[Womeninmedicine] statistics prize, math scores, and diversity in the lab

[Weisz, Ora Anna]

I've culled a few interesting tidbits from another listserv on women in science....seems like there are endless artcles and reports these days about how to increase the retention of women in science and medicine- I thought the last article in this list was the most provocative. Ora





Subject: Call for Nominations: 7th Annual Janet L Norwood Award

<http://ebiz1.exfoundry.com/members/response.asp?ID=9110618439100784>

For Outstanding Achievement By A Woman In The Statistical Sciences

The Section on Statistical Genetics and the Department of Biostatistics in the School of Public Health, University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) are pleased to request nominations for the Seventh Annual Janet L. Norwood Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Woman in the Statistical Sciences. The award will be conferred on Wed 9/17/2008. The award recipient will be invited to deliver a lecture at the UAB award ceremony, and will receive all expenses paid to deliver this lecture, a plaque, and a $5,000 prize.

Eligible individuals are women who have completed their terminal degree, have made outstanding contributions to the statistical sciences, and, if selected, are willing to deliver a lecture at the award ceremony. For additional details about the award, please feel invited to visit our website at http://www.soph.uab.edu/ssg/norwoodaward/aboutaward.

To nominate a candidate, send a full curriculum vitae accompanied by a letter of not more than two pages in length describing the nature of the candidate's contributions. Contributions may be in the area of development and evaluation of statistical methods, teaching of statistics, application of statistics, or any other activity that can arguably be said to have advanced the field of statistical science. Self-nominations are acceptable.

Please send nominations to:

David B. Allison, Ph.D.

Professor & Head Section on Statistical Genetics Department of Biostatistics, RPHB 327 University of Alabama at Birmingham

1665 University Boulevard

Birmingham, Alabama 35294-0022

Phone: (205) 975-9169

Fax: (205) 975-2541

Email: dallison at uab.edu

Deadline for receipt of nominations is Mon 6/30/2008. Electronic submissions of nominations are accepted and encouraged. The winner will be announced by Fri 7/4/2008. http://ebiz1.exfoundry.com/members/response.asp?ID=9110618439100785



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Subject: Girls' math scores

http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/05/3043n.htm

Today's News

Friday, May 30, 2008

Cultural Attitudes Affect Girls' Math Performance, Analysis Finds By LILA GUTERMAN

The debate over why girls do worse than boys on math tests is it their nature or their nurture?" has continued in the three years since Lawrence H. Summers, then president of Harvard University, provoked an uproar by coming down on the side of nature. He suggested that the under representation of women in science and engineering might reflect innate differences in mathematics ability. Now a new analysis finds that national culture, not innate ability, can account for some test differences.

Four scholars found that on math tests, the gap between girls and boys shrinks to nil in countries with greater parity between sexes, measured by factors such as economic activity. Their study appears in the new issue of Science.

The researchers, who hail from three universities in Illinois and one in Italy, compared the results of more than 276,000 15-year-olds in 40 countries who took a test in 2003 run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, called the Programme for International Student Assessment. On average, girls scored 2 percent lower than boys in mathematics.

But looking beyond the averages, the researchers found that the results varied by country. And when they compared the gaps in mathematics scores to various measures of gender inequality, they found a possible reason for those national variations. In the countries that had the greatest gender inequality, such as Turkey and Korea, girls tended to fare worse compared to boys. In countries with more equality, such as Norway, Sweden, and Iceland, the gender gap in mathematics test scores disappears. The United States ranked in the middle of the pack on both gender inequality and the mathematics-test-score gap.

In addition to economic activity, the gender-equality measures included women's education, female political participation, and responses to several survey questions, such as one asking whether respondents agree with the following statement: "When jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women."

