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12 The Graduate Experience of Women in STEM and How It Could Be Improved Anne J. MacLachlan The changing position of women earning doctorates in science and engineering is described by the title of the National Research Council’s 2001 report, From Scarcity to Visibility (Long 2001). It re®ects the impact of thirty years of study, programs, and initiatives as women have grown from 8 percent of all Ph.D. recipients in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in 1966 to 39 percent in 2002 (NSF 2003, 38; Hoffer et al. 2003, 13). Yet women earning STEM Ph.D.s today are still largely white, as the growth in female Ph.D. attainment has not been paralleled by similar attainment among U.S. minorities, even though more earn Ph.D.s than thirty years ago. Among the growing but still low number of individuals from underrepresented groups earning STEM Ph.D.s, women remain virtually invisible. Indeed, of the 14,313 Ph.D.s awarded to United States citizens in 2002 in STEM ¤elds, only 353 went to African American women, 103 to Chicana women, and 32 to Native American women (Hill 2003). Clearly barriers remain in STEM doctoral education for women of all ethnicities (Hollenshead et al. 1996). This chapter examines the graduate school experience of an ethnically diverse and highly successful group of sixty-three women who earned their Ph.D.s in science and engineering ¤elds from several University of California (UC) campuses between 1980 and 1990. They were admitted to some of the departments ranked most highly by the National Research Council (NRC), and despite the dif¤culties they may have had, succeeded in ¤nishing their doctoral programs. These women of all ethnicities also overcame other obstacles in the form of sexism and racism. They all are bright and good at science, with a strong will to succeed,to obtain the skills necessary to move ahead,and to structure a professional life compatible with personal and community values. If individuals of this caliber had dif¤culties in getting through their graduate programs , we can be sure that others found these dif¤culties insurmountable and left the program. The problems the study participants had with their training should, therefore, be taken all the more seriously as they are the survivors. There are two parts to this chapter. The ¤rst presents some of the ¤ndings of the qualitative study described below, which focused on the types of dif¤culty the diverse women participants experienced as they progressed through the graduate program, the role of their advisers, and the bene¤ts, obstacles, and omissions they perceived in their training. The second part goes beyond the study to make a series of systemic recommendations about how these documented issues could be addressed to make graduate education more responsive to the needs of women and other underrepresented groups. It situates the study’s ¤ndings in the wider literature on graduate education, and it uses the recommendations of the study participants as well as the many programs and practices I personally know to be successful, along with those documented in the literature, such as the programs described in Preparing Future Faculty in the Sciences and Mathematics (Pruitt-Logan, Gaff, and Jentoft 2002). Description of the Study The data analyzed here come from a four-year qualitative project entitled “A Longitudinal Study of Minority Ph.D.s from 1980 to 1990: Progress and Outcomes in Science and Engineering at the University of California during Graduate School and Professional Life.”Included in the study were African Americans, Chicanos, and Native Americans, because these groups are critically underrepresented in higher education. They were augmented by Asian Americans and Hispanics with a matched white group. The match was made by selecting a white graduate student from the same lab or who had studied with the same adviser as any minority student in the study and who received her or his Ph.D. around the same time. Data were collected through telephone interviews generally lasting two hours using a standard questionnaire. Questions covered respondents ’ entire lives, from their family background and early schooling through graduate school and professional life. A total of 158 interviews were completed. Of the 13,700 students who earned a STEM Ph.D. in the UC system between 1980 and 1990, 206 were members of underrepresented minorities (URM) (African American, Chicano/Chicana, Native American). The total number of women among the 206 is not known. On the Berkeley campus, the source of...

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