RESHAPING AFFIRMATIVE ACTIONBarring of racial preferences in school admissions in California and Texas sets stage for retooling affirmative actionMairin B. BrennanC&EN Washington
"M ay you live in interesting times" goes an old Chinese saying that can be taken as either a blessing or a curse. For supporters of affirmative action in college admissions, the times are indeed interesting. Affirmative action policies - which give preference to applicants of a certain race or gender with the goal of assembling a diverse student pool - are having to be rethought in the face of stiff challenges. The legal fortress that has watched over the interests of women and minorities - founded initially on laws that banned discrimination and then buttressed by policies seeking to correct past wrongs - is now crumbling. In two states, legislative maneuvering and court battles have overturned all or part of successful affirmative action programs. Other actions are forcing programs designed to increase the number of underrepresented minorities (blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans) in science to open their doors to nonminority students. Legislation enacted in California in 1996 barred public colleges and universities from using either race or gender as a consideration in selecting the students they admit. As a result, the number of black, Hispanic, and Native American high school students being admitted to California's most elite schools has plummeted. In Texas, the outcome of a lawsuit in 1996 prohibited the state's public institutions from using race as a consideration in admitting students. The following year, minority enrollment in the state's most competitive law school plunged. In other states, lawsuits contesting racial preference in school admissions have begun to surface. Similar suits have been brought against federally funded programs that exclusively target underrepresented minorities. The upshot is that affirmative action programs in general are being retooled to insulate them against legal attack, and a new vision for affirmative action is emerging. It calls for diversity-based programs that are inclusive and fair rather than programs that target only special groups. In trying to unravel the reasons for the changing climate in affirmative action, C&EN contacted several sources with intimate knowledge of past programs and a sense of what the future may hold.
"Affirmative action as it's being practiced now is politically likely to be a dead end," says Richard N. Zare, professor of natural science in the department of chemistry at Stanford University and a former chairman of the National Science Board. "It's too confused with quotas and job set-asides, even though education, you could argue, is the best way to level the playing field. I really think we need new words. Even if it's old wine, it needs to be put in new bottles with new labels. I'm not saying just keep the old wine, I'm just saying I think we should be more inclusive." Others agree. "I am of the opinion that a narrow focus on minorities could be counterproductive and, in the long run, become an unintended stigma associated with minority scholars and professionals," says Jesse W. Jones, a professor of chemistry at Baylor University, Waco, Texas, and a member of the Texas State House of Representatives. "Moreover, I have serious concerns regarding the argument for affirmative action based exclusively on race without equal emphasis on qualified applicants," he adds.
The problem is that "people have confused unqualified with qualified," says Earl D. Mitchell Jr., a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Oklahoma State University, Stillwater." The general impression you get about African Americans in terms of preferential treatment is that you're putting unqualified people in positions and passing over qualified whites. That's what I call intellectual dishonesty among those who are opposed to affirmative action." Mitchell, who is associate vice president for multicultural affairs at the university, believes that much of the current sentiment on affirmative action has arisen from abuse of federal set-asides for minority-owned businesses. (Such set-asides are contract monies designated for minority individuals only.) Set-asides have jump-started many successful minority businesses that otherwise wouldn't have made it, Mitchell notes. But the federal program has been badly abused, he says, by both minorities and whites who managed to fraudulently obtain these monies.
Other observers believe universities do not always follow the letter of the law in diversifying their student bodies. For example, some schools may admit foreign students "who meet someone's definition of a minority" into an affirmative action program, says a chemistry professor who asked not to be identified. Allowing these students to benefit at the expense of physically disabled or otherwise disadvantaged students born in the U.S. is not fair, the professor suggests. Such sentiments are helping propel the drive for diversity programs that serve America's needy. Still, "there's a reason for affirmative action, and that reason has not gone away in spite of what people think," says Mitchell." Attitudes against race still exist in this country," he contends.
