Twenty years of work by myself and Mary Ann Mason confirms Pollack’s worry that things don’t look good for women in science. The threshold problem is one Pollack discusses in only a sentence or two: the impact of children.

Motherhood is a much bigger hurdle to a career in science than Pollack acknowledges. Mary Ann Mason’s important work shows that only one-third of women who enter the tenure track without children ever have them — and the percentage of women in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) who do so is even smaller.

Pollack quotes one woman scientist discounting the impact of motherhood on the grounds that “being an academic provides a female scientist with more flexibility than most other professions.” But many women are abruptly pushed out of science careers the minute they have children. Young research scientists often are told by the principal investigators they work for that they will be fired unless they return to work within a few weeks after the birth of their children. Note that this is illegal. Title IX requires that universities that offer temporary disability leave to anyone on campus must offer maternity leave, on the same terms, to graduate students and post-docs, as explained in a forthcoming article in the NYU Review of Law and Social Change by Mary Ann Mason and Jaclyn Younger.

Another part of the motherhood problem is discrimination, pure and simple. Studies document that discrimination against mothers is often strong and remarkably open. Recently I completed a study including interviews of 60 women scientists of color. One recalled an incident in which a colleague was told to go home and have more babies. An Asian-American remarked, “If you had a full-blown career, that’s inconsistent with being a mother. I certainly feel that sentiment.” Said a third, “I feel like people think that Asian women, they are caring and then they will give up their professions for their children.”

Much of the gender bias, as Pollack recognizes, has nothing to do with motherhood. In the interviews, we described the four basic patterns of gender bias and asked whether they sounded familiar. “Every syllable,” responded one woman. Another, upon hearing the patterns described, burst into tears.

My study highlights the “slow drumbeat of being underappreciated, feeling uncomfortable and encountering roadblocks across the path to success,” to quote Meg Urry, the astrophysicist interviewed by Pollack. Striking, in particular, was the isolation. “This has been a very lonely life,” said one scientist. Another reported “feeling inadequate, some depression” because “you really don’t have the support you need.” The most striking story was of an Asian American whose department chair put up on the blackboard a diagram with three circles depicting the interrelations within the department. She was way out, isolated, on the extreme edge. “I said, ‘You know, if I was a little bit to the right, I’d be out of the department,’” she quipped. But, she admitted, “It gets to me. It’s hurtful.”

Those interviewed also recognized Prove-It-Again! bias, which requires women to provide more evidence of competence than men in order to be seen as equally competent. One scientist had her success in an experiment discounted by male colleagues who attributed her success to the fact she was using their protocol, a pattern known as attribution bias. Another, a Latina, recounted when audience members disrespectfully interrupted her while she was in the middle of a presentation, assuming she had made a mistake she had not made. A third reported a pattern called leniency bias: “You know that the rule only applies to the people it applies to,” observed one woman. “Generally speaking, women–and women of color–would be strictly held to rules and then some.”

These patterns stem from the automatic image of a scientist as a man, which means that women may be presumed incompetent. Women scientists get this from students, too. “I have always had the impression when I start a class, a course, it is always an uphill kind of battle. I get the impression that students don’t believe that I know what I’m supposed to know,” noted one black woman scientist.

Another pattern is The Tightrope women walk between being seen as too feminine (and not taken seriously), and too masculine (and disliked). “To get ahead here,” said a woman at MIT, “you have to be so aggressive. But if women are too aggressive they’re ostracized… and if they’re not aggressive enough they have to do twice the work.”

The most dramatic “too masculine” story came from a black scientist who received feedback that she was “unnecessarily brusque, undeferential” to her staff after she suffered a traumatic brain injury. The hospital staff told her “it was obvious that I needed to stay in rehabilitation longer until I started acting like a woman.” She recalled wryly, “This was in [in the South]. I don’t know how to be the southern belle. I’m from [a Northern city].” She had little choice but to play along. “I dropped my IQ by several points and started looking for little things to decorate myself with.”

“[I]f you’re aggressive, then you’re definitely the B word,” remarked a woman in medicine. “I was never part of the in group,” said an Asian American. “I’m very candid and I do not hesitate to open my mouth, and that was probably not the submissive female [they were expecting] . . . . I immediately started, I guess, having the reputation of being a dragon lady.”

Women are expected to be feminine; for one thing, they’re expected to do the office housework. The most poignant story was of a black scientist whose mentors were “very adamant” that she didn’t “need to sit on every blasted committee.” So, in a meeting with the provost, she pointed out that whites as well as people of color could be tapped to serve on diversity committees. The provost responded by inviting her to serve on another diversity committee. “Of course I’m not going to say no to the provost,” she remarked. “This is the man who basically has my tenure in his hands.”