Paola Sapienza, one of the authors, who is an associate professor of finance at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, said her team did not know whether gender inequality caused the gap in mathematics test scores" perhaps by undermining girls' self-confidence or by depriving them of female role models in science" or if the two were simply correlated. What is clear, Ms. Sapienza says, is that girls are not simply worse than boys in math. "The main lesson I take from this analysis is that the gender gap in mathematics in favor of boys is not a universal feature," she says.

Claudia Goldin, a professor of economics at Harvard, called the analysis a "particularly compelling" demonstration of that lesson. She and others have done similar work looking at math scores within the United States.



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Subject: Article from the NY Times: Diversity in the lab

May 15, 2008

Life¹s Work

Diversity Isn¹t Rocket Science, Is It?

By LISA BELKIN

BACK in the bad old days, the workplace was a battleground, where sexist jokes and assumptions were the norm.

Women were shut off from promotion by an old boys¹ network that favored its own. They went to meetings and were often the only women in the room.

All that has changed in the last three decades, except where it has not. In the worlds of science, engineering and technology, it seems, the past is still very much present.

³It¹s almost a time warp,² said Sylvia Ann Hewlett, the founder of the Center for Work-Life Policy, a nonprofit organization that studies women and work. ³All the predatory and demeaning and discriminatory stuff that went on in workplaces 20, 30 years ago is alive and well in these professions.²

That is the conclusion of the center¹s latest study, which will be published in the Harvard Business Review in June.

Based on data from 2,493 workers (1,493 women and 1,000 men) polled from March 2006 through October 2007 and hundreds more interviewed in focus groups, the report paints a portrait of a macho culture where women are very much outsiders, and where those who do enter are likely to eventually leave.

The study was conceived in response to the highly criticized assertion three years ago, by the then-president of Harvard, that women were not well represented in the science because they lacked what it took to excel there.

The purpose of the work-life center¹s survey was to measure the size of the gender gap and to decipher why women leave the science, engineering and technology professions in disproportionate numbers.

The problem isn¹t that women aren¹t making strides in education in the hard sciences. According to a National Science Foundation report in 2006, 46 percent of Ph.D. degrees in the biological sciences are awarded to women (compared with 31 percent two decades ago); 31 percent of the Ph.D. degrees in chemistry go to women, compared with 18 percent 20 years ago.

And, women enter science engineering and technology (known as the SET professions) in sizable numbers. In fact, 41 percent of workers on the earliest rungs of SET career ladder are women, the study found, with the highest representation in scientific and medical research (66 percent) and the lowest in engineering (21 percent).

They also do well at the start, with 75 percent of women age 25 to 29 being described as ³superb,² ³excellent² or ³outstanding² on their performance reviews, words used for 61 percent of men in the same age group.

An exodus occurs around age 35 to 40. Fifty-two percent drop out, the report warned, with some leaving for ³softer² jobs in the sciences human resources rather than lab bench work, for instance, and others for different work entirely. That is twice the rate of men in the SET industries, and higher than the attrition rate of women in law or investment banking.

The reasons pinpointed in the report are many, but they all have their roots in what the authors describe as a pervasive macho culture.

Engineers have their ³hard hat culture,² while biological and chemical scientists find themselves in the ³lab coat² culture and computer experts inhabit a ³geek culture.² What they all have in common is that they are ³at best unsupportive and at worst downright hostile to women,² the study said.

The 147-page report (which was sponsored by Alcoa, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Pfizer and Cisco) is filled with tales of sexual harassment (63 percent of women say they experienced harassment on the job); and dismissive attitudes of male colleagues (53 percent said in order to succeed in their careers they had to ³act like a man²); and a lack of mentors (51 percent of engineers say they lack one); and hours that suit men with wives at home but not working mothers (41 percent of technology workers says they need to be available ³24/7²).

Josephine, a computer programmer whose boss at a start-up a decade ago nicknamed her Finn, stands out among the accounts.

³It turned out to be really useful to allow some of my colleagues to imagine I was a man,² the worker is quoted as saying. The e-mail messages Finn received were strikingly different than those received by Josephine. Not only did they contain ³brutal locker room stuff, that was hard to take,² but also important information shared by colleagues who wanted to keep each other in the loop. Josephine got none of that, making the advantage of being a man in a male world quite clear.

