Women of MIT: Effective Practices for Recruitment, Mentoring, and Retention

LISKOV: I'm Barbara Liskov, and I'd like to welcome you to the second day of this lovely symposium. On our panel this morning, we have four very interesting and distinguished speakers.

What's going to happen is I'm going to introduce each speaker when they're ready to talk. And each speaker is going to talk for about 10 to 15 minutes, and each has a slightly different topic. Abby Stewart is going to talk about recruiting-- faculty recruiting. Milly Dresselhaus will talk about mentoring. Lotte Bailyn will talk about retention. And Cherry Murray will talk about leadership.

We're going to hold the questions until after all the speakers have spoken. So please, make a note of your questions. And then at the end, you can come up to the microphones and address your questions to everybody, or to specific speakers.

Our next speaker is Milly Dresselhaus. Milly has been a professor at MIT. In fact, she was the-- she came here in 1967. She was the first professor in the Electoral Engineering-- then the Electrical Engineering Department, now the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. She's a professor emeritus now and she's an Institute professor.

She got her bachelor's in physics from Hunter College, her master's in physics from Radcliffe/Harvard-- in those days, they were separate institutions, and her PhD in physics from the University of Chicago. She then spent two years as a postdoc at Cornell, followed by seven years at Lincoln Labs, and then she was recruited to come to MIT as a faculty member.

She's had a very distinguished career with many honors, including winning the US National Medal of Science. And she's a member of both the National Academy of Science, and the National Academy of Engineering. Her research interests are in physics/electrical engineering, carbon science, and carbon nanostructures.

So Milly. Milly's going to talk about mentoring.

DRESSELHAUS: One correction to my introduction. Yes, I have the title of emeritus, but I haven't changed my hours. Typical MIT thing.

So when I started out, maybe in high school or so, the options were to be a secretary, teacher, or nurse. And I chose being a teacher. And I've kind of done that ever since, in a way. I had some mentors and my mentors were very influential to me. My first mentor it was Rosalyn Yalow. She couldn't get a job at the time, so she was teaching at Hunter College. And we met up in a very small class and we've been lifelong friends. She taught me that women could do science also.

My next important mentor was in Enrico Fermi. When I started graduate school at the University of Chicago, I took a course from him. And I had the privilege of walking to school with him every day, because we lived pretty close to each other. And when he saw me, he would always come across the street and walk with me. I was too shy to go with him, but he came to me.

So I think the attraction was that he had a daughter that was six-weeks younger than me. And she was an artist and I was in science, and he liked women in science. So that that was a real plus. At that time, not all the men liked women in science. There was a certain amount of prejudice about that. But Enrico Fermi was really a straight shooter. He liked people that did the work.

What I learned from him was important to become sort of knowledgeable about all fields of physics. To pass the exams at Chicago, we had to do that. And that's been very useful to me in my career, especially in all the administrative things that I've done, heading up large programs where I had to know something about things that I wasn't working on myself. But it's great when you can ask a knowledgeable question about something to startle with the person working in another sub-field of physics. That's the way it is in physics, maybe not in other fields.

I got my first independent career job at Lincoln Lab. It was difficult for women to be taken seriously at that time, but Ben Lax took me seriously. And he hired me to do physics, not because I was a woman. And we got on really well together, because I did a lot of work and he liked that. That was the important thing and being a woman was not a handicap.

Well, he promoted me to give invited talks and that sort of thing. So people got to know me. And when I did okay on them, I would get invited on my own. So that's the way to start a career. And he did well. He had two women that he promoted-- myself and Laura Roth. Some of you might know her. We were contemporaries, the same age.

My husband has been a long time mentor. He always tells me when I'm going off the wrong track. So it's good to have a close mentor that's right there. And I do the same to him. So mentors for women could be either men or women. I think you noticed my sequence. And it's important for the men to take you seriously and not to worry about your sex.

You know, in physics, now, once you get established, it doesn't really make a whole lot of difference what your sex is. And I've taught all-male classes very happily for years. And they respected me. I don't think there was a much of a barrier about that.

