SU receives $3.4 million federal grant to benefit women in sciences
Mollie Manier has applied to two professorial positions in the biology department at Syracuse University and at many others institutions, such as the University of Southern California and Lehigh University. Her ideal career is one in which she could teach undergraduate students and continue to pursue research in biology.
But a full-time job in the sciences is easier said than done for Manier, a mother of a 9-year-old girl and an 8-year-old boy and a post-doctorate researcher on evolution and sexual selection at SU.
‘Work is what I do for me,’ Manier said. She said there is a flaw in the system — a lack of support for women in academics.
SU, currently below the national average for the number of female faculty members, hopes to pull in more female faculty members in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
The university will receive a five-year $3.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation to figure out how to attract and retain more female professors in the fields of mathematics and science, according to an SU news release Tuesday. Although the grant lasts five years, SU has committed to continuing the initiative for an extra five years to achieve change at the university.
SU was one of seven universities across the country to win the award, which is funded by the NSF’s 2010 ADVANCE competition. NSF has given out a total of 50 such grants to universities across the country since the program’s start in 2001.
The grant will focus on STEM fields — science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The project, ‘The Inclusive Connective Corridor: Social Networks and the ADVANCEment of Women STEM Faculty,’ aims to increase women representation in STEM fields at SU. The STEM areas are in 12 departments across the College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Information Studies and the L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Computer Science.
Despite the range of the STEM fields across the three schools, women make up a small portion of its faculty. Nearly 21 percent of SU’s STEM faculty is women, below the national average of 33 percent.
‘The recruitment, retention and advancement of women in these fields are critical priorities, not only for higher education but for the nation as a whole,’ Chancellor Nancy Cantor said in a written statement released Tuesday.
Lacking women in fields like science discourages girls from pursuing it as a career, Manier said. Despite few SU female science faculty members, there are many female undergraduate students pursuing science. There are 8,015 female undergraduate students and 6,186 male undergraduate students at SU enrolled for fall 2010, according to SU’s Office of Institutional Research and Assessment. Women made up 361 members of the full-time faculty at SU for the 2010-11 year out of the total 981 faculty members at the university.
Some female students may feel more comfortable around female faculty, Manier said. More female professors could encourage girls to pursue graduate school, she said. Many girls fall out of the track to becoming a professor because long hours, research and a tough job market are not easy to combine with running a household.
The grant ‘will hopefully increase the diversity in a department really lacking in role models for graduates and undergraduates,’ she said.
But Manier said she and the other women in her lab were confused as to how the grant would be put into effect because searching for only women would be discriminatory during the hiring process.
To overcome the underrepresentation of women across the STEM fields at SU, it will take profound teamwork from university faculty leaders from across the sciences, engineering, the Martin J. Whitman School of Management and the iSchool, Cantor said.
There is a core team of faculty members leading the research and execution of project initiatives funded by the grant. It includes Karin Ruhlandt-Senge, chair of the chemistry department; Jeffrey Stanton, associate dean for research and doctoral programs; Pamela Brandes, an associate professor of management in Whitman; and Shobha Bhatia, a professor of civil and environmental engineering in L.C. Smith. Cantor is the principal investigator for the NSF grant.
The core team has four project initiatives to help with the goal of increasing the presence of female faculty members in STEM fields at SU. The initiatives include a recruiting program that comprises women with disabilities and women of color; a plan that supports leadership development for all faculty members; a networking initiative that relates female faculty to one another, possible mentors and other resources on campus; and a corridor scheme providing professional development and opportunities for affiliation with business.
The core team will investigate methods to increase the number of women in the STEM fields through promotion and hiring. They will also look at search committees and settle on other ways to enhance recruiting women with disabilities to faculty positions in STEM fields.
In the program’s second year, there will be a Chancellor Visiting Assistant Professorship that will be given to a female candidate in STEM for one year to help her start her career. The professorship would be funded by the hiring department and the Chancellor’s Office, and it would include mentoring and coaching for the STEM candidate.
The research team will also look at factors that create obstacles to faculty success, focusing on challenges specific to female faculty members and identifying how to create a wide-ranging university environment.
Brandes, associate professor of management in Whitman and core research and implementation team member, said the grant can help both men and women, in addition to proving what obstacles are holding women back from STEM fields.
‘We just want to be sure we’re using all of our capital effectively for the STEM faculty,’ she said.
Other universities that have obtained the grant have been successful in increasing the number of women in faculty, said Bhatia, a member of the core research and implementation team and an engineering professor. Bhatia said she expects the grant will do the same for SU.
Bhatia, who has been working on promoting women in science and engineering through the Women in Science and Engineering program for 13 years, said she was very excited to receive the grant to help increase programming and initiatives focusing on women.
When Stanton, a member of the core research and implementation team and an associate dean for research and doctoral programs in the iSchool, was at Dartmouth College for his undergraduate degree in computer science in the early 1980s, the science and mathematics fields lacked gender diversity, he said.
‘It was pretty bad, it was almost all men. I think I had one woman mathematics professor,’ Stanton said.
Stanton was approached to help write the grant in fall 2009. Stanton has previously done research on diversity and gender equality. He is now leading the evaluation team and working with an external consulting firm to measure how successful initiatives are.
Hiring is an ongoing process, but implementing the grant for hiring will not begin until next year, Stanton said. The research and implementation team is currently getting feedback from staff on improving diversity and applying the research when it begins the hiring process next school year, Stanton said.
Diversity in general is important, Stanton said, but because SU has a relatively low number of women in faculty positions, it is also important to be adding different perspectives to the classroom.
He said: ‘The quality of education gets better the more we have faculty who are representative of the world at large.’
