The Pipeline

This is a term I see a lot when reading articles about women in science.  So I decided I would give a little introduction to “the pipeline” here – talk about what it is, why it’s important, the fact that it is leaky, etc.  It’s an important concept, so here goes!

First of all, what is the pipeline?

In this context, the pipeline is a career path for a scientist in/entering academia.  It theoretically takes you from your undergrad to grad school to post doc and then to a tenure-track professorship. 

Why is the pipeline significant in issues relating to women in science?

Women scientists are much more likely to “leak out” of the pipeline before achieving a professorship.  At each transition point, more women are lost.  To increase women’s representation in the sciences, it is important to identify the causes of these leaks, and then to fix them.

What causes these leaks?

One cause of leaks could be having to choose between children and a scientific career.  A recent study entitled “Keeping Women in the Science Pipeline” finds that married women with children are “35% less likely to enter at tenure track position after receiving their PhDs”.  The study also found that the odds of a married woman with children entering a tenure track position are also 28% less than those of married women without children and 33% less than single women without young children.  Married women without children also have the odds working against them; they are 8% less likely than married men without children to enter a tenure track position.  Married women with children are also significantly less likely to receive tenure after entering a tenure-track position.

Discrimination could play a role too; according to a study by the Bayer Corporation, 40% of women and minority scientists say they were discouraged from pursuing a STEM career at some point in their lives.

What can we do to fix this?

Places that hire scientific researchers need to make sure they support women scientists who choose to have children.  Tenured male scientists are much more likely to be married with children than female researchers.  Female scientists are almost three times more likely to be single without children.  It seems that there exists a situation in which female scientists, unlike male scientists, are forced to choose between a career in science and children.  Female scientists should not be forced to choose one of the other.  The availability of maternity leave among graduate students and postdoctoral fellows is pretty dismal, and paternity leave is even worse.  New policies on maternity/paternity leave, and things like on-site child care could make it easier for those who have families to remain in scientific careers.

In addition, young women scientists considering families need to see that there are women who are science faculty and have families too.  The study reports that female doctoral students tend not to see enough female faculty who “successfully combine work and family”.  Perhaps seeing that it can be done will help women see that they don’t have to choose one or the other.

For more solutions, take a look at this article on Under the Microscope: Keeping Women in the Science Pipeline (Part 2): Solutions

Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of World War II

“These computers, these ladies that computed these firing tables – it was absolutely vital work. And without their contributions to the war effort, we would have lost World War II. We could not have won World War II without that data.”

-Dr. William F. Atwater, Military Historian

Female Computers of WWII

The documentary “Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of World War II” introduces us to the women computers of WWII – women who were recruited to help calculate ballistics trajectories in order to create trajectory tables that were shipped to troops around the world.  Back then, a computer meant a person who did calculations as a job.  During WWII, with men overseas, women saw expanding opportunities in the workplace.  These female computers were recruited from the mathematics departments of colleges and asked to interview for the Pennsylvania Computing Section, a ballistics lab in the Moore School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

These trajectory problems required thousands of calculations and the solving of differential equations.  A 60 second shell trajectory problem took a human around 40 hours to complete.  Six women were assigned to work on a differential analyzer, which completed the same problem in 15 minutes.  These women worked hard, knowing that the soldiers in the field relied upon the manuals they sent out.  They worked double or triple shifts if necessary and took no vacations.  

Later on, some of these women became programmers on ENIAC, the world’s first electronic computer.  When ENIAC was designed, the women were invited to interview to be programmers since they had been involved in the human computing work.  Two of them worked day and night to program the press demonstration of ENIAC, which was held in February 1946.  However, these women did not always receive the recognition they deserved.  Of the demonstration, Dr. Jennifer S. Light says, “Many of the men engineers received publicity, while the female computers and programmers did not.  As far as the official publicity that was staged in February 1946 that was organized by the war department and pretty tightly controlled in terms of what journalists and other people attending saw, Betty Jean Jennings and Betty Snyder developed the demonstration trajectory program.  Again, they were the ones who made the machine do the things that we all got very excited about, but their participation was never mentioned in either war department press releases or later news reports that relied on those publicity materials.”

