Happening Today: Women in Academic Research Pathways

Today I’ll be at JHMI from 3-4 PM speaking to WARP – the Women in Academic Research Tracks. Topics to be covered include

• Women of Hopkins
• JHU Faculty Composition Report
• Women Faculty Forum at Homewood
• National Academies Report on Sexual Harassment in Academic Science, Engineering and Medicine
• What we can all do to nurture a more inclusive community

Come join the discussion in the Vivian Foster Conference Room (#602) 1830 E. Monument Street, JHMI.

This event is sponsored by the Johns Hopkins Office of Postdoctoral Affairs and UHS Wellness. Organizers Margaret Ho and Sarah Maguire

Where We Stand 2019

Come out for the Women Faculty Forum annual Where We Stand Event sponsored by the KSAS Dean’s Office. Our themes this year are Mentorship, Community, & Equity.

Happening later today from 5:30-7PM. Mudd Atrium ~ refreshments ~ kids welcome.

Remarks by Professors Anne-Elizabeth Brodsky & Karen Fleming, Dean Beverly Wendland and Senator Barbara Mikulski followed by round table discussions on topics related to the status and success of women faculty, staff and students.

Women of Whiting

I’m using this post to salute the Women of Whiting (WOW). “Whiting” is the name of our engineering school, and this group of women are graduate students who have taken the initiative to come together, lift each other up and build their network.

When I give talks, I am often asked about what we can all do to nurture a more inclusive community. Among my answers is THIS: support each other at all levels. And what the Women of Whiting are doing is just one example of what each of us could do with our peers at any stage in our professional development. 

Women

of

Whiting

Although WOW had existed in fits and starts in the past, Alexandra Sneider and Inez Lam re-started the Women of Whiting in Fall 2016. Its purpose is “support women in STEM through professional development, outreach, and social events”. Alexandra and Inez are now in their third year as Co-Presidents, and they have grown the organization to include over 200 members (students, staff, and faculty) across the many divisions of the University. They imagined and executed the annual Women in STEM Symposium, a one-day event providing communication, negotiation, and career planning guidance that draws over 150 attendees from Hopkins and surrounding universities with 20 diverse speakers, a poster session, networking, and career fair component. 

In addition to WOW, Inez and Alexandra are involved in many outreach and leadership positions on campus. Inez has served on the Biomedical Engineering PhD Student Council as co-president and now as faculty-student liaison, and has helped in planning PhD student recruitment for the BME program. In addition, she is a mentor in the P-TECH Dunbar program, a speaker for prospective students at the Institute for Computational Medicine, and has served the BCI-EDGE advisory committee to promote career opportunities for biomedical PhD students.

Alexandra serves as the WOW representative on the Diversity Council for the School of Medicine graduate students, and as a Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) Program mentor for the past two years. Alexandra is also actively involved in recruitment efforts for the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChemBE) PhD program, for prospective undergraduates through the Hopkins Office for Undergraduate Research (HOUR), and as a speaker for the Mechanical Engineering Department’s Graduate Recruitment Day. 

We can all walk the walk

Several people asked for a transcript of the remarks I gave yesterday at the awards ceremony for the Provost’s Prize.

This award recognizes the grassroots work that we can all do to nurture a more inclusive community. And I want to empower each and every one of you by quickly mentioning three aspects that I think are important.
 
The first is the distinction between culture and climate.

An institution’s culture is defined by how we aspire to do things. You find institutional cultural values in the form of a mission statement. These are often found online. At Diversity.jhu.edu, it starts, “Diversity of people, thought, experience, and background is fundamental to the mission of this university.” This statement comes down as policy from the top. This a pre-requisite to inclusive excellence, and I like to think of this as “talking the talk”.
 
In contrast, the climate we all experience is the expression of culture. We can think of this as the shared perceptions of our community. How do we all feel when we come to work each day? In the STEM fields – and probably all other male-dominated fields (law and politics come to mind) – data show that the climate is hostile to white women, to women of color, to under-represented minorities, to LGBTQ+ members of the community, to differently abled and to other so-called out-group people. So these people opt-out. I think of climate as “walking the walk”.
 
The key to authentic, inclusive excellence is finding the synergistic overlap between culture and climate.

