"When I accepted this invitation last fall, I didn't know that speaking out as a university president on the subject of under-representation of women would become a form of risk taking that made jumping over Niagara Falls in a barrel seem sane."– Princeton president Shirley Tilghman, at a talk at Columbia University, March 24, 2005

The well-publicized flap over Harvard president Larry Summers' poorly informed comments in January on women's aptitude in the sciences led to a public controversy that ended at simplistic and naïve questions such as, "Can women do math?" Women can do math, they can do science, and they can do engineering.

Here's the problem for life scientists: Women account for just under half of the PhDs awarded in the United States, but for only one quarter of those applying for academic positions and, nationwide in 2001, for only one tenth of full professors who had been tenured more than 10 years.[1]

The national debate now has the opportunity to mature to the level that it has at places such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which issued an influential report on women in science in 1999 and has since doubled the numbers of senior women faculty in science and engineering. Or Columbia University, whose Earth Institute last year received a five-year, $4.2 million National Science Foundation grant as part of the 18-university ADVANCE program to encourage the hiring of women in the earth sciences and engineering.

One of us (IO) attended the Columbia program's inaugural lecture by Princeton president and molecular biologist Shirley Tilghman. She related a comment by Suzanne Keller, a professor of sociology at Princeton who retired last year. Keller said that when she joined Princeton as the first tenured woman in 1968, it was like landing on Mars. Last year, 36% of tenure-track appointments at Princeton were women. That's progress, but improving on such trends requires work in three areas.

First, as Tilghman said, paraphrasing political strategist James Carville, "It's daycare, stupid." Sure, this costs money. But that cost is dwarfed by the costs to innovation of not having half the world's population adequately represented among scientific faculty members, which is the clear result of a lack of daycare.

Second, universities must look beyond the United States, in particular to the former communist countries of Eastern Europe. There, women make up more than half of the scientific teaching staffs of universities. The news is not all good there; women do not seem to make it into higher positions.[2]

The subject of former Eastern bloc nations, many of which have recently joined the European Union, came up the day after Tilghman's lecture at a talk by Nancy Hopkins, the Amgen Professor of molecular biology at MIT. Hopkins was the first leader of that institution's committee on the status of women in science, and she was so disgusted by Summers' comments in January that she walked out.

There may be a link between our first two considerations. At Tilghman's talk, Beate Liepert, an associate research scientist at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said the lessons of Eastern Europe are "daycare, daycare, daycare." In East Germany, the government provided daycare from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. and even now, after reunification, Liepert's relatives in Germany pay approximately $100 per month for such programs. Scientists in the United States often pay at least that much per week for shorter hours of daycare.

Finally, any discussion must involve men. This should be obvious, but to many men it isn't, if attendance at Columbia's conference is any indication. The audience at Tilghman's lecture was perhaps one-third men, with fewer still at Hopkins' lecture. But women must include men in these efforts as well; a panel following Hopkins' talk consisted solely of women. Such efforts may be important, but they must be partnered with those involving the entire academic community.

We would welcome the opportunity to publish constructive ideas on solving this problem in The Scientist.