I came to MIT and joined the faculty, never applied. I came on a fellowship. There was a woman, Abby Rockefeller Mauze, who was the older sister of the five brothers of that family. And she donated a pile of money to MIT in support of the scholarship of women in science. And I was a benefactor of an early fellowship.

I came to MIT, because the dean of engineering thought that they needed somebody in science to teach engineering students physics. And that was my job and he thought I did it well. So then I got a permanent job to do it. I never applied, it just sort of happened. They asked me if I was willing to stay. That sort of thing doesn't happen today.

But I don't think he asked me to stay because I was a woman, or because I wasn't a woman. It was they needed the job done. And this is kind of an MIT thing, I think. You do your job well, it doesn't make a whole lot of difference what your sex is.

And I really don't feel I have had much discrimination. Sometimes there's a man here and there that says something a little bit naughty, but by and large, it's business as usual. And I can't complain too much. At least I don't I don't let these comments bother me. Just go on and move with the tide.

MIT has been a wonderful environment for doing science. I would say my success in my career has been due to my colleagues and my students that I work with. They stimulate me. I listen to them argue about things that we think about. And we come up with some good solutions together. And I like this collegial spirit. And it does involve mentoring, but I mentor them and they mentor me.

I might mention that I have four children. And I've learned a lot from raising children about teaching, and how to get along with graduate students and provide for their careers. I'm a little bit different than many of my faculty members. I feel that I work for my students. Many of them think that the students work for them. But I've always felt that the students work for me and we work together. And this makes me happy, and I think they like it also.

So let me mention a few things now about mentoring. I made a list of topics. I work at the interface between science and engineering. I'm in applied physics, so I kind of cross the boundaries. Yesterday, we talked about the boundaries being different. But in my career, there is very little difference, because I'm involved with both sides of it.

And I think that the list of things that I came up with that are important, have been important to me, are common to all people-- men and women. There isn't much difference. Curiosity, creativity, being innovative, being skeptical-- not believing what you hear and checking it out. Being patient. It takes a long time to do an experiment to get it right. Don't accept it until it's really working well.

You have to be a deep thinker. You have to think about something out in the fringes that other people aren't yet thinking about. That's what-- where the action is. You have to be a strategic thinker. You have to figure out how to get from here to there. You never have the right resources. You always have a big lack of money, big lack of equipment, but, yet, you have to solve the problem. So you have to figure out how to do it.

Stubbornness I think is important. You don't give up right away. It doesn't come one day. It takes a little while to solve a problem and you have to stay with it. You need self-confidence and it's OK to make a mistake.

I think the self-confidence aspect is the one thing that's different between the female students and the male students that I've had. Speaking of students, I've had, I don't know about 80 PhD students that I've graduated. Some number-- I don't count it. Some number on that order of magnitude. And about 20%-- and I don't count that either-- have been female.

So I'm used to having mostly male students, because in my field-- at least when I started, we were only 2% of physics. And now we're about 20%, so huge improvement. But we're certainly far from being equal-- equal numbers. We're equal as people, but not equal in numbers.

Another thing that I say is that it's important in all kinds of sciences to be able to handle disappointment. The experiment, the concept, when you're out there at the cutting edge doesn't work all the time. In fact, most of the time it doesn't work. And it doesn't work exactly like you think it will work. However, usually, it actually works better than what you can see in the beginning, if you have a good project. But it takes a little while to get it that way.

You have to be prepared to spend long hours. And this is kind of difficult for women, especially when they have young families. And they have to figure out some way to do this. Having a good husband that shares some of the responsibility is one of the keys to success. I can't overemphasize that point. You have to be willing to take some abuse from some people. I mentioned that already.

Some of the challenges. I would say that the two of them are in particular big challenges, combining career and family. And it's getting to the point that men have exactly the same problem now, because we have two-career families. So as that's happening more and more, they understand our situation.

