It’s hard for me to believe it, but it’s been 20 years since I first visited the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. My mom, goddess rest her soul, dragged the whole family there one day while we were on a Disney vacation. She did it because I, the eldest and nrrdiest of her daughters, was obsessed with NASA and being an astronaut. It also happened to be the 20th anniversary of the Apollo Moon Landing.

I remember the thump in my chest as we drove up, got out and oh my goodness, I was there! At 14 the only thing that would have been better would have been Space Camp with River Phoenix. Sadly I never made it to Space Camp or met River Phoenix. Broken youth dreams! But back to the Kennedy Center…I went wild. I read most of the placards carefully, sucking in all the geeky information and breathing in salty air. I spent far more in the souvenir store than I thought my parents would let me or could afford. But it was their way of supporting my dream.

We even went on a bus tour of the center. The tour director had his usual trivia questions ready to stump and educate the masses. Only he ran into me. I answered every single question without hesitation or competition. I don’t think I ever saw my mom in tears from laughing and pride every again.

This year we mark the 40th anniversary of man’s landing on the moon. It’s obvious that I didn’t end up becoming an astronaut. A few days after the Kennedy Space Center my parents took us to SeaWorld and I fell in love with marine biology – which I did end up doing for a few years. I know my box of newspapers that I bought at garage sales about the moon landing are somewhere in my basement. I also still have a commemorative plate to boot. I’m counting the days (just over 400) until my daughter and I can go to Space Camp together.

Before we go, I’ll be sure to read parts of Tanya Lee Stone’s latest book, Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared, with her. It’s a heart-wrenching book for me. To love space exploration so much and yet read how society and powerful government officials colluded to keep 13 highly qualified women from fulfilling their dream and potentially inspiring a generation of young girls. But I want my daughter to know what it took for her to have the chance to even consider being an astronaut or any scientist. I plan on a full review of the book on July 20th at my blog.

I sometimes wonder what it would have been like if Nelly Armstrong had landed on the moon with Betsy Aldrin. Who knows what kind of world we’d be living in…Or if we’d finally have that moon colony.

Last week National Academies Press released findings from a new research study on the status of women in science and engineering that signals some great progress. It was commissioned to look at how the numbers change when women apply for tenure-track positions as well as their advancement on campus from assistant professor to fully tenured professor.

The key thing to remember is that the report is a snapshot report for the years 2004-2005. But the snapshot taken is one of change:

If women applied for positions at RI institutions, they had a better chance of being interviewed and receiving offers than male job candidates had. Many departments at Research I institutions, both public and private, have made an effort to increase the numbers and proportions of female faculty in the sciences, engineering and mathematics. Having women play a visible role in the hiring process, for example, has clearly made a difference. [PDF]

Since 2001, the National Science Foundation through its ADVANCE program has invested over $130 million towards finding solutions to the problem of underrepresentation of women faculty members in science and engineering and that includes the hiring and promotion process. Very simply put, ADVANCE teams around the country have come to the conclusion that unconscious bias towards women from men and women has hindered the hiring and promotion of women faculty in STEM fields. This means that gendered expectations come into play. Is there evidence of children in a candidate’s life? Bonus points for the man, negative for the woman. Look at the support letters: Are women described with weak words and men with strong ones?

One very simple trick to increasing women in an applicant pool (any applicant pool, I tell conference and panel organizers this too) is when you are speaking with a contact about potential job candidates to ask specifically, especially if none are named, for women and people of color. I continue to be amazed at stories from members of search committees who have been on the phone with a friend who still names only white men, but then remembers that there are women and people of color in the larger department.

Interesting though is the finding that the mere presence of a woman chairing the search committee will mean that women will apply for that position. We don’t have enough women to chair each search committee out there, so we need to do a better job asking women to apply.

An increase in women in the pool, getting interviews and offers, and doing just as well as men in terms of promotion should be a reason to celebrate. A lot of hard work has gone into getting to this point (which is not an end point, by the way), so why are some grumbling about discrimination?

The Chronicle noted the findings and a polite discussion about meritocracy and advantages that women receive, to the detriment of men, is happening. Seriously? Let’s look at the numbers from the study:
• Women account for about 17 percent of applications for both tenure-track and tenured positions in the departments surveyed;
• …there were no female applicants (only men applied) for 32 (6 percent) of the available tenure-track positions and 16 (16.5 percent) of the tenured positions.

