|
Abstract:
|
The absence of women faculty in the science and technology classroom creates a negative feedback loop that resists change. Few women want to go to places where few women are. This is understandable. Gender schema bias increases exponentially as the proportion of women in a given population decreases. The women who do stay in science and technology tend to migrate away from academia toward industry where there is no tenure clock to create conflict with the biological clock and where family-friendly policies and resources make it somewhat easier to have a balanced life. In this paper, I describe an innovative, exportable, low-cost solution to the conundrum of small numbers that has been proposed by the Murray Center for Women in Technology at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). The Murray Center strategy builds on Sue Rossers observation that women researchers often respond to a chilly university climate by creating a small, empowering environment in their own labs (Rosser 2004). That is, they achieve in microcosm what they are not able to achieve in macrocosm: functional critical mass. Functional critical mass changes more than the number. It changes the way men see women (dampens gender schema bias effects); and it changes the way women see themselves (the quorum sensing effect). It generates strategic power for sustainable structural transformation. I go on to discuss how social network theory can be applied to achieve functional critical mass. I argue that universities can generate strategic power for fundamental climate change by enabling and funding a network of interdisciplinary research collaborations among their current women faculty and a few of the womens male peers. By positioning these female-majority research communities in the interstices between disciplinary departments--the structural holes in the organizational map--this strategy exploits what sociologist Mark Granovetter (1973, 1983) has called the strength of weak ties--that is, information and control advantages of being a broker in relations between people otherwise disconnected in the social structure (Burt 1998). In addition, I also discuss how new pervasive information technologies can be used to diminish isolation, increase social capital, and support community among women faculty. These technologies, in combination with traditional networking techniques, can serve to interconnect small female-majority research communities to each other and to change agents in senior administration who have an established record of supporting women faculty. These administrators, in turn, can extend the web still further, establishing connections to external best practices advisors in business and industry that can help to redefine peer culture from a position of strength. The resulting networks will increase the social capital of the women faculty as a whole and create leverage in the departmental P&T process. The existence of interconnected collaboraties of women scholars will tend to improve retention and recruitment simultaneously. I conclude by describing the third dimension of the Murray Center proposal: an assessment strategy that maps networks in research-oriented social space over time. This innovative approach offers universities across the country a dynamic method of measuring institutional climate change.
|