It will never be equal, because we bear the children. But still, they understand a lot more than they used to. And I think that's a very important factor. For women in physics-- and some of the other fields of science-- you're working in a highly-male environment. And you have to learn how to work in that and tell them that you're doing the work too. So equal treatment. And you have to stick up for that, I believe.

I wanted to say one final thing. That children-- having children is a plus. I've always felt that my children have helped me a lot in my own career. I've learned from them about teaching. I've learned from them about mentoring. I've learned from them how to make my research group a lot more pleasant than it would be if I didn't have them.

And when they were in their sort of middle ages-- when they were in junior high school and high school-- they used to come to the lab all the time and help all the graduate students with their research. Those were the golden years, because my graduate students really loved them. They did a lot of good work for them. And they were sort of a cute besides.

I think that my children also have helped me to face the generation gap, because I have my children. Now I have grandchildren. My grandchildren are-- my oldest one is graduated from college already. So I've been through that phase. So I've seen the different generations as they come by. And it's helped me, on a more personal level, keep up with the students I'm teaching.

So that's kind of my story. Thank you for listening.

LISKOV: Thanks very much, Milly, that was very interesting.

Our next speaker is Lotte Bailyn. Lotte is the T. Wilson Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School. She also is emerita, but working full time as far as I can tell.

Lotte got her BA in math from Swarthmore, and then a PhD in social psychology from Harvard. She's had a very distinguished career and her research has focused, among other things, on organization practices that affect gender equity in business organizations in academia.

And then notably, Lotte was the chair of the MIT faculty in the period 1997 to 1999. And although people-- people mentioned her yesterday, but the one thing they did not say was that she was truly instrumental in getting that report out of MIT and into the public, where it then had the big impact that had.

BAILYN: Thank you, Barbara.

I'm talking-- my topic is retention. And that's clearly important, because the universities-- with all the things that Abby talked about in hiring-- they get the women in, they get them their labs. And then, if they leave, it's not only bad for them, but it's bad for the university.

So a couple of things have already been mentioned. Obviously, mentoring is very important and relates to retention. And I want to say one thing about the hiring that Abby said, we need open searches. One of the interesting things in the report was that if you come in in an open search, there are some issues, because you don't fit as easily into your department, both in getting research going and in teaching.

So we have to be aware, in order to retain the people we get through an open search, that we pay special attention to them in some way, to make sure that they get involved with the right to research group, with funding and even with teaching.

But there are certainly other issues as well. And so one of the questions you can ask is, why do women leave? And we do know, from data from many universities, that women and minorities, in fact, do tend to leave proportionately more in the early years then the majority of the white men.

So I'd say that there are really two categories-- two sets of reasons why people leave. One has to do with the experience they have when they're here. A hostile climate-- and I really mean beyond harassment, many universities have dealt with that. But it also involves many of these other things. A feeling of being excluded, a lack of respect.

We certainly found that was true when we did the first report put on the women faculty in science. That was a big issue then. And the recent report that just came out shows that it is less true now, but there are still elements that are there. Another thing we found, also from the report, but we know it in general-- is that the climate is very much dependent on the department head. And we have seen climates for women that go from bad to good, and back to bad, depending on the character of the department hear.

So all of these issues of the experience of women have to do with confidence-- the confidence that Milly was talking about. And obviously, if you lose your confidence, you also are not going to be as productive. And there are losses not only to the women or the minorities, but to the department itself.

Then there are the more structural reasons, particularly that Milly has already mentioned, on family structure. And interestingly enough, in the original report, there weren't-- these problems didn't really come out among the senior women, because there were, on the whole no children and no dual careers. But it's definitely a key issue now. And of course, it's also beginning to include elder care.

So how can the university respond? What are the things that can be done? On the first set of issues, actually doing a climate survey is quite important, because it gives you data on how the climate is experienced by the people. And it's also an important issue, because by doing it periodically, you can gauge change. But it really depends on how it's used.

