High Table Happenings & Hopes

Our team members are busy getting some Women of Hopkins portraits ready for the Johns Hopkins High Table event. This is a first-year undergraduate experience in which the students join the deans and professors for a formal “Harry Potter” type dinner. Read about last year’s event here.

It’s cool. The Rec Center is transformed for an evening into a medieval-like banquet hall. Fancy gold plated dishes and flatware placed along long, stately tables are the settings for this sit down dinner. The walls are covered with formal curtains that give the feel of velvet drapes, and the faculty, deans and the JHU president march in all decked out in their academic robes. It doesn’t hurt that the president’s robe is a brilliant Hopkins gold. If you’ve ever been in any of the dining halls of Cambridge or Oxford, you’d have to agree that the organizers do a great job of capturing this ambiance.

I have been a participating professor at this dinner for several years. It has a super fun feel and comes at a good time when the semester is gaining full steam whilst the students are still somewhat rested. But one thing always bugged me about it. As a female faculty member marching in, I passed by numerous ornately framed portraits of (presumably) the luminaries of Hopkins past. Although I’m sure these past leaders were better than Moaning Myrtle, what struck me immediately is that there were no portraits of women. Only men.

Really? No women?

This realization was one of the motivators for our Women of Hopkins exhibit. And I’m pleased that our Diversity Innovation Grant funded not only the main art show but also enabled us to add women to the portraits that students and professors will pass by on the procession into this Hopkins Harry Potter banquet. After all, 49% of the undergraduate students at Hopkins are women. I’m hoping that these images will be noticed by the young women students. I’m hoping it will spark a recognition that female luminaries can lead the way. And I’m hoping that these heroines of Hopkins will inspire confidence in the students to become the next generation of scholars, doctors, business women, leaders, engineers, writers and scientists of prominence and brilliance.

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Gender-Diversity Dividend of Discovery

From Forbes to Scientific American, it is well known that being around people who are different from us makes us more creative and increases our personal investments. It should therefore come as no surprise that an opinion piece published in the current issue of PNAS draws the same conclusion: Gender diversity leads to better science.

Encouraging greater diversity is not only the right thing to do: it allows scientific organizations to derive an “innovation dividend” that leads to smarter, more creative teams, hence opening the door to new discoveries.

This opinion piece covers many ways that gender diversity paves the road to excellence and speaks to the importance of supportive institutional contexts. As universities strive to increase their diversity numbers, this article also recognizes the crucial aspects of inclusion in the scientific community. Make no mistake: numbers are still important. Achieving a critical mass of women (between 15% and 30%) will be required for women to flourish. Only then will they experience “less stereotyping, more involvement in decision making and teamwork and higher levels of support”.

Inclusion is a second key ingredient. No matter what the diversity numbers, an open and accepting work culture can accelerate this needed transformation. Putting aside the social justice motivations, the scientific enterprises of universities, medical schools and research institutes all seek the same things: a greater understanding of the world’s natural laws as well as novel cures for diseases.

Surely we can achieve this?

After all, the university setting strives to be the epicenter of open inquiry, the hotbed of newfangled ideas, and the center of excellence. If institutions invest in this stock, the gender-diversity dividend is guaranteed to pay well.

That’s a better promise than the stock market….

Nevertheless, she persisted.

Women’s March tweeted this artwork by Courtney Privett. We could play micro aggression bingo with it for fun, because that would be the only other fun thing about its content.

 

This happens in STEM, too….

The unpalatable truth is that women encounter this behavior in most professions. It often comes from well-intentioned men who are horrified when it is pointed out or oblivious when it is going on, as well as those who are less enlightened.