In the beginning Affirmative action in higher education suffered its first major blow in 1978 when the Supreme Court ruled against the use of strict racial quotas in affirmative action programs ( http://oyez.at.nwu.edu/cases/76-811/). In the lawsuit that precipitated this action, Allan Bakke, a white male, contended he was denied admission to the medical school at the University of California, Davis, solely on the basis of race. As part of its affirmative action program, the school had been reserving 16 of the 100 places in each entering class for qualified minorities. Bakke's grade-point average and test scores exceeded those of any of the minority students admitted in the two years he applied to the school. While the court ruled for Bakke, it also ruled that race could be taken into account in evaluating applicants as long as different standards weren't used in admitting these students. Thus, California's public universities continued to implement affirmative action programs. In 1996, however, with the enactment of Proposition 209, California dealt a fatal blow to the state's affirmative action programs. This legislation prohibits preferential treatment in state and other public entities on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin ( http://Vote96.ss.ca.gov/Vote96/html/BP/209.htm). Also in 1996, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans (which covers Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi) ruled against race as a factor in student admission to the University of Texas School of Law ( http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/hopwood). Four white students, including Cheryl J. Hopwood, after whom the case is named, contended that they were denied admission to the law school because of race-based preferences. Texas Attorney General Dan Morales interpreted the court's decision to mean that race cannot be considered in admissions or for financial aid at any of the state's public universities. Subsequently, fearing that the Hopwood decision would limit minority access to undergraduate school, Texas lawmakers in 1997 enacted the" 10% rule," a law that grants all high school graduates in the top 10% of their class automatic admission to the state's public universities. Other race-based lawsuits, some settled and others ongoing, were initiated in 1997. Among those settled was a suit against the National Science Foundation filed by the Center for Individual Rights (CIR), a Washington, D.C.-based legal advocacy group that works to strike down affirmative action programs through litigation. The suit claimed that a white graduate student was discriminated against when he was denied the opportunity to apply for one of the slots in a graduate fellowship program that are reserved for members of an underrepresented minority group. It was settled last month, and NSF agreed to pay $95,400 in damages and attorneys' fees and to restructure its minority fellowship program to make awards to institutions rather than individuals (C&EN, June 29, page 11). Another lawsuit filed by CIR, in which one party has settled, was brought against the National Institutes of Health and Texas A&M University, College Station. It challenged the exclusion of a white high school student from a minorities-only Texas A&M summer program funded in part by NIH. The agency settled out of court by opening the program to disadvantaged students. CIR also is challenging racial preferences in student admissions at the University of Washington (Seattle) Law School and at the University of Michigan's Law School and undergraduate College of Literature, Sciences & the Arts. Also in CIR's legal portfolio is a suit against Alabama State University, brought on behalf of a black student who is seeking admission to a federally mandated scholarship program designated for white students only. (Information on these and other affirmative action lawsuits advocated through CIR is available at http://www.wdn.com/cir.) More trouble may be on the way for affirmative action programs this year: The state of Washington has on its ballot for the November election a civil rights initiative reminiscent of California's Proposition 209 ( http://www.wscri.com/equality/txt.html).
A changing landscape For example, the Hopwood decision sliced minority enrollment at the University of Texas Law School, Austin. Fall enrollment of underrepresented minorities dropped from 16.2% in 1996 (81 students) to 7.8% (36 students) in 1997. According to data provided by the school's office of institutional studies, in 1995, the year before the Hopwood decision, this group made up 21% of the 510 new entrants. In chemistry, the picture at the University of Texas, Austin, hasn't changed much, says Marye Anne Fox, vice president for research and the M. June & J. Virgil Waggoner Regents Chair in chemistry. But the numbers in chemistry are small, she notes. In 1995, for example, just 13 underrepresented minorities applied to graduate school in chemistry, two were accepted, and none enrolled. In 1996, 15 applied, three were accepted, and one enrolled. In 1997, nine applied, four were accepted, and one enrolled. This year, 11 applied and seven have been accepted. "It's too early to tell about enrollment" for 1998, she says. Most are not likely to be Texas residents, notes Fox, because 90% of the pool of U.S. citizens and permanent residents applying to graduate school in chemistry at UT Austin are not Texas residents. "These [small] numbers are amazing - and distressing - to me," says Fox, who will become chancellor of North Carolina State University, Raleigh, in August. "I've had three African American students and three Hispanic students out of 45 who have received graduate degrees with me, and all of them have been awarded within the past decade. I thought things were getting better." A key difference between law school and graduate school is the issue of tuition and fellowship support. Law schools nationwide charge tuition. Chemistry departments offer teaching assistantships or fellowships, so graduate students are assured of financial aid that can cover tuition. A