My talk for the @ucdavis Advance Awards Symposium

I gave a talk Thursday as part of the UC Davis Advance Awards Symposium in Sacramento. I am crazy busy right now so don't have a lot of time to write here about the talk but I did post about it to Twitter in a long thread.

Here are the slides for the talk:



Here is the first Tweet in a long thread I posted annotating the slides.



He is a Wakelet with some Tweets about the Symposium.

Not protesting this commencement address: Nancy Hopkins at BU on Gender Bias in STEM

Thank you Paula Olsiewski for pointing me to this: Boston University’s 141st Commencement Baccalaureate Address: Nancy Hopkins.  It is the text of the commencement address that Nancy Hopkins gave at BU on Monday.  And it is really worth reading.  Or watching.

And fortunately BU has posted video of the talk




In the talk Hopkins discusses her work in biology and the subtle and overt gender bias she has seen. Hopkins is quite an amazing person. For more about her see
Also see a talk by Hopkins at U. Chicago from 2011 at a colloqiuium on advancing women in science and engineering. 








ADVANCE Blog Notes: Interesting article by Mary Ann Mason at Slate.Com "In the Ivory Tower, Men Only"

There is a really interesting article at Slate.Com from Mary Ann Mason, the author of "Do Babies Matter" which I have written about here before.  The post is titled "In the Ivory Tower, Men Only".  The post tells some of the background behind the book and discusses issues about graduate school, post doctoral positions, applying for faculty jobs and more.   The article also has some very good guidance for universities that would like to level the playing field:
We all know what structural changes would help to level the playing field in all of these careers and they are quite similar: paid family leave for both mothers and fathers, especially for childbirth, a flexible workplace, a flexible career track, a re-entry policy, pay equity reviews, child care assistance, dual career assistance. Those universities and corporations who have actively created these policies have found an advantage in recruitment and retention. For instance, at Berkeley, after enacting several new policies to benefit parents, including paid teaching leaves for fathers, job satisfaction scored much higher among parents, and more babies are being born to assistant professors.
Some good guidance for some of the activities at UC Davis as part of the ADVANCE program in which I am involved. And she ends by recommending
It is time for women to “lean in” and demand family policies that will at least give them a fighting chance to have both a successful career and babies.
I agree.  But it is also time for men to do the same.  The more that men also support and demand such policies the quicker things will change.


ADVANCE Reading of the Day: Sylvia Earle, Women in Japan and the Gulf, Spaceflight

Quick post here ... Some news stories and posts I am checking out today in relation to the UC Davis ADVANCE project in which I am involved.

ADVANCE Journal Club: Developing Graduate Students of Color for the Professoriate in STEM

As I have posted about before - I am involved in the UC Davis ADVANCE project funded by NSF.  From the project website:
UC Davis ADVANCE is a newly funded Institutional Transformation grant that began in September of 2012. Our program is supported by the National Science Foundation’s ADVANCE Program which aims to increase the participation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers. 
My role in this project is as a member (and now Co-Chair) of one of the "Policies and Practices Review Initiative" Committee.  As part of my work on this committee I am trying to read various papers on related topics.  And I figured I would simultaneously post about these papers as much as I can because it would be great to get a broader discussion going on these topics.

So today I am reading the following:CSHE - Developing Graduate Students of Color for the Professoriate in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) which I was pointed to in our Committee meeting yesterday.  It is quite interesting.  It is by Anne MacLachlan from the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley.

The abstract:
This paper presents part of the results of a completed study entitled A Longitudinal Study of Minority Ph.D.s from 1980-1990: Progress and Outcomes in Science and Engineering at the University of California during Graduate School and Professional Life. It focuses particularly on the graduate school experience and degree of preparation for the professoriate of African American doctoral students in the sciences and engineering, and presents the results of a survey of 33 African American STEM Ph.D.s from the University of California earned between 1980-1990. Relationships with thesis advisors and principal investigators are evaluated by the study participants in fifteen specific areas from highly-ranked intellectual development to low-ranked training in grant writing. Deficits in training and socialization are discussed along with the tension between being both an African American and a graduate student. Career choices and outcomes are presented. These findings, in conjunction with current analyses of graduate education in STEM, suggest ways in which graduate training for all could be improved.

Lots of interesting information in there.  Perhaps most important for my current goals is what she describes at the end in terms of a Proposed Development Program.  She starts this section by commenting on the general situation in terms of training scientists in the US today.  She then identifies what she refers to a "discontinuities" in federal and local policy which can hinder "developing faculty of color."  These include "compartmentalized, externally mandated sets of programs" and the "nature of Ph.D. training".  Of the 33 Ph.D.s surveyed in the study, nearly all of them recommended diversity training for faculty.  They also recommend better laying out of expectations and requirements for students and more involvement of current faculty in recruiting.  They also made many recommendations for improving the life of current students of color.

Anyway - a lot of this material and the concepts involved are bit new to me so I am still digesting the article.  But I thought I would share it with others in the hope that this will help catalyze more open discussion of issues involved women and underrepresented minorities in STEM fields.

Storified tweets from the #UCDavisADVANCE Symposium on Increasing Diversity of STEM Faculty

I live tweeted a symposium at UC Davis yesterday that was part of the UC Davis ADVANCE project to increase diversity of STEM Faculty. Here are the notes.

 

For more on the project see