My second point is how do we do this? 
 
Well, we need to think big. We need diversity in our highest levels of leadership. We need courageous leaders to foster change away from the status quo of Hopkins past into a new Hopkins future that leads inclusive excellence. We need our prestigious endowed professorships to be roles models held by faculty with demographics proportional to their representation in the population. We need programs that incentivize change. Because nothing will change if we continue to do the “same old thing”. Instead, we are going to get the “same old outcome”.
 
We also need to think small, because institutions are fundamentally people. The institutional transformation we so urgently need is not the metamorphosis of a nameless, faceless entity that is someone else’s problem. Any change must come from within us – each and every one of us. And so what we can all do, one-on-one, every day, is to check our biases. We need to value our colleagues as individuals and not as members of a group. We need to listen to each other. We must be inclusive of each other. We must respect that each of us brings a different lived experience to the table. We must be better bystanders for each other. These small, daily transactions are how institutions leverage diversity.
 
And as faculty we must especially value diversity, equity and inclusion in our classrooms through our actions and words and through what we choose to teach because our students are the academic community of the future. We must teach them to be good to each other and to lift each other up. We must instill within them that they alone hold the amazing power to nurture the kind of inclusive community that they want to have going forward. 
 
My third point is about the money.

Thinking big will cost money, and I hope Fenimore Fisher (our Chief Diversity Officer in the Provost’s office) has deep pockets. Or at least I hope his friends in high places have deep pockets.

But I also want to point out that thinking small can be free. We can all individually do the work of nurturing a sense of belonging. Every day. Stated another way: we can all walk the walk in our own way.

So my final challenge is for you to all to look in the mirror and ask yourselves every morning: How will I be an ally today?

Vanderbilt University Medical Center has an opportunity to lead. Will they take it?

I ran a workshop at Oberlin College last fall on the topic of Bystander Intervention. Afterwards a black woman graduate student thanked me and went on to express how stunned and pleased she was that an actual, real scientist was speaking out about the institutional inequities experienced by women and minorities in the STEM community.

She’s right. The fact is that the vast majority of actual, real scientists do not speak out, even when something really bad happens to them personally.

The pool of targets who could potentially speak out is not small. The National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine reported that over 58% of women in STEM have personally experienced something bad. And when this happens to you, or a female colleague, or your sister, or your wife, or your daughter, or your trainee, it is incumbent upon you to recognize that these women have been put between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

There is currently no good way out.

Women who don’t file formal reports, which is most of them,  pay high costs as documented by links between experiences of harassment and declines in personal and professional well-being. These women have less job satisfaction; and they detach, disengage, and eventually leave. Hence the leaking STEM pipeline.

Still, most targets do not report harassment because of even higher perceived and real risks to their careers. Even though my younger self was totally confused about the rules of the game, I implicitly understood as an assistant professor that making any kind of formal complaint would be a career killer.

This is not hypothetical drama. I am not being sensitive. We are, in fact, now witness to this actually transpiring in a public forum.

Last week, Science magazine published an article about BethAnn McLaughlin – aka @McLNeuro –  and the very real possibility that she will lose her tenure-track job at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC). From Meredith Wadman’s Science article:

“In the past 9 months, McLaughlin has exploded into view as the public face of the #MeToo movement in science, wielding her irreverent, sometimes wickedly funny Twitter presence, @McLNeuro, as part cudgel, part cheerleader’s megaphone. In June 2018, she created a website, MeTooSTEM.com, where scores of women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) have posted mostly anonymous, often harrowing tales of their own harassment. In just 2 days that month, she convinced the widely used website RateMyProfessors.com to remove its “red hot chili pepper” rating for “hotness.” And after launching an online petition, she succeeded last fall in spurring AAAS, which publishes Science, to adopt a policy allowing proven sexual harassers to be stripped of AAAS honors.“

The 2018 NASEM report makes it clear that women are bullied or harassed out of career pathways in STEM. And it appears from the Science article, that some serious institutional bullying has been going on at VUMC. After voting to tenure her, they reversed the decision in a second meeting called by the dean and put her tenure on hold for 17 months after hearing reports that she posted anonymous, derogatory tweets about colleagues.