concern in Texas, which is echoed in California, is that talented minority students who don't qualify for need-based financial aid may opt to attend out-of-state schools that are free to offer them financial support now that their home states have been barred from offering race-based scholarships. The perceived upshot is a brain drain in Texas and California. Jack Bristol, professor emeritus of UT El Paso's department of biological sciences, notes that Texas is "a very, very large state, and the majority of minority students in higher education are in schools like" UT El Paso that have a high Hispanic enrollment. For example, at El Paso, Hispanics account for 64% of the total enrollment, he notes. The Hopwood decision may have no impact on these schools, he suggests. "But the fact is the demographics are changing rapidly, and we need to encourage what may well be our future workforce to go as far as they can" in higher education by increasing the proportion of minority enrollment in schools like UT Austin and Texas A&M, he says. Competition for admission to these schools is tough, says Ray Grasshoff, assistant director for media relations for the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. That opens the way for a brain drain at the undergraduate level." The best and brightest of our minority students - undergraduate students - are being siphoned out of our state," says Bristol. For example, Bristol points out, a prestigious medical school in the Northeast "recruited five of our students when they were sophomores." The students will visit the school in summer and spend their senior year there; the Northeast university will foot the bill. They will take course work required to complete their undergraduate degree at UT El Paso as well as courses toward their first year in medical school at the Northeast school. "Those kinds of things are going on," says Bristol. "After Hopwood, we in the UT system have set up task forces to look at how we can encourage our minority students to stay in Texas." The number of minority students at both UT Austin and Texas A&M is fairly substantial, notes Bristol. However, "if you look at the percentage of the total enrollment they represent, it's disappointing." As affirmative action policies were being retooled at Texas' flagship schools - UT Austin and Texas A&M - the proportion of underrepresented minorities in the freshman class slipped a bit. At UT Austin, this group comprised 15.1% of the freshman class in 1997, compared with 17.4% in 1996. In reality, though, a larger number of minority students enrolled in 1997 (1,003) compared with 1996 (961). This year, 1,066 intend to enroll, according to data provided by the school, bringing their proportion in the freshman class to 17.6%. Aggressive recruiting as well as private minority scholarships - for example, from the UT Austin alumni association and others - are helping to increase minority enrollment, says UT Austin's Fox. At Texas A&M, underrepresented minorities made up 13.1% of the freshman class in 1997, compared with 15.1% in 1996. That translates into a head count of 814 in 1997 versus 967 in 1996. Data for the incoming class were not available from the school at press time. Meanwhile, schools in the University of California system, which includes the state's eight major public research universities that have undergraduate programs, are experiencing the fallout of Proposition 209. The state's top 12.5% of graduating high school students are eligible for admission to these schools; admission is based on the students' grades and standardized test scores, among other factors. In the wake of Proposition 209's restrictive legislation, the eight schools collectively accepted for admission 13,105 underrepresented minorities this year, down 19% from the 16,203 they accepted in 1997. Of those accepted, 4,161 intend to register, down 9.5% from the comparable figure for last year (4,599). But the data are somewhat slippery - total admissions are likely inflated because students with multiple offers would be counted more than once, and registration data are affected by the increase in the number of students who declined to state their race or ethnicity this year - 3,863 versus 1,233 in 1997 ( http://www.ucop.edu/ucophome/commserv/admissions/sirtable1.html). UC Berkeley and UCLA are among the six UC universities that accepted fewer underrepresented minorities this year. UCLA accepted 1,363 minority students compared with 2,122 last year. Of those, 604 intend to register, compared with 862 last year. Berkeley accepted 888 compared with 1,865 last year. Of these, 376 intend to register, compared with 776 last year. Only three students from underrepresented minority groups are expected to register as chemistry majors at UCLA this fall, compared with 13 last year, according to data provided by the school. Only three are expected to register as chemical engineering majors, the same as last year. For biochemistry, the picture is brighter but still tarnished - 19 versus 23 last year. At UC Berkeley, 15 of the 165 students who have signed up for chemistry or chemical engineering majors are underrepresented minorities, says Herbert L. Strauss, associate dean for undergraduate affairs in the College of Chemistry." We're down a hair of a percent" compared with last year when 19 of the roughly 200 students registering for these fields were underrepresented minorities, he adds. "Everybody worked like the devil to call up all the minority candidates and have them register. "One of the troubles we have in Berkeley, and to a lesser extent at UCLA, is that we are perceived as being more prestigious than some of the other UC campuses. So the competition for the different campuses differs enormously, even though the education doesn't," he says. Two schools in the UC system - UC Riverside and UC Santa Cruz - are looking to have more underrepresented minority students in their freshman class this fall - 637 at Riverside versus 432 in 1997, and 438 at Santa Cruz versus 352 in 1997. Both schools accepted more of these students than they did in 1997.
