Women of MIT: Shaping Policy in Academia and Across the Nation

KASTNER: Welcome everyone. So in connection with this symposium, the women faculty in science and engineering carried out a new study of the status of women faculty members in those two schools. And if you've read the report, an overwhelmingly positive view of MIT emerged, with dramatic improvement since the original 1999 report. We heard a lot about that yesterday.

The positive improvements include an increase in the number of women faculty members, more equitable resource and salary distribution, and the increase of women in senior administrative positions. The vast majority of the tenured and untenured women interviewed emphasize that MIT offers outstanding opportunities and resources, and that the Institute is a much friendlier and supportive environment than perceived from the outside.

Despite these positive findings, there are still challenges. Some of these are the subjects of our panel discussion this afternoon and relate to making academic careers at MIT even more attractive so we can increase the fraction of women in our faculty even further. It's really important that we address some of these issues.

It's also likely that similar improvements will increase the racial diversity of our faculty. The organizers have asked us in this session to address several issues. One is making science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers more attractive to young women. Second, balancing the needs of young women to start families and starting academic careers. Three, eliminating harassment. Four, improving the climate for women in other ways. I guess there were four.

I will introduce our two three panelists and then I'll ask each of them to speak for 15 minutes on these topics. We'll then take questions from the audience. So I'm going to introduce all three of them. And then they'll speak in turn. And I'm introducing them alphabetically. And it happens that the first is a male, but I apologize for that. It's my friend Bob.

On Wikipedia it says Bob Birgeneau is a Canadian physicist, which is true. He's chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, and prior to that he was president of the University of Toronto from 2000 to 2004.

Bob was the first of his family to finish high school. He graduated from St. Michael's College in Toronto, receiving a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics. And then he received his PhD In physics from Yale in 1966.

From 1968 to 75, he worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories, and then he joined MIT as a professor of physics. During his 25 years at MIT, he served as chair of the physics department and then as dean of science. Birgeneau's research accomplishments have had great impact, and he has been honored for them in many ways. He's a fellow of the US National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of London, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. Among the awards he has received for his research on the fundamental properties of materials is the Oliver E. Buckley prize of the American Physical Society.

Throughout his career, Birgeneau has been a passionate advocate for increasing diversity in academia. In 2008, he received the Carnegie Corporation academic leadership award for championing excellence and diversity in education. Most recently, he was one of three recipients of the Shinnyo-en Foundation's 2009 Pathfinder's to Peace Prize for his, quote, "commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and to the integration of public service as an essential component of the academic experience."

Our second panelist is Dr. Heidi Hammel, who is the Executive Vice President of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, called AURA. It operates world class astronomical observatories. Dr. Hammel is also an interdisciplinary scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. Her primary scientific research focuses on astronomical observations of planetary atmospheres. Dr. Hammel also does a significant amount of award winning education and public outreach work. In her spare time she's a single mother of three school aged children.

Hammel received her undergraduate degree from MIT in 1982 and her PhD from the University of Hawaii in 1988. After a postdoc at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, she returned to MIT where she spent nearly nine years as a principal research scientist in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. In 1999 she joined the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado as senior research scientist, and eventually codirector of research. Her position at AURA began in 2011.

Lisa Maatz is Director of Public Policy and Government Relations at AAUW, the American Association of University Women, which started as the Association of Collegiate Alumni founded in 1882. Ellen Swallow Richards, MIT's first female graduate, was one of the cofounders, and MIT was one of two charter members.

As AAUW's top policy adviser, Lisa Maatz works to advance AAUW's priority issues in Washington. Maatz provides leadership to several coalitions working to advance opportunities for women and girls. Recently featured in the book Secrets of Powerful Women Maatz has developed a reputation for her strategic approach to legislation and advocacy. She has done similar work for the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund and the Older Women's League, and was a legislative aide to US representative Carolyn Maloney.