A comparison is a good point between departments-- sets up some of the competitive pressures that Abby was talking about. But it's also-- if it needs to be fed back to the department head, to the department for reflection, it's also a way for the administration to make department heads accountable.

There's quite a bit of research that shows that accountability is one of the most important things in creating a diverse faculty, or indeed, any workforce. And that it clearly works better than just diversity training. So dealing with a climate survey has some of these advantages. You've already heard from Abby about evaluation bias and gender schemas. They're important not only for hiring, but also for retention.

And as Abby has already indicated, STEM faculty tend not to be aware of these. And even though the social science literature has ample evidence-- and that's one of the real strengths of the Michigan Stride Program-- to get scientists aware and believe in some of this social science data. We clearly know that these are held by both men and women-- these biases, these schemas-- that they are not intentional on the whole. But they certainly affect behavior and evaluation.

One of the things that-- on inclusion, one of the key things that came out in the early who report was is that the women did not feel it all included. They weren't included on committees, on big decision-making making issues. And now we find, ironically, that they're almost included too much. That they're overburdened. They're on too many committees. So we see a sort of cycle in dealing with these issues, that the solutions to the old problems sometimes bring in new issues that have to be dealt with.

Most universities now have family policies of some kind. MIT has. We have extension of the tenure clock, paid parental leave where parents don't have to teach or do any administration. And can therefore, emphasize their research. But again, we reach a complicated dilemma with these.

If we make them gender neutral-- which we want, because we want children and childcare, and even elder care, to be a family issue and not a women's issue-- but at the same time, we know that women still do more. So completely gender-neutral policy may, in fact, advantage the men even more.

On the other hand, if you have a policy that favors women, you're reinforcing the status quo. The sort of stereotyping that you would like to get beyond, that these are only women's issues. And you take away some of the incentives for men to get involved. So at MIT, we've more or less gone halfway, in between. We've made some of these policies automatic for women, but the men have to ask and have to justify the need.

Dual careers is clearly a key issue. A high proportion of academic women are married to other academics, or to people with other high-powered careers. So in some way, consortia do help. And MIT is a part of HERC-- the Higher Education Recruitment Consortium. And Boston, of course, should be a good place. There are lots of universities, lots of other industries where people can get jobs.

But it's a complicated situation, because there is competition between universities. And universities and departments are on the whole reluctant to hire the trailing spouse, even when that spouse meets all the qualifications of the institutions.

On the other hand, without attention to these issues, we're clearly going to lose people and we're more likely to lose women, because there still is a tendency for favoring the male career. The hope, I think, is that as this becomes a problem for everybody, that universities and colleges and other employing institutions will learn that it's-- to collaborate more to coordinate these issues, because it's basically to the benefit of all of them.

So I think all of these issues are important. All of them need attention, if we're going to increase the retention once we've hired them. The good news, I think, is that the new report shows that the women faculty in science and engineering are more satisfied, therefore, more likely to stay. They feel more included. So I would say that we've made good progress on retention, but there's still work to be done. Thank you.

LISKOV: Thanks, Lotte, for that excellent talk.

Our last speaker is Cherry Murray. Cherry is the John A. And Elizabeth S. Armstrong Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and also a professor of physics at Harvard University. In addition, she's the dean of the Harvard School of Engineering in Applied Science. She has her bachelor's, and also her PhD, in physics. Both from MIT.

And she's had also a very distinguished career. She's a member of both the NAS-- the National Academy of Science-- and the National Academy of Engineering. And also, like Milly, she is a past president of the American Physical Society.

Prior to joining Harvard-- she's had a long career in industry, before she joined Harvard. First she went to Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, where she ultimately became the senior vice president for Physical Sciences in Wireless Research. And then she joined Lawrence Livermore Labs, where she was deputy director and then principal associate director for Science and Technology.

So you can see she has a long career that involves leadership skills. In her current role, she also, obviously, exercises her leadership skills. And one of the things she manages is faculty recruitment. So Cherry is going to talk to us about leadership.

MURRAY: Thank you, Barbara.

