Women in the Lab: Getting Involved in Research

Jacob Harris

Motivations and Concerns

Throughout the history of science, men have had the clear upper hand in terms of not only getting an education in the several arts and sciences but also the ability to advance their fields through research, and more specifically, lab work. When asking the general public to name famous and influential  scientists, a publication in “Psychology of Women Quarterly” shows that mostly men are identified (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0361684315622645). This result shows a stigma against women in science. In this article, we will dive into how this problem has reciprocated at Georgia Tech and the direction that Tech is taking regarding sexism in research. We will look at faculty stats, research done, the culture surrounding research, and how that culture has evolved since the first female students’ arrival in 1952.

Where We Came From

As society has become more accepting of women in science, it would make sense for Georgia Tech to at least somewhat follow the norm. In today’s Georgia Tech, as will be discussed later, women are working hard to have equal opportunity in the lab. However, it was not always this way (just as it was not always this way in the rest of the world). The first thing we’ll look at is this image from the early days of Georgia Tech’s labs:

Although the image is not dated in the Georgia Tech Archive, it is clear that it is an “older” picture. This image is captioned “Harrison M. Wadsworth, Jr., graduate assistant in the School of Industrial Engineering, uses the Georgia Tech Auto-Graphic Time Study Machine to time movements in the assembly of air conditioner grills. (Model is Mrs. Wadsworth).” The caption seems to add a lot of impact to the picture regarding how it portrays sexism and women’s relationship to science. First off, looking at the image it is clear that both the man and the women are working on whatever they are doing at the “engineering experiment station”. The women, Mrs. Wadsworth, is actually slightly in the forefront, drawing my attention to her first. After getting my hopes up, I realized the caption strongly downplayed any message of women getting involved in science. It indicates that Harrison M. Wadsworth Jr. is the one doing the work, not his wife that is not even given a first name. Not only this, but she is labeled as a model. She is being used to make science more “attractive” as opposed to encouraging women to participate in research. This also potentially explains why she is in the forefront as opposed to her husband, who might not be as conventionally attractive to the target audience (which is likely men). 

If the last example was any indication where the Georgia Tech research community was concerning gender equality, it was clear that change was needed. Thankfully, this was either recognized or gender equality naturally progressed, as is shown in the 1984 edition of “The Blueprint”. On page 64 of this magazine, there is an article discussing PhD work in architecture with accompanying pictures. The pictures here are what grabbed my attention. Not only are there multiple photographs of women, but there is a picture of a woman of color. This shows significant growth when it comes to inclusion in the scientific community at Georgia Tech. Also, this could still be considered the “then” of Georgia Tech, which shines light on a promising future for inclusion considering the progression from the first example to 1984. 

Although the progress is apparent in this edition of The Blueprint, there was still progress to be made. 

Women appear and/or talked about in the context of architecture, computer science, an unidentified lab, ROTC, and industrial engineering. There are still many sections of this edition that are completely composed of men, generally white men. 

In some kind of contradiction to the first example, there might be some hope that Georgia Tech’s gender inclusion started ahead of the curve. By that I mean Tech might’ve been relatively inclusive for the time when the photo in the first example was taken. I say this under the assumption that this photo was taken at a similar time:

This image appears to be from in a similar time frame as the first example, giving us an interesting counter to the negative implications that we initially saw. This image is uncaptioned and undated, so we must make some assumptions. We see a female scientist or possibly a student, standing in front of what looks like what would be a now antiquated and bulky computer. Not only is she standing in front of it, but she looks like she is showing it off. This negates the possibility of her just being a model; she looks proud to be there. 

From these three examples, we see that while the research opportunities for men and women might not have been equal in the beginning, significant progress was made in a relatively short time. In a magazine issue that we might now consider “old”, there are many examples of women working in science and research. Furthermore, we saw that even if the playing field was not even, Tech had women doing something they could be proud of at a time when that was very rare.

What About Today?

As the previous section and the intro discussed, getting involved in research has been a historical challenge for women. As we progress as a society, however, this problem is slowly being alleviated. Implicit and explicit biases towards women and other groups are still apparent in academia, but the culture around research is slowly evolving to be more inclusive. 

This recent push for inclusivity has become more and more widespread in recent years, and looking at the case of Georgia Tech is a good way to measure this call for action. The first analysis of Georgia Tech we can do comes from the Georgia Tech Fact Book that is published every year. Because this book is published every year, we can inspect the evolution of certain statistics regarding Georgia Tech. The specific statistic we will be looking at is the number of male faculty compared to the number of female faculty. In the 1979-1980 school year Fact Book, the numbers are shocking.  In the College of Engineering, there were 237 male faculty members and 5 female faculty members. If this statistic doesn’t speak for itself, you can compare it against the fact that in the same College of Engineering, there were 3 male clerical/secretarial employees as opposed to 92 female clerical/secretarial employees. This statistic shows that women were not really afforded many opportunities to work in research or in labs, but in positions that required much less specialization. This statistic did not just apply to the College of Engineering, this graph shows the generalization to all departments:

This graph highlights the inequity of job distribution in every single category. Furthermore, the point I made earlier about clerical/secretarial work stands because those bars are the only bars in the graph that show women holding more jobs than men (by a very notable amount too). These conclusions about the job distribution in 1979 set the bar pretty low in terms of how diverse the workforce in science was. If you want to look at this with a glass half full mentality, it’s a horrible statistic but at least that leaves a lot of room for improvement. 

The evolution from 1979 is clear after observing the difference in the 2020 edition of the Georgia Tech Fact Book. The total faculty ratio is 888 men to 393 women. This does show improvement, but it also emphasizes that it has been a slow evolution, especially in the School of Engineering, where there are 383 men and only 97 women. This brings us back to the “why?” question. That is a discussion for another blog, but you can check out this interesting paper: Stereotypes About Gender and Science: Women ≠ Scientists – Linda L. Carli, Laila Alawa, YoonAh Lee, Bei Zhao, Elaine Kim, 2016. 

The room for improvement has definitely been noticed at Georgia Tech; not only awareness of the issue but also that the process of change has been too slow. This has been recognized with the foundation of organizations such as the Georgia Tech Society of Women Engineers. This society has done alot for women, including contributing to the fact that “GT is the leading producer of female engineers in the country.” (georgia-tech-swe). They do this through programs that reach out to both the youth and ethnically diverse groups.

Another source that GT has produced is the GT ADVANCE program (overview). This program serves women in science by doing things such as providing seminars on microaggressions. While the need for these programs is sad, it is a good sign of initiative that they exist.

Sources

“Engineering Experiment Station.” Georgia Tech History Digital Portal, https://history.library.gatech.edu/items/show/8272. 

“Engineering Experiment Station.” Georgia Tech History Digital Portal, https://history.library.gatech.edu/items/show/8377. 

“Fact Book.” Fact Book | Institutional Research & Planning, https://irp.gatech.edu/fact-book. 

Georgia Tech SWE, http://www.swe.gtorg.gatech.edu/about/georgia-tech-swe/. 

History.library.gatech.edu. http://history.library.gatech.edu/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=48&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=2014.003&output=omeka-xml. 

(https://smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/42070 if the citation didn’t work)

Linda L. Carli, Laila Alawa. “Stereotypes about Gender and SCIENCE: WOMEN ≠ Scientists – Linda L. CARLI, LAILA Alawa, Yoonah Lee, Bei Zhao, Elaine Kim, 2016.” SAGE Journals, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0361684315622645. “Overview.” Georgia Institute of Technology, http://www.advance.gatech.edu/overview.