Towards Title IX: The Rise of Women in STEM

Women in STEM from 1946 to the passage of Title IX

Annie Easley at NASA Glenn Research Center. She started at NASA in 1955 as a “human computer”.

The history of women in STEM before World War II was complex. Women played a crucial role in science during the war, enrolling in STEM degrees in record numbers and working in industry, government, and academia. These roles were temporary though, and new struggles emerged for women in STEM before the passage of federal legislation that prevented discrimination in higher education.

Opportunities which women scientists had experienced during WWII were taken away

Post World War II, a conservative, antifeminist atmosphere descended. Women scientists often lost their jobs, or were denied opportunities to pursue STEM education, because universities were flooded with returning soldiers, eager to take advantage of new educational benefits.

Number of female students enrolled in engineering departments at the University of California through 1945. There was a climb in female enrollment during 1941-1945, when the United States was in World War II.

Despite this, women persevered and continued earning graduate degrees in record numbers. As a percentage of total doctorates, however, women remained at the 10% level in the 1950s and 1960s (Graham 1978). Furthermore, those that did pursue a graduate degree faced many obstacles and there were high drop-out rates among women. Despite increasing numbers of earned doctorates, women held low percentages of full professor positions, notably at prestigious research-intensive universities. Shockingly, from 1920-1995, there was only a 5% increase in women full-time faculty in all fields at American universities (West 1995).

Few efforts were made to accommodate women at coeducational institutions, and their enrollment was usually limited to the availability of women’s dormitories. Administrators expected that women would quit and drop out, usually due to marriage, and no accommodations for childcare or part-time study were provided
(Rossiter 1995). Resources related to mental health, career counselling, or social support were practically nonexistent (Oltman 1975). Negative conditions persisted, like low pay, stress, long hours, a limited dating pool, and realistic fears of post-graduation unemployment. Instead of addressing these issues, academic leaders fear-mongered about the “lowering” academic standards and took pride in these high drop-out rates (Rossiter 1995).

Employment of women scientists mainly were mainly in educational institutions. Women were only 3.07% of the industrial science workforce in 1956-1958 and this percentage barely budged by 1970. Rossiter 1995, page 107.

And once they earned a doctorate, women researchers faced many challenges in obtaining academic employment, pretty much the only employment option available since industry rarely hired women. Anti-nepotism rules abounded, which prevented spousal hiring, usually the wife. Those few who were able to obtain faculty jobs faced hostility from students, lack of recognition from universities, and minimal promotion opportunities (Rossiter 1995). Women doctorates had virtually no mentors or anyone willing to support their candidacy for tenure-track positions (Freidenreich 2007). Female faculty at smaller, local teaching colleges, which had been havens for women doctorates, were also pushed out in attempts to chase prestige. During the 1950s and 1960s, the percentage of women faculty nationwide was declining. Women faculty either took early retirement, struggled to find new positions, or continued on stoically and endured indignities (Rossiter 1995). According to Rossiter, the prevailing strategy to combat such inequality was to work hard enough to embarrass the university into recognition (Rossiter 1995). It was clear, however, that in post-World War II America, the research university was retrenching into a white, masculine space.

By the Late 1960s, women scientists were organizing

During the second-wave feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, women in STEM began to collectively question and pushback. The 1960s and 1970s saw a revolution in women’s higher education and employment. Women banded together to protest unfair treatment and were able to get important legislation passed. Notably, unsatisfied research associates in the 1960s worked to change conditions. Sociologist Alice Rossi became a founder of the women’s movement when she started to question the roles of men and women at universities. Her essay “Equality Between the Sexes: An Immodest Proposal” is a forceful deconstruction of how the post-war environment undermined feminism (Rossi 1964). Rossi notes how the increasingly conservative bent of sociology and psychology painted “intellectually aggressive women or tender expressive men […] as deviants showing signs of ‘role conflict’, ‘role confusion’, or ‘neurotic disturbance’”. The acceptance of new “psychoanalytic ideas” had “provided a quasi-scientific underpinning to educators, marriage counselors, mass media and advertising researchers, who together have partly created, and certainly reinforced, the withdrawal of millions of young American women from the mainstream of thought and work in our society”. In response to dissatisfaction with this “quasi-science”, rigorous, scientific studies of sex discrimination were published in prestigious journals, not the least of all was Rossi’s Science article “Women in Science: Why So Few?” (Rossi 1964). Women in academia began to organize and speak out on behalf of others. Women’s programs and networks were also developed (Freidenreich).

