April 9, 2007
Judith taught organic chemistry at the University of California-Berkeley and told some of her close friends that she suspected male members of her department were being paid substantially more than she was, despite her seniority of 10 years. When she examined public records, the gap proved even steeper than she initially thought. As author Ellen Daniell retells in Every Other Thursday, a book about women in science, “The discrepancy had been initiated at the time she was hired, and the salary gap had widened over the subsequent fifteen years. She wrongly assumed that administrative oversight of salaries and pay scales assured equality.” This all happened during a period where Judith was awarded several honors for her work, including her election to the National Academy of Sciences.
Judith’s story isn’t unique (Daniell kept her last name confidential to protect her privacy). The professional sciences continue to be overwhelmingly male. According to the National Science Foundation, women made up 40 percent of science and engineering graduate students in 2004 and earned 44 percent of science and engineering graduate degrees. But women make up less than 30 percent of science and engineering faculty at research universities. Women are just 7.6 percent of tenured professors in chemistry and 14.8 of tenured professors in the biological sciences, according to a 2004 study.
Although tenure itself has been under fire lately, the consensus is that tenure is generally good for the purposes of academic freedom, but the process of achieving it is often full of bias against less traditional academics, including women, people of color, and those focused on interdisciplinary research.
Mary Ann Mason is dean of the graduate division at Berkeley and has done some research about why women don’t show up in the faculty ranks at universities despite the fact that they have gained parity in graduate programs.
As reported in UCBerkleyNews, Mason’s research shows that upon beginning a Ph.D. program, 46 percent of female students reported wanting to pursue a career at a research university and about 27 percent preferred a teaching university. “But after the first year of doctoral studies, many had changed their minds: Only 31 percent of women remained interested in a research career.” Mason attributes this change to the tough demands of a research career in the physical sciences. Women in academia with children report putting in more than 100 hours of combined work and family activities a week, 10 hours more than their male counterparts.