 Our second panel is entitled A New Formula for Workplace Equity. I hope we'll come up with one in the next 20 minutes. I'm Meredith Wadman. I'm a Future Tents Fellow at the New America Foundation. Until recently, and for many years, I was a biomedical reporter for Nature here in Washington, DC. And I'm really honored and thrilled to be here and participating today. I'm going to reintroduce Maria Clave on the left-hand end. She's the president of Harvey Mudd College, renowned mathematician, computer scientist, and scholar, and the first woman to lead the college since its founding in 1955. Beside her is Ed Birchinger. He is the Institute Community and Equity Officer at MIT and a professor of physics there as well. His work focuses on cosmology, gravitation, and relativistic astrophysics. And in 2011, he chaired the organizing committee of a symposium called Leaders in Science and Technology, sorry, Leaders in Science and Engineering, The Women of MIT. On my immediate left is Hannah Valentine. She's the senior associate dean for diversity at the Stanford University School of Medicine, where she's also a professor of cardiology. And importantly, for those of you who follow federal agencies, she's about to become the first ever chief scientific officer for scientific workforce diversity at the National Institutes of Health. And that's an entirely new position she'll be coming to next month. I'm going to move right ahead and start with one question for each of our panelists. Hannah, I'll start with you. Part of the expertise that you have cultivated is in the area of unconscious bias. Talk to us about what you've learned as it pertains to the areas we've been discussing here. Thank you very much, Marius. First, let me say I'm delighted to be here. This is just an important topic very close to my heart as a cardiologist, no pun intended. And I think that by talking with each other, we are likely to really come up with important solutions to this ongoing problem of the loss of women as we increase or get higher in the ranks of all fields, including my own academic medicine. So as has been alluded to, this is a multi-factorial problem. And I will get to the answer to your question, Faraday, in a moment. But at Stanford, what we did when I was appointed senior associate dean for diversity and leadership eight years ago was to put together a multi-faceted plan that involved a focus on recruitment, focus on retention, with all of the tweaks to the life work policies, making faculty aware of them, and giving faculty development seminars, leadership development, and many other aspects. And with that, we were able to increase the number of women significantly at every rank. And this result is going to be published in academic medicine in a few weeks. But what we discovered in the course of that, what I discovered, was even though we were increasing the numbers of women, and especially in the full professor rank, to 22%, which the national average is actually 20%, it would still take us 28 years to reach 50-50 women at the rank of full professor. And I don't know about any of you in the room. That was far too long for me, especially as a cardiologist. We believe in going in, there's a code. You fix the problem quickly. And I thought I was in for this job for a very short period of time. So halfway through all of this, I began to look at the psychological and sociological factors that are involved in this problem. And at that time, Joe Handelsman started to talk about this issue of unconscious bias. And there's a lot of information on that. The science behind the phenomena is quite clear. But what isn't clear is what can be done about it. And it occurred to us that perhaps raising awareness of the phenomena might in and of itself ameliorate the decision-making processes, especially along the domain of women and leadership. So we did just that. We put together 15 advocates, we call them. These were department chairs, mostly male, and taught them the science of unconscious bias. And gradually got them engaged to then start the experiment. And the experiment was to go to each department meeting and give this talk about unconscious bias and do something that had never been done before, which was pre, post, pre and post implicit attitude testing. And we did that. And to our absolute amazement, contrary to what our sociologists would have predicted, we actually reduced implicit bias against women in this domain of women and leadership. But another finding that was really surprising to us was when we looked at the data separated by men and women, we saw huge differences in the level of unconscious bias, with men much more likely had a higher level of bias against women in leadership. Something, again, that our social scientist colleagues would not have predicted. But the good news here as well was that after the educational intervention, we called it, the bias also decreased quite significantly in the male faculty. And now we have over 500 of these pre, post testing. So there's one example of unconscious bias, a very difficult phenomenon to manage or to treat, shall I say, because we all have it, because these ideas are continually being reinforced in the societies that we live. But with this kind of intervention, we can make a difference, certainly in the implicit attitude. Now whether that actually changes behavior to increase hiring, we don't know yet. We're looking at the data. But certainly previous studies have showed that with this kind of intervention, you can actually change people's behavior. So that's my sort of background and my experience with unconscious bias. The flip side of that is how the individual actually feels in this context of realizing that there is bias going on. And this is called stereotype threat. And I'll leave that to discuss later on in the panel, because we have an intervention for that as well. Sure. I want to hear about that more. Ed, you had some remarkable success raising