Researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, TN, have used artificial intelligence (AI) technology to analyze how radiologists read mammograms, according to research published in the July issue of the Journal of Medical Imaging….
Darwin, Newton, Einstein. When scientists reach a certain level of fame, first names need not apply. That’s especially true if the scientist is a man, according to a new study. And it doesn’t just go for scientists: Politicians, athletes, and other high-profile figures are more likely to be referred to by their last names alone if they’re a man.
Some scholars have questioned academe’s reliance on letters of recommendation, saying they’re onerous for the professors writing them or speak more about connections to “big-name” scholars than substance, or both.
A recent study explores another concern about letters of recommendation: whether they’re biased against the women they’re supposed to help. The short answer is yes.
The longer answer — and the study’s obvious takeaway for recommendation-letter writers and readers — is that letters about women include more doubt-raising phrases than those about men, and that even one such phrase can make a difference in a job search.
I landed my dream job: a tenure-track position at a primarily undergraduate institution near my hometown where I would develop a new neuroscience major. I entered that position the way one enters a marriage: expecting it to last forever, assuming I would give it everything I had, hoping that—while it would not always be easy—it would be worth it. Soon, though, something seemed amiss. It felt kind of like sexism—but not exactly. Whatever it was, I experienced it from both women and men, from the department chair to the administrative assistant. It was only after many years and a career upheaval that I learned there was a legal term to describe it.
June 11, 2018
Glioblastoma multiforme, a type of brain tumor, is one of the most difficult-to-treat cancers. Only a handful of drugs are approved to treat glioblastoma, and the median life expectancy for patients diagnosed with the disease is less than 15 months…
Women of color earn only 67 cents on the dollar compared with white men in the higher-education work force, according to a recently released research brief from the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, or CUPA-HR.
Specifically, the brief found that women of color are underrepresented in academe, compared with their representation in the U.S. population at large — especially in more lucrative faculty, professional, and administrative roles, versus lower-paying staff positions. And in three out of four job types (professional, staff, and faculty) women of color are paid less than white men, men of color, and white women.
June 8, 2018
The State Department has selected Rice University bioengineer and global health pioneer Rebecca Richards-Kortum to serve as a U.S. science envoy. She is one of five science envoys announced today and one of only 23 scientists ever selected for this prestigious position…
Cynthia Reinhart-King, Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Engineering and professor of biomedical engineering, is one of 18 early-career leaders selected by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine to serve on New Voices in Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, a pilot initiative to engage a diverse network of emerging leaders in SEM fields across the United States…
Many research institutions have made efforts to increase diversity among their administrations, faculty and staff members and student bodies. But research shows there is work to be done — and that the pay-off is immense. A 2017 study of 40 US public universities, for example, found that black, Hispanic and female science-faculty members continue to be under-represented relative to the US population (D. Li and C. Koedel Educ. Res. 46, 343–354; 2017).
Besides honing their strategies to draw more women and people of ethnic-minority groups, some organizations are also expanding opportunities for people from economically disadvantaged areas and those with physical disabilities, as well as trying to better represent people of all sexual orientations and gender identities.
Nature spoke to six people on the front lines of diversity efforts for insights into what works.
In today’s season of #MeToo, Dreamers, Black Lives Matter movements, and radical-right backlash, colleges are adding chief diversity officers to the list of essential employees. However, hiring a skilled diversity professional is just the first step. To be most effective, chancellors, presidents, and provosts must join with diversity officers to build campus environments where equity, inclusion, and diversity become a part of everyday campus life. Otherwise, they are only setting up their chief diversity officers — and their institutions — for failure.
I hope the following strategies will help college leaders better position their diversity officers for success:
Go first. It’s unreasonable to hold others accountable for diversity when your own staffers look just like you. So if you want more diversity on your campus, start by diversifying your own staff at the highest levels and treating its members with respect. If you do that, others are more likely to follow, and your campus will be better for it.
