WISE Welcomes First Year Graduate Women

The 3rd annual Welcome Dinner for Graduate women in the Sciences and Mathematics was held in September. More than 60 women attended. The featured speaker was Pamela Raymond, Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology. Raymond spoke about the underrepresentation of women in the STEM fields. She pointed out that when she was doing her graduate work at UM, there was only 1 female full professor in the Biology department. Thirty years later, despite years of overrepresentation of women undergraduates in biology, she is now the only female full professor in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology.

Raymond highlighted the social research, which explains social biases by both women and men that overvalue the work of men and undervalue the work of women. Raymond talked about her experiences on the NSF-funded ADVANCE project promoting institutional transformation in science and engineering fields. The goals of this program were to improve recruitment and retention of women faculty in science and engineering and to improve the institutional climate. In the years before ADVANCE, just 14 percent of tenure-track hires in science and engineering went to women. Now that number is 34 percent. Advance has been so successful that after the NSF funding ended, UM officials decided to make it permanent with funding commitments approved through at least 2011.

Raymond stressed that despite the vast amount of work that remains to counter gender biases, the future for this group of graduate women is brighter because of the efforts of ADVANCE and the support of UM.

October 2006 eNews

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