So I was asked to talk about leadership development. And I haven't been in academia for very long. It's almost two years that I have been in academia. So I will say that academia, in general, has a rather Darwinian leadership model. And they could do better.

So what I would like to talk about is best practices. And I would argue that the Darwinian leadership model, which is basically leaving academics scientists and engineers to their own devices, to kind of stumble into management and leadership positions, that that is quite a wrong-headed attitude. That leadership is actually a learned trait. And you can do better by actually training people.

After all, leadership development of everyone-- including them in those in graduate school is important, because if they are going to be a professor in academia, they are going to be leading a team of students and postdocs. And why not give them the opportunity to do better at that? It's not typically taught in graduate school.

We also need real leadership in organizations, departments, schools, centers, institutes, universities, et cetera. As I said, it's definitely learned and is not necessarily innate. So why are we not actively training leaders-- especially women and minorities? As you have heard in this symposium, there are certain genders-- and I will say also a racial schemas-- that make it even more important for leadership development of minorities and women.

So I was at Bell Labs for 27 years. And I experienced there are a culture of excellence, including leadership development excellence, that is actually very hard to imagine surpassing. So I would like to tell you about the Bell Labs leadership development model for scientists and engineers.

First off, managers choose a few technical stars to develop into leaders. These people must be in the top 10% of their science and engineering staff and performance review, which is done annually-- a very systematic and careful performance review.

These people must be respected technically by their peers. They should be smarter than the manager. They should have demonstrated some possible leadership ability, but not completely. And they are discussed-- you know, this-- are they selected or not-- are discussed with the same level management team, usually in performance review.

The management team, so department heads or vice presidents or up the next level, actively mentors and manages the leadership development of each individual who is chosen. This takes place over many years. There is a development plan for each individual and it's discussed every year.

It includes suggested courses, both internal and external. For example, in my leadership development, I was sent to the Kellogg School to do executive training and business skills. Leadership training-- it was required to do diversity sensitization courses for all of the managers who were being trained. Things like making leadership opportunities in professional societies was done for people.

It was suggested they run for various positions in IEEE or whatever. The people were given challenging assignments on important task forces or committees internally. Going the next level up, managers themselves had development plans. This included apprenticeship opportunities. That is to say, brought with upper management to important business meetings-- to either board meetings, meetings with business-unit heads, whatever.

I was assigned a mentor who was a business-unit president of Lucent and had quarterly meetings with him, which was extremely interesting to me as a researcher. For promotion to executive level, which is three or four levels up, all people who would have gotten a promotion to executive level were sent to intensive, year long internal across business executive training.

This was internal and external. They were also team on cross-company assignments for solving challenging real-time business problems. They met one on one with the CEO. I would say at the dean level, this is the kind of thing that would be useful in academia.

This included a lot of opportunities for networking across the company with other developing executives. And for the executive training that was outside, networking with other technical leaders in industry. So constructive feedback was given annually to these developing leaders on performance in their leadership. There was an hour-long discussion with immediate and a separate discussion with the manager two levels up. It included feedback and a discussion of what worked and what wasn't working.

There's obviously no commitment to promote the person. However, I would argue that leadership skills are useful, no matter what you do. Therefore, it's useful to do this for people.

Every manager was required to go through a succession planning exercise annually with her management. This was the you were hit by a bus exercise. There were discussion of two to three people, either inside or outside, who could take your position. And what were their gaps, what kind of training did they need?

This actually developed a pretty good self-reflection exercise, because you had to figure out what your job actually was. And it also identified new leaders that went into the cycle, and their development needs, and actually got a lot of thinking about things. Every manager was required to go through 360-degree feedback every two to three years. And the results are a discussion with his management.

And this was extremely useful. And again, accountability is kind of important. So could this model be morphed and used effectively in academia? I would say, yes. You would just have to change the names of a few managers.