Compression therapy is a standard form of treatment for patients who suffer from venous ulcers and other conditions in which veins struggle to return blood from the lower extremities. Compression stockings and bandages, wrapped tightly around the affected limb, can help to stimulate blood flow. But there is currently no clear way to gauge whether a bandage is applying an optimal pressure for a given condition…
Glioblastoma multiforme, a type of brain tumor, is one of the most difficult-to-treat cancers. Only a handful of drugs are approved to treat glioblastoma, and the median life expectancy for patients diagnosed with the disease is less than 15 months…
Take a look at the two orange dots below. Which one is bigger? If you’re like most people, you can’t help but see the orange dot on the right as larger. However, when the blue dots disappear, removing the “context,” it’s clear that the orange dots are the same size. This is known as the Ebbinghaus illusion, and it illustrates a fundamental principle of our psychology: context matters. This is true for judgments of all kinds, ranging from how we see the world to how we make choices in our everyday lives.
Imagine that it’s the late afternoon and you’re craving a snack. You reach into your stash of snacks and pull out two options: a granola bar and a chocolate bar. How do you decide which snack to have? The granola is healthier than the chocolate, but the chocolate is tastier. Now imagine that instead of just these two snacks, you have a third: a gross but extremely healthy protein bar. Rationally, the protein bar shouldn’t affect how you feel about the two original options, and yet it makes the granola bar more attractive, because the granola bar now seems like a compromise on both health and taste. This well-documented shifting-of-preference phenomenon is known as the decoy effect.
Martine LaBerge, chair of the Department of Bioengineering, received the SEMDA Spotlight Award recognizing her contributions to the development of the Southeastern medical device community. The award came from the Southeastern Medical Device Association, a non-profit trade association that aims to make the Southeast a world-class region for medical technology, device and diagnostic companies…
One morning in February 1934, the police showed up at J. Robert Oppenheimer’s home in Berkeley, California, to ask why he had left his date in a car by herself all night. Oppenheimer explained that he had gone for a stroll, got lost in his thoughts and walked home, forgetting his car and companion.
Newspapers reporting this story for Valentine’s Day revelled in tales of the absent-minded professor, an archetype that most of us recognize. Brilliant, but short on social graces, such thinkers are assumed to be too busy pondering the deepest questions of the Universe to be bothered with the quotidian.
The Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, asked a judge on 11 May to dismiss portions of three gender-discrimination lawsuits filed by senior female scientists there in July 2017. To prove their cases, the plaintiffs are seeking to compel the Salk — a private research institution — to disclose information about how funds and laboratory space are allocated, as well as about complaints concerning sexual harassment and the unfair treatment of women.
Esteban Burchard is Latino. He grew up in poverty, raised by a single mother, and has faced discrimination all of his life. He is now a world-renowned researcher and tenured professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). His “underdog story” reads like so many others told about scientists from underrepresented backgrounds. However, these narratives have become stale, overused and devoid of important context and depth.
Aileen Rizo was training math teachers in the public schools in Fresno, Calif., when she discovered that her male colleagues with comparable jobs were being paid significantly more.
She was told there was a justifiable reason: Employees’ pay was based on their salaries at previous jobs, and she had been paid less than they had earlier in their careers.
For years, companies, universities and nonprofits have researched the reasons why women are less likely to enter STEM fields — and why, once they enter, they face challenges that frequently push them out. In prior research, we at the Center for Talent Innovation (CTI) found that women leave STEM fields in droves: 52% of highly qualified women working for science, technology, or engineering companies leave their jobs. We, and others, have found that the cultures surrounding women in STEM have been shown, time and again, to be particularly challenging.
“Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.” – Henry Ford
As has been articulated by many, team performance transcends individual strength. Certainly, this is the case for biomedical research, especially in the modern era. Team science draws together novel ideas and approaches, undergirding the value of workforce diversity for solving complex health challenges. Collaborations—across sectors and organizations—extend the concept even further. Such alliances are essential for achieving lasting health and economic impact from biomedical research, and for sustaining scientific workforce diversity, the engine that drives innovation from discovery to application.
A team of Clemson researchers is using a $398,263 award from the National Science Foundation’s Broadening Participation in Engineering program to examine factors that both encourage and discourage Black students from pursuing education in engineering fields. Researchers will also examine how different academic pathways in engineering vary by gender and institution type for Black students.
“Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.” – Henry Ford
As has been articulated by many, team performance transcends individual strength. Certainly, this is the case for biomedical research, especially in the modern era. Team science draws together novel ideas and approaches, undergirding the value of workforce diversity for solving complex health challenges. Collaborations—across sectors and organizations—extend the concept even further. Such alliances are essential for achieving lasting health and economic impact from biomedical research, and for sustaining scientific workforce diversity, the engine that drives innovation from discovery to application.
Leaders today hear a lot about the importance of having good networks. For example, firms with better-connected CEOs can obtain cheaper financing, and firms with well-connected board directors see better performance. We wanted to explore whether the diversity of CEOs’ networks might affect their firms.
Our study, published in the Journal of Corporate Finance, found that CEOs with strong connections to people of different demographic backgrounds and skill sets create higher firm value. We also found that this greater firm value comes from better corporate innovations and successful diversified M&As. Our work suggests that the diversity of leaders’ social networks is a key ingredient in how they grow their companies.
Dr. Coil, an astrophysicist at the University of California in San Diego, remembers the reaction as being mixed. While the women on the panel generally liked the female applicant’s proposal, one white man called it “too ambitious.” The woman didn’t get the funding.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) in Alexandria, Virginia, hopes that its new policy on sexual harassment will spur universities to deal more aggressively with the pervasive problem. But the additional reporting requirements, which will be officially published Monday in the Federal Register, are far from a definitive statement about how NSF plans to deal with this complex and sensitive subject.
The carefully worded notice, for example, doesn’t address whether a scientist found guilty of sexual harassment should automatically be removed from a grant. And it would not require universities to tell NSF when they launch investigations into allegations of harassment.
March 1, 2018
A key tenet of modern feminism is that women will have achieved equity only when they fill at least 50% of the positions once filled by men. In some fields, women have already surpassed that target—now comprising, for example, 50.7% of new American medical students, up from just 9% in 1965, and 80% of veterinary students. But the needle has hardly moved in many STEM fields—such as the physical sciences, technology, engineering and math, in which barely 20% of the students are female.
In a seminar for teaching assistants, one male and one female TA stand up; the professor in charge tells the room that the male TA will get more respect from students. A woman talks to her undergraduate adviser about her desire for a PhD in physics; he replies, “You know physics is hard. Are you sure you want to try to do that?” A physics major asks a senior male professor for advice on getting into a good doctoral program; he suggests that she flirt more at conferences. In his letters of recommendation for students applying to graduate school, a professor consistently describes his male students as “brilliant” and “outstanding” while praising the women for being “conscientious” and “hardworking”; his male students are accepted to more competitive doctoral programs.
When it comes to gender diversity, it’s hard to compete with the Nordics.
The region is home to the world’s three most gender-equal nations: Iceland, Norway and Finland, according to the World Economic Forum. (Sweden places 5th out of 144 while the U.S. ranks 49th.) So Nordic findings in how gender equality affects areas such as corporate life and investing may offer a glimpse of things to come for other corners of the globe.
With that in mind, the region’s biggest bank, Nordea, says a key contribution that women make to the companies they run is stable returns.
International Women’s Day, on March 8, is a global celebration of the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. It’s also an annual call to action on gender parity.
In light of this, what does the future look like for women in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine, or STEMM for short?
After all, quite a lot is riding on the answer. Our ability to address a wide range of current and future challenges — in climate, resource sustainability, food security, and health to name a few — will require advances in STEMM fields, as well as the insight and strategies to effectively use that new knowledge.
Kathryn Clancy has spent years studying the many ways sexual harassment pervades science, from university research labs to field biology sites. This week, she’s taking those findings to Congress.
The University of Illinois anthropology professor has found that harassment against women — and in particular, women of color — runs rampant in the space sciences. She’s surveyed researchers about the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and assault during scientific field work. She’s called out universities — which she says haven’t done enough to create change in research labs — to her thousands of Twitter followers.
Abstract
This study examined gender differences in entrepreneurship by faculty at a major U.S. research university using data from the Stanford Office of Technology Licensing from 2000-2014 and relevant public data. Differences in participation by men and women faculty in reporting inventions were observed based on the total number of invention disclosures and the number of faculty who disclosed during the study period. As demonstrated through invention disclosures, women faculty increasingly engaged in offering their discoveries for possible commercial development to benefit the public. However, they remain much less likely than their men counterparts to be involved with start-up companies and in leadership roles among companies licensing university-generated intellectual property. Universities can track these activities through their licensing offices to devise strategies that encourage and facilitate the engagement of women faculty with technology transfer and formation of new companies.