Proposition 209 hasn't yet affected schools in the California State University (CSU) system, according to Carlos G. Gutierrez, a professor of chemistry at CSU Los Angeles. "Hopefully, it won't," he says. "At Cal State right now, we are beneficiaries - in a perverse way - of the practices at UC, which are a very bad social policy."
CSU schools, in contrast to the UC system, accept students in the top third of the state's high school graduates, and two out of every three CSU students come from community colleges. Enrollment overall is going up, increasing by 24% over the past three years, says Ken Swisher, media relations manager for the Office of the Chancellor at CSU. Minorities, reflecting the changing demographics, are enrolling in droves, he says. In 1980, 72% of CSU students were white. In 1990, the percentage of white students fell to 64%, and in 1997 to 48%. As Gutierrez explains, UC schools now are excluding minority students who have outstanding Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores and outstanding grade-point averages (GPAs). "These students are being heavily recruited by eastern schools." Even though UC seems to be saying that these students "are not good enough to get into a UC school, some of the most selective schools in the country" find them to be outstanding candidates, he says. "The UC system has the premier public universities in California. When, however, through social policy, you don't have [representative minority] participation in those schools, what does that say about the leadership of California in the next generation?" Gutierrez notes, however, that there are "genuinely good people at the UC schools who care and who understand that the situation is a disaster in both the short and the long run for California." And these people are trying to put in place programs that will increase the pool of minority students eligible for UC schools, he says.
However, issues of education in California are very complex, a chemistry professor at a UC school tells C&EN. "It requires both dollars and a cultural sea change to solve the problems of minorities not getting educated," she says. "It's a sorry thing to have passed Proposition 209 ... and not address the core problems." These include resources, qualified teachers, and adequate school facilities at the precollege level and "books before computers," she insists. California schools are woefully underfunded at all levels, she adds.
Minority programs on the move The five-year-old program targets children in culturally diverse high schools in economically disadvantaged communities. "It's my premise that if you take 4,000 kids at random from a poor community, there's bound to be a significant number who have the capabilities, motivation, drive, and interest to do well in engineering," says NACME President and Chief Executive Officer George Campbell Jr.
Budding engineers are identified in their junior year of high school on the basis of problem-solving skills, motivation, creativity, and interest. Young minority Ph.D.s. in postdoctoral and faculty positions help with the selection. The students are given intensive training in math and science - including physics, chemistry, and calculus - in their senior year. With scholarships in hand, they go in batches of about 10 to engineering schools participating in the program." For these kids, SAT scores don't mean a whole lot," says Campbell. "If they went to [elite high schools], they would probably score 1,500."
