Report on College Recruiting Documents Gender Wage Gap

In an article published in April 2011 by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), researchers find that the long-documented gender wage gap exists even among recent college graduates. However, women in this group participate in the workforce at higher rates than their male counterparts.

Among recent graduates, women have experienced a lower rate of overall unemployment than men almost every year since 1994, according to data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). However, the BLS data on employment rates do not reflect whether subjects are appropriately employed or underemployed. In contrast, NACE data indicate that as a whole, “female graduates have a difficult time getting hired in professional positions corresponding to their level of education, at least in comparison with male graduates.” When examining offers made to senior-year students by gender and college major, however, results are mixed, and the evidence does not suggest that women suffer systemic gender discrimination across majors.

Data on salary differentials by gender paint a different picture. According to the report, women in the class of 2010 received salary offers that were only 83 percent as much as those given to their male counterparts. Additionally, women-dominated fields were associated with lower starting salaries. Women received higher starting salaries than their male counterparts in only two majors (engineering and the liberal arts/humanities).

The report concludes by stating that its findings, while “not definitive,” affirm the evidence that “wage discrimination based on gender continues to exist and will likely persist unless measures are developed to adequately protect women—the coming majority of America’s professional work force.” The article, written by Edwin W. Koc, is available for download at www.naceweb.org/gender/.

Task Force Releases Report on Women and the US Economy

A recent report written for the Wall Street Journal’s Executive Task Force for Women in the Economy 2011 argues that women are critical to maintaining the United States’ economic status. The report, titled Unlocking the Full Potential of Women in the US Economy, argues for increasing women’s participation at critical points in the corporate pipeline and presents recommendations to help achieve this goal.

As of 2009, women represent 48 percent of the workforce. However, only 76 percent of women age 25–54 participate in the workforce, suggesting substantial room for growth. Among college-educated Americans, women represent 53 percent of the population but only 50 percent of the workforce. And women’s participation decreases as they advance up the pipeline, from 53 percent of recent hires to only 3 percent of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, with incremental drops in between.

The report indicates several reasons that women leave the corporate pipeline or opt out of opportunities to advance, including “structural obstacles” like exclusion from informal networks, “lifestyle issues” like concerns about work–family balance (concerns expressed by male colleagues as well), and “imbedded mindsets” about women’s capabilities on both the institutional and individual levels. Drawing from these obstacles, the report suggests a variety of tactics to create the “organizational transformation” needed to improve women’s participation, including making the “business case” for change, “refin[ing]…the metrics used to track performance,” and “model[ing] the change” at the highest echelons of leadership.

The report was produced by McKinsey & Company and is available at www.mckinsey.com/en/Client_Service/Organization/Latest_thinking/Unlocking_the_full_potential.aspx.

NIH Grant Renewal Rates Lower among Women than Men

Analyzing application and success rates for grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), researchers have found that women are less likely than men both to apply for and receive grant renewals in the particularly prestigious R01 category, described as “the ‘gold standard’ of research awards” (760). Aside from this marked disparity, most awards programs did not show signs of gender inequity in success rates or in funding rates (764). The authors highlighted this and other findings in an article published in the June 2011 issue of Academic Medicine.

In addition to information about application, success, and funding rates, the data surfaced statistical differences related to the kinds of research conducted (764). Again within the R01 program, women have higher success rates than men when proposing research involving human subjects, and lower success rates when proposing research that did not involve human subjects. (Women’s applications are evenly split across the two categories.) Women also receive less funding than men when applying for the R21 program, which involves “high-risk” experimental research. Meanwhile, they request and receive higher funding in the R01 category overall.

The article’s authors noted that the disparities described above might be tied to such factors as “barriers resulting from gender stereotypes” as well as “unconscious biases” among reviewers (766). They stressed that although the study reaffirmed that equity exists among younger researchers, “it is not enough to simply wait for the situation to improve” throughout the research ranks. They call for NIH to continue investing in programs that will proactively address gender inequity in biomedical and behavioral research.