LEFT: % Women within various STEM fields 1966; women were 22% of the Psychology field in 1966 and only 0.50% of Agricultural Sciences. RIGTH: Ratio of men to women’s salaries in 1970, with women earning a lower median salary than men. Rossiter 1995, pages 104 & 111

Legislation was crucial in the fight against sex discrimination in STEM

Most significantly in women’s fight for equality were the 1972 Equal Employment Opportunity Act and Title IX of the Educational Amendments Act. The Equal Employment Opportunity Act extended protection from employment discrimination to faculty employment decisions. Title IX banned sex discrimination at educational institutions receiving federal funding. Both acts were important forces in turning the tide for women in academia by providing legal recourse. Between 1972-1985, class action lawsuits were initiated by women from universities including Cornell, New York University, Pennsylvania State University, and the University of California, who were denied tenure (Staub 1986). Sex discrimination lawsuits were filed, and prestigious universities underwent federal investigation for sex discrimination (Rossiter 1995). These cases were publicized in prestigious scientific journals (Holden 1972; Koleman 1980). Even though these lawsuits were slow and did not have clear cut victories, universities began changing policies and this made achieving tenure a more realistic possibility for women doctorates (Rossiter 2012).

As a result of recruitment and outreach, more women entered STEM majors in the 1970s (Ettinger et al. 2018). The number of doctorates awarded to women steadily increased. However, gains in the faculty ranks were still slow. Between 1920 and 1977, there were 36,881 earned S&E doctorates for women (10.4% of all S&E doctorates). By 1977, women held 9.8% of all American S&E faculty positions (Council). However, these faculty positions were more likely to be clustered at lower ranks or at less prestigious institutions. For example, in S&E fields, 72% of male faculty held tenure and only 46% of women (Menges and Exum). At top 25 institutions in 1977, only 7.3% of full S&E professors were women (Council). Lower pay for women faculty persisted through this period for most fields and institutions (Council). A 1987 New York Times article entitled “Women Gain Degrees, but Not Tenure” highlighted the slower progress for women, with a 50% tenure rate compared to 75% for men.

However, such gains were primarily beneficial to white women. Student demands and affirmative action mandates pressured universities to make genuine efforts to recruit URMs (Blackwell 1988). But by the 1975-1976 academic year, 36% of Black faculty in all fields were tenured compared to 54% of white faculty (Menges and Exum). And by the 1978-1979 academic year, white women obtained 21.5% of all quantitative (i.e., physical sciences, mathematics, computer, biological sciences, engineering) B.A. degrees, while black women obtained 1.7%, Latina women, 0.8%, Asian American women, 0.8%, and Native American women, 0.1% (Berryman 1983) (calculated from Table 24) (pp. 63-64). White women obtained 13.9% of quantitative Ph.Ds., Black women, 0.4%, Latinas, 0.2%, Native American women, 0.01%, and Asian American women 0.8% (Berryman 1983) (calculated from Table 26) (pp. 71-72).

White feminists and feminists of color have historically experienced different economic, social, and historical conditions which resulted in the inadequate perspective of race and class in first and second wave feminist theory. White women historically have had closer proximity to the social and economic benefits afforded to white men (Hurtado 1989). They attended the same schools and had similar socioeconomic backgrounds as their white brothers. They were less likely to have to support families and could attend school for longer than women of color. African American students faced particular challenges at predominately white institutions (PWIs). Housing was one of the most contentious issues, with African Americans facing discrimination in women’s dormitories (Kammen 2009). Even as late in 1947, a poll by Cornell University’s campus newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun, found that 33% of undergraduates did not want a Black roommate and 43% did not want a Jewish roommate (Altschuler and Karmnick 2014). Most women’s colleges admitted few or any women of color. Additionally, women’s colleges were entrenched in Christian “tradition” and rarely hired Jewish women (Freidenreich 2007). After 1975, women of color, whose enrollment had increased in the 1960s, declined at women’s colleges. Spelman college, a women’s HBCU, was a notable exception which was also producing graduates who were going on to obtain Ph.Ds. (Rossiter 1995).