But I will bring out one question, which is how does one take into account the undervaluing of women or minorities syndrome? And there, things like sensitivity training is extremely important, but upper-level management is completely key. One of the reasons that I would say Bell Labs did so well in the development of leadership-- both gender and race blind-- is because of the not just sensitivity, but appreciation of diversity by top management of the company.

And I believe that this is possible, along with mentoring. And it's a very large and important part of mentoring. And you will see this happen at Harvard. Thank you.

LISKOV: OK. So I want to thank all our speakers. And Cherry, especially, for the last talk.

And we've now reached the part of the session where we're open for questions. I think maybe we need the lights on, so that people don't stumble in the dark and we up the stage can see people in the audience.

AUDIENCE: A question for all of you. Informal social networks can be very important in helping people gain access to opportunities, getting a good word with the upper leadership or management, getting information in general.

Can any of you speak about how this can be managed for women before they reach critical mass in an organization?

DRESSELHAUS: I think you have to work at developing critical mass. When they're terrifically outnumbered, I think that there's some kind of perceived bias out there. Those of us that-- well, I went through this at MIT when we were very far below critical mass. And that was one of my big efforts in the mentoring department is to-- we had these faculty lunches that I used to sponsor out of my chair.

And got everybody together at an informal setting and spoke about how it was important to do, as you said, excellence and advance our careers. And there was a lot of helping of people from different departments, because we used to have one woman in this department and one woman and that apartment. So it was across the whole Institute.

And once we achieved critical mass, I thoguht-- and I even wrote a paper about this, for some electrical engineering journal. And they invited me to do this, because they were facing this issue. They wanted to increase the number of women and minorities. And they asked me what I thought it took.

And I said, to have two of them in a particular room, committee, function, whatever. When you're the only one, it's very hard to work. If you have two, it makes all the difference in the world. So that number, when you figure out of the size of classes and whatnot, it comes out to about 15%.

So when we reached 15%, I thought we had solved the problem. And that was just about 1984, when I became president of the American Physical Society. I said, this was a good time to give the baton over to some of the younger people. And boy, was I ever wrong, because in the 1990s, when we re-examined our progress, we saw this flat line of nothing happening.

So you really have to keep at it. So that-- maybe a--

AUDIENCE: Thank you.

DRESSELHAUS: -- kind of a historical view point to your question. Some of the other people that are more knowledgeable about social science can tell you about the theory of how this thing works.

LISKOV: Just to pick up on what Milly said. If you don't have critical mass in your small group, then one thing you can do is to try to find a larger group of people who are not necessarily in your field, but who can nevertheless act as your friends and colleagues. They can help you understand how to work the system and so forth.

And when we were doing this new study, and we were talking to women in science and engineering, I heard over and over this story about I used to be the only one in my department. As soon as there was more than one, it already started to change. And then we began to see, as there got to be more, that the women themselves were organizing informally to act as mentors for younger women and so forth.

So it's a sort of, if you don't have the mass in your department, look for it outside. And then work to get the mass up, because that's very important.

DRESSELHAUS: I think it's important to mention that we have to be mentors for men too. When you get to the point when the men start coming to you, you know you've overcome a certain barrier.

AUDIENCE: So I have a question for Cherry. Wake up, Cherry. So you told us very nicely about your experience at Bell Lab and the leadership training there and that universities fall short.

Can you comment a little bit on-- you've also spent time at national labs. And can you comment on diversity and leadership in national labs and what you've observed there? And are there lessons to be learned or what can we do better?

MURRAY: I would say that it depends on the national lab, obviously. There are quite a few of them. And it depends on whether they're DOE labs or NASA labs or NIST labs or whatever.

They are kind of midway between industry, which does have a focus on excellence. And it doesn't really matter who you are, providing you bring in the business, I'll just say. And academia where who you are is extremely important. Typically where you came from, where you got your degree, who was your mentor or whatever, is way more important in academia than it is in industry. So they're kind of in the middle.

And I would suggest that academia could learn a lot from the industry practices of identifying people and training them for leadership, no matter where they came from. And I would also suggest that they don't have to be department heads, or whatever, to talk about junior faculty and to graduate students.