NACME's first group of students will graduate this year from Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pa., and Rice University, Houston - the first schools to participate in the venture. "The program has been enormously successful," says Campbell." We haven't lost a single student since we started. We have a couple of kids with 4.0 grade-point averages and several in the 3.7 to 3.8 range. These are kids who would not have been accepted if you looked at their SAT scores. We have kids with combined SAT scores of 850 or 900 going to Rice, where the average for incoming freshmen is 1,450." The first batch of Vanguard students was chosen from a pool of about 4,000 students in New York City high schools. This year's crop will be culled from roughly 30,000 students in 25 high schools in five cities. Picking 150 winners out of 30,000 is not as difficult as it might seem, says Campbell. "In fact, it is an extraordinarily selective process, even though these kids won't have high SAT scores," he contends. Although the program is not limited to underrepresented minority students," it turns out that 85 to 90% of them are minorities," notes Campbell. Participating universities (now there are 10) have the final say in which students they will accept. At UC Davis, another program is proving its mettle. Launched in 1995, the Transfer Student Fellows Program (TSFP) is aimed at smoothing the transition to UC Davis for community college students "with a real passion for science" who have experienced educational or economic disadvantages that might put them at risk for academic hurdles in bridging the transfer to the university, says program director Merna R. Villarejo, a professor of microbiology at Davis. Minority students, economically disadvantaged students, reentry students, and students deemed to have a strong potential for success but in need of guidance to realize it are among those who have participated in the program. Villarejo notes that 37% of undergraduate students at UC Davis start their college careers at the state's community colleges, which play a crucial role in increasing the participation and success of underrepresented minorities. Recognizing the importance of paving the way for these students to flourish at the university, Davis supports the largest transfer program in the UC system, she says. The TSFP program, geared to transfer students pursuing biological sciences, introduces students to advanced-level course work during the summer to prepare them for the pace of the university's quarter system. At the same time, the students get to know each other and establish a peer group. During the academic year, the students participate in weekly seminars, laboratory research, and a scientific journal club. They also learn public speaking skills and are mentored on course selection. Students in the first two TSFP classes (1995 - 96 and 1996 - 97) completed their first year at Davis with average cumulative GPAs of 3.27 and 3.05, respectively, notes Villarejo. The comparative GPAs for biology transfer students who were not in TSFP were 2.87 and 2.89, respectively, for the same two years. "The difference [in GPAs] is all the more impressive because TSFP is not an honors program," says Villarejo. Current sponsors of the TSFP program include the National Institutes of Health and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. A somewhat similar transfer program is in effect at UCLA. Started with NIH funding for minority students, the program is a partnership with five local community colleges. Additional funding from the university has broadened the program to allow outreach to all community college students, says program director Richard L. Weiss, a professor of biochemistry in the school's department of chemistry and biochemistry. The UCLA program includes academic enrichment activities and tutorial laboratories held at the community colleges. At the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), a scholars program designed for minority students with highly competitive SAT scores has been opened to students of all races who are interested in increasing the numbers of underrepresented minorities in science. The program, created in 1988 with a $522,000 grant from Baltimore philanthropists Robert and Jane Meyerhoff, aims to increase the number of blacks pursuing Ph.D.s in science. While maintaining its original mission, the Meyerhoff program began to admit students of other races in 1996 (C&EN, April 1, 1996, page 32.)
About a fourth of current Meyerhoff scholars are not minority students, says UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski III, who heads the program. The scholars study together and socialize together, but they are also encouraged to study with "whoever is making the best grades," he adds. They're guaranteed research experience in their first year, and they publish with their advisers. "We've created an environment where these students talk about their research not just when they are in the lab, but at 2 AM in their residence halls. They've got to marry science," he says. The thrust of the program is to prepare the students for careers as Ph.D.s or M.D./Ph.D.s, and Meyerhoff graduates are already pursuing these goals in the best universities in the country, notes Hrabowski. Between 40 and 50 students are selected for the scholars program each year from the 1,400 to 1,500 nationwide who are nominated. Students who don't make the cut frequently opt to attend UMBC anyway, and the university tries to provide scholarships for them. "There's been a wonderful spillover effect," says Hrabowski. "Many of the African Americans who are not in the Meyerhoff program are majoring in science or one of the technology areas." Many of these students will opt for medical school over graduate school, he says, because they don't get the same exposure to research as the Meyerhoff scholars. Hrabowski calls that unfortunate. "I think [our program] is a positive approach" to addressing legal issues of affirmative action, says Hrabowski. "We are creating a class of people who will have the opportunity to talk about issues of race and poverty and who understand some of the reasons for the shortage of underrepresented minorities" in science. He believes it's a model program that others should consider in developing or reinventing their own programs.
