Bridging The Gender Gap: An Empirical Survey Of Provosts, Deans And Department Chairs In Stem Fields

The low number of women in the hard sciences has been a long standing concern in universities. Concerns regarding women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) in particular have recently come into the limelight in lieu of the fact that women are catching up to (or have exceeded!) men in many other fields, yet the number of women in these fields remains significantly lower than the number of men. Previous research has shown that it is women who want to balance family and research in particular who struggle to deal with the clash between the biological and tenure clocks, and end up choosing one or the other. Our work in this paper is built on the premise that structural changes at the university level will provide these women with policies that enable them to balance both family and work. Many other researchers in this field have suggested policies that could be implemented to help women. The aim of our research was to get university administrators to evaluate these policies to see which ones are actually good policies that can be implemented to help women succeed at both work and family life. To do this, we surveyed university administrators on their attitudes towards policies that could help women succeed in STEM fields. Using previous research, we compiled a list of policies that have been suggested to help women succeed in the sciences. This list was sent out by email to a total of 1529 provosts, deans, associate deans and department chairs of STEM fields in 96 research-oriented universities. These university administrators were asked for 2 responses to each policy - a rating of its quality and a rating of its feasibility. Our survey received 474 replies, of which 334 contained data which was used in the analysis. For the analysis done in this paper, publicly available information was gathered on each respondent's gender, title, and university type (public or private). After de-identifying the data to protect the confidentiality of the respondents, the data was analyzed to look for differences in the responses based on gender, title and university type. The analysis found that the evaluation of quality and feasibility of some policies depended heavily on the gender of the respondents, while the title of the respondent did not significantly affect most quality or feasibility ratings. University type was significant for policies that involved funding and the preferential hiring of women. However, when it came to the best overall policies, none of these factors were particularly significant. Thus we conclude that the best policies are considered to have high quality and feasibility regardless of gender, title or university type of the respondent. These best policies include providing equal opportunities for women and men to lead committees and research groups, developing mentoring programs to reduce isolation of female faculty, and providing on-campus childcare centers. This conclusion makes it easy for administrators who read this report to consider implementing these best policies without being overly concerned about how the gender, title or university type of the respondents influenced the results. The hope is that administrators across all research-oriented universities will use this report as a basis for implementing or altering policies to help women in STEM-fields better balance their work and family lives. Having the assurance that these best policies are backed up by the opinions of other administrators in similar positions will hopefully give administrators the reassurance necessary to implement new policies and bridge the STEM fields' gender gap. i