Newsletter

June 1999

Flaws in Report on NSERC Women Awards

Dr. Tom Brzustowski
President, NSERC
350 Albert Street
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 1H5

Dear Dr. Brzustowski:

In November of last year, I wrote to express the concerns of our Society regarding the revival of the Women’s Faculty Awards. I appreciate your considered reply, in which you enclosed a February 1997 report evaluating the previous WFA, prepared by Ekos Research Associates Inc. This report, however, I consider seriously flawed. Some of my reservations are given below:

1. The basic assumption of the report, that women are “under-represented” in the sciences because of discriminatory barriers, is unfounded. Your letter suggests that NSERC as a body shares this misconception. While I would not claim that there is no single instance of discrimination against women, I know of no scientifically credible evidence that the lower numbers of women faculty in the physical sciences is due to such barriers. One should not expect the numbers to be higher, when the pool from which women faculty would be drawn (graduate students and doctorates in the same fields) is also well below 50%.

   That these numbers are not the result of the “gendering” of science is indicated by the representation of women in the biological sciences, where the hiring rate has approached 50% in recent years. There is a good case to be made that the lower numbers in the physical sciences are influenced by two major factors: it is well established that women score lower, on average, on measures of mathematical reasoning, which is a more critical component of the physical than the biological sciences; and there is published evidence that even women with very high math reasoning scores still prefer “person-oriented” occupations to more object-oriented activities.

2. Much of the “data” in support of the WFAs in the report consists of opinions expressed by the award recipients, or by equivalent non-applicants or non-awardees (all of them women). However, none of the sources address such substantive issues as whether the awardees are academically on a par with men who were hired in equivalent departments over the same time span. In fact, in order to justify awards which absolutely bar men from eligibility, one should require evidence that the female awardees are superior to male candidates or hirees. Objective information on this question is of course more difficult to collect than the selective opinions of people, but it is the only information pertinent to the question whether women are being unfairly favoured. Even a crude objective measure, such as number of publications, would be an improvement over vague opinions.

3. Both the report, and your reply to me, mention as support for continuing the WFA programme, that it has had a positive effect on hiring women at the entry level. This is surely a tautology. The awards are available only to women, and most departments will be quite willing to accept a free appointment, hence the number of women hired in the designated fields will necessarily be higher than without the award system. There is no evidence in the report that women have been hired beyond this; in fact, in departments who got an award and made other appointments as well, almost 90% of the latter went to men! This suggests to me that the awardees were hired because they cost nothing. The report itself says that while 82% of department heads with award holders believe that the WFA had a positive impact on their department, it also concludes that these department heads would not have hired the applicants without the WFA award. To describe this as a positive effect is questionable indeed.

4. The equally compelling question of the potential long-term impact on the sciences of discriminatory awards, awards which may even lower standards in some fields, is never addressed. In my opinion, apart from the inequity, the most negative feature of the WFA programme is the inappropriate deploying of scarce research resources. Such resources should be directed toward the most talented researchers, not to individuals identified by irrelevant features such as skin colour or genitalia. It is incumbent on those who claim that women are being denied access to faculty positions in the physical sciences due to systemic bias, to provide objective evidence for the claim. In fact, two recent separate analyses of hiring rates in universities in the past two decades have reported that women are being hired in ratios higher than their representation in the applicant pool, in all fields, including the sciences. Such data might suggest that, so far from barriers being erected to women, they have been erected to men.

5. Finally, the report claims that the WFA programme helps provide important female role models. This claim is made despite published evidence (cited in the report) that same-sex role models were not considered important to over two-thirds of women scientists surveyed. The best role model surely is a good scientist, regardless of any other characteristic.

NSERC is the most important source of research funding for the sciences in this country. We have the right to expect that decisions about research funding be fair and be based on excellence alone. Once again, we urge NSERC to make these awards, so important for beginning scientists, available to men and women equally.

Sincerely,
Doreen Kimura, PhD, FRSC, LLD (Hon)
President, SAFS

c.c. Hon. R. Duhamel, Hon. D. Grey