Her grassroots advocacy career began when she was the executive director of Turning Point, a battered women's program recognized for excellence by the Ohio Supreme Court. Maatz is a graduate of Ohio University, has two masters degrees from Ohio State University. She holds an adjunct appointment with the Women in Politics Instituted at American University. Her honors include the women's information network's Young Woman of Achievement Award, and the Mentor Award from the Public Leadership Education Network. Maatz was also a congressional fellow for the Women's Research and Education Institute, and has received a mayoral appointment to the Washington, DC Commission on Women.

I think my first slide, my only slide-- if there is a slide-- well, it just repeats the topics that were supposed to be the topics of discussion today. So let's move along, and I'll ask Bob Birgeneau to speak first.

[APPLAUSE]

KASTNER: Thank you so much Marc. And it's just such a privilege to be back here at MIT and to see so many old friends and to even gotten the chance to make some new friends. Why is this not advancing?

So I thought I would really, just as a foil-- and I apologize coming from Berkeley, but since I'm chancellor of Berkeley, the situation I'm most familiar with is, of course, UC Berkeley. So I thought just as a foil I would show you some data from Berkeley, discuss what we're doing at Berkeley to try and address the issues, which have been the subject of this meeting for the last day and a half.

But then I want to move on. I will try and very quickly move on from challenges that women face in science and engineering to challenges that underrepresented groups face more generally, and where we're making progress and where we're not making progress, and tell you a few of the things that we're doing at Berkeley, some of which MIT might emulate.

So if we look at the number of women faculty at Berkeley as a function of time, you can see progress is slow, but it is sure. And so over the last decade and a half, we've gradually increased the number of women faculty while keeping the overall size of the faculty constant so that women now constitute just under, for 2010 to '11, just under 30% of the faculty at UC Berkeley.

Probably the single most important thing we've done at Berkeley-- and I know similar things have happened here at MIT as well-- is the full recognition for all of our faculty-- male, female, same sex couples, different sex couples-- of the importance of having family friendly policies for our faculty. And we've had two of our faculty members, the former dean of graduate school, Mary Ann Mason, and then a second professor of chemistry, Angela Stacy, who have really been forefront thinkers on this.

And so among our family friendly policies, first of all, importantly we have active service modified duties. And so every couple with a newborn or an adopted child have modified service, which means they're excused from teaching and committee duty for one semester. And for birth mothers, they're granted as an entitlement a second semester of relief of duty. So the faculty keep their research active, but their duties are absolutely minimized. As soon as a faculty member elects, as an entitlement for active service modified duties, one year delay-- not delay, but extension of the tenure clock is automatically implemented. So the person does not have to request it. That turns out to be extremely important. And the faculty member may or may not choose to take advantage of that. But it's a right. That's consistent with tenure clock stoppage.

Something we've introduced just in the last few years, which has turned her to have an inordinately positive impact, is our vice provost faculty created what he called CALcierge, which is just a play on Cal. It's really concierge-- which is a person whose full time job is to help families relocate to Berkeley and the Bay Area. And that person turns out to be tremendously effective, first of all in helping spouses find a job, helping people locate housing, helping the family locate daycare, et cetera, et cetera. So that cost of one person in their office has turned out to have a tremendously positive impact and minimized the burden for people moving.

Finally-- and I think this is true here at MIT also-- we've introduced emergency backup care, which is a phenomenal hit with junior faculty. And we've now generalized it so any faculty member can avail themselves of it, which is that if a parent is sick, if your child is sick, or even if you're writing a proposal and you just can't take care of your children during the days you're trying to write a proposal, then this service automatically provides child care or parent care for you at a nominal cost. And this turns out to be a remarkably inexpensive investment. So it turns out all of these have really had a tremendously positive impact on our faculty, but, most especially women faculty.

This has manifest itself. So how do you measure this? Well, one way that it's manifest itself, which I think is really quite dramatic is, in 2003, before we introduced all of these various family friendly processes, at that time, 2/3 of our junior faculty had no children. Since introducing these, if you now look at the make up our faculty-- this is both male and female faculty members-- 39% have no children, but the remaining 61% have either one, two, three, or more children. So this is an incredibly dramatic change.

And if I now just focus on women faculty and how that has changed between 2003 and 2009, one of the dramatic results in the study in the middle '90s was how few women faculty felt that they could take the risk of having children as a junior faculty member, because they felt there was so much cultural bias against women having children as junior faculty members.

