Where are women in the sciences?

Even though more women are receiving doctorates in the sciences and engineering, they are not finding a home in the nation's top research institutions, a new survey shows.

Over the last decade, women have picked up an increasing share of the Ph.D.s in chemistry, math, biology, economics and engineering, for example. Yet they still are poorly represented among the faculty in these disciplines and at the assistant professor entryway to their profession, according to Donna J. Nelson, a chemistry professor at the University of Oklahoma.

Nelson did a survey of gender and ethnic representation among faculty in 14 science and engineering disciplines at the 50 top research departments as ranked by the National Science Foundation. Her findings are reported in "A National Analysis of Diversity in Science and Engineering Faculties at Research Universities," released in January by a coalition of groups. (It can be downloaded at www.now.org/issues/diverse/diversity_report.pdf.)

Nelson looked at the percentage of Ph.D.s awarded to women over the 1993-2002 period and at the percentage of females in 2002 at the assistant professor level in the relevant 50 institutional departments. In chemistry, women earned 31.3 percent of the Ph.D.s but comprised 21.5 percent of assistant professors. In computer science, they earned 20.5 percent of the Ph.D.s but held 10.8 percent of assistant professorships. In the biological sciences, Nelson writes, "for years, females have received a greater percentage of Ph.D.s than white males, but white males still make up more than half of the assistant professors."

This reality has serious implications for the next generation of students, say Nelson and others. Female students do not have an adequate number of role models and mentors. In fact, says Nelson, because of the slow progress of women in earning the science degrees, a pool of candidates exists to address their slim representation on the faculty. Yet, as one chemistry professor observes in the report, "Women who are eligible for faculty positions have earned a Ph.D. in a chemistry department. They have absorbed the tone of that environment  and have decided they don't want any more of it."

The report concludes that universities must do what the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did five years ago when women scientists documented a pattern of inequitable practices. They "have to examine culture, attitudes and policies they have long followed assuredly," says the report. "This is a long overdue and realistic response to changing worlds."

Who gets to go to college?

The idea that if you work hard enough in school, you'll get the opportunity to go to college is a core part of the American dream. Federal and state financial aid policies have fed that dream, providing billions of dollars every year to worthy applicants. Yet the unfortunate truth is, those billions aren't achieving their original goal. There are great disparities by income level in who gets to go to college in America, and the gaps between rich and poor have grown wider in the past 10 years.

For example, some of the latest data on college attendance, broken down by income levels, show how likely certain kinds of students are to attend college. Of those in the highest socioeconomic quartile but whose academic performance is at the lowest level, 72 percent go to college. For the opposite kind of students÷those in the lowest income quartile but in the highest academic performance group÷68 percent enroll. Put simply, says financial aid policy analyst Lawrence E. Gladieux, "the dumbest rich kids have as much chance of going to college as the smartest poor kids."

Gladieux and three fellow policy analysts gathered recently to present conclusions and recommendations from a new analysis of federal higher ed policy released in time to influence the Higher Education Act reauthorization. The book, published by the Century Foundation, is called America's Untapped Resource: Low-Income Students in Higher Education.

In addition to looking at money, the collection explores problems with low-income students' poor preparation for college, poor academic performance once enrolled, and poor persistence. This second analysis, by Art Hauptman and Michael Timpane, reveals the flaws of policies focused on using money to get poor students through the gates of college, rather than into programs before and during college that will help them complete their degrees.

Finally, a third analysis explores whether we need an affirmative action program for the poor. Authors Anthony Carnevale and Steve Rose note that talk about opportunity for all to benefit from college, regardless of need, has become almost meaningless. Higher education is "an efficient machine," says Carnevale, for duplicating trends that reinforce wealth and class in America. In higher education today, he says, we have four times as much racial diversity as economic diversity. "Leaders pay lip service to this," he notes. "Colleges don't let these kids in." This is especially true of the selective institutions whose graduates rank in the top tiers of most indicators.

The authors make some strong recommendations. Among them:

• Address the vagaries of federal and state financial aid policies. Correct the loan-grant imbalance that shifts resources away from the poor and into the pockets of the middle class. "You don't boost investment by giving aid to people who don't need it," Gladieux notes. Instead, lawmakers need to fund Pell Grants and schools need to reduce institutional aid grants based on merit, not need.

• Sink more resources into academic preparation programs. In particular, says Hauptman, money would be well spent in training teachers in the special skills needed to work with the learning challenges low-income students bring to elementary school. He also urges pushing more federal dollars into college prep programs in middle and high school, such as the GEAR-UP and TRIO programs.

• Back away from policies that increasingly serve middle- and upper-income students. Early decision admission programs, for example, are useless to low-income students who must wait to see financial packages before they can decide where they will enroll. Expand affirmative action programs to include income level as well as racial and ethnic factors.

More information about the book, edited by Richard Kahlenberg, appears at the Century Fund Web site, www.tcf.org.