Women applying for academic positions are in a very small pool, thus the higher proportion of them being hired is a sign of progress. In biology, where 60-65% of undergraduates are women and 45% of PhDs go to women, men still receive 66% of the academic position offers at Research I institutions.
I know that it can seem threatening that the shift is happening, but the shift is happening towards balance, towards equity. And even with these shifts happening, I still hear people describe the Latina hired in Chemistry as “Outstanding!” meaning she didn’t get this because she’s Latina, we just took the time and rolled up our sleeves to find that outstanding Latina with an amazing research plan. When we can get to the day when we report that of the last 10 hires at Your University we had 5 women, 4 people of color and leave it at that, then we’ll really be getting somewhere.

This month Science Grrl looks at the mother-daughter bond in science & engineering.

First, the only mother – daughter duo to ever win the Nobel Prize was the Curies. Marie Curie won twice: first in 1903 for her discovery of radiation and second in 1911 in chemistry for her work on radium and polonium. Marie’s daughter Irène Joliot-Curie won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1935. Irène had built upon the work that Marie and her father, Pierre, had started. While we can stand in awe of the mother-daughter science-duo and the amazing knowledge they brought to our world, their relationship wasn’t ideal. Marie “was so obsessed with her science and the discovery of radioactivity that she pretty much ignored her two daughters and after her husband’s tragic death retreated into her mind even more.”

I try to temper this view of Marie with the knowledge that she lived in a vastly different time than we do. It was a time when she almost HAD to marry a scientist to gain access to good lab space and equipment. Her partnership with Pierre was born not just from love, but also from need of resources. She was often not chosen for faculty positions because she was a woman or because Pierre already had one. Today universities have spousal hire rules to allow them to hire one “lead” partner for a tenure track position and then hire the “trailing” partner for maybe a tenure track position or adjunct faculty position. A generation ago there were rules at universities that outlawed nepotism or the hiring of both husband and wife into academic faculty positions. While yes, it is nepotism it’s not the same nepotism that we warn against when we think our cousin might be the best person for a job.

Luckily things are far better for moms in science today. It’s far from perfect, but I can only imagine the amazing work the Curie women could have done today!

We also shouldn’t forget to mention that moms are often the #1 advocate for daughters who want to get into science and engineering. My late mom didn’t totally get my aspirations for marine biology, but she supported my decision and that meant the world to me. I found a curriculum online for creating a mother-daughter Science Club. They do recommend you buy their biography books, but I’m sure you can switch out biographies you find online or in your local library. As someone who works with college students, I find that one of the many issues young women have is getting their parents to understand why they want to major in physics rather than biology and go to medical school. The education goes both ways in this issue!

So girls, get your mom involved in your decisions and moms push your daughter to reach for the stars.

One of my most vivid memories of first grade is when Mrs. Gerry wouldn’t let me have a counting strip. It had lily pads on it and a frog at zero. When I got up to get in line to get my counting strip, Mrs. Gerry told me to turn around and sit down. “You don’t need one.” I was embarrassed to have my math skills announced like that to the class. But she was right, I didn’t need it. That was the start of my math nrrd status.

Last week I had my daughter at my office because of report card pick up. Yes, in Chicago, that means the kids have the day off so teachers can focus on parent conferences. She loves being at my office because I have a white board and I let her draw all over it. Normally she draws pictures, but this time she was doodling math problems. I turned around and saw that she was trying to add 15 to 20 and had figured it out. How did my kindergarten daughter figure this out? Well, she drew counters. First 15 then 20 more and counted them up. I also noticed that she wrote the problem out vertically, so I thought it was a good time to teach her how to add double digits. I drew boxes around the right column and told her to add those numbers, then did the same with the left column. I knew it would work because there was no carrying involved.

She looked at me like I was a genius. Then she asked me to write some more problems for her to do on the white board. Yes, I was proud.

The first thing I did when I got to the WAM! Conference at MIT on March 27th was to buy her a MIT sweatshirt. I buy her shirts from almost every campus I visit. Even though I work at a university, I want her to know that college is part of the plan and that there are so many more options than just the one mommy works at. While I was flooded with college brochures in high school, I had no idea how to navigate them. I threw the MIT one in the garbage because I didn’t think it was worth it to apply just to be denied. I want to keep that mentality from rooting itself in my daughter’s head. One of her favorite sleeping shirts is from Spellman.

So while I am a math nrrd and it is obvious that my daughter has some great math skills, I know that parents and teachers are key to making a skill into a passion. The next day when I was busy working when she asked me to write some math problems for her. “Some big ones!” So I did. And I did again when she was done and wanted more.

Girls have caught up with boys in math test scores and I give us parents a lot of credit for it. We stopped listening to naysayers who said math is a boy thing. We listened to feminists who said, hell no! We encouraged our daughters to explore the numbers dancing in their heads. It’s easy to be jaded and think that kids don’t listen to us, even as early as kindergarten. But we need to remember that we can still wow them with simple math magic. You never know where that might lead them.

