A little less lonely at the top: A blog for women academic leaders in STEMM

Numbers of men and women at academic levels in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (medicine not included) in the U.S. in 2015.  Adapted from Ref. 1.

The first post in a blog series intended to serve as a forum for senior women to provide advice, insight, and fellowship to one another.

By Janet G. Hering and Patricia A. Maurice

5 September 2023, DOI:10.5281/zenodo.7894663

“It’s lonely at the top” may be a cliché, but when it comes to women academic leaders in STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine), it’s far too often a simple truth. 

According to the 2019 Leadership Report from the Association for Women in Science [1], “women as whole earned over half of all bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in STEM[M], while women of color earned 20 percent of bachelor’s and master’s degrees and about 15 percent of doctoral degrees. Generally speaking, as they progress up the faculty ranks, the proportion of women, especially Black/African American, Latinx and Indigenous women, sharply declines. At the dean and president level, this also disproportionately affects Asian women.”  But “For men, the opposite is true.”

Over the past few decades, many organizations and resources have developed programs and measures to encourage, mentor, and support girls and young women embarking on STEMM education and careers.  But, much less attention has focused on helping women as they progress beyond junior positions.  Clearly, more attention needs to be paid on progression of women up the faculty ladder to full professorships, directorships, deanships, presidencies, etc. 

While being a path-breaking woman academic leader in STEMM can be rewarding, it can also be incredibly challenging, daunting, and even down right lonely.  Moreover, ‘loneliness’ doesn’t just have an emotional cost; it can be hard to do one’s job well without the many privileges of a well-established network.

The aim of this blog is to serve as a forum for senior women to provide advice, insight, and fellowship (hopefully interspersed with some comic relief) to one another. 

We – Janet [2] and Patricia [3] – are friends and colleagues who have retired from successful academic careers.  Between us, we have over 50 years of experience as professors in both private and public universities.  This experience is mainly in the United States, but Janet has worked for the last 16 years in Switzerland and continues to make her home there.  We also have extensive experience in academic leadership – Patricia as Associate Department Head, Associate Dean for Research, and Center Director and Janet as the Director of the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag).

Over our careers, we have observed and experienced the many challenges that women face in academic leadership.  As we advanced in our careers, we experienced increasing isolation in our positions.  We turned to each other, and also to other trusted, (mainly) female colleagues, for support and guidance.  As more women move into positions of academic leadership, we hope that sharing our experiences more broadly and opening up channels for exchange will help to ensure the sustainability of women’s leadership.  Specifically, we want other women to be successful in achieving and maintaining their leadership goals and to have the highest probability of long-term success.

As retirees, we are privileged to have the time to dedicate to launching this series of blog posts.  We are delighted that our focus on women in senior academic leadership has been endorsed by Epistimi as a valuable complement to its goal of providing female early career researchers (ECRs) with leadership skills that will help them to advance in STEMM careers. 

Both of us have written previously on some of the topics that this blog series will address (see Further Resources below).  We feel that collecting our new posts into this series will increase their visibility and provide a valuable resource for the community of women in academic STEMM.  We also hope that other members of our community will be interested in contributing posts to the blog series. 

 Of course, we have some ideas for upcoming blog posts.  Some of these are: recommended reading (our favorite books and articles on women in leadership), an invitation to contributors (we hope that our readers will also be interested in contributing a post), how funding agencies support women in academic leadership, how professional societies support women in academic leadership, how to leverage external evaluations, etc.  We recognize that many resources on academic leadership are available and we plan to build on those in our posts.  We also welcome suggestions from the community, which can be sent to us at epistimiblog@gmail.com.   

 We plan to end each of our blog posts with a few questions to stimulate further thought, discussion, and action.  Here are our questions for this blog post:

• What have you learned in your position in academic leadership that you wish you had known when you started?    

• How have you benefited from exchange with and/or support from other women in academic leadership?

• How, specifically, might this blog help you and your colleagues?

Notes and references cited

[1] https://awis.org/leadership-report/

[2] https://www.eawag.ch/en/aboutus/portrait/organisation/staff/profile/janet-hering/show

[3] https://sites.nd.edu/patriciamaurice/about-me/, https://ceees.nd.edu/faculty/patricia-maurice/

Further Resources (in reverse chronological order)

Hering, J.G. (2023) “Can external evaluations effectively promote gender diversity and equity?” StrukturELLE blog, https://www.strukturelle.ch/en/blog-article/can-external-evaluations-effectively-promote-gender-diversity-and-equity

Hering, J.G. and Molnar, D. (2023) “Why do measures to combat discrimination and harassment fall short and what can be done about it?” StrukturELLE blog, https://www.strukturelle.ch/en/blog-article/why-do-measures-combat-discrimination-and-harassment-fall-short-and-what-can-be-done

Hering, J.G. (2022) “ETH Professors over 65 – Who and Why”, StrukturELLE news item, https://www.strukturelle.ch/en/news/eth-professors-over-65-who-and-why

Hering, J.G. (2022) “Women’s success in academic leadership can and should be robust, not fragile”, Carte Blanche blog post, SCNAT, https://scnat.ch/en/publications/uuid/i/45d75233-b478-55f9-ad89-aed142ea9659-Women%E2%80%99s_success_in_academic_leadership_can_and_should_be_robust_not_fragile

Hering, J.G. (2022) “Eight Questions for Women Embarking on Academic Leadership”, 500 Women Scientists Fribourg-Bern blog, https://www.500womenscientistsfribourgbern.ch/post/eight-questions-for-women-embarking-on-academic-leadership

Hering, J.G., Green, S.A., Heckmann, L., Katehi, L.P.B, Maurice, P.A. and Young, S. (2022) “A call for an alliance between female academic leaders and early career researchers to improve the academic STEM system”, Elephant in the Lab, doi:10.5281/zenodo.6514731, https://elephantinthelab.org/a-call-for-an-alliance-between-female-academic-leaders-and-early-career-researchers-to-improve-the-academic-stem-system/

Täuber, S., Hering, J., Keller, U., & Mahmoudi, M. (2022). Academic harassers are protected with public resources. eClinicalMedicine, 52, 101588 (2 pp.). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eclinm.2022.101588

Maurice, P.A. (2021) “How to end the hemorrhaging of senior women in STEM”, 500 Women Scientists Fribourg-Bern blog, https://www.500womenscientistsfribourgbern.ch/post/how-to-end-the-hemorrhaging-of-senior-women-in-stem

Hering, J.G., Croce, R., Escher, B.I., Magurran, A.E., and Noheda, B. (2021) “News stories must account for gender bias”, Science (letter to the Editor), 374: 1455-6, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abn2559.

Hering, J.G. (2021) “No room for discrimination or harassment” ETH Zukunftsblog, https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2021/06/no-room-for-discrimination-or-harassment.html

Hering, J.G. (2019) Learning for Leadership, ETH Zukunftsblog, https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2019/03/blog-janet-hering-leadership.html.

Hering, J.G. (2019) “Women as Leaders in Academic Institutions: Personal Experience and Narrative Literature Review”, Pure Appl. Chem, 91(2): 331–338, https://doi.org/10.1515/pac-2018-0603.