Asian-Americans described being treated as the “perpetual lab assistant” and Latinas described pressure to play the office housewife. One described herself as “the mother of our research group.” Another scientist found herself “asked to be kind of the mother of the group. I’m the one who has to make sure that everybody fills out their paperwork, and I’m the one who takes care of things, sets up the meetings and things like that. I mean, I play many roles that could be done by a competent administrative assistant if we happen to have had a competent administrative assistant, which we don’t. . . . It’s assumed that I’ll take care of it because nobody else will.” “[T]hese kind of administrative duties eat into my time,” noted another scientist.

Common in workplaces in which women are rare is the Tug of War pattern: women pitted against other women. Said one scientist, “I have been in an organization where there was room for one woman, but one woman decided that she was it and would simply sabotage her colleagues, which unfortunately included me.” Another noted, “I have seen females trying to be very accommodating and playing a certain role that made them more likable. I tended to be very professional, straightforward, and not stroking people’s egos or whatnot.” She recalled “woman wars” where someone strives to prove “she is better: she can give more, she can do more, and there were games played along those lines.” “That happened over and over again,” she said. A third described a monthly meeting in which the only other woman in her group “pretty much focuses attention on the men.” She added, “rarely she’ll look at me. I’m thinking she might be one of those type of women where, okay, there’s only room for one.” Studies document that when women experience discrimination early in their careers, many respond by distancing themselves from other women.

Woman-on-woman conflict also arises between scientists and support staff. “My stuff won’t get done first,” noted a scientist. “They say the bosses are too demanding,” said another, recalling a conversation with administrative assistants who worked with her. She said to them, “Well, the boss that you had before was equally demanding. The guy that you were working under was equally demanding.” The assistants’ reaction: “Yeah, but that’s different.” Mused another woman, “If a male boss asks, ‘Can you bring me a copy?’ they will, and if you ask the same thing, they will say, ‘Well, why am I going to bring you the copy?’” Race exacerbates the problem. “Here they have this Mexican woman telling them what to do,” remarked one scientist.

Pollack has opened up an important conversation. The take-away, as she realizes, is not just that we need to encourage young women to pursue undergraduate majors in science. The issue is not just why women don’t enter science. The number of women science PhDs has increased sharply. In fact, in the life sciences women earn over half of all PhDs.

Based on the results of my study, I’d say the issue also isn’t why more women scientists don’t stay. It’s why more don’t leave. Being a woman scientist may be thrilling intellectually, but the day to day grind sounds pretty darn grim. (For a suite of tools to keep women in STEM, see www.toolsforchangeinstem.org.)

The post Why Are There So Few Women in Science, Continued appeared first on New Girls' Network.

Sexist Remarks

Some of my male colleagues frequently make sexist remarks about other women in the office. Their comments really offend me, and I don’t like keeping quiet. But I’m not sure of how to confront my colleagues without upsetting them and making the situation worse. How can I respond effectively?

We hear you! The idea of calling out sexist remarks in the workplace can seem incredibly daunting. And the truth is, we’re often far less likely to challenge sexism when we encounter it than we’d hope.

However, confronting sexism head-on may not incur the hostile backlash that you might expect. In a recent study, researchers from Loyola University Chicago found that men who were called out on their use of sexist language responded with greater sensitivity to gender issues and treated the women who confronted them better than those who were not called out did. Research also indicates that directly challenging instances of sexism improves women’s feelings of competence and self-esteem. And substantial scholarship has suggested that speaking up against any sort of bias reduces expressions of that bias in the future.

Confronting these comments may be the wisest choice not only for your conscious, but also for your professional relationships, personal well-being, and the betterment of your work environment.

Of course, your situation is still a delicate one that should be handled carefully. Here’s how savvy, successful women have tackled gender bias against their co-workers:

• “I have waited to talk to the person privately and said, ‘You may not realize what you’re saying when you say this about a woman.  But, you know, this is how it sounded to me, and I think this is how it’s going to be received.  And so, I would encourage you to rethink it.’”
• “I called it out in the moment in a meeting, because I just didn’t feel it was right to let it go by with other people present. ‘Well, wait a minute.  I’d like to talk about that further. This is the possible ramification of what you’ve just said.  And I don’t think you intended it that way, but this is how I heard it, and I think this is how it may be received by other people.’”