STEM-focused groups upped recruitment

CYNTHIA OLIVER COLEMAN, chemical engineer; Jazmin Johnson, software engineer; Patricia Delvac Daniels (left) and Gail Kendall (right), engineering students in SWE at Berkeley; Dr. Valerie Thomas, data scientist.

The years 1972-1985 saw a large increase in female undergraduate enrollment in STEM majors. Furthermore, aggressive outreach and recruiting campaigns aimed towards K-12 girls were successful in increasing the overall number of bachelor’s degrees awarded to women in STEM. The Society of Women Engineers which had existed since 1950 as a response to the alarming post-war decline in women in engineering, became an important engineering organization and recruitment for undergraduates. Charlotte Tyson, second president of Berkeley SWE, reported her experience here:

“1974 was not a welcoming time for women engineering students at Berkeley […] I chose to sit near the back of the deep, narrow classroom with individual desk seats. As the room filled with other students and the professor started teaching, I realized that I was sitting on an island in a sea of empty seats. The other seats in the classroom were filled with male students, but as the lone female, all seats adjacent to me in every direction were empty! I was unsure if it was due to my gender or because I was new, but it was unsettling to be avoided so completely. My gender awareness also led to a habit that I continued throughout my engineering program: I only listed my first initial and last name on homework and tests so that I would not be as easily labeled as ‘that dumb female’ by whoever graded the papers […] and restrooms were hard to find since women had not been considered in the original design of the old buildings”

(I can indeed relate to the lack of female restrooms in old engineering buildings on campus, even though it was the 2010s!).

Notably, at land-grant universities, there were large increases in female enrollment in agricultural colleges in the 1970s. Agricultural departments, which were struggling in the industrial era, worked to recruit women, if only to boost declining enrollment (Rossiter 2012; Knobel 1978). Traditionally male colleges also began to go co-ed in the 1970s, though women often faced barriers to entry and success (Robbins 1970; Mendel 1979; Villarreal 1976). However, by 1985, there were plateaus in female undergraduate enrollment in some STEM fields, notably engineering, mathematics, and computer science (Rossiter 2012). The gender gaps between degrees awarded in these so-called “harder sciences” and the “softer sciences” (e.g., biology, psychology, life sciences) would only continue to widen in the following decades.

LEFT: Number of bachelor's degrees awarded to women in science and engineering from 1970-2000. RIGHT. Number of bachelor’s degrees awarded to women in engineering 1970-2000. Rossiter 2012, pages 42 and 45.

Between 1970 and 2000, STEM graduate education changed dramatically. The enrollment of women, people of color, and temporary visa holders became more prevalent. Issues like sexual harassment and equitable pay came to the forefront. Women’s groups developed campus resources for counseling, student groups, programs, and workshops (Rossiter 2012; Radovic 1976; Dickey 1986). But post-graduation plans still presented issues. Women doctorates were five times more likely to be unemployed than male doctorates. While women in academic positions increased from 22% to 37%, the number of tenured positions only increased about 10% between 1960 and 1985. Women of color were also severely under-represented at all academic levels (Rhode 1988). Few ascended to administrative positions, and their experiences were mixed.

Federal initiatives were ways to increase the number of women faculty. The National Science Foundation (NSF) combined several smaller programs into the Professional Opportunities for Women in Research and Education (POWRE) which assisted young women scientists in the tenure-track. Congress also established a congressional commission on women science and engineering (Rossiter 2012). The NSF ADVANCE grant was established to give money to institutions to improve the climate for women. The NSF ADVANCE grant would award $3-5 million to institutions who agreed to review existing practices for gender equality and to set up new programs for gender equality. Because of ADVANCE, programs such as STRIDE (Strategies and Tactics for Recruiting to Improve Diversity and Excellence) at the University of Michigan were developed (Rossiter 2012; Meyerson and Tompkins 2007). Though peer networks established by ADVANCE programs have been successful, it has been suggested that they could go even farther by organizing women for collective action to change the structure or culture of the university (O’Meara and Stromquist 2015).