Her advice? ³Get yourself a Finn,² Josephine said. ³He¹s as necessary today as he was in 1997. Back then I thought that Finn would outgrow his usefulness, that there would come a day when Josephine was in the know. It¹s sad, but that day hasn¹t happened.²

This portrait of a male-dominated culture comes as no surprise to Carol B. Muller, the chief executive and founder of MentorNet, an online network for women and minorities in engineering and science.

The reason the ³hard sciences² are ³so much worse than other fields,² she said, is multifaceted and rooted in the societal perception that women simply are not as good in math and science as men are.

This notion persists despite the dozens of studies that show the abilities of boys and girls are equal well into high school.

³Most people just don¹t look at a woman and see an engineer,² Ms. Muller said.

The result, she said has been a work environment that dismisses women. Female employees come up against ³the kind of culture that evolves when women are in the extreme minority,² she said. (Think ³Lord of the Flies.²) The ideal worker in this realm is ³the hacker who goes into his cubicle and doesn¹t emerge for a week, having not showered or eaten anything but pizza. Those people exist and they are seen as heroes.²

THERE is a new spotlight being pointed at these testosterone-soaked corners lately, a result of the fact that even in a faltering economy, the technology and science industries need workers.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that job opportunities in these fields will grow five times faster than in other industries. Demand for information technology workers, for instance, is projected to increase by 25 percent over the next 30 years, while the number of available workers is expected to shrink over the same period.

Wouldn¹t it make financial sense, the study concludes, for these employers to find a way to halt the exodus? And will that incentive be sufficient to transform a culture that has been resistant to calls for change?

A handful of companies are trying. The report highlights 14 pilot programs, many of them implemented by the report¹s sponsors, that are designed to retain and promote women.

At Cisco, for instance, where only 16 percent of employees are women, the company¹s Executive Talent Insertion Program aims to add about a dozen senior women to its management ranks within an 18-month period ending this year.

This would provide mentors and role models as well as alter the gender landscape. The program at Johnson & Johnson, called ³Crossing the Finish Line,² tutors women in leadership skills.

Reducing the current attrition rate by 25 percent would add 220,000 SET workers to the economy, Ms. Hewlett said.

And that just might be a figure that even the unshowered geek in the cubicle can respect. ³Cultures only change because they have to,² she said. ³Maybe it¹s finally time.²

E-mail: Belkin at nytimes.com



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Subject: Why aren't there more women in science and engineering? Controversial new research suggests: They just aren't interested.

By Elaine McArdle | May 18, 2008

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/05/18/the_freedom_to_say_no/?page=1

WHEN IT COMES to the huge and persistent gender gap in science and technology jobs, the finger of blame has pointed in many directions: sexist companies, boy-friendly science and math classes, differences in aptitude.

Women make up almost half of today's workforce, yet hold just a fraction of the jobs in certain high-earning, high-qualification fields. They constitute 20 percent of the nation's engineers, fewer than one-third of chemists, and only about a quarter of computer and math professionals.

Over the past decade and more, scores of conferences, studies, and government hearings have been directed at understanding the gap. It has stayed in the media spotlight thanks in part to the high-profile misstep of then-Harvard president Larry Summers, whose loose comment at a Harvard conference on the topic in 2005 ultimately cost him his job.

Now two new studies by economists and social scientists have reached a perhaps startling conclusion: An important part of the explanation for the gender gap, they are finding, are the preferences of women themselves. When it comes to certain math- and science-related jobs, substantial numbers of women - highly qualified for the work - stay out of those careers because they would simply rather do something else.

One study of information-technology workers found that women's own preferences are the single most important factor in that field's dramatic gender imbalance. Another study followed 5,000 mathematically gifted students and found that qualified women are significantly more likely to avoid physics and the other "hard" sciences in favor of work in medicine and biosciences.