the number of physics majors at MIT over the course of about a decade. I remember being the only girl in my senior level high school physics class. And also, it's only at about what? 20% PhDs nationally, I think, that graduate? Talk to us about what the results were that you got and how you got them. Thank you very much. Let me first thank you for the invitation to participate in this event. It's an honor to be here with such colleagues. The efforts at MIT started more than a decade ago when our enrollments were plummeting for the physics major. And the motivation for change was not coming from the lack of gender diversity, but from the fact that the projected enrollment declines were such that we'd have no need of teaching faculty in about a decade. So our then new department chair at the end of the 1990s realized that some intervention was necessary. For context, in 1998, we awarded a total of 41 bachelor's degrees in physics from MIT. It does produce the largest numbers of bachelor's degrees in physics in the nation. And of those 41, five were to women. What we did, spurred by the decreasing enrollments overall, was to offer a flexible track of our degree program. We had branded our undergraduate program as preparation for physics graduate school. And we noticed that we had the strictest requirements and the hardest curriculum of any of our peers. So we offered a parallel track with no difference in the degree designation, but merely allowing the students to substitute three of the upper-level courses for a concentration in any subject that they wished. As it happened, many of the students, in fact, chose physics for that concentration, or astronomy, or other technical fields. But they could choose politics, literature, or any other curriculum offering of the university. This provided a kind of a safety valve or a release valve for those students who were unsure about their dedication and were perhaps suffering issues with confidence, such as Maria Klave discussed, so that they could, as it was initially perceived, fall back from the very ambitious track to our flexible track. But in fact, it very quickly became reframed as the way to major in physics and have fun. So now, nearly all of our students adopt this flexible track. And it resulted in a very quick increase in the numbers from about 12% in 1998 to 22% in 2002 to about 30% for the most of the decade of the 2000s. When I became the department head in 2007, I thought that we could do better. And so I worked on some further changes, including addressing issues of climate, of support for the students, of the social interactions, of mentoring. And with those changes, we increased the numbers further so that in 2011, we had 36 bachelor's degrees in physics awarded to women. That was the number awarded to men in 1998 and 58 to men. So the numbers for men grew, but the fraction of women earning bachelor's degrees had grown to 38%. And that approaches our average for the overall undergraduate body at MIT, which is legs Harvey Mudd's now a little bit. We're at about 45% women. Remind me to come back and ask if you've tracked those women as they've gone forward and what has become of them. Maria, I'm going to crib a little from Liza's article about you and recount an instance at the Keystone conference in Colorado where you and some other prominent female computer scientists had organized a panel on the imposter syndrome. And I think it maybe was a room about this size. I don't know. But you got there and literally the room was overflowing. There were young women against the walls and the aisles hanging on seats. It was completely oversubscribed. And there was clearly strong identification among at least younger female computer scientists with this topic. Talk about it. And how do we fix that? So this conference was, it was a tell you right, I guess, in Colorado. And it was actually the Hopper conference that I mentioned. So one of my, actually my first PhD student, her name is Corey Ngpin Quinn. She's now a senior researcher at Microsoft. And while she was a PhD student, we had many conversations about the imposter syndrome. So let me just ask, is there anyone here who has not heard of the imposter syndrome? OK, so I'll just very briefly talk about it. So it's this feeling, it's this feeling that's very common among highly successful people, but probably a bit more common and more intensely felt by women than by men. Where even though, to many people, it looks like you're being very successful, in your heart of heart, you know you're a failure. And I'll just tell you that I wake up most mornings and I have this voice on the side of my head that goes, I'm pretty sure you are the worst failure ever. I just cannot believe that you keep on trying to do things when you fail so much. And on the other side of my head, I have this other voice that goes, I can change the world. And it's just not, OK, anyone else suffer from this? Yeah, it's pretty common. And so Corey emailed me and said, I was thinking of putting in a proposal for a panel. And asking, say, five women who were thought of as being really successful in computer science to talk about having the imposter syndrome. And what do you think? And I wrote back and I said, well, that's good. There's two of us. We only have to find three more. And that's going to be really easy. So I'd say the room was probably twice the size. And every single, not just every chair was taken, every inch of the floor had people sitting on it. You could see about 10 heads sticking in from the corridor that were trying to listen to it. And so what we did was each person put up four PowerPoint slides. So the first one was, I just said your name. And so for me, it was the presidential imposter. For Corey, it was the senior researcher imposter. And then the next slide was the highlights of your career. And which was just sort of supposed to show that according to most measurements, you looked like you were