According to the National Academy of Sciences, global warming is occurring and is cause for alarm. By contrast, in the world of women and academic science, warming the chilly climate has been a good thing. It has increased the number of students studying science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and helped retain more women teaching in STEM fields. But as this issue of On Campus with Women demonstrates, icebergs still threaten past progress and future possibilities.

Ten years ago in 1995, I commissioned a monograph for AAC&U's Program on the Status and Education of Women. It was called Warming the Climate for Women in Academic Science, and authored by Angela B. Ginorio, then director of the Northwest Center for Research on Women at the University of Washington. In that volume Ginorio surveyed what the research revealed about girls and women along the STEM pipeline. She identified and documented blockage points as well as interventions that enhanced the likelihood that girls and women would be attracted to and succeed in the sciences.

It is fitting that we use this issue of OCWW to reflect on what has occurred during the intervening decade, a period of time that, when measured by the lives of undergraduate students, encompasses two and a half generations of men and women going through our colleges and universities. That, in turn, translates into a similar generational pattern of students opting into—or out of—careers in science.

The Conscientious Gardner
Ginorio opened her monograph with a powerful allegory that is retold in the accompanying box. It tells the story of a series of gardeners, all of whom love plants and are committed to amassing the most spectacular, impressive collection for their common conservatory. But the plants fare differently. Some thrive, others languish, and still others die. At first the gardeners assume the problem is with the plants. But then they begin to question whether the problem might be with how they have constructed the conservatory and tended the plants. The first gardener explains, "I treat them all the same," while the second one explains, "I only feed and water the ones that are thriving." The third one says, "I try to provide what each plant needs." Only under the care of the third gardener do all the plants flourish.

Higher education's progress in tapping the talents and promise of women has been marred or accelerated according to which gardener's philosophy triumphed. The accumulated research distilled in Ginorio's monograph identifies what have become consensus understandings today about how to increase the number women who graduate with STEM degrees, go on to graduate school in STEM fields, and decide to enter the STEM workforce.

First, the academy needs to affirm that science needs women, women across all colors, classes, and categories. Then it needs to be sure that K-12 is encouraging girls in science and challenging them with ever increasing degrees of rigor at every level. All along the way, high expectations by parents and teachers matter, as do role models and mentors. Hands-on, student-centered, group work in the classroom—in which students are asked to apply their knowledge to real world issues—attracts and retains not only women, but formerly science averse men as well. Each of these pedagogies is, of course, a hallmark of the best in a 21st century liberal education.

Collecting both qualitative and quantitative institutional data about science students and faculty that is disaggregated by race, gender, and when possible ethnicity and class, is essential if one expects to map trends and detect slippage in progress. This data needs to be collected through courses in departments as well as through larger programmatic units and divisions. Only when MIT women scientists amassed such data in 1999, for example, did they prove to themselves, their colleagues, and the higher education community that it was not a case of isolated, anecdotal discrimination but a systemic pattern of gender discrimination in such things as the allocation of lab space, economic and material resources, and graduate student research assistants.

As Ginorio stresses, a warm rather than chilly climate affects persistence, engagement, retention, choice of major, and choice of career. The climate includes all factors in the experience of women students in higher education: the classroom, the advising, the department, peers, the dorm, the campus at large, the president.

Three Steps Forward, One Step Backward—and Sometimes Four
Because of all the research and reform work in the sciences from K-16, we have seen remarkable progress over the last decade, as this issue of OCWW illustrates. But we also see surprising backsliding and continued areas of intransigence. If higher education has evidence of what works, why aren't more institutions adopting these practices?

Why have some patterns of discrimination persisted for more than three decades—or the equivalent of seven and a half generations of students? Why the salary gap between women who head STEM departments and men? Why the continuing salary gap across gender in the science fields? Why do women advance more slowly than men in science? Why has the percentage of women in computer science, math, and engineering decreased in recent years? Why are women spread so unevenly across the STEM fields? And why do women of color continue to be less represented in the sciences proportionate to their numbers overall?

And why do we read in Anny Morrobel-Sosa's article that she still is accumulating all those "firsts" and "seconds": the first tenure track woman in chemistry at the University of Alabama, the second tenure track female ever hired in the College of Engineering at California Polytechnic State University?

As the national catastrophe of Katrina taught the world, there is a difference between possessing knowledge and applying it. And there is a difference between applying it comprehensively and applying it in patterned unevenness. When the latter happened, 20,000 people of a particular and predictable kind ended up stranded for four days without food, water, medical care, or protection. In this rare case, they were actually filmed in their stark deprivation with the entire globe as their witness.

Directions for the Second Decade
As we mark the beginning of the second decade since Ginorio's Warming the Climate in Academic Science, what are some things higher education might do to melt those dangerously submerged icebergs and propel the good kind of climate change on college campuses? And how do we begin to do the next generation of work that has barely been initiated: altering not just the bodies in science, the pedagogy, and the climate, but the very content and methodology of STEM courses? How do we begin to introduce more global learning into the framework and practice of the sciences? And how do we begin to make a clearer case that excellence in the sciences, both its practices and its scholarship, is dependent on diversity?

Part of the answer lies in the three B's rather than three R's.

BE INTENTIONAL
Higher education leaders, department chairs, faculty, staff, and students will need very deliberately to adopt a kind of intentionality that AAC&U's Greater Expectations monograph calls for. Intentionality seeds a clear alignment of goals with pathways to those goals, of aspirations with practices, and careful, self-conscious implementation of what has been proven effective.

BE INSTITUTIONAL
To sustain the multi-level and multiple kinds of practices that evidence proves are successful, institutions will need to begin to implement reforms comprehensively, simultaneously, and in coordination with one another. Some of the institutional work includes issues as diverse as the improvement of K-12 science teaching, admissions outreach for diverse students, campus climate issues, advising, course and department pedagogy and content, and salary equity. It cannot be happenstance and haphazard if progress is to be made.

BE DISRUPTIVE
Most of the default methods of educating women in the sciences simply have not worked. Too often, they operate like the first and second gardeners in Ginorio's allegory. Treating everyone the same or rewarding only the strong ones produces just those patterned gender and racial inequities that remain so entrenched. It was by disrupting the typical way of educating girls and boys and women and men in sciences that significant changes occurred over the last three decades.

Strategic, coordinated, and sustained institutional interventions that are informed by a gender and racial analysis have unblocked that pipeline for women in science, improved all student learning in science, and made science itself—the questions it poses and the way it answers them, all the better. "I try to provide what each plant needs," the conscientious gardener answered.