Notes from a Revolution?

Wednesday, May 28 – So, yesterday at noon I attended the traditional Women in SETAC lunch, for attendees interested in women’s issues in the sciences. It’s not just for women, I should note! I had a conversation with one man who thought he and other men were banned from the proceedings, but they certainly are not. In fact every year that I’ve been to the women’s lunch, (the last three were at SETAC Europe meetings), at least two men showed up, and the first year, I think about a dozen were there, but my memory is not clear on that point!

The luncheon this year was a bit of a disappointment. There was no speaker and no discussion, but rather some videos on businesswomen working in the technology and manufacturing sectors in Germany and Bulgaria. It was interesting, but not quite right for this group—and like a lot of the venues at this meeting, the sound in the room was awful.

I was disappointed. So I sought out Tinka Murk of Wageningen University (The Netherlands). Tinka arranged the first luncheon, at the SETAC Europe meeting in Den Haag. She was inspired by a study that showed that culturally, people are happiest with androgenous bosses—male or female. But if they had  a male boss, they said that the ideal boss is a male. (The results, from Janka Stoker at Groningen University, are from a free Dutch publication sent to anyone who has earned a masters degree in Holland.)

Tinka decided she would poll SETAC attendees at the Den Haag meeting in 2006.  “What’s wrong with the system?” she asked, “and what would it take to change it?”  I’m not exactly sure of her response rate. Of the people who responded in Den Haag, 39% said it was “job conditions” that make it hard for women to get to the top, while 25% noted that it is the attitude of men that needs changing.

But when it came to fixing the system, 21% said that societal views had to change, but only 8% said that outdated societal views are the problem with the system. In the end, Tinka says, the Dutch survey underscores that it *is* societal views that make the difference—“It’s more important, but it’s unconscious,” she says. Most people in Stoker’s Dutch survey would be happy with a male or female boss, she explains, but that boss should be someone who has both male and female characteristics: powerful, yet caring for the people and the group.

Tinka put that notion together with ideas on catastrophic change, particularly those expressed in a paper by ecologist Marten Scheffer and colleagues in Nature. Their ideas on proposed tipping points mesh with Stoker’s thought that if 20% of people in boss positions are female, societal views on the qualities of a boss will change.  To increase the number of women in science, Tinka says, “I think you should stimulate positive action to reach 20%” — from that moment on, women have a fair chance, she adds.

This means getting more women into higher positions in academia, where they can model characteristics typical of a female boss. But how to do that is a question for another day, whether the solution is making quality daycare cheaper and easier to find, or stopping tenure clocks, or some other measure, all at a time when academic jobs are hard to come by!  Tinka, who just became a full professor herself, plans on publishing some of her modeling data on these issues soon, with Scheffer.

Oh, and I think that SETAC Europe is fairly even : Tinka’s numbers showed that proportionately just slightly more male members hold mid-level positions than the female members of the organization.  Most of the women who attended the women’s lunch in Den Haag were in their 30’s to mid-40’s.

Let me divulge my biases here: My master’s thesis in journalism school investigated why there are more men than women at the top of academia. You pick thesis topics because they are near and dear to your heart—or at least because you are interested enough to spend a lot of time on the topic. I’m still interested.

This was about a decade ago, and things haven’t changed much, it seems.