doing OK. And then the third slide was, I feel like an imposter when I, and then you completed that. And I guess maybe there were five slides because the next one was, at least for me, I gave the things that made me feel like an imposter in different decades, so the 70s, the 80s, the 90s. And then the final one is how I cope with imposteritis. So for me, the things that make me feel like I'm an imposter is when I do something, first of all, successful people do. Because I just don't see myself as being successful. Secondly, I mean, I do know I've done things that are valuable. It's not that I doubt that. I just don't feel successful. OK, so when I do things that successful people do and things that women don't usually do. So I've been the first female in my job for 25 and 1⁄2 years now, so I spent a lot of time doing things that females don't usually do. And then the third one for me is anything involves physical coordination because I am one of the least coordinated people in the face of the earth. And then when I gave my slides, so in the 70s, it was eating in restaurants and going to conferences. Both my parents were academics, and they were incredibly supportive of us, but we did not have a lot of money. So we didn't eat in restaurants or ride in taxis or stay in hotels or any of those kinds of things. So by the 80s, it's riding in taxis and staying in hotels. And by the 90s, it's my first press conference. And by 2000, it's meeting CEOs. And by 2010, it's going on the Microsoft board, which is still one of the most terrifying things I have done in my life. And then in terms of coping with imposteritis, for me it's, first of all, it really helps to look back. I mean, I really can eat in restaurants today without feeling like an imposter. I can ride in taxis without feeling terrified. I can do all these things. I can even go to Microsoft board meetings most of the time without feeling terrified. So that's one of the things that's just reminding myself that even though something was terrifying 20 years ago, like talking about babies at MIT 20 years ago, doesn't have to be right now. The second thing is surround myself with support. I already talked about the fact that I have an incredibly supportive husband. But I also have a lot of peers, mostly women, who whenever I'm really freaked out, I can send an email or do a phone call and say, help. And they'll go, Maria, you rock. And it really helps. And then the third one is I make a very conscious effort to do the things that scare me. So I started taking ski lessons. Remember this uncoordinated person about four years ago? And I'm becoming a good skier. I mean, not a great skier, but I'm 62 years old. It's very cool to be coming better at being a skier. So it was an amazing thing. And we have now held these panels. I mean, it's the easiest thing to organize, because it is so easy to find people who are willing to talk about it. And not just women. So the most recent one I did was at UC Santa Barbara for the computer science students. And we had two male professors, a male alum, a female student, and myself as the imposters. And it was just awesome. I mean, I really feel like when it's like surfacing the implicit bias, that when you start to talk about these things, it's not that you stop having the imposter syndrome, but it makes everybody feel less threatened by those feelings of self-doubt. And they lose their power to a degree the more they're out in the open. Yeah. Well, that's just fascinating. What about the contention that the fact that women experience this syndrome relatively more than men has some grounding in reality? Yes, the expectations have been higher when you're the first one turning up at the Microsoft Board meeting. Well, you're probably not the first woman, I hope. No, no, I'm not the first woman. Dina DuBlon was on the board. But you know what I'm getting at. Yeah. So I do think, I mean, I know. And Dina and I have actually talked about Dina DuBlon, who's an amazingly talented woman. She's on like four major corporate boards. And we talk about the fact that we feel like when we make comments and suggestions, they are undermined by the fact that it's coming from a female. They just are not heard the same way. And I have the dummy whammy of actually being an academic. And clearly, academics would not really have anything, even though I'm a computer scientist, would not have anything valuable to contribute. And Dina has the disadvantage of being a CFO background. So she's not a technologist. And so we've talked about the fact that we'll say something. And then we'll look at the faces around the table and we'll sort of go like, yeah, they didn't really hear that one, did they? So it's interesting. I mean, I'm with Nancy in that there's reality that, so for example, I'm a pretty assertive person. I mean, you could say I was an aggressive person in some contexts. And if you're that way in a leadership role, you're a bitch, OK? You're not an assertive leader. You're a really, I mean, I had the nickname when I first went to work for IBM Research. I got into an argument with the director of the lab two months in at lunch. And I had the nickname bitch on wheels for the rest of my time that I was there. I mean, so it is true that females who demonstrate approaches that would be thought of as completely OK for males to do are held to much higher standards and are criticized. I mean, I often feel like as a president, I just live my life under a microscope. Now, I think every president lives a life under a microscope to a certain extent. But if you're the first female in a role, they are like, they're reading tea leaves constantly trying to, OK, she didn't really mean that. She meant this other thing, so. But it's OK. I love my job, I can tell. And I want to come back to whether you've followed your female physics majors. But I want to preface it with the results of this study of post-doc students from all scientific disciplines