Female Programmers wit ENIAC

These women made massive contributions to the war effort, but went largely unrecognized.  This documentary pays homage to these great women.  They were eager to help and to put their skills to use in whatever ways they could.

In addition to showing us that these women had serious mathematical chops, we also get the opportunity to see how they worked together, how they felt about their work, and what their lives were like during this time.  These women grew very close while working on this project.  Betty Jean Jennings, one of the ENIAC programmers, said, “Well I’ve always said that I was the luckiest person in the world because of working on the Eniac with these women that I really came to love and admire and respect and I had so much fun with them.”  It is clear that they cherished the opportunity to participate.  But while the women computers knew their work was important, they also understood the gravity of what they were calculating.  One computer, Doris Blumberg Polsky, said “For many, many years, even when my older children were certainly old enough to understand what we did during the war effort, I never discussed it with them.  I never mentioned ballistics, I never mentioned the unit or anything like that, and it kind of came as a surprise to them when we finally opened up and told them what we did during the war.  I didn’t feel – I still don’t feel – that it’s something I can kind of brag about.  This was a tough thing to get your mind set on and accept for yourself.”

Throughout history, women have not always been able to contribute because of a lack of opportunity and gender stereotypes standing in their way.  When World War II provided the opportunity, these women rose to the challenge without hesitation, and poured everything they had into the important project at hand.  “Top Secret Rosies” is a compelling and informative documentary, teaching us about WWII, and those women who contributed behind the scenes in integral ways.  In 1997, the female ENIAC programmers were inducted into the Women in Technology Hall of Fame.

Top Secret Rosies

If you are interested in watching “Top Secret Rosies”, it is available for instant watch on Netflix, or you can attend one of the screenings listed on their website.  For anyone in NYC, there is a screening at Hunter College’s Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute on March 17th at 6:30pm.

Sofia Kovalevskaya

Sofia Kovalevskaya

Sofia Kovalevskaya was a Russian mathematician, born in 1850.  Her interest in mathematics began as a young girl, when she was encouraged by her uncle, Pyotr Krokovsky.  She said she had studied her father’s old calculus notes that had lined the walls of her nursery in lieu of wallpaper, which was in short supply.   Her first proper study of mathematics took place with her family’s tutor.  However, her father decided to put a stop to her studies in math.  When she was 14, she taught herself trigonometry in order to understand a physics textbook that had been written and given to her by her neighbor.  Her neighbor, Professor Tyrtov, was impressed with her talent, and convinced her father to allow her to go to school in St. Petersburg.

After graduating from secondary school, Sofia very  much wanted to continue at the university level.  But as a young, unmarried woman, she was not allowed to travel by herself, and no nearby universities were open to women.  In order to be able to travel, she married Vladimir Kovalevsky in 1868.  After a few months, they moved to Heidelberg, Germany, where Sofia had to convince the school to let her take lessons without being an official student, since women could not matriculate.  In 1870, she decided to move to Berlin to study with renowned mathematician Karl Weierstrass.  After she completed a problem set for him, he immediately started privately tutoring her, because the University of Berlin would not allow women in attendance.  She studied with him for four years, and wrote three papers: one on partial differential equations, one on Abelian integrals and one on Saturn’s rings.  One of these papers, “On the Theory of Partial Differential Equations”, was published in Crelle’s Journal, a leading mathematical journal.  In 1874, she received a PhD from the University of Göttingen, but was unable to find work and returned home to Russia.

For the next six years, she was a writer for a St. Petersburg newspaper, reporting on science and technology and doing theater reviews.  During this time, her and Vladimir even attempted to fundraise to start a women’s university.  She gave birth to a daughter in 1878. Vladimir and Sofia eventually separated, and he committed suicide in 1883.