So now at Cal, because of these change in policies, fully 2/3 of our women junior faculty have families. And again, bearing between one, two, and three children. And so our women faculty are able-- and male faculty too, but women faculty in particular are able to experience a full family life, and simultaneously be able to pursue their careers, get tenure, et cetera, effectively.

So that's all I'm going to say about issues that are specific to women in academia. Clearly there's still lots of things that we can do. But one of the things we've really learned at Berkeley is many small things which make life easier for people, and remove the typical barriers, have an incredibly important effect on women in their careers, and their satisfaction. So when you do satisfaction surveys, the satisfaction level of our junior faculty, male and female, is incredibly high.

I forgot to mention, one of the other things, but here we have the advantage of having both a large psychology department and a school of education is that we also have very robust daycare. We reserve 80 slots for faculty. We have eight daycare centers on campus. And these are also, frankly, also run as sort of educational centers, because we have a number of faculty whose specialty is in preschool education. And therefore that turns out to create an incredibly positive environment. The only challenge is the cost, frankly. And so that's an unsolved problem.

It is solved for our women graduate students and undergraduates where there's will we invest a huge amount of money in support of our women graduate and undergraduate students for child support. So that's also turned out to be extraordinarily beneficial.

So I'd like to now switch to the more general challenges that we face in academia for underrepresented minorities where it's a less salubrious story I'm afraid. So if we look at the Berkeley data and we say how has the number of underrepresented minorities evolved as a function of time-- and this is something where we've put in a lot energy, with only partial success. So this shows you the number of underrepresented minority faculty as a whole. This is out of 1,500 faculty at Berkeley. And there's now about 120. There's a recent rise in the last several years because we've been working really hard on that. But the situation for Asian Americans is rather more positive. And you so there's been a really rapid rise within the past decade actually in the number of Asian American faculty members at Berkeley.

However if we look at underrepresented minorities specifically, then you can see an interesting trend here. Sadly, at Berkeley over the last 20 years, the number of African American faculty has stayed flat at about 40, in spite of a lot of energy that we've put into this. Recently, because of some concerted effort-- and this is particularly relevant in California-- we've seen a dramatic increase in the number of Chicano Latina faculty at Berkeley. So in that way we are making some progress.

But this is an unrelenting challenge for us. And obviously we're hoping that the family friendly policies which are turning out to be very successful for women in academia will be equally successful in making life easier for our underrepresented minority faculty.

And now I want to switch to a purely academic subject. So shortly after I arrived at Berkeley as chancellor, several faculty appeared in my office. Actually, many different faculty with special interest appeared in my office. But there's one that caught my attention, the same Angie Stacy, the one who I mentioned already, the chemistry professor who's been so effective in terms of policies for women in academia, and then an astrophysicist, and African American by the name of Gibor Basri, a very distinguished African American. Appeared in my office and said, we're in California. California is, excluding Hawaii, the first state where there is no majority population. But our academic programs don't reflect that fact.

And specifically they argued, California's a living laboratory, and that, even though one was a chemist and one was an astrophysicist, they argued that the social science of equity and inclusion was as important an academic subject and even less understood than any of the frontier work they were doing in chemistry, or in astrophysics, or what have you. And so they advocated that we should create a new essentially department, which would be a bona fide academic department, which would attempt to understand what multicultural societies and inequities in society as an academic subject.

And so after some time-- as usual in academia, you have a committee, et cetera, et cetera-- we created a new research center called which is now called the Haas Diversity Research Center after the Haas Family who have funded this initiative. And we committed 12 new faculty positions to create this center. But these faculty positions are in a way 12 plus 12 because all of the faculty members are both members of the center, but also members of some other academic department, so one half in each.

And part of our goal here was to ensure that this wasn't isolated, just a program that's off in one corner, but that we had faculty members from law, from economics, from public health, et cetera involved. And that is working quite successfully.

