U.S. women burdened by bias, not inability, in the sciences

American women in science and engineering are hindered not by lack of ability but by bias and "outmoded institutional structures" in academia, an expert panel said in a report Monday.

The panel, convened by the National Academy of Sciences, said that in an era of global competition the United States could not afford "such underuse of precious human capital."

Among other steps, the report recommends that universities alter procedures for hiring and evaluation, change typical timetables for tenure and promotion, and provide more support for working parents.

"Unless a deeper talent pool is tapped, it will be difficult for our country to maintain our competitiveness in science and engineering," the panel's chairwoman, Donna Shalala, said at a news conference at which the report was made public.

Shalala, a former secretary of health and human services who is now president of the University of Miami, said part of the problem was insufficient effort on the part of college and university administrators. "Many of us spend more energy enforcing the law on our sports teams than we have in our academic halls," she said.

The panel dismissed the idea, notably advanced last year by Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, that the relative dearth of women in the upper ranks of science might be the result of "innate" intellectual deficiencies, particularly in mathematics.

If there are any cognitive differences, the report says, they are small and irrelevant. In any event, the much-studied gender gap in math performance has all but disappeared as more and more girls enroll in demanding classes. Even among very high achievers, the gap is narrowing, the panelists said.

A spokesman for Summers said he was out of the country and could not be reached for comment.

Nor is the problem a lack of women in the academic pipeline, the report says. Though women leave science and engineering more often than men "at every educational transition" from high school through college professorships, the number of women studying science and engineering has sharply increased at all levels.

For 30 years, the report says, women have earned at least 30 percent of the nation's doctorates in social and behavioral sciences, and at least 20 percent of the doctorates in life sciences. Yet they appear among full professors in those fields at less than half those levels. Women from minorities are "virtually absent," it adds.

The report also dismissed other commonly held beliefs that women are uncompetitive or less productive, that they take too much time off for their families, and so on. Their real problems, it says, are unconscious but pervasive bias, "arbitrary and subjective" evaluation processes, and a work environment in which "anyone lacking the work and family support traditionally provided by a 'wife' is at a serious disadvantage."

Along with Shalala, the panel included Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard who has long challenged the "innate differences" view, and Ruth Simmons, president of Brown University, who established a widely praised program for aspiring engineers when she was president of the all-female Smith College.

The 18-member panel had only one man: Robert Birgeneau, chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. But Shalala noted that the National Academy of Sciences committee that reviewed the report had 10 men.

"Nothing was a foregone conclusion," she said, adding that the committee was surprised at the strength of evidence supporting the report's conclusions. In an interview, Simmons said: "The data don't lie. There are lots of arguments one could have mounted 30 years ago, but 30 years later we have incontrovertible data that women do have the ability to do science and engineering at a very high level."

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