well as on career success, career satisfaction, and career commitment. |
Finding: Engaging in culturally responsive mentoring, whereby mentors show interest in and value students’ cultural backgrounds and their non-STEMM social identities, is one strategy mentors can implement to validate their mentees’ multiple identities, especially in cross-racial relationships. | |
Finding: Changes in institutional rewards systems can enhance mentoring provision and quality A commitment from institutional leadership to support mentorship could have a profound effect on the quality of mentorship and ultimately the development of undergraduate and graduate students | |
Finding: Funding agencies can further encourage culture change in mentorship by requiring evidence-based mentorship plans, mentor and mentee education, and reports of mentorship quality and outcomes for grantees. | |
Recommendation: Institutional and departmental leadership should regularly and systematically review formal mentorship activities and programs to support development of mentorship skills and student success and well-being. | |
Recommendation: Mentors should learn about and make use of inclusive approaches to mentorship such as listening actively, working toward cultural responsiveness, moving beyond “colorblindness,” intentionally considering how culture-based dynamics such as imposter syndrome can negatively influence mentoring relationships, and reflecting on how their biases and prejudices may affect mentees and mentoring relationships, specifically for mentorship of underrepresented mentees. | |
Recommendation: Department chairs, in consultation with institutional leadership, should use promotion, tenure, and performance appraisal practices to reward effective mentorship. Elements of a promotion or tenure package could include descriptions of approaches and resources used in mentoring, reflective statements of ways the candidate has worked to improve their mentoring over time, evidence of mentored scientists as coauthors on manuscripts and grants and their placement into positions, letters from program leaders and testimonies from students, institutional and national award for mentorship, and process measures that assess mentoring relationship quality from the perspective of the mentee and the mentor. | |
Recommendation: Funding agencies should encourage the integration of evidence-based mentorship education for mentors and mentees and assessments of mentorship into grant activities that involve undergraduate and graduate student research, education, and professional development to support the development of the next generation of talent in STEMM. |
REFERENCES
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2018. Sexual Harassment of Women: Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/24994.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2019. The Science of Effective Mentorship in STEMM. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/25568.
National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 2006. Biological, Social, and Organizational Components of Success for Women in Academic Science and Engineering: Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/11766.
National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 2007. Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/11741.
National Research Council. 2001. From Scarcity to Visibility: Gender Differences in the Careers of Doctoral Scientists and Engineers. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/5363.
National Research Council. 2006. To Recruit and Advance: Women Students and Faculty in Science and Engineering. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/11624.
National Research Council. 2010. Gender Differences at Critical Transitions in the Careers of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Faculty. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/12062.
National Research Council. 2013. Seeking Solutions: Maximizing American Talent by Advancing Women of color in Academia: Summary of a Conference. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/18556.