Yet, we have to face up to the fact that affirmative action, no matter how laudable it is, has worked at a snail's pace. Many superb, accomplished female scientists have been trained in the last 25 years, but so few have reached the professorial ranks, and so many are still being discouraged. A 1992 Science magazine issue on women in science described the situation as so dismal that even chemistry was characterized as a field that was middling on opportunities for women, somewhere between neurobiology, seen as pretty good, and mathematics, which was the pits. We can wait around for a while longer in the hope that progress will slowly continue. In the meanwhile, a lot of money that could be used for good science will be spent on studies that try to determine why affirmative action has not worked more rapidly, and why young female scientists disappear somewhere between their Ph.D. or M.D. degrees and the assistant professor positions.
Current strategies have an important flaw.
No matter how hard we may work to have them succeed, they depend ultimately on other people, mainly men, changing their attitudes and expectations. But it seems to me that waiting around is insufficient. Current strategies have an important flaw. No matter how hard we may work to have them succeed, they depend ultimately on other people, mainly men, changing their attitudes and expectations. The contrast is powerful.