In addition to developing a welcoming, diverse classroom space, the climate of certain subfields can be improved through extracurricular groups, networking and mentoring programs, hiring female faculty, and anti-harassment policies. For example, the Women in Engineering Program (WIEP) at Purdue University was a pioneering program founded in 1968 by Jane Z. Daniels which successfully increased women’s enrollment and halved attrition rates for women in engineering at Purdue. Similar programs throughout the country have been successful in improving the climate for women. Hiring more female faculty members can have a positive effect on student interest in continuing in STEM (Monroe et al. 2014). Scrutiny of existing hiring processes, student counselling resources, and current policies have been methods for improving the climate of STEM at an undergraduate level (Rossiter, 2012, p. 44-46). Overall, providing resources which actively promote women’s accomplishments and aid women in “chillier” subfields can improve retention—to an extent.

A 1975 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) report exposed “The Double Bind: The Price of Being a Minority Woman in Science”

This report was the product of a December 1975 meeting of women of color in science, engineering, medicine, and dentistry with the purpose of determining their unique position (Malcom, Hall, and Brown 1976). The proposals suggested ways to reduce isolation of minority women scientists. The report recommended that universities”

1) provide need-based financial aid for women of color committed to studying science, engineering, and biomedical professions

2) provide academic, financial, psychological, and cultural support services

3) aggressively recruit women of color faculty

4) provide resources for job search strategies

Furthermore, they recommended that scientific societies should 1) collect data based on race, ethnic group, and gender, 2) raise awareness of needs and barriers for women of color, and 3) actively recruit women of color. They recommended that funding agencies should create special programs for minority women (**this is now illegal in the US**). The report also noted that women, particularly women of color, were often invited for many more interviews than corresponded to job offers.

The report also highlighted the unique struggles of different ethnic groups. For example, Asian American women doctorates faced higher unemployment than white men (Malcom, Hall, and Brown 1976). Most government agencies excluded Native Americans from funding because of the incorrect assumption that they would receive aid from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (32). Puerto Rican women faced racial discrimination, language and cultural barriers, and poor educational opportunities, which hindered success in the mainland (33-34). Latina women reported strongly internalized cultural norms (34-35). Black women reported the need to strengthen and support minority serving institutions, family and community groups which had been instrumental to their success (35-36). In 1978, the National Network of Minority Women in Science was founded by the participants of the AAAS in the early 1980s for community and encouragement (Rossiter 2012).

This report revealed institutional shallowness of intention to comply with affirmative action mandates. Even though doctorate attainment was at gender parity by the 2000s, there was deep sex and race inequities by field. By 2004, 51% of all earned doctorates in the U.S. were awarded to women (Hoffer et al. 2004). Specifically, women earned the majority of doctorates in such fields as education, the humanities, and the social sciences. From 1974 to 2004, doctorates for women in physical sciences increased from 8% to 27%, and 1% to 18% in engineering (12). But by 2021, these levels were only at 32.5% in physical sciences (18) 24.5% in engineering (NCSES 2021). Of 42,980 S&E doctorates awarded in the U.S. in 2019, white women received 19%, Latina women 2%, Black women, 2%, Asian women, 3%, women temporary visa holders 12%, American Indian or Alaskan Native women 0.08% (NSF 2021). From the 1970s, gains for women of color have only marginally improved. However, there is persistent sex segregation among “prestige” STEM doctoral programs and fields, despite the fact that nearly half of doctorates in the United States are earned by women (Weeden, Thébaud, and Gelbgisera 2016). For example, the field of mathematics has had significantly higher attrition rates for female faculty (Kaminski and Geisler 2012).

Conclusion

While Court rulings and legislation provided legal leverage for women to advance in STEM, academic institutions still dragged their feet on compliance. Networking groups and professional organizations helped to an extent in recruitment and support. Today, there are still persistent gaps in female enrollment by STEM field, and issues advancing on the job market. However, collective action proved successful in bringing larger awareness to issues women face in STEM.

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