Interestingly, it has turned out that this has been very easy to raise philanthropic money for. And so to date, mostly the Haas Family, which traces its money's back to blue jeans. I encourage all of you to buy Levi's since it's Levi Strauss money actually, ultimately, three generations later. Very socially conscious, outstanding family. And so they plus the Hewlett Foundation have altogether contributed about $35 million to underwrite this effort, including six endowed chairs and a distinguished, a seventh, which is a distinguished chair for the director of this initiative.

So there are altogether currently six academic programs to understand educational disparities. That is how do we understand the differences in educational achievement among different groups, ethnic and otherwise, one health disparities, one to understand our democratic system in the United States works for some groups and does not work for other groups. Fourth is obviously economic disparities. Fifth is on gender issues. It's LBGT oriented, but in fact it's the women's studies department which actually is playing a lead role in this. And then the sixth is disability studies.

So each of these programs have five or six faculty members connected with them from all over the university. Interestingly, the program in disabilities is actually led by our humanities faculty. The social sciences, law, et cetera tend to dominate in the others. This has enabled us, these programs, to recruit to Berkeley some phenomenal new faculty members. One, Na'ilah Nasir, an African American woman that we managed to recruit away from Stanford whose research is on understanding the particular challenges of K through 12 and African Americans, the challenges that African Americans encounter in trying to master mathematics and science in high schools. And this is just absolutely brilliant new woman faculty member who's just been pretty extraordinary.

So along with this, and the person who overseas this is, one of the things we realized early on-- this also was faculty driven-- that we wouldn't make the kind of progress we needed to make, and I think we are now making at Berkeley, unless equity and inclusion was a part of every conversation. And the only way to guarantee that was to create a position of a vice chancellor, the equivalent of a vice president here at MIT, a vice chancellor for equity and inclusion. And so that person is present at every single meeting.

And you might say well, why for example should such a person be-- where does equity and inclusion come into capital projects? Well it turns out that if you want to be able to give minority owned construction firms an opportunity to bid, then you have to have your capital project broken down so that the size of the project is commensurate with building projects that minority firms can take on, et cetera. So equity and inclusion turns out to impact a remarkably broad range of activities that the university participates in.

So finally then, with the center, we currently have 12 FTE. But there are many more, a large number of endowed chairs. And we, in essence, have turned equity and inclusion from, if you like social programs at universities, to genuine academic programs. And we're very hopeful that the kind of scholarship which leads to Nobel prizes in physics, that we'll have the functional equivalent of Nobel prizes in equity and inclusion coming out of this endeavor.

So with that, I want to thank you, and I look forward to hearing our next two speakers.

[APPLAUSE]

KASTNER: Our next speaker is Heidi Hammel.

HAMMEL: Hi, it's great to be here. You know, I am a woman of MIT. I was an undergrad here. And then after escaping, I was drawn back into the fold for nine years. But I escaped again.

When I found out about this conference, I was very excited about coming here. And when they asked me to participate in the panel, I thought wow, that's great. But you know, this panel's about academia, and I don't know anything about that because I've never been in academia. And we'll come back to that a little later.

But when I asked, well what do you want us to talk about, they sort of had this laundry list which we never got to see. But the first one on there was work-life balance. And I said well gosh, I can sure talk about that. Because as you heard in the introduction, in my spare time, when I'm not running the major US astronomical facilities, I have three children who are ages nine, 11, and a daughter who's 13. So I know all about family issues. And I can talk about that not in an academic sense, but in a very personal sense.

Now since I am a graduate of MIT, I decided to build a model of work-life balance. And since I am in fact a mother of school age children, I can build a model of anything out of things you find around the house. So here's my model.

[LAUGHTER]

This is my model of work-life balance.

[APPLAUSE]

It's made out of Dixie cups, and yarn, and tape. Taped it to some straws that are hanging from a blue crayon that has a pin stuck through it, for safety's sake of course. It's stuck into an eraser so you can't hurt yourself with it. Those of you who have small children know you've got to do stuff like that. But that's just the model. There's more.

We got to have our simulated work and life. So here's life. Yellow LEGOs, life. And here's work, the red LEGOs. So can you help me with this? And help me. That's a very important lesson young ladies. Always ask for help. Always, always, you need help.