in the UC system. It was published in 2009, so it's a wee bit dated, but not too badly. And what it found was that this post-doctoral stage was, at the post-doctoral stage, women who had children were twice as likely as their male colleagues or as their female colleagues who had no plans to have children and who had no children to drop their goal of becoming a research professor. It also found that these women were more likely than men to cite feelings of alienation, isolation, and lack of mentoring as being very important in their reaching that decision. So in that context, can you talk to what you found if you have indeed followed your graduating physics majors who are female, and as they've gone out into the post-BA or BSC world, and also have any of the three of you been part of launching policies to try to attack this very critical juncture at the post-doc level where childbearing sort of collides with tenure tracking? Thank you. Let me take up the post-doc question. You're referring to the work of Mary Ann Mason and Mark Uldin at UC Berkeley and recently summarized in a brilliant book, Do Babies Matter? I read it over Christmas vacation and gave it to some of my students to read, because it identifies a lot of the issues that play in the additional burdens that are experienced by women and which make it harder in those critical junctures of different career stages, including the transition from graduate school to post-doc and then from post-doc to faculty, as those occur in prime childbearing years, as you rightly say. At MIT, we have the last few years begun to track and organize the data and policies for our post-docs. Number of universities are beginning to do this. Some, like those in the UC system, are driven by unionization. But other universities are doing it because it's the right thing. We feel that our post-docs have been a somewhat neglected component of our university workforce, and they're so important in this transitional period to preparing future faculty and other academic leaders. And of course, therefore, they're very important for promoting diversity in higher education. One thing that our Vice President for Research did a couple of years ago was to institute a requirement for all of our post-docs on campus that the PI, the principal investigator or supervisor of the post-doc, prepare a mentoring plan and then meet with the post-doc annually to discuss progress and career goals. Now, this is a kind of exercise that is required by some of the funding agencies, including the National Science Foundation, where I get some of my funding. But it's not uniformly applied. Not all the federal agencies do this. And certainly, the universities are not compelled to. But we felt that it was the right thing to do. And so that has had a very positive impact because it leads to conversations about career development. In parallel, we've implemented programs for mentoring that cross outside of the department. We have career development workshops. We focused on child care. We have a new child care center on our campus that post-docs can and do use. And then most importantly, I think, really, the climate overall. Setting the climate by communications from the president, from the leadership on down, about the importance of an inclusive welcoming environment, one that does not distinguish or discriminate on basis of gender or race or any other qualities, but one that strives for the ideal of meritocracy, where people can succeed based on their potential and where they are supported to do so. We have to go and do the data analysis to see over a period of years what effects these will have on our post-doctoral cohort. But it's the right thing to do. I'm going to finish with a question to you, and then we'll open it to questions from the audience. You wanted to follow up on another aspect of the work that you have been doing. Yes, thank you. Let me just follow you ask the question. Yeah, at the end of the one, I just asked. Yeah, at Stanford, we have approached this issue of career life fit quite seriously because we've realized that even when we have really good flexibility policies, faculty, junior faculty, and we think also post-docs, do not take them. And we know they do not take them because we track this. And when we ask the junior faculty why they haven't taken 10 o'clock extensions, why they haven't taken the amount of time that they allotted to them for maternal leave, et cetera, the number one question, the one one answer is that they were concerned that they would be viewed as not serious about their career. And number two from the clinical faculty was that they were concerned to overburden their colleagues. So here we had a really nutty problem, really difficult to grapple with. So one sunny California morning, we walked over the campus to the design school. Design thinking is an area that comes up with creative kind of approaches to complicated problems. And working with a design thinking company, we have developed this program called Academic Biomedical Career Customization, which really has at its core two elements. One is this talking about career flexibility with your boss, with your team, so it becomes a norm and it gradually changes the culture to be able to talk about it. And this work was supported by the Sloan Foundation in part. The second part is a banking system because we discovered that there's a lot of extra work that happens at work that women overly burdened with, like serving them committees or the service work. And yet it doesn't count very much for promotion. So we have a system whereby for each time somebody does this work, they get a credit that can be changed at exchange for certain kinds of things that buy back their time, house cleaning services, meals delivered to your home, et cetera. And of course, the New York Times was very excited about this part of it. I'm actually more excited about the talking about and changing the culture. So we have