During their tenure at UMBC, Meyerhoff scholars are required to tutor inner-city schoolchildren in math and science and act as role models for them. That's among the facets of the Meyerhoff program that Clifton A. Poodry, director of the Minority Opportunities in Research Division at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), Bethesda, Md., believes could be incorporated into NIH-funded programs designed to increase the pool of underrepresented minorities. The Meyerhoff program "focuses on a national or community need, not the ethnicity of the applicant," says Poodry. In the wake of the spate of race-based lawsuits, NIH is looking to protect its programs from legal attack. Thus Poodry is looking at various programs that, by design, are insulated from affirmative action lawsuits while reflecting NIGMS's mission of increasing the number of underrepresented minorities in the biological sciences. "Congress has been very supportive," he says. "It continued to support affirmative action in the transportation bill this year. What I think is a cause for concern are the continuing lawsuits." At Pennsylvania State University, the way students are assessed is being retooled to guard programs from lawsuits." We're looking at high school students' academic journey" from kindergarten on, says Karen B. Wynn, associate director of the Women in Sciences & Engineering Institute and former assistant director of the Pennsylvania Space Grant Consortium (PSGC), which is funded by the National Aeronautics & Space Administration. The new approach takes into account hardships - poverty, race, gender, rural background, and the like - that applicants have endured and overcome. "The purpose is to identify the highest achievers and award on merit," Wynn says. "We are not using 'disadvantaged' in the selection process. All we are trying to do is to recognize how far the students have come academically." The new approach, called the distance-traveled model, was used last year in selecting students for some fellowship awards. "That was pretty interesting," she says. Panel members from the physics and mathematics departments told Wynn and her colleagues it wouldn't work. "The model made no sense to them," she relates. "They could not see how you could translate the quality of a person's life into any kind of numerical standard. Within one round, they had completely turned around, and they were using the model to make the case for certain candidates. It was so surprising to see their initial intellectual resistance dissolve so quickly under the pressure of having [to decide] among extremely competitive, highly qualified candidates with marginal differences. What happened was the margins became highly important." The model was developed by PSGC Director Richard F. Devon, an associate professor of engineering design and graphics in Penn State's College of Engineering, notes Wynn. It has identified disadvantaged white male candidates as well as female candidates in middle-class families where the "education dollars" are set aside for men, she says. Yet another program, established 22 years ago, funds graduate fellowships in science and engineering for underrepresented minorities (http://www.nd.edu/~gem/). Since its inception in 1976, the National Consortium for Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering & Science Inc. (GEM) has graduated - in engineering - 1,800 people with master's degrees and more than 200 with doctoral degrees, says Howard G. Adams, senior associate director of mentoring at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. GEM is a partnership between universities and corporations. Adams is manager of its Southern Regional Office. Such gains "wouldn't have happened without affirmative action," he says." I'm talking about students who went to the best universities, such as Stanford, MIT, Georgia Tech, Michigan." More than 90% of GEM fellows complete their graduate degrees, surpassing the national average of 81%, he notes. Eight former GEM fellows came up for tenure last year, and they all got it, he says. He suggests people should not think that affirmative action is for" some pitiful black folk who didn't have it on the ball." The program doesn't offer fellowships for a master's degree in science, but it has produced 20 Ph.D. scientists.
Women and Proposition 209 "White women have benefited from affirmative action, but not to the extent that they [no longer] need it," says Oklahoma's Mitchell. "Women of color have benefited too, but we don't see the benefit to the same extent." When it comes to gender differences, it doesn't matter whether women are white or black, he argues. White women will have to deal with problems relating to gender. Minority women will have to deal with the same problems, but they also have to deal with problems relating to race or ethnicity, he explains. He calls that a double whammy.