So all right, so let's see. I said that this was life. Every morning starts with life, all right, because you've got three kids that you've got to get up and get out of bed. So the scale instantly tips down. And the other morning, it was like three days ago, all three kids were sitting at the breakfast table, clothed, eating breakfast-- not fighting. I just took a step and I said, I'm super mom. All my children are dressed, eating breakfast, and it's half an hour before the bus comes. It's great.

All right, so they go off to school and fine. And you say okay, now I'm going to start working. Okay, so the scale goes to work, all right. But immediately the phone rings. It's your nine-year-old. Mom-- mom, I forgot my viola. Can you come pick it up and bring it into school? Okay, all right. It's fine. So you leave work. You go, you take the viola in.

And then you get back to work. And the phone rings again. And it's your job, people saying, oh Heidi, you didn't ever turn in your technical reports on that grant. So NSF won't send any more money to our facility until you send it in, now.

All right, that's all right. I'll do that. No problem, no problem. And you go along. And then you realize, oh my god, today is the day the reports are due for the telescope. You got to do that too. So you do all that.

And then the phone rings again. And they say to you-- it's day care calling. Your daughter, she has head lice.

[LAUGHTER]

Come pick her up. And she can't come back for three days of being nit free. All right, so that's an interesting thing. And so then life goes on. These are true stories by the way. It's absolutely a true story.

And so then we're balancing here. And this is just a regular-- you all know what I'm talking about. The proposal's due-- the proposals due, and your printer runs out of ink. And you're on backup ink jet, so you got to run off to the store and do that. And in the meantime, your son, he calls you. Mom, we got to go, because I need this thing to do my report. And see what happens to your scale?

[LAUGHTER]

Now that's only about halfway through the day. In reality, this is what a day is like. There are sizes and shapes of crises you never dreamed of.

I was thinking of asking one of these guys to dump this over my head for dramatic effect, because that's what life if really like as a mom and working full time. But I figured then this would look just like my living room floor and I'd have to pick them all up, which is where I got them from any way the day before yesterday. So I'll put these over here to remind you about work-life balance.

My message though, pertaining to our subject today, is that in fact, we are the scales. We are this broken straw. Our goal here, what we're talking about today, is how to keep this strong. Because those things are going to happen. Anybody who works in academia-- or doesn't work in academia in my case-- you have to deal with this.

So what are the things that we can do to help? The kind of things that you heard Bob Birgeneau talking about is those are policies that help strengthen this. They help. They won't solve the problem.

And I do want to say this. I was really conflicted about sharing this information with you here today, because this is a celebration of MIT, and a celebration of all the progress that has been made at MIT. And believe me, as someone who was here 30 years ago, I can tell you the progress has been considerable.

But-- and that's the caveat, this celebration with caveats-- all these amazing programs that you've been hearing about, and that you just heard about at Berkeley, how would they have helped me with my first child here at MIT? Not in any way whatsoever, because I was not a faculty member here. I was a research scientist. A principal research scientist, it's very nice, but all these programs for faculty don't help people like me. And there are many people here, many young women here who won't necessarily become faculty members. What are we doing to help them? Those programs for child care, wow. Wouldn't help me. The programs for assistance, wouldn't help me.

So how did I make it? All right, I found an organization. When I had the dual career problem, the dual couple-- my now ex-husband took a job somewhere and I had a baby, and we moved there. And MIT said, you've got to be up in Cambridge. And I'm like well, I'm not. I'm in Connecticut. And they said well, choose.

So I chose to leave MIT at that time. And I got a position with an organization called the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. But they allowed me to work in Connecticut where my family was. And in fact the Space Science Institute, the research branch there, 1/3 of our organization is not in Boulder at all. We're spread out across the United States. We're anywhere anybody wants to be, but we work remotely from our homes. It was terrific, absolutely terrific opportunity.

And I also am very proud of the work I did at Space Science Institute because the Institute itself was committed to diversity, women like me, gender issues, it's not an issue. We had lesbians working for our organization openly. We just talked about-- it didn't matter. Anybody who had work to be done got a research grant. Space Science Institute would work for you.