Have a question of your own? Then Ask the New Girls!

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Check out some pictures of the event below!

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It’s been a rough couple of weeks for women in STEM.

Most shockingly, Adria Richards, former developer evangelist at SendGrid, was fired after she publicly reported two men (one of whom was also fired) for making lewd jokes in earshot at a PyCon Conference. Richards has since received nasty messages for speaking out—including some that threatened her safety—in what is now referred to across the web as Donglegate (the jokes that began this incident were about dongles and forking; you get the idea).

Likewise, women game developers were shocked at an after party for a separate tech conference—this time the GDC in San Francisco—when they found that the party hosts had hired scantily clad women dancers to sashay on stage.

And that’s not all. Elise Andrew, a blogger in Canada who kept a low profile while running a very popular all-about-science Facebook page, promoted her new Twitter handle (which included her name and photo) to her Facebook fans. The response? Many were shocked that she was a woman. “Is this really 2013?” Andrews asked on Twitter.

The STEM fields are notoriously chilly for women. A new study by Corinne A. Moss-Racusin and colleagues found that science faculty rated men applying for a lab manager position as more hireable and competent than women with the exact same qualifications. A 2008 study by the Center for Work-Life Policy found that while 41% of highly qualified scientist, engineers, and technologists are women, 52% of these women quit their jobs around their mid-to-late thirties. The authors cite hostile workplace culture (like some of the recent incidents described above), long hours, and low expectations of career advancement as the main reasons for female attrition.

A third study from 2011 suggests that the exclusion of women in STEM may start even earlier. The study, by Danielle Gaucher, Justin Friesen and Aaron C. Kay, found that advertisements for male-dominated jobs—like many of those in STEM—contained a greater amount of masculine words (like dominate and competitive) than female-dominated positions. Women, after reading advertisements for male-dominated roles, were more likely than men to feel that they would not belong in these positions and found them less appealing. This pattern is perfectly illustrated by the posters that were at one time tacked up around Stanford University’s campus: “Want to bro down and crush some code? Klout is hiring.”

This chilly climate for women is an open secret. Said Etsy CTO Kellan Elliott-McCrea, “there’s a decent chance, based on their experience in industry, that your workplace is going to suck” for women, making it hard to recruit women and increase diversity. Rather than focusing on recruiting senior women, who continued to flock to more gender-balanced tech departments, Etsy, in partnership with 37Signals and Yammer, paid for junior women to attend a three-month training program in New York City. As a result, Etsy has increased the number of women engineers by 500%. They now make up 20% of their department.

Etsy’s strategy addresses a key issue: the problem of reaching critical mass, so that a few women don’t feel out of place in a sea of men. To quote Jocelyn Goldfein, director of engineering at Facebook: “The reason there aren’t more women computer scientists is because there aren’t more women computer scientists.”

Women in STEM sometimes feel they stick out like a sore thumb, but that’s not the only problem. Recently, Joan’s project interviewed 60 women of color in these fields, describing the four basic patterns of gender bias and asking, “Any of that sound familiar?”

It did. All 60 scientists reported at least one of these patterns. One scientist explained her experience with the Prove-It-Again! pattern, which occurs when women have to provide more evidence of competence than men in order to be seen as equally competent. She recalled that, back when she was a student working in a group, her contributions fell on deaf ears. “And it wasn’t until the professor came around and said, ‘Are you guys listening to what [she] is saying?’ where it hit home to me that, you know, it didn’t matter what I was saying. But, it was just the fact that it was coming from my mouth.”

Several women in Silicon Valley reported that women get “the job but not the title,” and that they’re told over and over again that they are “not ready” for promotion—even, in one instance, where the woman in question had actually been doing the job in question.

Another STEM academic found that even students questioned her competence. “I have always had the impression when I start a class, a course, it is always an uphill kind of battle. I get the impression that students don’t believe that I know what I’m supposed to know.”

One scientist felt that even hard data—in the form of student evaluations— that proved her competence was brushed aside. “Even when I get really good evaluations, then the next thing that follows is ‘Well, you’re an easy grader, and so that must be why,’” she said.

And this was only one of the four patterns of bias. Joan’s impression by the time she finished the interviews: what’s amazing is not that there are so few women in science, but that there are any. What recent events and the 60 interviews show is that the STEM fields are filled with both overtly hostile and subtly discouraging hurdles that keep women down and ultimately push them out.

We keep hearing that STEM fields hold the jobs of the future; let’s give women a chance to “lean in” to them.