It's important to note that these findings involve averages and do not apply to all women or men; indeed, there is wide variety within each gender. The researchers are not suggesting that sexism and cultural pressures on women don't play a role, and they don't yet know why women choose the way they do. One forthcoming paper in the Harvard Business Review, for instance, found that women often leave technical jobs because of rampant sexism in the workplace.

But if these researchers are right, then a certain amount of gender gap might be a natural artifact of a free society, where men and women finally can forge their own vocational paths. And understanding how individual choices shape the gender balance of some of the most important, financially rewarding careers will be critical in fashioning effective solutions for a problem that has vexed people for more than a generation.

A few years ago, Joshua Rosenbloom, an economist at the University of Kansas, became intrigued by a new campaign by the National Science Foundation to root out what it saw as pervasive gender discrimination in science and engineering. The agency was spending $19 million a year to encourage mentoring programs, gender-bias workshops, and cooperative work environments.

Rosenbloom had no quarrel with the goal of gender equity. But as he saw it, the federal government was spending all that money without any idea what would work, because there was no solid data on what caused the disparity between men and women in scientific fields.

To help answer the question, Rosenbloom surveyed hundreds of professionals in information technology, a career in which women are significantly underrepresented. He also surveyed hundreds in comparable careers more evenly balanced between men and women. The study examined work and family history, educational background, and vocational interests.

The results were striking. The lower numbers of women in IT careers weren't explained by work-family pressures, since the study found computer careers made no greater time demands than those in the control group. Ability wasn't the reason, since the women in both groups had substantial math backgrounds. There was, however, a significant difference in one area: what the men and women valued in their work.

Rosenbloom and his colleagues used a standard personality-inventory test to measure people's preferences for different kinds of work. In general, Rosenbloom's study found, men and women who enjoyed the explicit manipulation of tools or machines were more likely to choose IT careers - and it was mostly men who scored high in this area. Meanwhile, people who enjoyed working with others were less likely to choose IT careers. Women, on average, were more likely to score high in this arena.

Personal preference, Rosenbloom and his group concluded, was the single largest determinative factor in whether women went into IT. They calculated that preference accounted for about two-thirds of the gender imbalance in the field. The study was published in November in the Journal of Economic Psychology.

It may seem like a cliche - or rank sexism - to say women like to work with people, and men prefer to work with things. Rosenbloom acknowledges that, but says that whether due to socialization or "more basic differences," the genders on average demonstrate different vocational interests.

"It sounds like stereotypes," he said in an interview, "but these stereotypes have a germ of truth."

In the language of the social sciences, Rosenbloom found that the women were "self-selecting" out of IT careers. The concept of self-selection has long interested social scientists as an explanation for how groups sort themselves over time. Since human beings are heterogeneous, self-selection predicts that when offered a menu of options and freedom of choice, people will make diverse choices and sort themselves out in nonrandom ways. In other words, even given the same opportunities, not everybody will do the same thing - and there are measurable reasons that they will act differently from one another.

The concept of self-selection sets off alarms for many feminists. It seems to suggest that women themselves are responsible for the gender gap. It can also be an excuse for minimizing the role of social forces, including discrimination in the classroom and the workplace.

But self-selection has also emerged as the chief explanation in other recent studies of gender imbalance, including a long-term survey done by two Vanderbilt researchers, Camilla Persson Benbow and David Lubinski.

Starting more than 30 years ago, the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth began following nearly 2,000 mathematically gifted adolescents, boys and girls, tracking their education and careers in ensuing decades. (It has since been expanded to 5,000 participants, many from more recent graduating classes.) Both men and women in the study achieved advanced credentials in about the same numbers. But when it came to their career paths, there was a striking divergence.

Math-precocious men were much more likely to go into engineering or physical sciences than women. Math-precocious women, by contrast, were more likely to go into careers in medicine, biological sciences, humanities, and social sciences. Both sexes scored high on the math SAT, and the data showed the women weren't discouraged from certain career paths.