I like the idea of having them all meet at once. And I started actually doing that at Harvard, and I think it is working quite well. The whole group of graduate students, in the school or the department, and the whole group of junior faculty just to talk about things like, well so, what kind of networking is good? What kind of courses are available?

The focus on just doing science is critically important, but just doing science is not going to get you necessarily ahead in your career. You also have to think about leadership.

DRESSELHAUS: Yes. I wanted to comment that being at MIT is a unique place in giving you opportunities to do all of these things. I don't know how it was, but I have been on corporate boards of some major large corporations. Yes, I was almost always the only female on the board. But I don't think I was particularly appointed because I was a female. But when I was there, I did speak up about diversity issues. Maybe more than others, because they saw me in the room. You know, it has that kind of effect.

And likewise for the national labs. I've been on advisory boards for many of the labs. The DOE labs, the NIST. And what other?

MURRAY: The DOD-- have you been--

DRESSELHAUS: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

MURRAY: Oh, you were in Lincoln Labs.

DRESSELHAUS: Sure, sure, sure. I've been-- DOD labs, yeah. Several of them. Yeah. And it's the MIT base that allows you to do that.

AUDIENCE: Yes. I'd like to make a couple of comments. One is I noted that Milly, who is about my generation, got her faculty position in a closed appointment. It wasn't very open, which is more the sign of the times.

Also on the issue of confidence in women-- of the women who get into positions, who might feel that they got an edge. And whether they got an edge or not is controversial. I think in this day and age, it may be that a woman a man with the same credentials, the woman will get the edge because of the pressure from above, which may be appropriate. But I must say, the discussions I've been hearing lately, really don't involve that. The women that I've been hearing discussed lately are just superb. So I don't see that as much of a factor.

But to the extent that it is, I would tell any woman that every one of us who were on the faculty got there because somebody opened a door for them. I was a white Anglo-Saxon professor's son. And when I walked through the door, I didn't feel guilty or lack of confidence. And I would suggest the same of any woman or a black person. Thank you.

LISKOV: I guess, Ed. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Ed Bertschinger. I want to thank the panel for just a beautiful summary of the recruitment, retention, mentoring, and leadership. And I'm especially grateful for the leadership aspect, which I hadn't thought when the-- to include when the panel was put together. I have a question for-- about that for Abby and for Cherry.

I've been looking for resources for department-head leadership training to share with colleagues. And I'm aware of some of them, including workshops offered by various of the advanced programs. I know that Michigan does it for its own faculty. And I believe the University of Washington, and perhaps Wisconsin, offer workshops for others.

I wonder if you-- either of you could comment on the leadership training opportunities you're aware of for department heads and deans.

MURRAY: Yeah. I forgot to mention that one-on-one coaching is really critically important. And it's probably the most useful thing that I have used when developing other leaders.

DRESSELHAUS: We actually do have one-on-one coaching. I have--

MURRAY: At MIT?

DRESSELHAUS: Yeah. I have two young faculty members that I'm a coach for them. And we meet every week.

BAILYN: As part of your official mentor?

DRESSELHAUS: Oh, I just do it. I mean, I was asked to be a mentor and that's what I think it takes. So I do it. And they value-- and then I have a whole bunch of other people-- men and women, it's not one sex-- that come to me when they need something about, you know, how do I do that, in a sort of administrative type person-to-person context.

MURRAY: I know of the University of Washington program, which is a national program that is quite good, as far as I can tell. And there's also a University of Texas at Austin. Texas A&M is doing this. And I'm very glad to hear what Michigan is doing. I think there are more and more programs that are specifically designed for leadership development. And I think it's helpful to have a program at the least provost level.

AUDIENCE: Dr. Stewart, especially. I heard you talk several years ago and you talked about the two-career problem and what Michigan was doing to see that the second spouse got interviews. My daughter, an academic nephrologist, my son-in-law, an evolutionary biologist, went through this. Landed on their feet at UCSD. But it was very interesting in the process that the College of Arts and Sciences people were more effective at pulling in the med school, than the med schools were at pulling in the arts and sciences.