I left Space Science Institute just this past January 1 because I was offered the job opportunity of a lifetime. And I decided it was time to take that opportunity to go to try to make the next generation of space facilities available to young people. Whether it's space telescopes, whether it's ground based telescopes, I have an opportunity to do that. But I was very upfront with them. I said look, I've got this issue right now where I've got kids. We're in Connecticut. I'm not moving to Washington anytime soon. They said okay, we'll make that work for you. And so right now I'm commuting to Washington and working remotely.

And it's been working out very well for me, I think because I knew that it would work. I told them it would work. I said this is going to work, got to make it happen.

So I guess the message that I want to get across to you today is twofold. First of all, it is not easy being a full time working scientist, an academic, and a parent. I mean, you heard that, but I just need to say it over and over again. I am so glad that MIT and other universities are recognizing that and taking proactive steps to make it easier, to make it possible. At the same time, I challenge all of you, particularly those of you who are working in the highest levels of academia, to acknowledge, to recognize, to remember that there are young people in your midst who are not on the faculty track. So please, please be aware of that, and let's see what we can do to help those young people. And I think I'll leave it that and answer questions later.

[APPLAUSE]

KASTNER: And our last panelist is Lisa Maatz.

MAATZ: Well I hate to disappoint you, but I don't have those kind of visuals. Hopefully I can keep you entertained in other ways.

I'm so glad to be here. AAUW has had such a nice history, a rich history with MIT, and with the Boston area actually. We were founded here in Boston back in 1881. And I like to call those 17 women kind of the original uppity women because they had college degrees and they had the nerve to actually want to do something meaningful with them. They also wanted to have more women join them in the ranks of college graduates. And so when you think about it, back in 1881, that was a pretty rebellious thing to do. And so we're very proud of that history.

AAUW has been working in the STEM field for a very long time. We have over 100,000 members and 1,000 branches across the country. And our work really centers in a variety of different ways. We do research. And one of the things we've done most recently in this area is a research report called Why So Few? that I hope many of you will take a look at on our website. You can download it for free.

We also do public policy work, which is the work that I do. I have to admit, I'm a lobbyist, but I do use my powers for good. I swear. And one of the things that we do within the public policy realm is look at some of the best practices that we see coming out of research, coming out of reports, and so forth, and trying to put that into action, trying to make sure that programs that we know are good get the funding that they need to continue. As you can imagine in this particular environment, that last one is a bit of a challenge.

We also do wonderful programming. Just was in Buffalo, New York, for instance with our Buffalo branch. And they had their sixth annual Tech Savvy day, which was 500 11 to 14-year-old girls for a day long kind of symposium, camp, workshop, what have you, on STEM, on all kinds of different hands on models that they could do and enjoy.

Even more importantly, they also had 200 of their parents going through the day as well, on a separate track, talking about things that parents need to do in order to keep the STEM field open to their kids, in order to make sure that they're a viable option if their kid has that interest and how to encourage that interest, especially in girls.

But our history also goes back to fellowships and grants. For those of you who might not know it, I think this is one of the best kept secrets about AAUW. We give anywhere from $3 to $5 million a year for women's postgraduate work, for doctorates and so forth for graduate degrees. Because especially back in the day, we were trying to put our money where our mouth is. And one of the things that was really an issue for women faculty, and for women who wanted to be faculty, was to get research money. And it was harder for women to get research money, so the AAUW women said okay, well we'll give them the research money. Doesn't matter where the money comes from, right?

So actually one of the first things that we did that we're particularly proud of is that we were the ones who bought Madame Curie her first gram of radium, which back in 1920 cost about $150,000, which now is over $1.6 million. So those are the AAUW ladies. They put their money where their mouth is. And on this particular issue, we definitely have some street cred.

One of the things that I want to focus on is things that we're talking about in terms of how to get more girls and more women into the STEM field, and also how to deal with the climates issue. Because one of the things that we know, of course, is that there's a leaky pipeline. And so you kind of lose girls and then women along the way in various science and STEM fields. What can we do about that? How can we kind of be vigilant and try and stem that leaky pipeline?