The survey data showed a notable disparity on one point: That men, relative to women, prefer to work with inorganic materials; women, in general, prefer to work with organic or living things. This gender disparity was apparent very early in life, and it continued to hold steady over the course of the participants' careers.

Benbow and Lubinski also found something else intriguing: Women who are mathematically gifted are more likely than men to have strong verbal abilities as well; men who excel in math, by contrast, don't do nearly as well in verbal skills. As a result, the career choices for math-precocious women are wider than for their male counterparts. They can become scientists, but can succeed just as well as lawyers or teachers. With this range of choice, their data show, highly qualified women may opt out of certain technical or scientific jobs simply because they can.

These studies looked at different slices of the working world, but agree that in a world in which men and women both have freedom of choice, they tend to choose differently.

They have a provocative echo in the conclusions of Susan Pinker, a psychologist and columnist for the Toronto Globe and Mail. In her controversial new book, "The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women, and the Real Gender Gap," Pinker gathers data from the journal Science and a variety of sources that show that in countries where women have the most freedom to choose their careers, the gender divide is the most pronounced.

The United States, Norway, Switzerland, Canada, and the United Kingdom, which offer women the most financial stability and legal protections in job choice, have the greatest gender split in careers. In countries with less economic opportunity, like the Philippines, Thailand, and Russia, she writes, the number of women in physics is as high as 30 to 35 percent, versus 5 percent in Canada, Japan, and Germany.

"It's the opposite of what we'd expect," says Pinker. "You'd think the more family-friendly policies, and richer the economy, the more women should behave like men, but it's the opposite. I think with economic opportunity comes choices, comes freedom."

If the gender gap in many fields has its roots in women's own preferences, that raises a new line of questions, including the most obvious: Why do women make these choices? Why do they prefer different kinds of work? And what does "freedom of choice" really mean in a world that is still structured very differently for men and women?

For example, the choice to drop out of high-paying finance careers appears to be driven by the longer hours required in those jobs, says University of Chicago economist Marianne Bertrand, who studied the career tracks of the school's MBA graduates. Women who want families eventually decide to walk away from the career, at least temporarily.

"I've gone from the glass ceiling to thinking, if these jobs weren't 70 hours a week, women might not need to take so much time off," she says.

Benbow and Lubinski, at Vanderbilt, found that high-achieving women often pick their careers based on the idea that they'll eventually take time off, and thus avoid fields in which that absence will exact a larger penalty. In humanities or philosophy, for instance, taking a year or two off won't affect one's skill set very much. But in quickly evolving technical fields, a similar sabbatical can be a huge career setback.

Beneath those structural questions, though, women still seem to make choices throughout their lives that are different from men's, and it is not yet clear why.

Rosenbloom, the economist behind the IT study, says little research has been done on how interests are formed. "We don't know the role of mentors or experience or socialization," he says.

To some sociologists and many feminists, the focus on self-selection is a troubling distraction from bigger questions of how society pushes girls and boys into different roles.

Rosalind Chait Barnett, at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis, says that boys and girls are not, at root, different enough for such clear sorting to be seen as a matter of "choice."

"The data is quite clear," she says. "On anything you point to, there is so much variation within each gender that you have to get rid of this idea that 'men are like this, women are like that.' "

Sorting through the various factors is extremely challenging, all the researchers agree, and the issue is as complex as the individuals making each career decision. These findings on self-selection only open new areas of inquiry. They do suggest, however, that if the hard-fought battle for gender equality has indeed brought America to a point where women have the freedom to choose their career paths, then the end result may be surprising - and an equal-opportunity workforce may look a lot less equal than some had imagined.

Elaine McArdle is a Cambridge writer. Her first book, "The Migraine Brain," coauthored with Harvard neurologist Dr. Carolyn Bernstein, will be published in September by Free Press.



© Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company


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