Now to figure out how to teach her about carrying numbers in a way that keeps me looking like a genius.

Happy Women’s History Month from Science Grrl! But for this post, you can call me Engineering Grrl, even though the only thing I’ve ever engineered is how to make all the pieces of an IKEA furniture piece fit where they need to fit.

Why am I Engineering Grrl this month? Because I’m participating in the fifth annual Global Marathon For, By and About Women in Engineering! It’s a live webcast and teleconference that ran continuously from noon on Wednesday, March 11 through Noon Thursday, March 12, 2009.

Archives from the 2008 Marathon feature presentations originating from points worldwide, with North America leading off, followed by South America, China, India, South Africa, and Europe. Topics included tips on heightening awareness of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics issues among pre-college, college, and young career women, and examining issues such as retaining women in college engineering programs and the workplace.

The schedule demonstrates how engineering for and about women can be discussed around the world in 24 hours. Doesn’t that just blow your mind? I was excited about what would be discussed from the perspective of Africa. I’ve known plenty of women engineering students who hoped to take their engineering skills to Africa to work toward alleviating suffering from drought by crafting new irrigation systems or bioengineering drought-proof seeds.

I’ve found that many women engineering students think this way– They wonder how they can help the world with their engineering skills. Yes, they “ooh and ah” at rockets but most of the women I’ve met who study engineering are thinking with both their brains and hearts. Of course, it’s not just women: Engineers without Borders, which involves both male and female engineers, is one of the fastest growing student groups on college campuses. National Engineers Week Foundation makes a point to have a “humanitarian” group listing.

When people ask me how I try to convince girls to take an interest in engineering, I reply that I don’t. I ask them what their interests already are and then point out the science, technology, engineering and math could encompass those interests. Does she want to have her own cosmetic line? Well I point out that she should have a solid chemistry background (you don’t want her to turn out like Frenchie from Grease!) and perhaps even a bioengineering background to help smooth out wrinkles, keep mascara from running and make bronzers natural, but also glittery.

There’s not much in this world that hasn’t been handled by an engineer. We just need to see it and help our girls see it too.

January 20, 2009 not only ushered in a new President, but a President who believes in science and wants to fund it. While I haven’t been in the lab in over a decade, my heart is still there, and I have been working on a daily basis for over ten years to convince more women to decide on a scientific research career.

The last few years I’ve had a tough time with this because the level of funding for science has dropped like a lead balloon. I have many reasons for wanting women to enter science or engineering, but one of them is that they can make up to $40,000 – $60,000 right out of college. Economic justice for women can’t happen if we continue to keep women segregated into low-paying jobs. In my insider/outsider status in the scientific community, I’ve seen more and more scientists fight over fewer and fewer dollars. It’s made me think: Is this really the place I wanted to send women?

The women I meet want to change the world with their science and engineering skills. They want to ease, if not eliminate, poverty in drought-stricken environments. They want to cure diseases that they watched their grandparents die from, that broke their parents’ hearts. So yes, of course, I still encourage them to keep moving forward and to chase their dreams. They will change the world.

As I write this, the economic stimulus package has just been passed in the Senate, though it may ultimately be shorn of some essential funding for science and education. Republicans criticized and wanted the removal of funds for the National Science Foundation, which supports much of the basic science that happens at colleges and universities where many of our future scientists and engineers are training. Apparently a number on the right side of the aisle don’t believe in or understand science enough to know that yes, science is stimulus and is shovel-ready. I’ll let my former research adviser, Mark Westneat, take it from here:

…scientific research is basically all about hiring people and buying stuff. NSF grants are not funding elite Ivory Tower endeavors — the money helps everyone. The primary line item in most research grants is salary for students, technicians, interns, post-doctoral scientists, and researchers. These are mostly young people who contribute fresh approaches and new ideas to the research while receiving training in science and technology. While these are not blue collar jobs, all institutions charge an overhead fee on federal grants that is used to fund operational costs, including administrative assistants, plumbers, electricians, and house-keeping staff to keep the research enterprise running. The remaining money is used to buy things, from high-end items such as computers, microscopes, DNA sequencers, and chemicals, to every-day items like office supplies and airline tickets. Most of these things are purchased from American companies and, in the case of my own institution, preferentially from local minority and woman-owned businesses. In addition, scientific institutions provide a significant portion of developmental aid at low cost, by training thousands of students and colleagues each year in developing countries.