In 1880, Sofia returned to mathematics, presenting a paper at the Congress of Natural Scientists in St. Petersburg.  A former student of Karl Weierstrass, Gosta Mitag-Leffler, was very impressed with her work and tried to find her a professorship.  Sofia moved to France, and in 1883, was offered a professorship at the University of Stockholm.  In June of 1884, she was appointed to a five year professorship.  She was the first woman to hold a full professorship in Northern Europe.  During her time at the University of Stockholm, she completed important research and became the editor for the journal Acta Mathematica.

In 1888, she was awarded with the Prix Bordin of the French Academy of Sciences for her work on solving the problem of a solid body rotating around a fixed point.  All entries were submitted anonymously, and her entry was deemed so important that the prize was increased by 2000 francs.  This prize gave way to the appointment of a lifetime chair of mathematics at the University of Stockholm.  She also gained membership to the Russian Academy of Sciences.

In 1891, Sofia died of influenza, at the height of her career.  Sofia was an extraordinary mathematician who helped pave the way for women who came after her, by proving that women deserved to be taken seriously in mathematics.  She was a women’s rights advocate who struggled to obtain her own education, but did what she needed to in order to study.

Sources: Prominent Russians: Sofia Kovalevskaya, Sofia Kovalevskaya, Sofia Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya

What are the biggest obstacles for women in STEM fields?

In the challenge for equal representation for women in STEM fields, where should we focus our efforts?

As a young woman getting ready to enter academia in a male-dominated field, it is useful for me to know what challenges I might come up against.  A new study published by Stephen Cici and Wendy Williams of Cornell University suggests overt discrimination is no longer a problem and that societal factors, gender expectations, and life choices pose the biggest obstacles for women entering science.

According to a 2008 NSF survey, 30% of doctorates in the physical sciences go to women.  However, women hold only 10% of full-professorships in the physical sciences.  So why is there such a big drop from the time women graduate to the time they achieve full-professorship?  Cici and Williams say they have not found much evidence in 20 years worth of data that gender bias in peer reviewing processes and grant approval is still a problem.  Instead, they suggest that outside factors are most important.  The tenure clock conflicts directly with a woman’s window for having children.  They say that things like motherhood and child-rearing can make women less likely to choose research careers, where hours are long and not always regular.

Many take issue with the claim that gender discrimination is no longer a problem.  Christine Corbett, who is a senior researcher at the American Association for University Women, says that it is “naive to suggest that judging applicants differently based on their gender is a thing of the past”.  And others are concerned that progress will decline if practices that increase female representation are abandoned.

I agree that successful practices should be continued.  Women are still underrepresented in the sciences, especially in math and physics.  This chart from the American Institute of Physics shows the percentages of women in various physics professorships in 1998, 2000, and 2002.So, with the numbers of women physicists rising significantly, I think it would be a bad idea to give up practices aimed at ending gender discrimination now.  However, these statistics also show that as the professorship ranks go up, the numbers of women decrease.  There are many more women assistant professors than full professors.  Women could have a harder time staying in physics due to the factors described by Cici and Williams, such as raising children.

If we want to correct for these things, universities need to make sure they have the proper resources for women faculty members.  Childcare on campus is one thing that could make it easier for women who have children to remain researchers and professors.  I think this would help tremendously.

I think it is also important to note that there are traditional gender roles deeply entrenched in our society, which can make it very difficult for women who choose to have careers and have children.  I hope that in the future, balancing a research career and having children is not solely a women’s issue.

What do you think are the biggest obstacles for women in STEM fields?  What can we do to overcome them?

Book Review: The Madame Curie Complex

I recently read The Madame Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science by Julie Des Jardins.  The book discusses prominent female scientists, from the Nobel Prize-winning Marie Curie to Rosalind Franklin – the brilliant scientist largely passed over for her work uncovering the structure of DNA, to Lillian Gilbreth – engineer, psychologist, and mother of twelve (two of her children went on to write Cheaper By the Dozen).

The Madame Curie Complex introduces the reader to female scientists, all of who have made important contributions, and some that have gone unnoticed and unappreciated.  The book is divided into three sections: “Assistants, Housekeepers, and Interchangeable Parts: Women Scientists and Professionalization, 1880-1940″, “The Cult of Masculinity in the Age of Heroic Science, 1941-1962″, and “American Women and Science in Transition, 1962-”.

