DR. APRILE: I think I wouldn’t do it as nicely as you.

DR. KING: But women can help each other out a lot in this way because we know this about our younger women colleagues. We can introduce them to our colleagues. We can say: “Diane has a fabulous result. She needs to tell you what it is, and don’t move until she has told you.”

JOY HIRSCH: There is one very important component here that is worth raising, and I think that is the need for institutional procedure and commitment to bring women on board. When I was at Yale, I was the chairman of the Status of Women Committee for a long period of time. During that time Yale as an institution had a major commitment to raise the visibility and the numbers of women, and we did exactly as you described without a compromise at all in quality. It is not that we just teach our women to be self-promoting and to be excellent. We must also, I think, take the responsibility of teaching our institutions to be receptive and proactive and even aggressive in this manner.

DR. APRILE: And it is not just the top. It should also be the colleagues and the ones closest to you. You have to have women involved in search committees.

MS. KOLATA: So what you are describing, as I understand it, is getting a lot of people into the beginning positions. But then how do you keep them?

DR. KING: I think the choke point is going from a postdoc to an assistant professorship to a tenure-track position. In my experience the largest remaining obstacle is how to integrate family life with the life of a scientist.

MS. KOLATA: And you have advice for women?

DR. KING: At institutions where there is child care on site, where it is subsidized, where there are enough places for assistant professors to have their children, women do well. And at institutions where it is assumed that you will make your own arrangements, women do less well. There is good data on this. We need institutional commitment.