The article, titled “Sex Differences in Application, Success, and Funding Rates for NIH Extramural Programs,” was written by Jennifer Reineke Pohlhaus, Hong Jiang, Robin M. Wagner, Walter T. Schaffer, and Vivian W. Pinn. To download the article, visit http://journals.lww.com/academicmedicine/Fulltext/2011/06000/
Sex_Differences_in_Application,_Success,_and.30.aspx.

New Issue of Harvard Educational Review Focuses on Women of Color in STEM

Over thirty-five years ago, the original “Double Bind” symposium first convened women of color in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) to share their experiences and catalyze change in their fields. The Harvard Educational Review has revisited the topic with its Summer 2011 issue.

In their preface to the issue, the editors lament the extraordinary lack of literature on the topic of the unique experiences of women of color in STEM even as they dedicate the issue to addressing that gulf. As noted by Maria Ong at a recent symposium, although many dissertations on the subject exist, an astonishingly low number—zero—of these had been published as of her most recent research. The Harvard Educational Review itself published no articles at all between 1976 and 2010 that focused specifically on women of color in STEM.

This issue of the journal makes great strides in opening the public conversation on this topic. The issue opens with an article by Shirley Malcolm (one of the authors of the 1976 Double Bind report, writing here with her daughter Lindsey Malcolm) about the next generation of women of color in STEM. It also includes a review of empirical research as well as studies on how women of color’s undergraduate experiences affect their persistence in STEM, whether they follow traditional pathways through four-year institutions or transfer from community college to four-year settings.

This groundbreaking issue is available for purchase online at www.hepg.org/her/abstract/814.

US Department of Commerce Highlights Disparities for Women in STEM

In a recent report, the US Department of Commerce explores persistent gender gaps in STEM education and the STEM workforce. The report compellingly presents what its authors call “definitive evidence of a need to encourage and support women in STEM with a goal of gender parity” (8).

Among that evidence were the following findings: In 2009, women were only 20 percent of STEM degree holders working in STEM jobs (compared to nearly 50 percent of employed college-educated workers) (5). Only 26 percent of women who have STEM degrees actually work in STEM jobs, compared with 40 percent of their male counterparts (6). Female STEM majors more often work in education or healthcare than their male peers (6). And although women with college degrees earn 20 percent more in STEM jobs than in other sectors of the economy and the STEM sector experiences a smaller gender pay gap than other sectors (7), women in STEM still earn less than their male counterparts (4). While the report does not parse the source of the disparities it documents, nor suggest ways to amend them, it does point to the need to use its contents to inform policy decisions.

The report is titled “Women in STEM: A Gender Gap to Innovation” and was released in August 2011. The executive summary, written by David Beede, Tiffany Julian, David Langdon, George McKittrick, Beethika Khan, and Mark Doms, is available at www.esa.doc.gov/sites/default/files/reports/documents/womeninstemagaptoinnovation8311.pdf.

Scientists Have Fewer Children than Desired

A study published in August 2011 suggests that both male and female scientists have fewer children than they would like, and explores the implications of this finding on scientific careers. The study suggests that both men and women experience dissatisfaction about their careers as a result of having fewer children than they had hoped for.

Among faculty, a greater share of women than men expresses dissatisfaction with their faculty roles, although men and women work roughly the same amount of time each week. Men and women without children work more hours than their colleagues with children, but within each group, differences by gender are not significant. When it comes to their lives outside of work, however, women and men are equally satisfied. Noting the interrelationship between work and life satisfaction, the authors interpret these and other indicators as suggesting that “having fewer children than wanted has a more pronounced effect on [overall] life satisfaction for male scientists.”

That said, 45 percent of women science faculty report that they have fewer children than they would like due to their science careers, as compared with 25 percent of men. Among graduate students, women more often express concerns about the effect careers in science will have on their ability to have a family, and women at the postdoctoral level “are much less likely than men to report considering a tenure-track academic job at a research university.”

The study concludes by urging universities to reconsider how their policies affect both men and women in science. The authors advocate for creating family-friendly policies that allow women and men to achieve work–life balance and thus greater satisfaction with both aspects of their lives. The study is freely available at www.plosone.org.