U.S. universities foster "a culture that fundamentally discriminates against women," says a new report by the National Academies on the status of women in academic science and engineering.
Reposted from Science magazine, June 28, 2002. BOSTON--Two former Harvard University researchers face up to 25 years in prison and a $750,000 fine for allegedly conspiring to steal Harvard-owned trade secrets and for shipping university property across state lines. The defendants--a Chinese citizen named Jiang Yu Zhu and his Japanese-born wife, Kayoko Kimbara--were arrested last week and are in j...
Reposted from Science magazine, 20 May 2005 Harvard University plans to spend at least $50 million over the next decade to create a more diverse academic community in all disciplines, including throughout the sciences. President Lawrence Summers announced the outlay this week after receiving two reports commissioned in February following his comments about the ability of women to do science, whic...
Senior scientists at MIT and Harvard find their voice amid growing discontent with their institutions' slow progress in hiring and retaining female researchers "I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in." --Virginia Woolf, contemplating women in academia, in A Room of One's Own CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS--It took more than a year of fussi...
For researchers eager to improve the position of women at their own institutions, scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) offer some hard-won advice. Start From Grass Roots: An edict from above is not enough. "Women have to organize themselves," says Robert Birgeneau, dean of sciences at MIT. Such organization puts pressure on the administration to act. Safety in Numbers: ...
This article appears in the February 2, 2001 issue of Science magazine. BOSTON-- The leaders of nine top U.S. research universities this week pledged to smash the glass ceiling that hinders women from advancing at their institutions. Meeting on Monday at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the all-male group stopped short of setting a specific agenda but acknowledged that women face ...
Reposted from Science magazine, November 1, 2002 Takuhiro Hoshino has just entered a master's degree program in medicine at Kyoto University. But he's already mapping out plans to become a postdoctoral researcher in the United States. His to-do list includes spending long hours studying the basic regeneration processes of the human immune system and reading Stephen King novels to hone his English...
Today women from Hillary Clinton on down are praising the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for recognizing and beginning to correct its unfair treatment of female scientists (see main text). But 5 years ago, at least one woman viewed the prestigious school not as an ally but as a powerful enemy. In 1994, the same year that senior biologist Nancy Hopkins and her colleagues were taking g...
One morning in mid-May 1997, astronomer Margaret Geller received a letter from Jeremy Knowles, dean of Harvard University's faculty of arts and sciences, offering her a Mallinckrodt chair at Harvard--an honor traditionally reserved for outstanding tenured scholars at the university. Geller, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, was euphoric, and she rushed out of her of...