The post Is It Too Cold To Lean In? Women In STEM appeared first on New Girls' Network.

An essay this month in The Wall Street Journal recycled a tired trope: “queen bees” in the office are making the lives of other women a living hell.

We’ve heard this before. Powerful women are just grown up high-school “mean girls” chipping away at the self-confidence of the women who work with and for them.

Suggesting that these women are at once “encircling” their prey and protecting their “perches,” author Peggy Drexler paints two incompatible pictures of the infamous “queen bees.” In one, queen bees cause the workplace to be unfriendly to women, by using surreptitious childish tactics to keep women down. In the other, these women’s bad behavior results from workplaces shaped by gender bias.

Those are two very different pictures, and we politely ask that she stick with one.

Drexler uses a few chilling anecdotes, and some shocking statistics, to suggest that an epidemic of women-on-women hostility is taking over the workplace. Citing one 2010 study by the Workplace Bullying Institute, Drexler highlights the fact that female bullies directed their hostilities to women 80% of the time. Shocking indeed, but somewhat misleading; while the 80% figure is accurate, the same study found that male-male bullying was more common than female-female cases, that women are more likely to be targets of bullying, and that men are more likely to be perpetrators. It is true that women are more likely than men to choose same-sex targets, but this is hardly surprising. Bullies target the vulnerable, and for bullies who are women, it’s just plumb safer to target other women than it is to go after men.

Drexler cites another 2011 survey of 1,000 working women, which found that 95% of them believed they were undermined by another woman. Sure, but how many men believe they have been undermined by men? That number, had she used it, would not have been cited as evidence that men are mean people stuck in immature, high-school-type roles. (Tellingly, the study never asked about men.) In fact, a new study finds that, while we tend to overlook workplace conflict among men or between men and women, we are more likely to be concerned about workplace conflict among women.

The study, by Leah D. Sheppard and Karl Aquino, asked participants to react to one of three stories of workplace conflict, which differed only in the names, and gender, of the characters involved. They found that both men and women believed female-female conflict had more negative implications for the characters than other forms of conflict. Specifically, participants believed that women involved in female-female conflict were less capable of putting differences aside to achieve common goals than were women in mixed-sex conflict and men in same-sex conflict.

And then there’s the Marissa Mayer issue. Does every woman have a duty to place helping other women as one of her key career goals? Men don’t. We admire women who help other women—thank you Sheryl Sandberg —but we can’t expect all women leaders to do so. In a workplace plagued with unfair hurdles for women, it’s not fair to insist that every woman fights this battle.

What Drexler suggests casually we will argue explicitly: gender bias against women creates conflict among women. (We at The New Girls’ Network call this the Tug of War).

Unlike Drexler’s “mean girls” hypothesis, this interpretation is backed by social science. One studyby Derks et al. found that when senior policewomen who had low gender identification (who did not identify strongly with their gender and other members of their gender) were reminded of instances of gender bias in their careers, they were more likely to elicit “queen bee behavior,” like emphasizing how much they differed from female colleagues. When these women were not reminded of past experiences of gender bias, their responses did not differ significantly from those of high-gender identifying women and showed less “queen bee behavior.” A second study by Derks et al. found that women who had low gender-identification at the beginning of their careers and experience a high degree of gender discrimination on their way to the top were the most hostile in their perceptions of other women.

When social science research indicates that gender bias in the environment creates conflicts among women, it is irresponsible to then blame women for creating unfriendly work environments for other women. Hear ye, hear ye, Wall Street Journal. Stories like this are not fit to print.

Of course, not all conflicts between women can be chocked up to gender bias. Some women are jerks. Some men are jerks. That’s just part of the human condition.

With that in mind, here are our two take-aways: (1) if you want to talk about female-on-female conflict, understand that often gender bias in the environment is to blame; and (2) if you want to talk about prevalent forms of workplace conflict, check your biases—and your research.

The post Shame On Those Queen Bees? appeared first on New Girls' Network.

This seems like an insignificant issue, but it’s not an isolated phenomenon. As I sat in that classroom, I remembered reading dozens of interviews while writing the upcoming book The New Girls’ Network, in which incredibly high-powered women described struggling with the expectation that they perform undervalued service work. The women my co-author (and awesome mom) Joan Williams spoke with included Fortune 500 executives, senior partners at international law firms and bestselling authors. More than a few of them are still being asked to make coffee, take notes at meetings and organize birthday celebrations when no one would ever dream of suggesting such menial tasks to their male co-workers.

