Women comprise a majority of the population attending college, both at research universities and, to an even greater extent, small liberal arts colleges. Nevertheless, women are typically underrepresented in certain disciplines, including much of the sciences, engineering, economics, and even philosophy. In the 20 years since I started college, certain fields have made tremendous strides in attracting women: biological and environmental sciences in particular. According to current national statistics from the National Center for Education Statistics women are no longer underrepresented in undergraduate programs in biology and health professions. However, other fields have not seen the same gains. In my field, in particular, the percentage of women has decreased slightly. Nationally the numbers of women in the physical sciences and mathematics has remained disturbingly low. Macalester's enrollment patterns are generally typical of national trends, though both Chemistry and Geology have had greater success attracting women majors than national trends would suggest.
Over the ten years that I've been at Macalester, I have been involved with a number of different initiatives, grant proposals, and activities designed to support and encourage women in my field and the sciences in general. I even recall a discussion between Math/CS and Economics about our shared issues attracting women students. Some grants have been funded, some have not. The success of the activities we have tried has been difficult to assess. I have found it difficult to get grants that focus on attracting and retaining students at Macalester. From the perspective of many funding agencies, Macalester is too small and too elite to justify funding. It is hard to make a case to pour a lot of money into a place where only 20-30 women might ever be affected, and where the student body is widely perceived as being "privileged" in the first place.
Faced with the daunting task of revising a grant that I suspected would not be funded, I cast about for a new approach that would enrich our students, attract new women into our disciplines, and reach out to girls at that key moment when they begin making decisions that move them away from science and quantitative disciplines. Through a focus on outreach, I hope to find something that will appeal to all our disciplines, including those which have high enrollments of women, whether in line with or bucking national trends.
My idea is to offer a course, perhaps cross-listed and team-taught, whose goals would be to study disciplinary and cross-disciplinary issues concerning the underrepresentation of girls and women, and to apply both this new knowledge and the students' disciplinary knowledge to develop hands-on, scientific activities that would appeal to girls and teach them about the disciplines involved. Toward the end of the semester, we would bring in a group of late elementary school girls to try out our students' projects. Students would then have a week or two to reflect on their experiences in class and through a summary paper. I have begun the process of outlining such a course, and have found some preliminary materials that might be suitable. I have also discovered a national organization that supports exactly the kind of one-day conference this course would create. See the details in the Course Description section below.
I see positives to be gained, but also potential difficulties with the idea of this course. I am most eager to get feedback from my colleagues about whether the positives outweigh the negatives. I will disclose my own list of positives and negatives below, but feel free to contact me to add to either list.
I have been thinking about this idea, and researching resources, for most of this past year. At this point, I need the help, advice, and criticism of my colleagues. I would like to find a group of colleagues interested in this, or other, approaches to issues of underrepresentation to continue this conversation. I expect that somewhere down the line, we would need to seek internal or external funding to continue the development of this idea.
An acknowledgement: This idea was inspired, in part, by Eric Wiertelak's "Brain, Mind, and Behavior" course, which involves projects about Neuroscience aimed at schoolkids. Thanks, Eric!