Female engineers, scientists needed

It's no longer news women earn more B.A. degrees than men. Small, liberal arts institutions are so female-dominated, some coeds worry more about finding a man than passing their biochemistry final.

More recently we learned that women now outnumber men in science and engineering undergraduate programs. The National Science Foundation reports in 2001 that women earned more than 202,000 such degrees compared with 197,623 earned by men. But what we cannot figure out is the bizarre rationale behind why these gains in women's education levels have yet to translate into gains in the real world of work. Two years ago, there were just shy of 575,000 employed science and engineering Ph.D.s nationwide.

Only one-fourth was female. While that's a significant gain over prior generations, women are not advancing in their career tracks at anywhere near the pace at which they're gaining degrees. No one understands why.

The debate between liberal and conservative women's groups goes as follows: Liberals: Women continue to face routine workplace discrimination and gender bias in hiring, promotion and pay. Conservatives: Women's lack of advancement is their own choice; they'd rather stay home to raise kids than command higher salaries and success in the world outside the home.

The fields of science and engineering have been particularly hard for women to crack. So, too, have the lofty ranks of tenured professorships in science and engineering university departments. Former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers' decamp would not have been so abrupt if he had had a better track record on offering tenure to women professors. (Summers, you'll recall, posited women's relative lack of success in the fields of math and science might stem from innate biological differences between the sexes.)

Perhaps we should spend less time and effort trying to divine a reason and more time recruiting less-represented groups to fill technical jobs. Last fall the National Academy of Sciences sent Congress a report, "Rising Above the Gathering Storm." In it leading scientists, academicians and business executives warned the "scientific and technical building blocks of our economic leadership are eroding" and we're about to be bypassed by, you guessed it, the same two countries overtaking us in manufacturing and outsourcing: China and India.

Columbia University Professor David Keyes wrote one of the most cogent arguments I've seen for setting gender differences aside and hightailing it toward producing more science and engineering graduates, as quickly as possible. Keyes, of Columbia's applied physics and mathematics department, says the sooner we do so, and the more scientists and engineers we employ, the better.