Being under consideration for tenure is one of the most stressful times of an academic career. What did the leadership at VUMC expect she was going to do in response to freezing her tenure? What were they secretly hoping she would do? Was this a tactic to just wait out her contract after they set her up for failure?

In full disclosure, I do not know @McLNeuro personally. I have never even met her. I only know what is in last week’s Science article and what she posts on Twitter.  For this, I greatly admire her unwavering courage in speaking out, and I fully support her initiatives to remove harassers from science. As with any complicated situation, I appreciate that there may be more to the story than is published in the Science article. Is @McLNeuro perfect? None of us are.

Yet, plenty of men are grabbing and touching and mansplaining and retaliating against and interrupting and marginalizing and diminishing women on a regular basis with no negative consequences whatsoever. Why? Because women are afraid of the consequences of speaking out.

With this in mind, should @McLNeuro be essentially fired because she tweeted a few things?

Similarly, do I think that the environment at Vanderbilt is especially hostile? Probably not. Sadly, it’s probably the norm. Based on data in the NASEM report, academia in general is hostile to women. I suspect what is playing out at Vanderbilt could conceivably play out at many of our own institutions.

But Vanderbilt University Medical Center is in hot seat right now, so to speak, and timing is everything. And guess what? #TimesUp. In a little over two days, almost three thousand people have signed a petition protesting the retaliation against @McLNeuro by VUMC. (Update: the petition below has reached over 5,000 signatures in 5 days!) You can sign it here: https://www.change.org/p/nicholas-s-zeppos-vanderbilt-do-right-by-bethann-mclaughlin

At this scientific crossroads, one way to look at this messy predicament is to realize that VUMC has been given a unique opportunity to lead. Instead of firing Professor BethAnn McLaughlin, Vanderbilt University Medical Center could, as the NASEM report suggests institutions should, “convey through their actions that reporting harassment is an honorable and courageous action”. VUMC could acknowledge that the institution essentially killed her career by placing her tenure decision on hold for nearly two years. VUMC could leverage @McLNeuro’s energy, passion and platform for the greater good. VUMC could lead in developing novel and creative mechanisms to nurture inclusive excellence in STEM environments.

Opportunities to make a real difference do not come along every day.

Will Vanderbilt University Medical Center make the right decision? Which side of history will they be on?

Women are watching.

 

 

 

Reactions from the student newspaper on our WWS event covering the NASEM report on sexual harassment in academia

Anne-Elizabeth and I were pleased that the Johns Hopkins News-Letter covered our Where We Stand event last week. This is the student newspaper, and it is always interesting to hear how the students react. You can read about it here:

https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2018/11/report-reveals-gender-inequity-in-academia

 

Discussion on Sexual Harassment in STEM

The Women Faculty Forum is hosting a special reception this Thursday to discuss the recommendations of the recently published National Academies report on Sexual Harassment in Academic Science, Engineering and Medicine. The NAS study identifies institutional culture as one of the key determinants of sexual and gender harassment. 

This  Where We Stand event will happen this Thursday, October 25, from 5:30-7pm in Mudd Atrium, hosted by the Women Faculty Forum at Homewood (WFF@H, formerly the Committee on the Status of Women). There will be good food and good company, and children are welcome (we’ll have toys and coloring pages there).

 

We’ll have multiple tables set up, each focusing on a different recommendation. After Dean Toscano’s introduction, I will present an overview of the report with a commentary on intersectionality—which any understanding of academic culture must clearly reckon with—and then we will arrive at the heart of the event: themed tables where participants will discuss concrete ways that Johns Hopkins can activate these recommendations across the Homewood campus, across all disciplines.

 

Various resources will be on the table to inform your discussions: a copy of the NAS report (2018); the Vision 2020 report (2006); Roadmap on Diversity and Inclusion (2016); Report on Faculty Composition (2016); Report Card on Vision 2020 (2017); and others.

 

On behalf of the WFF, we very much hope you can join the discussion.  Finally, we invite you to follow our blog and/or twitter (@wffhop).

 

Workshop on Apr 26: How Are You Heard By Others? Aggressive, Assertive or Passive?