Keywords: gender analysis, invention disclosures, companies founded by stanford University, stanford university, technology licensing, 2000-2014
Women only make up 24% of the computing workforce – and that number is declining. In fact, four out of ten women are leaving STEM careers despite engineering and computer science jobs being some of the fastest growing and highest paying around the world.
With computer science and engineering fields having the highest return on investment compared to any other field of study, these jobs play an important role in the future of women and our world. Not only will bringing more women into these jobs stimulate innovation but it’s one of the best ways to help women and girls break the cycle of poverty in developing nations in regions like Southeast Asia.
As NIH Chief Officer for Scientific Workforce Diversity, my main goal is to promote scientific workforce diversity as a means to institutional excellence as I have described in previous blogs. To accomplish this, I must maintain a pulse on what is happening at NIH, in our own labs, as well as at NIH-funded institutions around the country. For academia in particular, what do we see when we track the demographics across the career path from training to independent faculty positions?
What we see is promising, but only partial success. Indeed, we have enhanced the diversity among biomedical research trainees considerably (strengthened the STEM pipeline), but with little impact further up the career ladder. Diversifying academic faculty and leadership remains an unsolved challenge and a missed opportunity for bringing diverse thought and experience to biomedical research. Doing so will not only assure that our research priorities address the full range of biomedical research challenges facing our nation, but it will also catalyze excellence in research quality. It is essential that we establish a diverse population of faculty and leaders as role models for the next generation of scientists.
For some women, enrolling in an engineering course is like running a psychological gauntlet. If they dodge overt problems like sexual harassment, sexist jokes, or poor treatment from professors, they often still have to evade subtler obstacles like the implicit tendency to see engineering as a male discipline. It’s no wonder women in the U.S. hold just 13 to 22 percent of the doctorates in engineering, compared to an already-low 33 percent in the sciences as a whole.
As I’ve noted in previous blogs and elsewhere, I see enhancing workforce diversity as an opportunity and an imperative for maintaining our nation’s biomedical research preeminence in an increasingly competitive global environment. But to grasp this opportunity, we as a biomedical community face a set of cross-cutting challenges ripe for innovative, evidence-based solutions. In an article I co-authored with NIH Director Francis Collins, we proposed that sustainability of efforts to enhance diversity in the scientific workforce will unleash boundless opportunities to benefit the full ecosystem of biomedical research spanning discovery to application. In this blog, I expand on how we might address sustainability with the goal of accelerating diversity and inclusion in the scientific workforce. But let me first draw your attention to some relevant facts regarding NIH’s diversity efforts in the training phase of the biomedical research career path, and how the data allows us to set the stage for sustainable and rapid change.
MARCH 8th was International Women’s Day. That seemed to Elsevier, an academic publisher, a good occasion to publish a report looking at the numbers and performance of female scientists around the world. The report, “Gender in the Global Research Landscape”, analysed the authorship of more than 62m peer-reviewed papers published in 27 subject areas over the past 20 years, in 11 mostly rich countries and in the European Union as a whole. The papers and their citations are indexed in Scopus, a database that is run by Elsevier.
Over years of working in government and in academia, I have been able to study the practical ways in which the most effective male leaders value, praise, and advance women every day in their professional lives. Here are the five outstanding techniques I have seen deployed:
1. Always give a woman credit when she deserves it. In any meeting or discussion involving men and women, whenever a man makes a point ask yourself if he is repeating something a woman has already said. If so, simply say, “Yes, that’s the point that Jennifer made earlier; it’s an important contribution.” Or, “Thanks for bringing Jennifer’s point back to our attention.”
A generation has been lost in the journey towards race equality in terms of income. The income gap between blacks and whites has been stuck since 1980. Why? Dozens of factors count, of course, but one in particular is worth further exploration: the underrepresentation of black students in elite colleges. As I noted in a previous blog, this could help to explain why blacks earn less than whites, even in the same occupation and with the same level of education.