The first section talks about women such as Marie Curie, Lillian Gilbreth, and Annie Jump Cannon.  These woman were pioneers in their fields – women doing science when there were essentially no other women in the field.  One of the chapters in this section talks about the women of the Harvard Observatory, from 1880-1940.  The director of the observatory, Edward Pickering, hired many women to record measurements and help with classifications.  However, these women were not intended to be astronomers – they were considered “computers” only.  But many of these women, such as Annie Cannon, Williamina Fleming, and Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin, discovered great things.

The second section discusses scientists such as the Nobel Prize-winning Maria Goeppert-Mayer, Rosalind Franklin, and the women involved in the Manhattan Project.  In this age of “heroic science”, when the atomic bomb was being developed and science had captured the public interest in a great way, women began to enter the sciences in larger numbers as many men were recruited for science relating to WWII efforts.  This section was extremely interesting; it contrasts the careers of Goeppert-Mayer and Franklin, one of whom is one of two women to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, and the other who deserved a Nobel Prize.  The section on the Manhattan Project discusses both female scientists who were involved, and the lives of women who accompanied their husbands there.

The third section discusses more modern women of science, like Rosalyn Yalow, Barbara McClintock, and “The Lady Trimates”.  The Lady Trimates are Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikas, all of whom conducted primate research in the field and challenged the cold and removed way science was generally conducted at the time.  It discusses the increasing number of women in science thanks to the second-wave feminist movement and the passage of Title IX.

This book offers an enlightening look at the struggles and accomplishments of the some of the great women scientists of our time.  These women faced incredible odds; many had great trouble getting faculty positions at universities, and if they did, they were overworked and underpaid.  It was often extremely difficult for them to find the resources to do their research.  Marie Curie was forced to go on a tour of the United States to raise money to buy radium for her lab (ironic considering that she discovered radium).  Women scientists sometimes had to portray themselves as “maternal scientists”, doing science for the good of humanity rather than for the sake of science, in order to be accepted.  But despite obstacles such as these, these women were so dedicated to science that they found whatever way they could to contribute.  I highly recommend it for anyone interested in science or women’s history, and for anyone involved in science.  All scientists, whether they be male or female, should have a knowledge of the contributions that women have made to science and of the hardships that they overcame.  Marie Curie discovered radium and polonium, and is one of only four people to ever receive two Nobel Prizes.  Rosalind Franklin made incredible contributions to uncovering the structure of DNA.  Annie Jump Cannon developed the OBAFGKM stellar classification system.  Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was the first person to show that the sun was made of mainly hydrogen.  Jane Goodall’s field observations challenged the ideas that chimpanzees were vegetarians (they aren’t) and that only humans are capable of using tools.  These accomplishments comprise only a small fraction of those discussed in The Madame Curie Complex.  The stories told in this book are inspiring, informational, and give women scientists the recognition they deserve.

Jardins concludes by discussing the ways in which women have helped to change the face of science; many women such as Rachel Carson and the Lady Trimates have taken up important roles as science popularizers, making science accessible for the general public.  She writes that women have helped create a new scientific hero; one who is “collaborative and multifaceted”, and realizes that “her experience in the private realm has bearing on her science”.  Women have different experiences in the world, which is why it is so important to make sure that women have equal representations in science, where the viewpoints and observations of all are needed to make important discoveries.  She emphasizes that the positions of women and men in science are different because of cultural traditions, not because of innate biological differences.

Exciting exoplanet news!

Today, the Kepler mission announced the discovery of over 1,200 exoplanet candidates, bringing the total number of planets candidates found by Kepler to 1,235!

Kepler Exoplanet Candidates (image from nasa.gov)

The planet candidates break down as such:

• 68 ~Earth size
• 288 Super-Earth size
• 662 Neptune size
• 165 Jupiter size
• 19 larger-than-Jupiter size

And here’s the really exciting part: 54 of these planet candidates are in the habitable zones of their stars, and of those, 5 are near Earth sized.