been putting together that kind of pilot. And it's going remarkably well. We're seeing that people are taking more of the policies. They're talking about it. It's becoming more of the norm. And I would say that even though we have these policies, there's something in the culture that prevents us from actually allowing this integration of work and life that creates this ongoing barrier that really something else that needs to be sorted out. So this is kind of the direction that we've gone for the career flexibility for faculty and postdocs. And then finally, the stereotype threat issue. This is the fear of succumbing to a negative stereotype that is associated with your identity group. Claude Steele described this many years ago. The classic example is women and math. Give a woman a math test. And before taking the test, just remind her of her gender and say, well, you know, women don't do as well as men and math and her performance actually goes down. And we have some interventions for that. At the core of it is the sense of not belonging, which has some analogies to the imposter syndrome, which actually make you feel more anxious. And you are unable to do as well. And when faced with some kind of barrier, you're more likely to give up and leave the institution. And I think that also is playing a role in this leaky pipeline, which clearly is multifactorial. And the awful thing that I think about, the most difficult thing, is that we have to be addressing all of these multiple issues together. Otherwise, I think the problem in the past, we find one causal factor, and we focus on that. And it really doesn't make a lot of difference in the long run. We've got to be working on multiple fronts. Who would like to ask a question? Yeah, just here, can we get your mic turned on? Why don't you start at the beginning of your question? Oh, no problem. So you have all talked about the work you're doing at the undergraduate level to increase your numbers. And then at the post-doctorate level, what you're doing for your faculty and your staff that are working for you. Are you doing any training for your undergrads and graduate students as alumni programming? Well, I'll answer. So no, that's a really good idea. I mean, one of the things, we've had some conversations about the fact that our students are having an experience in a very gender balanced and supportive learning community. And do we worry about the fact that they're then going to go out into the workforce or into graduate programs and run into very different kinds of experiences? And I think one of the, I think our students are pretty smart about it in the sense that they often do internships and research experiences at other institutions. And so we actually do some mentoring for them when they're thinking about taking jobs or going to graduate programs. And I will say, I want you to go and look at the environment in a PhD program, because I want you to think really hard about you being in a very supportive environment. I want you to think really hard about whether that environment is going to be good for you, same for work. And so because we're such a small place, our alumni talk to our current students. I mean, when you're a first year at MUD, you're interacting with seniors and juniors and sophomores the whole time. And so when people graduate, there's a lot of dialogue that goes on about, is X a good place to work? Is Y a good place to do a PhD? So I think there's a sort of an informal kind of thing. But actually, that's an interesting idea. I just wanted to mention the work of Peggy McIntosh on feeling like a fraud. Peggy's from the Wellesley Centers for Research on Women. And her white paper, Feeling Like a Fraud, part one and part two, readily available on the internet, has tremendous connections to the imposter syndrome. And she turns it around and suggests that those who never have feelings of fraudulence are truly the real frauds because of their inability to look at the strengths and weaknesses of their approach in their life's work. So I just wanted to add that to the imposter syndrome. That's such a great point. There's a young woman, well, she's one young compared to me. She has two children and she's a senior engineer at Google. But she was talking about going through a recent promotion. And there was another guy in her group who was up for the same promotion. He didn't get it. And she said, I wish I could be like him because he was just going, they were so stupid, et cetera. And I said, no, you really don't want to be like that person. You want to be who you are. I mean, she did get the promotion. You want to be constantly challenging yourself to be better. And she went, oh, that's such a good way to look at it. Let's move on to the next panel. Sorry, it's the brief. Yes, wait there. Dr. Valentine, could I ask whether Stanford considered the default option for family leave rather than the, as they did at Princeton, rather than the opting in, as that you describe? Well, yeah, what do you mean by the default option? So if you become pregnant or adopt a child to have a child, it's the fault. You don't actually have to request it. It just is granted. Yes, we do grant it. It's granted to everybody. But you have to take it on. You don't even have to apply. You have to take it. Say you're going, and this is where we find people just don't take it, actually. And the same is true for the 10 o'clock extension. And that is automatically granted. And you can take it. And people, a very small proportion of those who are eligible, take it. It's a real issue to be contended with. I just have to finish by saying I was doing some research in Sweden in September. And my translator, a young mother, had just finished her fully paid first year of maternity leave. And her partner was just about to take his six months. So they would have had 18 months paid in total with a full-time one parent. So these things are achievable anyway. Thank you all.