SBGradMag Stony Brook's Graduate Student Magazine

Sophomore Ricky Chachra doesn’t mind missing class to attend this Provost’s Lecture; even though Dr. Flint had to leave early, she made sure to attend. Approximately sixteen men and fifty women turned out at the Student Activities Center auditorium on March 21st, 2006 to hear about a fifty million dollar problem facing Harvard University and several other universities today.

In honor of Women’s History Month, Stony Brook University’s Provost’s Lecture focused on the status of women in academia in the 21st century. Dr. Kathleen Flint, part of Stony Brook University’s science department and assistant director of the Reinvention Center, acknowledged that “as a scientist, women in academia has always been an issue for my field.”

Evelynn Hammonds, Ph.D., Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity at Harvard University opened the discussion. Her opening remarks reminded audience members of the “intellectual tsunami” caused by the now infamous speech given by Harvard University president Lawrence H. Summers, regarding possible “innate differences” between women and men.

Dr. Hammonds went on to describe some statistics regarding the status of women in academia at Harvard University. In 2003-2004 only four tenure offers were made to women faculty at Harvard, a drop from a high of 14 in 1999. Highlighting such inequity is the fact that there has never been a tenured female faculty member in the math department at Harvard University. Dr. Hammonds admitted that the university had taken previous efforts to remedy the situation however she felt as if those efforts were “inefficiently monitored.”

In response to such statistics Harvard University has established two university-wide task forces to address “different dimensions of the problem:” The Task Force on Women Faculty and The Task Force on Women in Science and Engineering. Harvard has pledged 50 million dollars toward these two efforts. Dr. Hammonds chairs the Task Force on Women Faculty; some issues the Task Force is looking into include expanded child daycare, monetary assistance for child care, maternity leave, and sexual harassment.

Abigail Stewart is the director of the ADVANCE project. Dr. Stewart’s research has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, a fact which she believes helps improve the “credibility” of the results. According to the University of Michigan website:

“ADVANCE is a five-year, grant funded project promoting institutional transformation in science and engineering fields. The goals of this program are to improve recruitment and retention of women faculty in science and engineering and to improve the institutional climate.”

ADVANCE was actually inspired by a similar program at Harvard University. Some of the issues ADVANCE is looking into include a generous family leave for both men and women and dual degree programs; the proposed changes are to benefit all faculty, hopefully creating “a structure that will last.” Dr. Stewart believes that the discrimination faced by women in academia today is largely the result of “implicit bias, not explicit practice.” This kind of discrimination has led to what Dr. Stewart terms an “accumulation of disadvantage” against women.

Professor Virginia Draper of Stony Brook University’s Writing and Rhetoric Program agreed with Dr. Stewart’s notion that “funding agencies, such as the N.S.F., need to pay for such things as childcare and family leave and that those requests should be written into grant proposals.” However, Professor Draper is optimistic: “I can see that it would take a while to develop a pool of qualified women to staff academic departments… the [current] numbers [of women in higher education] suggest that in the not too distant future, faculty at most institutions of higher education could be 50/50.”

By Allison Hoyt