"In terms of overall numbers and success, women have benefited more from affirmative action than minorities," says Catherine J. Didion, executive director of the Association for Women in Science (AWIS). Others agree. "Women across the board have made gains in the labor force, and they have made gains in most fields of science," says Paula M. Rayman, director of the Radcliffe Public Policy Institute at Harvard University. "There have been modest gains in women beginning to make it up within the hierarchy of the sciences," she adds. In fact, women have benefited so much from affirmative action that a consensus is emerging that white women no longer need affirmative action to get into college or pursue most postgraduate degrees. It's what happens - or doesn't happen - after graduation that's the problem. The path to high-level positions is still gender sensitive. On the business front, a study conducted last year by Catalyst, a New York City-based not-for-profit-organization that works with businesses (including chemical companies) to effect change for women, indicated that although women held 48% of managerial positions, they made up only 11% of corporate officers and just 2.5% of top earners. Only two women were chief executive officers at Fortune 500 companies. In academia, the number of women chemists in faculty positions at most major research universities still can be counted on one hand. At the same time, women are garnering Ph.D.s in chemistry at a good clip, although not nearly on par with the proportion of the U.S. population they represent. In 1996, the latest year for which data are available, women earned 30.7% of Ph.D.s awarded in chemistry, up from 12.5% in 1976, according to data compiled by the American Chemical Society's Committee on Professional Training. Also in 1996, women received nearly a third (32%) of all doctoral degrees awarded in science and engineering, according to NSF. In the biological sciences, women received 42% of the Ph.D. degrees awarded that year. By comparison, they fared rather poorly in the physical sciences and engineering fields: In 1996, in the combined fields of engineering, women earned 12% of doctoral degrees; in chemical engineering, 18%; in physics, 13%; and in computer sciences, 15%.
The fact is that affirmative action was created by way of the civil rights legislation on race, and "women were added as an afterthought" (in 1967, via Executive Order 11375), says Helen C. Davies, a professor of microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine." We have benefited tremendously from that legislation," she notes. "And we need to protect it. Can we really depend on men saying: 'Yes, of course. Women are worth having as colleagues?' " Davies, a 46-year member of the American Chemical Society and president of AWIS, calls the dearth of women faculty members in chemistry "pathetic." An Ivy League university where 40% of the faculty members in the microbiology department are women can have one or two women faculty members out of 30 in chemistry, she says. Having affirmative action forces white males to consider women as part of the competitive group, she contends. Not having women and minorities in positions of authority in the scientific establishment creates bias in research funding, says Davies. "Although white men may think what they are doing is nondiscriminatory, the reality is that research on breast cancer languished until enough women were elected to Congress to move it forward," she notes. Clinical trials to determine the safety and efficacy of drugs were also biased, she says - for example, the study that indicated aspirin's protective effect against heart disease was done only on white males. It's easier to make the case for proportional representation when you talk about issues of health, Davies argues. Getting the appropriate mix of diversity in research is likely to need some form of affirmative action. "In a very competitive world, anything that will weed out numbers of people, whether on the basis of national origin or because they are foreigners or women, is one way of decreasing the competition" among white males, Davies claims.
Joanna Floros, a professor of cellular and molecular physiology and pediatrics at Pennsylvania State College of Medicine, Hershey, draws on the fable of the blind men and elephant to describe why diversity is needed in scientific research. When the blind men felt the elephant, each described it differently, because each approached the elephant from a different angle, she explained. "We as scientists - and anybody who seeks to know what is not yet known - are metaphorically blind," she says. "Sometimes our views will be as different as the tusk and tail of the elephant. But yet they are part of the same big picture. And if we want to see the big picture, we need to be able to see the parts."
Minority women A Catalyst study of black, Hispanic, and Asian women in corporate management completed this year indicated that whereas 57% were satisfied with their jobs, only 34% perceived satisfactory opportunities for advancement. The women cited a lack of access to both mentors and influential colleagues as a major drawback. In fact, a fourth of the black women in the study planned to leave their companies.
To help retain black women managers, Procter & Gamble has a mentoring network and "a focused personnel development process in place," says Joel I. Shulman, the company's manager for external relations. Mentors are men and women of all races and ethnic groups. "There are still a lot of problems with equity in affirmative action," says Oklahoma's Mitchell. For example, he says, many black males think that women of color have benefited more than black males. "But when you start discussing who is not getting what, it gets away from the central issue of the diversity [and] everyone sharing." Mitchell is optimistic about the future of affirmative action. "I think people are beginning to realize that change is needed to increase diversity and open up more doors." What happens is that we always make progress in something, and then there's a backlash, and we stop and take a look at it and move on." The difference between today and two generations ago is that a lot more minorities are well educated and have good jobs, he says. "We're far from where we were two generations ago, but we're a long way from where we ought to be. What's the old saying? 'Thank God I'm not where I used to be. Thank God I am where I am.'" |
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