And so I wanted to ask you, where does this stand? Does Michigan still have this program? And Dr. Bailyn, you mentioned the program in the area, because I think you're seeing more and more. Dr. Hopkins talked yesterday about having to get divorced to become a full professor. People today don't want to do that, OK? And they don't want to have a second career. They want to have two careers.

So what are you-- what is happening in Michigan now and elsewhere?

BAILYN: OK. One of the-- when we started HERC-- and it was actually started by Harvard and it covers all the local universities and hospitals and some other-- of the points-- and I really don't know how it's worked. We should follow that up in some way. But one of the points was that it can be used by the recruiting institution to alert the candidate and the trailing spouse to opportunities, without going directly to another institution. And that's where you get the resistance. We don't want a trailing spouse.

This way it's an indirect mode. The trailing spouse you know all the opportunities. Can apply in the normal way. And the hope was that it would take away this who's resistance of universities that, we don't want the trailing spouse.

AUDIENCE: I have a question that I think is within the scope of this panel, and perhaps has been most directly addressed by Dr. Dresselhaus.

So we've heard from fabulously accomplished MIT faculty, who mentor legions of young men and women-- and particularly young women, as we've been focusing on. And not all of these young men and women are going to land at MIT, Harvard, Michigan, UCSD. They're not all going to land that those kinds of institutions.

And what kind of mentorship can current faculty provide given, forgive me, the sorry state of the job market? And the fact that there are-- well, first of all, the sorry state of the job market. But secondly, the fact that the institutions to which students might either go, if they're lucky enough to get a job, or to which they might naturally be attracted may not in fact be replicas of MIT?

DRESSELHAUS: I'm happy to take that one, because in at least my EE side, I have made a practice to always have advisees who aren't doing well. I always take on a few that are struggling and barely surviving, because I think that's important. And my approach with them is that we're going to do the best we possibly can with you.

So every individual that you mentor is an individual. And you have to understand that person and their abilities and assets, and maybe problem areas. You emphasize their assets and try to make them run with that. And you try to develop the deficiency.

Now I have no training in this. I'm just a mother and that's what I do with my own children. And maybe some of the experts can give you some more professional expertise of how you go about this.

BAILYN: Well, it doesn't-- it certainly doesn't help to lead people who are not going to meet the quality of the very top institutions, to suggest to them that that's the only way to go. And there are, in some ways, we've talked about these lifestyle issues. There are some advantages in being at that next tier. Below the top tier, one is able to, perhaps, have an easier time on combining families.

And I think to indicate that the important thing is doing good work. And I have known people who have actually done better work at a second-tier institution, than they might have done at the top tier. So to try to value the work, wherever it takes place.

MURRAY: So I want to speak up, because PhDs engineering, 70% of them go to industry. And I think that is not-- I mean, that's a wonderful thing. Having been in industry myself, I thought it was a fantastic career. We maybe don't train enough people by giving them internships to see what it's like. But it can be very exciting and breathtaking. And not all people end up replacing you in academia.

AUDIENCE: I want to say that I came to MIT through the Community Fellows Program, which was an Urban Studies and Planning Program, and then I got a couple of research fellowships.

And one of the things we always we're told is we were the same as everybody. And I think, coming also from a bicultural background, I feel that I have gained an incredible knowledge of the other culture, while the other culture doesn't really want to come into my culture. And I'm not expecting anybody to really understand me, but I want to say that by having a bicultural, two-tier career, breaking boundaries, we all become better. And this is what it's about.

So I think that this is a situation where we can take this opportunity to come together and say, you know, everybody's got to work for the best. We've got to break the boundaries and everybody's the same. If you are an institution like this, you have something to bring. It is not what you know, because you already have a box where you think this is the way this other person is. And this other person is completely different and you have never taken a look at this other person.

LISKOV: All right. Thank you very much. And I'm going to close the session.