Observe how this woman talks in this cartoon from Non-threatening Leadership Strategies for Women from the CooperReview.com

I like to keep most things on this website grounded in the research and data on gender issues in male dominated environments and less on the anecdotal side. Certainly the stories we could all tell are important – and most of us have more than a few doozies! But equally important is the dialogue that we can create in our communities by knowing the data, which is the main goal of my efforts here.

I’m going to make an exception to this rule with this post because I’m really excited about an upcoming workshop we’re having on perceptions of talk by women (more on that below).

I am direct. I didn’t understand this for a long time because I grew up in Texas, and people there are, well, direct. So I fit in.

Having a natural tendency to be direct has its advantages. It is important in the classroom to be clear and unambiguous in teaching, assignments and expectations. A straightforward prose in a grant application leaves nothing to the imagination of the reader, which is usually good. And directness on grant review meetings and in writing grant reviews provides the applicant with clear feedback so they are not wondering what the reviewer means when reading their comments. Program officers from national agencies have commended me for this skill. I can’t tell you how much this means to me, especially after a wrenching panel meeting.

Social norms are a little different on the east coast, where I’ve been for the past couple of decades. My impression is that people here are generally less direct in their communication and do not always value frank talk. I am older, too, and hopefully wiser and also now understand that being direct conflicts with my gender stereotype. People look to women to be kind and nice and nurturing. I think I am all those things, too, but my sugar-coating skills are a constant work in progress.

In a pedagogical setting, the perception of an assertive, direct woman can lead to disappointment in a student because said professor is not meeting the “nurturing” stereotypical expectations. This affects teaching evaluations. While comments on a male professor may include how brilliant he is, a different B-word definitely shows up on teaching evaluations for women professors. I am not making this up, and this bias makes it harder for WomenInSTEM to do their jobs.

So, are you perceived as aggressive, passive, or assertive? And does this perception match your desired image?

Illysa Izenberg is going to address this topic in a workshop on Thursday April 26, 2018 at 5 PM in the Mudd UTL. In this workshop, you’ll learn the difference between assertive and aggressive and practice declarative speech that fits your individual style without overcompensating or changing who you are.

In keeping with tradition, Pizza will be served. To make sure I order enough, please send me a quick email if you think you may come so I can get a head count. Karen dot Fleming at JHU dot edu.

 

The Power is in the Data

Wow! 60 Minutes tonight.
I love data. And I agree with the sentiment of the story they ran tonight: the real power is in the data.

But so much of the data associated with unconscious bias in the workplace is – well – squishy.  Not so for salary data. Everyone knows how to count those green dollars.

Even so, there is a well known gender gap between the salaries of men and women: white women earn on average only 80 cents for every dollar that a man earns. This is even worse for women with intersectional identities. So, if you are interested in gender equity as it relates to your salary – and who wouldn’t be? – then you should definitely check out the 60 Minutes story that ran tonight about Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/salesforce-ceo-marc-benioff-leading-by-example-to-close-the-gender-pay-gap/

First, Kudos goes out this CEO for using his privilege to bring more voice to this problem. And second, special Kudos goes out to him for putting his money where his mouth is. To the tune of millions of dollars. Yes, millions. That’s at least six $$$$$$.

This CEO learned that he had to pony up this money through a company-wide salary audit. In other words, they collected the data, then analyzed it, then acted on it. What they did not do is bury it or keep it a secret. All workplaces should adopt this practice. As Mr. Benioff learned, gender inequities in salary are endemic to our society, and we must all be vigilant about checking for these on a regular basis.

#WeMustDoBetter for our society, for our #WomenInSTEM, and for women in general.

Happening Today: Women in Leadership Panel

The Career Center and Alpha Phi Omega are co-sponsoring a Women in Leadership panel from 6 to 8 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 30, in Bloomberg 272. The panel features Jeannine Heynes, Hopkins’ director of women and gender resources at Johns Hopkins. Another panelist, Karen Fleming, is a biophysicist and advocated for the Women of Hopkins exhibit at the Mattin Center. The final panelist, Illysa Izenberg, has more than two decades of business experience and received the 2016 JHU Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award.

The Q&A discussion focuses on the gender climate of the professional workplace, from the point of view of the panelists, who work in business, STEM, and gender equity fields.