These planet candidates are based on about 4 months of observing, and Kepler’s field of view only covers about 1/400th of the sky.  So just imagine how many Earth sized, habitable-zone planets there are in all of our galaxy!

They have also found a system of six confirmed planets orbiting the sun-like star, Kepler-11.  All six of the planets are bigger than Earth and all have orbits smaller than the orbit of Venus.  This is one of two confirmed multiple-planet systems, the other being Kepler-9, which has 3 confirmed planets orbiting the star.

A bit about exoplanet detection: Kepler locates planets by searching for a small dip in the brightness of a star, which is caused by an object crossing in front of it.  If that dip occurs in regular intervals, it tells you that there is an object in orbit around that star.  The amount that the star’s brightness decreases tells you how big the orbiting planet is.  Kepler also uses ground based telescopes and the Spitzer Space telescope for follow up observations on candidates.

Planets that are in the habitable zones of sun-like stars will probably take a few years to detect; you would only see a transit about once a year, and three transits are required for exoplanet verification.

Galaxy Zoo blog Part 2: Obstacles for professional female astronomers

As I discussed in my last post, the “She’s an Astronomer” series by Karen Masters asks women astronomers (amateur and professional) the same questions in order to see how different women feel about the same issues.  Her recent summary post compiles all the answers to the question “What (if any) do you think are the main barriers to women’s involvement in Astronomy?”.  Previously, I talked about the obstacle of poor grade school enthusiasm for science as a barrier to women’s involvement.  This post will discuss some of the views of the professional astronomers.

There were varying opinions on barriers to women’s involvement depending on how long a person had been a professional astronomer.  Encouragingly, the younger members tended to express the view that strong discrimination against women in science is more or less gone.  Recent PhD recipients said that they haven’t experienced any discrimination and that they didn’t feel there have been any obstacles for them.  However, the older professional astronomers did not share this same view.  Professor Meg Urry said that as an undergraduate and a graduate student, she didn’t expect or notice any discrimination problems, but that as her career progressed she noticed “the huge pile of female talent that goes wasted every year”.

A masters student that was interviewed said that she had a male colleague tell her that now, it was easier to be a woman in astronomy than a man.  Professor Meg Urry talks about this issue in her interview, describing that ‘even 30 years ago she was being told that “as a woman, I would benefit (the implication was, unfairly) from affirmative action” and concludes “When people say this today, as they often do, I have to laugh. . I sure do wish it were true [..]”’.

Many issues for women in astronomy are related to the astronomy career path, which involves moving several times from post-doc to post-doc.  One astronomer points out that this isn’t a barrier specific to women, and that it is something men have to deal with as well.  Karen Masters says, “to remain in a career as a researcher is very difficult for both men and women, and I believe slightly more so for women”.  Masters also talks about the difficulty of having two academics in a relationship, saying that “because of the current gender imbalance, a higher proportion of female scientists than male scientists are married to other scientists”.   Having a family is also something of concern to some of the professional researchers, who say that it is extremely difficult to be a researcher and have a family at the same time.

The most senior professional astronomers interviewed said that there is still discrimination, but that it is usually subtle.  For example, Meg Urry said that “Fewer women are sought after as speakers, assistant professors, prize winners, than men of comparable ability”.  She also said that she has “seen talented women ignored, overlooked, and sometimes denigrated to the point where they abandon their dreams”.  Another professional astronomer, Pamela Gay, remembered the assumption that she must be a secretary if she was in the physics department.  She thinks that it will take a generation and maternity/health care reforms for real change to take place.

The article closes with a statement by Meg Urry about unconscious bias – discrimination done by all of us, male or female, whether we are aware of it or not.  She states that since we are raised in a society where men hold most leadership positions, women are often undervalued.

She gives some good advice that I will take to heart: that “every young woman or under-represented minority scientist should learn about this “unconscious bias” so that, should they ever find themselves getting discouraged or feeling inadequate as scientists, they will correct for the effect of a harmful environment and recognize their own considerable achievements and talents.”