So one of the first places we try and do this obviously is in education. Many of you, if you're watching the news, might know that one of the things they're talking about in Washington, DC, aside from the budget and whether to close down the federal government-- which at this point some of us think might now be a bad idea. But essentially one of the things they're talking about is reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Act, also known as No Child Left Behind-- not a really popular law. One of the things that happens with No Child Left Behind, because its emphasis on testing-- it's a do or die, winner take all emphasis on testing-- is that they teach to the tests. So if all we want our kids to be able to do is to read and do math, that's fine. But you look at any school's curriculum now and you will see a huge drop in science-- a huge drop in science. I don't care if they can add, multiply, and divide. If they don't actually go in and do some science work as well, if they don't go in and do chemistry work as well, they're not going to be able to use that and apply that in a way that could be useful.

So one of things we're talking about in the reauthorization is, number one, no more high stakes testing. Testing is a useful tool, but it should not be the only thing we use to measure achievement. Number two, let's make sure we're getting science in there, because we're kind of missing the boat here, and in that sense really not preparing our students.

The other thing that we have talked about is of course trying to get more kids into AP classes. Unfortunately, one of the things that we see with girls in high school is that they take the AP classes, but they don't take the AP test, which I find very interesting. Now they don't take the AP classes in the same rate as boys do, but still, it's not that big of a difference. The problem is in taking the test. And so what's going on there that we need to address to make sure they're taking that next step?

We also want to make sure, of course, that we are, as I said earlier, dealing with the parents. Because one of things that we know from AAUW's own research in the Why So Few? report is that parental attitudes, parental notions about what kind of work is appropriate for girls and what kind of work is appropriate for boys obviously can have a huge influence on a kid. And so having a conversation with parents and actually working through some of those issues can really make a difference.

The other thing, of course, that we've seen is that when you talk about trying to get more girls into STEM, you actually need to start talking about middle schoolers. Because if they haven't started taking the math classes in middle school, they're not going to have the preparation they need for the right math classes and science classes in high school. So actually, in a very real sense, especially with today's kind of curriculum issues, you could actually kind of put a girl off the path of a STEM field in seventh grade if you don't get her into algebra. Because if you don't get her into algebra then, she's not going to progress fast enough. She won't be able to take AP when she gets to be a senior.

So these are decisions that-- parents already have it tough enough, but they need to be thinking of probably even sooner than they had probably thought of originally.

Another thing that we've been talking about, and I said before, we try to put research into practice. There was this great report that came out from the National Science Foundation called Beyond Bias an Barriers. And it was looking at women in academia. And one of the things that they put in as a recommendation, which I thought made a lot of sense, especially given what Heidi just talked about, was the way that the government structures its grants. And one of the things that-- we actually have a bill that we're working with Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson from Texas on is to make sure that when grants are given, there are allowances made either to pay for child care, or potentially to pay for kind of a replacement scientist if you need to go on maternity leave or paternity leave.

Because the reality is, especially for some science experiments and such, cells aren't going to stop dividing. Things aren't going to stop growing. Whatever your research is is going to continue even if you want to stay home and do some things for a newborn. So having that flexibility I think is going to be key.

I think of the most profound things though that came out of that report is something that probably will surprise some of you. Donna Shalala was the chair of that particular committee. And one of things that she said when she was testifying before Congress was look, I run a major research institution. I also happen to run a major athletic institution. Now I can tell you exactly where my university stands in terms of Title IX when it comes to athletics. I can tell you what we do with our coaches, how many resources we give our teams, the number of male athletes to female athletes. I know exactly where we stand. Part of the reason for that is because we're a member of the NCAA, and they require us-- and the federal government by the way requires us through the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act to report those statistics. So I know. I know where we stand.

Now a lot of you might not know it, but Title IX actually applies to any federally funded program that receives federal money, educational program that receives federal money. That means you cannot discriminate based on sex in any program, any educational program that receives federal funds. That means that we can use Title IX as a tool to advance girls and women in STEM.

We can do this through compliance reviews. One of the things that has happened and been very interesting at the federal level-- even if you're not getting a grant from the Department of Education, if you are getting a grant and it is educational programming or it's going through an educational institution, you have to be in compliance with Title IX. So if you're getting a grant from NASA to look at some things, you have to be in compliance with Title IX. NASA has actually started doing its own internal compliance reviews to make sure that they are following what Title IX says it should do. That's a key thing. That's a tool we already have in our toolbox, if only we would use it.