Carol Bartz, former CEO of Yahoo!, told us about a small dinner party she attended at Steve Jobs’ house for then-President Clinton. One of the guests there was an entertainment executive who wasn’t familiar with the Silicon Valley-heavy crowd. Early in the evening, the executive came up to Bartz and asked her to get him a cup of tea.

“I just said, ‘Gee, does it look like I’m the one who gets the tea?’” she remembered.

Anther woman we interviewed said: “Women would get leaned on… ‘Can you run this?’ ‘Can you volunteer to do this?’ ‘Could you serve on this committee?’ It didn’t translate into pay or advancement. It was just, ‘You’re a helping kind of person.’” Law firm partners had stories of being expected to serve on party-planning committees while their male peers begged off because they had to work. An upper-level partner at a major professional services firm said she’s still expected to bake birthday cakes for her employees.

Academics Pamela Bettis and Natalie Adams refer to these sorts of undervalued tasks as “the work of nice.” Being nice is hard work, Bettis and Adams argue, but it’s work that tends to disappear; asking for credit for being nice isn’t nice at all. As a result, women are expected to do unnoticed, unappreciated work, and face backlash if they demand credit or simply refuse. At the New Girls’ Network, we refer to this pattern of bias as the Tightrope.

Why does any of this matter? As a first-year law student, I can’t get away from the statistic that, while 46 percent of incoming law firm associates are women, barely 15 percent make it to the equity partner level. (And for those optimists who hope that’s getting better, those statistics have been more or less static for fifteen years, although the most recent report from the National Association of Women Lawyers indicates that the percentages of both female equity partners and incoming associates are actually going down.) This is not, of course, purely or even significantly because women are more likely than men to volunteer for menial tasks or because they’re less likely than men to raise their hands when they’re not completely confident they know the answer. But these things are part of a wider pattern with real effects.

There are relatively small, simple ways to get around the biases at work here. Do what I did, and quietly refuse to sign up for administrative tasks. If someone asks you directly to do something you feel is unfair or gendered, offer a neutral reason for why you can’t (“I want to focus my attention on this big project”) and provide an alternative (“Have you thought about putting together a list of junior associates who can take notes?”). For those in power, it’s easy to just assign people these tasks, making sure to balance for gender.

The key is not to avoid talking about these things because they seem small or unimportant. They matter. And we can’t change them if we don’t notice they’re there.

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Mayer is a partner at Morrison & Foerster LLP and co-founded the firm’s Venture Intellectual Property Group with senior partner Tom Ciotti. 

What piece of advice would you give young women early in their careers to help mitigate gender bias?

I think being able to recognize the patterns of gender bias is an important first step in understanding and learning effective strategies for dealing with the bias, and websites like this can be a great tool for getting information out there.  I would encourage women to heavily rely on their personal and professional networks for support, suggestions, and guidance as soon as they have a concern.

What are you most proud of?

I am most proud of my team.  They are an amazing group of individuals and we work extremely well together in a natural system of mutual help and contribution.  I believe that our team interactions are one of the most concrete forms of a positive influence, and that is something I value very highly.

Who has been an important mentor to you? How has he or she supported you?

Tom Ciotti, a well-known and respected patent attorney and senior partner at my firm, was an incredible mentor to me.  In fact, he was so much more than a mentor.  He supported me in every possible way through all aspects of my career.  He gave me challenging and interesting assignments and demanded excellence.  He demonstrated confidence in my ability and work product, and never took credit for my work.  He promoted me inside and outside our firm, and discussed my work and accomplishments whenever possible.  He always brought me to the table and fought for me to be there when others were hesitant to bring me along. He also shared years of professional and personal wisdom, and helped prepare me for my success.  I aspire to be that type of mentor and hope that I have a positive impact on others.

What do you love most about your job?

Sometimes I feel like I’m one of only a few attorneys who actually enjoys what they do.  I recognize that one’s career has to fit into the broader context of one’s life, not the other way around. They are both (life and career) long haul projects, and so being able to grow, evolve, learn, and have a sense of satisfaction through the journey is simply critical to me. I am very fortunate to have a job that I love.

In addition to providing the opportunity for continued learning in science, technology, and the law, my job helps me feel connected to the process that brings life-saving technologies to the public. This is very rewarding to me.  My job also reflects many of my inherent character traits, such as attention to detail and the satisfaction of helping good ideas become successful, and so it allows me to earn a living by being myself.

What’s your favorite drink?

My favorite drink is water, however sometimes I freeze it and mix it with other things.

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