In all reality, some of our great institutions of higher learning are putting off building maintenance in order to keep classes open and faculty employed. I’m sure that if those who criticized NSF funding as pork understood that science and education are shovel-ready projects, they would have thrown a few million to universities to fix deferred maintenance on buildings.

Here we are in a new administration, which clearly supports science, and yet we still have to deal with anti-science people who seek to cripple our colleges, universities, and museums from doing what they do best – research, teaching, and preparing a new generation of products and people to bring us economically and scientifically into a new frontier. Science and engineering bring us medical advances and the new gadgets that people line up for days before going on sale to buy. From the smallest iPod to the next Wii, there’s a lot of science and engineering, education and research, behind it. Ever seen the line outside the Apple store? That’s stimulus. And that’s an industry I could feel comfortable telling women to go into in order to derive all possible benefits. But clearly it’s still going to have to take some more Change around Washington to do.

“It’s not rocket science.”

The old saying is supposed to put one at ease when attempting to solve a problem. But it also is our way of elevating rocket scientists as the epitome of intelligence. Thus we are left with the image that only the most intelligent people can be scientists and engineers. Please note that I said “most” intelligent because obviously you need to be intelligent to do science.

That said, people have often pointed to the fact that there are more male geniuses or, more recently, that boys make up a large majority of those in the 99% percentile in math:

At the very highest level, the 99.9th percentile, this difference meant 2.15 males for every female. This difference was large enough that, in an occupation requiring math skills at that level, the job ranks could be expected to be filled 68 percent by men, 32 percent by women — enough to explain, as Summers suggested, part of the gender gap.

While I have not seen the breakdown of what people, men and women, who score in the 99th percentile do with their lives, I doubt we can focus on this slim slice of the population to increase the number of scientists and engineers in the United States. Thus the idea that because we currently have more male geniuses is a reason to just accept that we will always have more male engineers is hogwash. Thankfully others see through this flawed logic.

In my career as a student, scientist and advisor, I have seen students who blow my mind with their genius trip on their laurels and ego to fall flat on their face. I have seen students who started their college careers in remedial math, yet worked hard and succeeded not only in passing Calculus, but continued on to graduate school. And yes, I have seen the stereotypes: Genius students sprint through college in 3 years and straight into medical school; others drop out after getting clobbered by Calculus. Having a solid foundation in math is obviously key, but in the end percentiles cannot predict creativity or aptitude for science and engineering.

In my opinion, this argument is merely another excuse to avoid the harder questions of discrimination, curriculum, and the lack of encouragement we give our girls to consider engineering and science. Given the need for more engineers in our society, we should be working to find ways to encourage as many students as possible, of both sexes, to turn to this field. It is a sad fact that even with a 3:1 advantage in math genius, our boys are not turning to engineering as a career and that spells trouble for the future of our economy.

Last week I sat down with a group of journalism students and they asked what we can do to make math cool for girls. “We simply need to make math cool in general, not just for girls,” I replied. The same goes for science. Science is portrayed as the only field that uses big words (it’s not like law is any better—have you ever tried to read the terms & conditions for Facebook?) and thus intimidates many to think one needs to be a rocket scientist to be well, a scientist. So when scientific studies are printed in the media that “prove” that working moms are happier than stay-at-home ones, or vice versa, or that feminism is to blame for the rise in women alcoholics, most people are unprepared to question the findings.

This lack of skepticism is scientists’ fault. Far too often we, (even though I haven’t been a practicing scientist in over a decade, I’ll lump myself in), don’t explain things in a simple way. It takes a long time to tackle those big words and we need to use them…when we talk to each other. But basic knowledge of science is a must in today’s society. Scientific literacy should be just as important to our education as knowing how to read and add together two numbers.

More and more I find that this scientific literacy is a must for women and girls in particular. As we have seen in the eight long years of the Bush administration women and girls health care has been politicized. Yes, most of the Bush administration has been politicized, but health care is especially touchy. I just heard a story of a friend whose pregnancy was going badly and instead of offering a termination immediately her doctor referred her to labor & delivery to birth the dying fetus. She said she couldn’t believe that she had the will to stand up at the time and tell the doctor he had better find someone to perform an abortion. This friend is one of the most vocal feminists I know and yet she knows that she almost folded under the cloak of “Doctor Knows Best.”

When the Bush administration says that climate change has nothing to do with polar bears dying, we have photos of dead polar bears. When the Bush administration says that the morning after pill is an abortificant we don’t have a photos to counter. That’s the tricky thing with science and health care.

Our only defense is to educate ourselves. We should know how to spot when the science is bad or when the reporting is bad. Debunking is a science and often our bodies are a battlefield. Ladies, suit up.

Image Credit.