We have seen a huge growth in the number of girls playing athletics ever since Title IX was passed in 1972, like a 900% increase in the number of girls playing sports in high school. That's huge. That's an amazing growth pattern. Imagine if we could do that with STEM. Imagine if we could use Title IX in the same way, the same tools, with the same focus. Imagine what we would have.

And that's not just about giving girls an opportunity to play ball. Because that's important, girls who were active in sports, they're much more likely to graduate. They're much less likely to get pregnant. They don't use drugs. They get better grades, all that stuff.

But one of the things that we know in terms of using it in terms of STEM, we don't have that kind of NCAA like institution. And that's one of things that Beyond Bias and Barriers actually recommended. We need to come up with some kind of quasi-governmental institution that has the same kind of data reporting requirements that sports do. If we have to report about sports, why not have some information about the STEM fields? And do the same kind of work there in terms of building up women in the STEM field.

So that I think is a particularly workable kind of solution because there's so much money that flows from the federal government. There are a lot of people who get those grants. And one of things that it says, are you in compliance with Title IX? And they just have to check a box. I would like to have them do more than check a box.

And oh by the way, if you're one of those folks who get those grants, you should know that the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education is now expecting you to do more than check the box. They're actually going out and proactively, randomly selecting universities to do compliance reviews where they come in and they see if you're doing okay. And it happens.

Notre Dame had one a couple years ago. And one of the things that came out of it, which I thought was fascinating, and is actually I think very demonstrated in AAUW's Why So few? report as well is that they realized they needed to kind of restructure their curriculum, that they really had this huge leaky pipeline in the engineering field with women at Notre Dame. And they looked at the curriculum, and they realized that the first course they have people who are declared majors in engineering take is kind of a weed them out math course. It's the very first course they have them take.

So there were a lot of women who, even though they might have gotten through that math course, actually changed majors fairly quickly after that. So they changed the curriculum around and actually have, as their first course now, more of an introduction into what engineering is, what engineering can do. The reason why this is important is because one of things we now from girls and women in the sciences is that a lot of times their interest stems, not necessarily most immediately from the science, but how can they use it to help people? How can they use it to make a better world? How can they use it to improve their situation and the situation of others?

And so if you have a course that shows them that before you then get into the more esoteric kinds of nuts and bolts about how it works, you can actually then help them see how these classes all apply and how they kind of build on each other. A really good example of that we were just talking about recently, it wasn't until just a couple years ago that the crash test dummies actually started to be-- started to use crash test dummies the size of women. Now if they had been using crash test dummies the size of women when they started using airbags, we would have found out sooner that if you're a 5'2 women, 100 pounds soaking wet, an airbag is not your friend. There has to be an adjustment made to it. But because we were only using male sized crash dummies, they didn't know. And we had to actually have all those injuries and deaths to prove it. So that's a place where the applied sciences in many respects for women and girls can make sense, a place where they feel like they can make a difference.

The other thing that I wanted to mention real quickly is just some other things that we are doing on a policy level to try and make STEM fields more open to women and girls. There was a lot of talk about childcare. I think that's a huge issue. Federal funding for childcare unfortunately is under attack at the moment. We've been trying to not only increase that finding, but to get them to be a little more common sense about how to use it so that it's not like an 8:00 to 5:00 childcare, that it also runs at night, that it runs on the weekend, that it works for graduate students and faculty members.

Some other things that we have been looking at is trying to make sure that when you have campus policies put in place, that there's a real kind of thought processes about consequences and even unintended consequences. One of the other things that Notre Dame did as a result of their Title IX compliance review is they actually ended up putting together a dorm, a residence hall, that was just for women in science, a STEM dorm essentially. And having that cohort, they called it the posse effect. Having the folks around them was something that was really useful in terms of keeping them in the program.

So let me just stop there. I'm happy to take any questions. And I do just want to say again, thank you for having us here today. This has really been a great panel. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

KASTNER: So now we'll open the floor for questions. I'd ask you to come up and use the microphone if you have a question you'd like to ask.