Last month the Organization of Women Faculty at UAlbany sponsored a public lecture called “The Gendering of Academia.” Dr. Lisa Frehill, the Executive Director of the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology (CPST), spoke about the underrepresentation of women and minorities in academia. Although the message was not new, the data she presented were certainly interesting, and somewhat depressing. I had hoped to reproduce some of the statistics relevant to the social sciences here, but I was disappointed to learn that these data are not freely available from the CPST web site. Needless to say, the social sciences had much better representation among women and minorities than the hard sciences, but some of the figures were still disturbing.
While the presentation was full of data, which I personally enjoy, it was short on solutions. I suspect that the goal of the talk was to present the national figures in order to spur discussions about how UAlbany compares and how to address these disparities within our environment. I think this is an admirable goal in and of itself, although I suspect that many members of the audience were from the social science disciplines and were likely to already have thought about the gendered state of academia. Dr. Frehill did briefly mention two important factors contributing to underrepresentation: (1) the need to fill the pipeline early by encouraging academic development among women and minorities in high school and college, and (2) academic cultures that perpetuate gendered norms for success. The last point is especially relevant for the social sciences where it is too easy to think that we have “conquered” these disparities because we have met certain thresholds of participation.
