The changing face of biology

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — A fruit fly lab hooked Kim Dej on genetics. A professor hooked her on a career.

Dej was a senior at the University of Toronto in 1992 when she signed up for her first genetics course—complete with the requisite fly lab. Fascinated by the science behind breeding flies to study genetic abnormalities and emboldened by her enthusiastic instructor, Ellen Larsen, Dej embarked on a path that eventually led her to Whitehead Institute and the lab of Member Terry Orr-Weaver, where the postdoctoral fellow still studies the fruit fly Drosophila.

“I think it helped a lot that she was a woman,” Dej says of her professor and mentor. “It made science a more realistic option because most of the faculty were men.”

The field of biology, like other sciences, has long battled a gender bias in the lab. When Whitehead Director Susan Lindquist first entered this area of graduate study in 1973, it was considered solely a man’s field. She recalls interviewing for graduate school and being asked, “Why should we take you if there’s a man of equal qualification?”

When Lindquist settled on Harvard University for graduate school, there was just one woman among the 60 biology faculty members. Lindquist’s first papers were in effect “orphaned” because she was pressured to publish them under her then-husband’s name. She didn’t even dream of her own lab at the time, instead happy just to be close to science. “I just assumed I would work in someone else’s laboratory for the rest of my life,” she notes.

Indeed, in 1977, just an estimated 34 percent of life sciences graduate students and 23 percent of new PhDs were women, according to the National Science Foundation. But their numbers in faculty posts were much, much lower.

Things have improved since then. In 2001 women accounted for approximately 54 percent of graduate students in biology and earned 45 percent of that year’s PhDs, reports NSF. At Whitehead, 44 percent of the scientific staff is female.

“It’s very important to understand that science, especially biology, has come an enormous way in terms of representation of women on faculties everywhere, even since I started at MIT,” says Whitehead Member Hazel Sive.

Still, she and other female scientists wonder, are the numbers as good as they could be? Probably not, say some scientists, pointing to a continued inequity in the number of men versus women in senior positions. One look at the higher echelons reveals that the number of women dips precipitously between postdoctoral positions and tenured ones. Although in 2001 women comprised 43 percent of postdocs working in the life sciences, they accounted for only 26 percent of associate and full professors.

Young postdocs such as Dej, who have experienced little, if any, gender bias, remain aware of the abyss that lies between postdoc and professor. “If you’re a graduate student, 50 percent of your cohort is female. Where do you feel left out?” asks Leah Cowen, a postdoctoral fellow in the Lindquist lab. “But if you see 50 percent of women in your grad cohort and then so few as PIs, you say, ‘There’s a problem.’”

Part of the problem may be a persisting societal gender bias in professional and personal life, but in academia, female biologists such as Sive also point to the old-fashioned tenure-track system as a major stumbling block. Biology is anything but a 9-to-5 job. Add tenure to the mix and the unforgiving system especially burdens women trying to care for infants and toddlers.

“It is a profession that still has the hallmarks of its origins—a profession for men with few other responsibilities,” says Sive, “It is also a profession that (like most) really rewards competitiveness and aggressiveness, which are traits biologically more prevalent in males than females. I believe this adds another level of stress onto the incredibly intelligent and creative women who enter science and sometimes choose not to continue in the profession.”

“You’re under pressure to be really productive all through grad school and then through postdoc for sure if you want to get a good faculty position,” agrees Cowen. “And when you get a position, you have this very short period of time during which to get tenure—or not. By that point you’re almost 40.”

Which can be a problem. “If you’re a woman in her mid-30s who is raising kids, those are the vital years for both the work and the kids,” says Dej, herself a new mother.

Still, she notes, the environment has improved since the 1970s when Dej’s college mentor draped herself in oversized lab coats to hide a pregnancy, fearing it would affect her position in her male-dominated department. Today, Dej has but to look to Orr-Weaver for a positive role model. “She’s raised two boys and she has a tenured position at MIT,” says Dej. “What she has done is very encouraging.”

“Many women think it’s so difficult to do science that you have to give up having a family, but you don’t,” notes Lindquist, a mother of two teenage girls. “Having a family can enrich the quality of the science. It gives you perspective. There have not been enough women role models at the higher levels, but that’s changing.”

So where does that leave us? “I think we’re still losing women along the pipeline,” says Sive. “I think one of our biggest challenges is keeping postdocs in the pipeline when they have children. They need to be able to continue to do research that is competitive during this time and I believe we need a mechanism to encourage this, beyond sheer determination, perhaps by funding extensions. I feel very positive that we will be able to encourage this.”

The next generation has answered the call. Jana Koubová is a graduate student researching mouse genetics in the lab of Whitehead Member David Page. She hopes one day to have her own lab.

“Some really incredible women scientists were there 30 years ago, but they were unique and there were very few of them,” Koubová says. “In fact, in my field the big scientific advances were by those few women. I don’t feel discouraged in any way.”