Bulletin of the American Physical Society
2007 APS April Meeting
Volume 52, Number 3
Saturday–Tuesday, April 14–17, 2007; Jacksonville, Florida
Session K6: Enhancing the Physics Enterprise through Gender Equity |
Hide Abstracts |
Sponsoring Units: CSWP Chair: Bradley Keister, National Science Foundation Room: Hyatt Regency Jacksonville Riverfront Grand 7 |
Sunday, April 15, 2007 1:15PM - 1:51PM |
K6.00001: Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering Invited Speaker: Review of the report by the National Academies, with a focus on action strategies in the physical sciences. Women face barriers to hiring and promotion in research universities in many fields of science and engineering; a situation that deprives the United States of an important source of talent as the country faces increasingly stiff global competition in higher education, science and technology, and the marketplace. Eliminating gender bias in universities requires immediate, overarching reform and decisive action by university administrators, professional societies, government agencies, and Congress. Forty years ago, women made up only 3 percent of America's scientific and technical workers, but by 2003 they accounted for nearly one-fifth. In addition, women have earned more than half of the bachelor's degrees awarded in science and engineering since 2000. However, their representation on university and college faculties fails to reflect these gains. Among science and engineering Ph.D.s, four times more men than women hold full-time faculty positions. And minority women with doctorates are less likely than white women or men of any racial or ethnic group to be in tenure positions. The report urges higher education organizations and professional societies to form collaborative, self-monitoring body that would recommend standards for faculty recruitment, retention, and promotion; collect data; and track compliance across institutions. A ``report card'' template is provided in the report. To read the report online, add a comment, or purchase hard copy, go to: http://www.engineeringpathway.com/ep/learning\_resource/summary/index.jhtml?id=94A4929D-F1B2-432E-8167-63335569CB4E. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 15, 2007 1:51PM - 2:27PM |
K6.00002: Recruit and ADVANCE Invited Speaker: Beginning in 2001, the National Science Foundation launched the ADVANCE Initiative, which has now awarded more than \$70 million to some thirty institutions for transformations to advance women. Results of studies on how to attract and retain women students and faculty underpinned our ADVANCE Institutional Transformation grant funded by the NSF for \$3.7 million for five years, beginning in 2001. As co-principal investigator on this grant, I insured that this research informed the five major threads of the grant: \newline \newline 1) Four termed ADVANCE professors to mentor junior women faculty in each college; \newline 2) Collection of MIT-Report-like data indicators to assess whether advancement of women really occurs during and after the institutional transformation undertaken through ADVANCE; \newline 3) Family-friendly policies and practices to stop the tenure clock and provide active service, modified duties, lactation stations and day care; \newline 4) Mini-retreats to facilitate access for tenure-track women faculty to male decision-makers and administrators for informal conversations and discussion on topics important to women faculty; \newline 5) Removal of subtle gender, racial, and other biases in promotion and tenure. \newline \newline The dynamic changes resulting from the grant in quality of mentoring, new understanding of promotion and tenure, numbers of women retained and given endowed chairs, and emergence of new family friendly policies gave me hope for genuine diversification of leadership in science and technology. As the grant funding ends, the absence of NSF prestige and monitoring, coupled with a change in academic leadership at the top, provide new challenges for institutionalization, recruitment, and advancement of women into leadership positions in science and engineering. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, April 15, 2007 2:27PM - 3:03PM |
K6.00003: Best Practices for Recruiting and Retaining Women in Physics. Invited Speaker: Universities make a tremendous investment in faculty, often recruiting and hiring them at great expense. These faculty have highly specialized talents that are needlessly wasted when faculty spend time struggling in a bad environment, or leaving the university. Therefore, there is a great incentive to improve the working environment for female faculty. This talk will highlight specific strategies that departments can use to recruit and retain the best faculty, including female faculty. These strategies have been developed over several years of site visits by the APS Committee on the Status of Women in Physics to physics departments around the US. The mark of a successful departmental climate for women is one in which the enthusiasm and ambition of the women undergraduates is transformed smoothly into successful and ambitious women graduate students, with dynamic, forging-ahead female postdocs, energetic junior women faculty, and productive, happy, senior women faculty who all serve as positive role models. [Preview Abstract] |
Follow Us |
Engage
Become an APS Member |
My APS
Renew Membership |
Information for |
About APSThe American Physical Society (APS) is a non-profit membership organization working to advance the knowledge of physics. |
© 2024 American Physical Society
| All rights reserved | Terms of Use
| Contact Us
Headquarters
1 Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740-3844
(301) 209-3200
Editorial Office
100 Motor Pkwy, Suite 110, Hauppauge, NY 11788
(631) 591-4000
Office of Public Affairs
529 14th St NW, Suite 1050, Washington, D.C. 20045-2001
(202) 662-8700