James Goodman

Staff writer

Carol Romanowski did not take the traditional route to becoming a tenured faculty member in computer science at Rochester Institute of Technology. For one thing, she never considered such a career path until her late 30s.

"I was actually never told anything like this was possible," said Romanowski, 60, who initially earned a bachelor's in general studies at State University College at Plattsburgh.

Not until Romanowski was raising three children did the idea of going back to college to develop her considerable math skills enter into the realm of possibilities — an idea she got paging through a course catalog of the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Romanowski went back to school at SUNY Buffalo and earned a doctorate in industrial engineering.

Had Romanowski been a man, she would have more likely been steered at an early age in this direction. "In male-dominated fields, teachers tend to assume that boys have the talent and girls do well only because they work hard," said Catherine Hill, director of research for the American Association of University Women.

But in today's high-tech economy, a push is now being made to get more students into what is called the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) fields — academic disciplines in which women are underrepresented.

RIT is the recipient of a $3.5 million National Science Foundation Advance grant to help increase the number of female faculty in the STEM fields. As of 2012, 101 — or 24 percent of RIT's faculty in STEM disciplines — were women who held tenured positions or were on a tenure track. The percentage of minority women on STEM faculty who are tenured or on a tenured track at RIT was 2 percent as of 2011.

"We're working on changing the way we do business," said Margaret Bailey, a professor of mechanical engineering who is spearheading the AdvanceRIT effort, which officially launched Thursday.

RIT Provost Jeremy Haefner said that changes that have or will be implemented are data-driven — based on statistics and surveys — and affect various administrative practices and policies.

"It's about examining and trying to remedy inequities," added RIT President Bill Destler.

Trends at RIT

RIT and its predecessor institutions, such as Rochester Anthenaeum and Mechanics Institute, placed a heavy emphasis on what have become known as the STEM fields.

This emphasis on technology, Bailey suspects, helps explain why there are about twice as many male students as female students at RIT.

While the number of women faculty and students has increased, the percentage of women STEM faculty trails the national average of about 35 percent, Bailey noted.

Female faculty members have left the RIT faculty at twice the rate of men faculty, although Bailey said preliminary new data show that the gender gap is beginning to narrow.

AdvanceRIT is helping devise and promote various strategies to attract and retain female faculty members.

Eight mini-grants — ranging from several thousand dollars to about $10,000 — were awarded at Thursday's event. These grants are mostly related to career development.

Romanowski, for example, is part of a group of women who got a $3,400 grant to pay for professional development and guidance in furthering their academic careers.

A sense of how far RIT needs to go is evident from statistics compiled by AdvanceRIT, which show that, as of 2010, women who had tenure or were on a tenure track made up 12 percent of the engineering faculty, 17 percent of the physical sciences faculty, 29 percent of the computer science faculty, 16 percent of the faculty in math and statistics and 44 percent of the faculty in biological sciences.

As a sign of the changing times, RIT's engineering college was renamed in 1998 the Kate Gleason College of Engineering to honor a woman who more than a century ago studied engineering first at Cornell University and then at the Mechanics Institute here.

Her father was the owner of Gleason Works, now called the Gleason Corp., which makes gear production machinery. Kate Gleason was the first female member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Some of AdvanceRIT's initiatives are already taking shape.

In December, a team from the University of Wisconsin, trained by that school's Advance grant, came to RIT to give a primer on how to reach out more in recruiting as part of the AdvanceRIT initiative.

Next month, a team of experts will come to RIT to give training to faculty members on negotiating their workloads in their contracts so that they have the time they need to fulfill all their responsibilities.

As it is, AdvanceRIT successfully pushed for a stop-the-clock policy, which permits the extension of a year for applying for tenure if a faculty member has taken time off for maternity leave. Typically, faculty members submit their "tenure package" — their credentials to be considered — after five years of teaching at a college.

Another issue being addressed is that of "dual careers." A team is being formed at RIT to help the spouse or significant other of a faculty member get a job — an issue especially important for attracting and retaining female faculty members.

Pipeline problems

The lack of women in college teaching positions is a result of an academic pipeline that has leaks in it.

At the high school level nationwide, girls hold their own against boys in math.

Slightly more female students than males took Advance Placement calculus exams in 2012, with boys doing about a quarter of a point better in scores on a five-point range, according to statistics compiled by Hill of the Association of University Women.

But, as was the case with Romanowski, women often don't end up majoring in STEM courses at the undergraduate level.

Statistics provided by the University of Rochester, for example, show that more than twice as many male undergraduate students as female undergraduates — 893 to 354 — were seeking bachelor's of science degrees in such STEM majors as computer science, electrical and computer engineering and mechanical engineering.

But women seeking a bachelor's in biology at UR outnumber men by almost a 2-1 margin — 205 to 110. In the class of 2013, most went on to medical school or other graduate degree programs.

Super Bowl stereotypes

Although the Title IX Education Amendments of 1972 put in place federal legal prohibitions against unequal treatment of women, inequalities persist.

Hill, who is the chief author of the 2010 Association of University Women report, Why So Few?, tells of women encountering "implicit bias," an assumption among employers — including college administrators hiring faculty — that they won't do as well as men or won't be as dependable.

A blatant reminder of the need to break stereotypes and overcome other barriers to gender equality came with Volkswagen's latest Super Bowl ad.

Boasting about the "power of German engineering," the ad says that Volkswagen has the most vehicles on the road that have racked up over 100,000 miles.

The ad's imagery clearly suggests that engineering is a man's profession. Men engineers are the ones shown getting wings, which is the award given in the commercial when a Volkswagen hits the 100,000 mile mark. A woman in the ad is relegated to slapping a male engineer in an elevator after his expanding wings hit her, as if to make a sexual advance.

"I drive a Volkswagen and wrote a response. I find the ad objectionable — absolutely absurd," said Marjolein van der Meulen, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell University.

Van der Meulen, who played a leadership role in Cornell's Advance grant, was the keynote speaker at RIT's Thursday event.

Cornell's $3.3 million federally funded initiative, which ran from 2006 through most of 2011, saw women STEM faculty at Cornell increase by 72.

"We created a really high level of engagement," said van der Meulen.

A lot of what was done was in the area of networking and professional development.

In the past, a female candidate for STEM faculty position at Cornell might not see any women during a department visit, but that changed with female STEM faculty meeting with the candidate as a group for coffee.

Van der Meulen qualified the progress made with "Yes, maybe, sort of, but."

But she told of the value of female STEM faculty members uniting behind common goals.

"Bringing women faculty together gives us a voice," she said.

JGOODMAN@DemocratandChronicle.com

Twitter.com/Goodman_DandC