Women can be held back by family obligations, says professor

Achieving a gender balance in higher education requires a sustained commitment that can last for years. Balance can be reached however, as shown by a programme pursued at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

There are three main challenges faced by women working in science, engineering and mathematics, said Prof Nancy Hopkins, the Amgen professor of biology at MIT.

Balance achieved

She described how gender balance was achieved at the famous university at a meeting on Thursday at

Trinity College Dublin

. Today she receives an honorary doctorate from Trinity.

Women can be held back by heavier family obligations than experienced by men, she said when speaking after the meeting. And there is a "leaky pipeline" for women leading to senior posts such as departmental heads, deans and heads of faculty.

This refers to the comparatively lower numbers of women entering science, maths and engineering education and then staying on long enough to take senior positions. Many leak out of the system, leaving fewer woman to bid for these jobs, Prof Hopkins said.

There was also a more insidious if hidden impediment to women in the form of “unconscious bias”, she said. Women can be excluded from faculty posts because of assumptions that they are not capable, and their work can be unfairly undervalued.

Endemic

MIT appointed Prof Hopkins in 1995 to chair the first committee on women faculty in the university’s school of science. Its report on the scale of the problem caused a sensation given the problem was endemic in universities across the US.

“This really changed MIT,” she said. It was difficult to introduce change but it could be done. “You have to look for the barriers that are invisible.”

Trinity’s centre for women in science and engineering research hosted Thursday’s meeting.