Mildred Dresselhaus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), guest speaker at the Women in MRS Breakfast, speculated on the position of women in science and engineering. She addressed the growing proportion of women working in science and engineering since 1970, and the role that interventions played in this increased participation. She also gave some perspectives on the future status of women in the field of materials science and engineering.

Dresselhaus provided numerous statistics exemplifying the progress made in increasing the number of women in science since 1970. When MIT implemented a program to aggressively attract women to the science departments, the Institute saw a rise in the number of women undergraduate students. The program included interventions as simple as students actively contacting newly accepted applicants. This direct contact would pull women into the educational program.

In a Survey of Doctorate Recipients conducted by the U.S. National Science Foundation, a graph of the number of full-time doctoral science and engineering faculty, by rank and sex, demonstrates that between 1973 and 1995, the number of women faculty from junior to full professor has remained below the number of male professors of all ranks (see Figure 1). Since 1994, the Committee on Women Faculty in the MIT School of Science has reviewed issues such as salary; grant funds; percentage of academic year salaries brought in on grants; start-up funds; allocation of departmental resources; teaching loads; participation on search committees; inclusion on important departmental committees of governance and policy; chairs, awards, nominations for internal and external awards; and use of maternity/family leave and delays in the tenure clock. The effect of this intervention has been a steady improvement in the status of the senior women faculty members in the areas under discussion, and improvement in the morale of the women faculty and of the graduate students and the postdocs.

The School of Science furthermore showed an increase of women faculty (tenured and untenured combined) of 5% between 1994 and 2000, in which women made up 8% of the faculty in 1994, to 13%. In the School of Engineering, women make up 17% of the faculty in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, as of last year (see Table I). This is superseded by the School of Science in the Department of Biology-in which women make up 22% of the faculty-and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Science-in which they make up 26% of the faculty. In the Department of Physics, women constitute 7% of the tenured and untenured faculty.

Table I: Percent/Number of Female/Male Faculty by Department at MIT - 2000 Female Faculty as a Percent of Total Number of Tenured Number of Untenured Female Male Female Male 17% Materials Science & Engineering 4 26 2 3 22% Biology 7 29 4 9 26% Brain & Cognitive Science 5 11 1 6 7% Physics 3 52 2 12 Numbers are extracted from the original source. The primary data was obtained from Lydia Snover, Assistant to the Provost for Institutional Research, MIT. The numbers should be considered unconfirmed because data may have been collected at varying times during the year.

Dresselhaus showed numbers, as of 1999, in which there are 43.3 female students per female faculty whereas there are 10.8 male students per male faculty (in engineering). Among the recommendations of Gender Equity in Academic Science and Engineering Convocation at MIT on January 29, 2001 was to increase the number of women faculty so as to reflect the number of women students, and to ensure full participation of the women faculty across the spectrum of faculty activities.

This event was organized by the Outreach Subcommittee within the MRS Public Affairs Committee.

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